Selections from the Assassin\u27s Memoirs, or a Shard of the History of the World since World War II (original) (raw)
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Selections from the Assassin's Memoirs, or a Shard of the History of the World since World War II
The Iowa Review, 1977
Gaston Bachelard) Maw and mouth, womb and tomb, hut and house, these are our spaces. And the hero of the round is, of course, the slain god, he of endless veg etative vitaUty. Borne on the wind from what other world we know not, consumed (Uke Uttle Jens in Dinesen's "The Dreaming Child") by recol lections of other fathers and other mansions, buried, harrowed and har vested, sacked and cellared, swallowed at last, he never fails us with the multipUcity of his members. Line At the end of Borges' fascinating EucUdean fiction "Death and the Compass," the Parisian mobster Red Scharlach shoots and kills the de tective Eric L?nnrot. "Red Red" kills "Red Line-red." Or, through a punning on the Indo-European roots and a more attractive arrangement of word order: "Red Red" meets "Red-line Red-line." The assassination comes after an illusory rhombic chase and the simple animadversions of L?nnrot's assistant, Treviranus, the Christian, whose trinitarian principles determine his plainness.
The Life of an Unknown Assassin
CRIME, HISTOIRE & SOCIÉTÉS/Crime, History & Societies, 2010
Cet article vise à examiner les discours qui ont entouré la vie de Léon Czolgosz, l'assassin de William McKinley. Les trous dans la biographie de Czolgosz, ses silences étranges, sa mauvaise santé, l'ambiguïté et la minceur de ses aveux, ont été interprétés dans la perspective d'un assassin révolu-tionnaire anarchiste, plutôt que comme des symptômes de détresse physique et mentale. Czolgosz est une manifestation somatique d'une tradition cultu-relle. Mon argument est que l'histoire de vie de Czolgosz a été forgée par une construction discursive du crime, présente dès la fin du XIX e siècle. The purpose of this essay is to examine the discourses that surrounded the life of Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley. The gaps in Czolgosz's life, his peculiar silences, his poor health and the ambiguity and thinness of his confession, rather than taken as instances of mental and physical distress, have, instead, been understood as signs of a revolutionary anarchistic assassin. Czolgosz is an expression of a cultural tradition in somatic form. I argue that the discursive construction of criminality, already present in the late nineteenth century within the medical and human sciences, is what shaped Czolgosz's life story. NINETEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS A ssassinations played a key role in the development of the discursive construction of the late-nineteenth-century dangerous individual 2. As paradoxical as it may seem, assassinations bring forth life. The murder of a political figure reconfigures the lives of both the deceased and the assassin. In the case of the deceased, hagiographies are written, celebrating the deceased's birthplace, his education , his army service, his friendships and his fidelity to his wife, culminating in the achievements of his political career: president, statesman, hero 3. The criminal,
Philippe Artières, Un Séminariste assassin: L’affaire Bladier, 1905
European Journal of Life Writing, 2021
At the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging violent criminals to write their life stories became an accepted tool of forensic medicine. The autobiographical texts which emerged became vital building blocks in the psychological diagnosis of the subject. One of the leading international exponents of this method was the Lyon-based professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who developed a science of criminal anthropology guided by the principles of heredity and phrenology (the idea that mental functions could be precisely located in specific parts of the brain). Lacassagne was fascinated by abnormal behaviour and urged the inmates of Lyon prisons to write their autobiographies. He took a paternal interest in them, studied their tattoos, and used their life writing as a key to understanding the criminal personality. Philippe Artières has been working on Lacassagne’s papers for over 25 years, and they formed the basis of his previous work Le livre des v...
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, (1838-89), impoverished literary aristocrat, friend to Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Wagner, is widely considered, alongside Maupassant, to be the principle storyteller of his age. His tales, the Contes cruels, published in 1883, follow the French tradition of the Fantastic, offering variants on the ghost story and the supernatural escapade, charged with an ornate spiritualism, frequently icy in tone and savage in their irony. Black humour is often used as a critical device; Villiers’ perception was that, as readers, we are naturally more receptive to a critic who makes us laugh rather than one who attacks us.
In Thomas De Quincey's series of essays on murder, the familiar essayist's archetypal pose of blase detachment is applied to its most shocking, and therefore perversely appropriate, subject. Responding in like manner to John Wilson's vituperative essayist-assassin in the Noctes Ambrosianae, in addition to the moralistic-sensationalism of the "penny dreadfuls," De Quincey anticipates high Victorian aestheticism and paves the way for the amoral and clinical psychology of detective fiction. Most importantly, however, De Quincey's diabolic, metropolitan brand of "un-affect" articulates an elaborate rejection of the Wordsworthian, ruralist poetics of sensibility, thus suggesting a more complex model of Romantic affect than simply a 'feeling' reaction to Enlightenment 'reason.'
Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Street Names and Private-Public Violence in Modern French Crime Fiction
Modern Language Quarterly, 2007
vérité sur la rue Morgue, which ties together Poe's three Paris mysteries into a common source crime, and Robert Deleuse's La véritable affaire de la rue Morgue, which connects Poe's tale to the Haitian insurrections of the Napoleonic age. 1 Of these two returns to crime fiction's primal scene, the second is particularly interesting for its implied generic argument: by fundamentally disavowing politics, Poe's text launched a deceptively refined tradition of mysteries interested only in bounded, private, domestic forms of violence. In Deleuse's novel, a mid-nineteenth-century narrator investigates a fait divers of 1815 from which Poe had apparently cribbed his story. Struck by Napoléon's having escaped from Elba on the same day that
s fascinating book begins in North America with the birth of the modern detective story on a Poe-imagined street in Paris; it concludes on the same continent with Montreal-based Maurice Dantec's cyberpunk novel of a fragmented detective traversing a deterritorialized postapocalyptic Europe, its Paris an empty space on a useless map. In between, Goulet ranges widely through French detective fiction, from canonical figures such as Émile Gaboriau, Gaston Leroux, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, and Léo Malet, through heretofore unidentified sub-genres such as "catacomb crime fictions" and "street-name mysteries" to the "metatextual play" of the nouveau roman and the "anti-'crime novels'" of "cyber-noir." The strength of the book comes from its innovative organization around space and spatial representations: the two main sections analyze vertical and horizontal conceptions of space in terms of "geological" and "cartographic" imaginaries, respectively; a shorter, bridging chapter discusses the city street as "intersection" between these two imaginaries. But there is much more. Goulet is centrally concerned with the permutations undergone by several binaries during the roughly century-and-a-half that her book spans: the local and the global, individual and national identity, and the private and the political. She also considers the emerging discourse of modern science and the poststructuralist dynamic of the destabilization of a totalizing and referential spatiotemporal order through the eruption or "'shadow-space' of cartographic disorder, brutality, and crime" (p. 229). This is a lot to juggle within 250 pages, and Goulet does an impressive job of keeping in play the myriad intersecting elements in her study. For mostly idiosyncratic reasons-I am not professionally or personally invested in the genre of detective fiction per se, and most of the popular fiction I read is Anglophone or global rather than French-I found the central argument of the book regarding French detective fiction less compelling than the farther-flung places where it begins and ends, the questions that emerge from the many nooks and crannies it peeked into along the way, and the methodological challenges Goulet's approach raises for my own interests in subterranean studies, film, urban cultural studies, and the slum/urban poverty imaginary. These questions and issues are what I discuss below.
And Per Se And: Time and Tempo in "The Masque of the Red Death"
A Question of Time, 2019
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