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DEEPSIX_MYSTERIES
April 06, 2022
"Metropolis on the Styx" (2007)
by David L. Pike
Okay, fun's fun and all, but looking DEEPSIX
through silly books *just* to make fun
of them isn't *really* the goal of
peering in these dark corners-- UNLIKELY_PLACES
I'm trying to find something useful here,
trying to actually learn something from this
source, however dubious I think it is.
And here's some details of literary history
that are actually of interest to me:
David L. Pike points out that the success of
Eugenie Sue's "Mysteries of Paris" (1842) called And actually, you
forth a series of imitations-- you might say it could argue that
defined a sub-genre that persisted for many years. "Noir Film" is a
later form of it.
(I see this genre is called "city
mysteries" on Wikipedia.)
[link]
Eugenie Sue's tales of the dark criminal
underworld of Paris was originally a
long-running newspaper serial--
I was curious about this book for many years, because Balzac
had made a few dismissive remarks about Sue-- but I didn't
get to read any of it until Penguin finally released a trade
paperback edition in 2015. This is a huge volume, 1363
pages, and 2.5 inches thick.
The forward by Peter Brooks comments:
"... the joy felt by readers when on June 19, 1842, the newspaper
_Journal des Débats_ began publishing _Les Mystères de Paris_ on
the "ground floor"-- the bottom quarter-- of the front page. The
novel held that place until October 15, 1843, unfolding over some
sixteen months and 150 installments its breathless and lurid tale.
It was certainly the runaway bestseller of nineteenth-century
France, possibly the greatest bestseller of all time. It's hard to
estimate its readership, since each episode was read aloud, in
village cafés and in workshops and offices throughout
France. Diplomats were late to meetings, countesses were late to
balls, because they had to catch up on the latest episode. It was
a truly national experience, riveting in the way certain celebrity
trials have been in our time... "
(Which makes it clear the author
had been in the grips of OJ mania,
and it was still fresh in his mind.)
Peter Brooks mentions some of the imitators following
the now-standard naming scheme:
_The Mysteries of London_ (nominally by Reynolds)
_The Mysteries of Naples_
_The Mysteries of Lisbon_
_The Mysteries of New York_
Pike's got some nice lists of these
things segregated by French or English
sources (which is both sensible, and The effect of textual databases
also what you'd get from two database on academic Literary literature
searches, one for "Mysteries" and one would be a good topic for a
for "Mystères"-- Moretti, I think...
As Pike comments (p. 160):
"If we also include titles of the genre that omit the
term 'mysteries,' the list expands beyond citability,
especially about Paris, and during the 1840s."
And especially if one lacks an army of grad students you
can put to work categorizing works (do you distinguish
between mysteries and "mysteries of <place>" as separate
genres?).
Anyway, while I'm still in the mood, let me quote some
of Pike's picks:
"In Paris, we find a comprehensive survey of legendary
sites, including, among others:
_Les Mystères du Grand Opera_ (1843),
_Les Mystères du Palis-Royal_ (1845),
_Les Mystères de I'lle Saint-Louis (1839),
_Les Mystères de l'Hôtel des Ventes_ (1863),
_Les Mystères de du Bicêntre_ (1864)_
... "
Actually, that's enough for now. (Maybe more later.)
Pike throws in some tidbits about the entries in the genre:
"The _Mystères de Paris_ were able to be concluded in
novelistic fashion and continued only in real life; ... "
the _Mysteries of London_ could, and would, be
extended well-nigh indefinitely: Markham's series was
followed by an analogous set of characters in an
analogous plot; then Reynolds (and his ghostwriters)
shifted the time frame away from the present for the
four further series of _The Mysteries of the Court fo
London_ (1848-56), a sum total of some
four-and-a-half million words spanning, all told, more
than a decade of uninterrupted weekly installments
--p 194
Pike pikes out at this point:
".. the underground metaphorics and gothic trappings
ostensibly discarded by the naturalistic fiction and
journalism of the later decades of the century."
This leaves me wondering if there was once
something called "gothic journalism"-- but
perhaps I'm reading too much into this.
Then on p.195 of his book, Pike seques into a quick
gallop through the History of Mystery:
"... the mystery proved a potent and enduring
metaphor for the modern city"
Can I gently suggest that the Pike's of the
world should pause before casually declaring
that something is a "metaphor"?
(This cheapshot is a metaphor for the 2016 American
presidential election, the challenges of implementing
distributed transactions for relational databases,
and the coca-cola bottlecap collection I maintained
when I was a kid, all stuck to a large magnet hanging
on the ceiling, scavenged from an old stereo speaker.)
"both linguistically and generically."
I believe Pike is groping for an idea like "both
in fiction and in fact", but perhaps I should give
his academic linguistic quirks a rest for now. Nevertheless,
and yet,
Anyway, Pike finally pauses the historical survey on a however thus.
discussion of some early movie serials (these were
still using the "Mystery of" naming formula, and I
would guess came up in his database searches), which
is the subject he needed to get to here to have an
excuse to use a bunch of snazzy stills clipped from
old movies.
But where I want to be right now is back on Pike's p. 160,
where his long list of Mysteries (and Mystères) culminates
in a discussion of a jokey article from 1860:
"The Real Mysteries of Paris and London":
"Nevertheless, the article suggests, the most
intriguing and the most fundamentally mysteries,
those by which the city actually functioned, were the
middle-class activities at the heart of industrial
and imperial capitalism. Thus we find posited the
'commercial mystery' for which no solution is
apparently possible: the importance of India to the
empire, 'parliamentary and pecuiniary mysteries,
prices of stocks, the English funds.' and the
enormous number of apparently unfrequented shops
selling basically useless commodities: perfurmers,
chemists, print shops, furriers in London; jewelers
and bonbon shops in Paris."
Pike gives us the Marxist spin on this:
"... it also makes the same argument that Marx and Engels
had proclaimed in the _Communist Manifesto_ and Marx in
the preface to _Captial_: that if one could succeed in
wedding the sensational appeal to truth of the descent to
the underworld with a materialist analysis of the economic
and social mechanisms responsible for producing those
sensations, one could potentially create a revolution."
(Evidently The Manifesto plumbs depths deeper than I remembered.)
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