Semiotics of paranoia: The Thriller, Abduction and The Self

Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336

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The semiotics of paranoia: the thriller, abduction and the self

PAUL COBLEY

The year 1980 saw two momentous publications that bear closely on the topics dealt

with in this essay. The first was by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok and

entitled ‘You Know My Method’. On cursory glance it was a curious little volume,

being neither a straightforward piece of Holmesiana in spite of it appearing under the

imprint of Gaslight Publications; nor was it a typically academic essay based on the

narrow appeal of acutely focused analysis. The second was an essay entitled ‘Clues’

by the respected Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg. This, too, might have been thought

a curiosity in that Ginzburg’s prominence in the Anglophone academic world was

based mainly on his translated work of 1976, The Cheese and the Worms, a quirky,

but nevertheless exemplarily documented, tale of a sixteenth century miller and his

autodidacticism. ‘Clues’, on the other hand, was an illuminating piece of metahistory,

focusing on an obscure art historian in conjunction with both the father of

psychoanalysis and the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes.

As is well known now, in different form both publications were to appear as essays in

Sebeok and Eco’s legendary volume, The Sign of Three (1983). The editors of that

book had not only already knew that these two essays on related topics existed but

also found that there were a good many scholars writing about the topic which was so

central to their view of detection: that is, ‘abduction’. Unsurprisingly, a number of the

aforementioned scholars had been operating within Peirce scholarship where the issue

of abduction was so central. However, others had been treating abduction with

particular reference to the process of detection. Given the far-reaching nature of the

insights contained in Eco and Sebeok’s collection it might have been thought that the

fields of popular fiction, genre studies and literary history might have undergone a

sea-change on publication of the volume. But this, oddly, is not the case. Indeed, it


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almost seems as though the scholarly work on abduction as it relates to these fields

was eclipsed by the publication, in the following year, of Eco’s bestselling novel, The

Name of the Rose (1984) which, of course, replayed abductive reasoning in a number

of its set-pieces.

The following essay considers some of the consequences of The Sign of Three for the

broad history of the thriller, for the theory of genre, and in terms of an investigation

of the relations between genre and subjectivity. It is not a fully worked-out history of

the thriller and fictional detection in light of the scholarship concerned with

abduction. Rather, it is a mere sketch of how such a history might look. It attempts to

cast some light on the process of generic canon-building. It also poses a relation

between the growth of ‘social paranoia’ in the history and cultural growth of the

thriller and the general phenomenon of ‘anxiety’ which is pivotal to the biosemiotic

foundations of what has been called by Sebeok (1979) and others (e.g. Wiley 1994)

the ‘semiotic self’.

The thriller and abduction

It should be explained at the outset why the broad designation ‘thriller’ is used rather

than ‘detective fiction’, here. Some words should also be offered on the definition of

‘genre’ of which the thriller, of course, is one. It is clear that there are some popular

fiction readers that will only consume spy stories, or some that will only consume

‘cozy’ detective narratives, or some other form of similar fiction. However, strictly

speaking, these are subgenres of a larger genre called ‘the thriller’ which comprises,

as well as the subgenres that have been mentioned, such phenomena as the police

procedural, hard-boiled fiction, adventure narratives, gangster films, crime fiction,

sensation novels and so forth. The waters are somewhat muddied by the fact that


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generic classifications may lump such fictions under ‘crime’ (in bookshops, for

example) or ‘suspense’ (in film and TV publicity); yet, as has been argued elsewhere,

the texts and subgenres that make up the thriller, while nebulous and by no means

subject to a reductive formula, are characterised by a specific verisimilitude and

united by the vastly accommodating general theme of conspiracy (see Cobley 1997).

This conspiracy is both a threat to, at once, wider and local relations of equilibrium in

thriller, and, more specifically, to the veneer of capitalist success.

Insofar as the thriller is a genre, it should not be assumed that its features are

immanent to it. Customarily, from Aristotle to the ‘synchronic’ thinkers of the

twentieth century, genre has been pursued as a purely textual entity that can be

discerned through scrutiny of the ‘structure’, ‘syntax’, ‘archetypes’ or ‘re-playing of

myth’ and suchlike, in a given configuration of signs. An emergent perspective on

genre, instead, seeks to show that it is to be considered more as a set of expectations

harboured by readers about the quality of interaction that a generic text will facilitate

for them (Altman 1999; Cobley 2001; Makinen 2001). Where the thriller is

concerned, these expectations concern its verisimilitude and the enactment of a fear

of conspiracy, but these are figured in terms of mysteries, puzzles, codes, detection

and quests for knowledge.

The Sign of Three directly addresses detection and the knowledge question in the

thriller. There is no substitute for a reading and re-reading of the volume, but a brief

replay of the general argument of the contributors is required here for two reasons.

Firstly, for purposes of exposition; and, secondly, because of the failure of the

majority of commentators to recognize the way in which the volume’s conclusions

fundamentally transformed the field of research into the thriller.1 More will be said


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about this latter in relation to the thriller canon. A bald summary of the arguments of

The Sign of Three, though, would be that ‘classical’ detection in thrillers, as carried

out by two detectives who expound upon their methods, Dupin and Holmes, consists

of ‘abduction’ or, put another way, ‘retroduction’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘conjecture’. The

inferences of the classic detective are not, as commonly assumed, acts of ‘deduction’;

rather they are informed ‘guesses’ of the kind that Charles Sanders Peirce discussed

in his writings on science, logic and philosophical method.

Probably the most accessible exposition of Peirce’s own arguments regarding logical

method is the essay, ‘Deduction, induction and hypothesis’ which appeared in

Popular Science Monthly in 1878 (reprinted in 1923 in the collection entitled Chance,

Love and Logic). Here, Peirce summarises Aristotelian logic, using syllogisms to

demonstrate different types of reasoning. One example concerns a bag of beans in

which two thirds of the beans are known to be white; if one bean is taken from the bag

there is a two thirds probability that the bean will be white. This is a deductive

inference (1998: 133). But a deductive inference can be inverted to make a synthetic

inference (induction or hypothesis [also called ‘abduction’]):

Suppose I enter a room and there find a number of bags, containing different kinds of

beans. On the table there is a handful of white beans; and, after some searching, I find

one of the bags contains white beans only. I at once infer as a probability, or as a fair

guess, that this handful was taken out of that bag. This sort of inference is called

making an hypothesis. It is the inference of a case from a rule and result. We have,

then –


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DEDUCTION

Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.

Case.- These beans are from this bag.

. . . Rule.- These beans are white.

INDUCTION

Rule.- These beans are from this bag.

Case.- These beans are white.

. . . Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.

HYPOTHESIS

Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.

Case.- These beans are white.

. . . Rule.- These beans are from this bag.

(1998: 134)

A basic knowledge of detective fiction, even if derived only from the works of Poe

and Conan Doyle, enables one to see that the form of reasoning which most concerns

the classic detective falls into the third category: ‘abductive inference’ or


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‘hypothesis’. As Peirce frequently points out, deduction deals with what must be,

induction is a matter of what is, and abduction is about what may be (given the

necessary conditions). A fictional detective is usually presented with an event - a case

- without knowing what precipitated it; the detective’s task, then, is to find the

solution, the precipitating factor(s). As Peirce argues, induction is a conclusion that

facts similar to observed facts are true in cases not examined; abduction or

hypothesis, on the other hand, involve a conclusion of “the existence of a fact quite

different from anything observed, from which, according to known laws, something

observed would not necessarily result” (1998: 143). Induction reasons from

particulars to the general law in an act of classification; abduction reasons from effect

to cause in an attempt to explain.

Abduction is altogether more tentative and risky than either induction or deduction.

Peirce notes that “There is some justice in the contempt which clings to the word

hypothesis” (1998: 146). Yet, problems with abductions arise primarily when they are

not tested or when conditions are imperfect. In The Sign of Three, Truzzi is especially

sceptical:

The great weakness in Holmes’s applications of inference - at least as Watson related

them to us - was Holmes’s failure to test the hypotheses which he obtained through

abduction. In most instances, Holmes simply treated the abducted inference as though

it were logically valid. (Most of the parodies on Holmes are built upon this weakness

in the narratives). The simple fact is that the vast majority of Holmes’s inferences just

do not stand up to logical examination. He concludes correctly simply because the

author of the stories allows it so (1983: 70)


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Truzzi’s comments are true of many detectives in thrillers, from ratiocinators such as

Poirot, to police operatives with a hunch, to profilers who try to enter serial killers’

imaginations. Hypothesis, according to Peirce, must be put as a question; the results

of its predictions should be anticipated; random cases of the hypothesis should be

used in testing; and a log of failures in testing should be kept (1998: 142) – measures

that fictional detectives usually fail to take.

The conditions prevailing in an abduction also make the act of constructing an

hypothesis risky. When Holmes infers a number of details about a man from

examining the dilapidated nature of his hat, as he does in ‘The adventure of the blue

carbuncle’, the modern reader, especially, is able to identify the tell-tale signs of

speculation. One of Holmes’s conclusions is that the man’s wife has ceased to love

him if she takes no care of this aspect of his appearance. It is questionable whether

Holmes has made an accurate abduction here, even within the milieu in which he

exists; certainly, given the change in women’s roles in the West since the nineteenth

century, his observations are far from universally applicable (cf. Pyrhönen 1999: 70-1

and Truzzi 1983: 70). The standard analysis of the thriller, especially detective

fiction, as being consonant with the rise of science and presenting in its resolutions a

form of logical closure (e.g. Van Dover 1994; Nordon 1967: 247; Booth 1997: 158-9;

Panek 1987: 85-6) is therefore brought into question by The Sign of Three.

Abduction, to be sure, is certainly part of scientific method; moreover, The Sign of

Three is concerned with the development of this method, the continuity and

divergences between common sense and scientific investigation and the role of

detailed scrutiny of ‘trifles’ in the pursuit of answers to larger questions. But in its

juxtaposition of Peirce with Dupin and Holmes The Sign of Three also fundamentally

re-orientates the established view of what might be called the thriller’s ‘dominant


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procedure’. There is a problem of knowledge in the thriller; but it is not the one that it

is customarily thought to be.

‘Deduction’ and the dominant: re-thinking the thriller canon

The exploration of abduction offered by The Sign of Three and the attendant

qualifications of the knowledge process discussed therein, actually shed light on the

very ways in which a genre (of any kind) is constituted. The case of the thriller, it

might be argued, is pronounced, because logical reasoning is frequently so central to

thriller texts; but, most importantly, the character of logical reasoning is the basis on

which canon-building and reification of a corpus’s generic quality takes place.

As Harrowitz points out in her essay for The Sign of Three, one of the most

influential histories of the thriller, Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder (1974; originally

1972), opposes two approaches to the origins of the detective story: one which relies

on the key process of ‘deduction’ as an almost timeless phenomenon and another

which relies on detection used by the police and private detectives as a fact of social

life. For Symons, what matters is whether a purely historical connection between

social life and the text is applicable in the case of Poe’s rarely disputed paternity of

the detective story. He is willing to accept that his object of study is a ‘hybrid’ and

therefore subject to a number of influences from a number of sources and yet, he

wishes to avoid discussing the “enormous mass of more or less entertaining rubbish”

(1974: 10) which would make up the object of a more comprehensive consideration

of the thriller. Here, immediately, is the canon-building impetus. In some degree, it is

excusable, as the volume of popular fiction that has been, and continues to be,

produced is simply impossible to accommodate within academic analysis. However,

unself-conscious canon building has implications regarding that which is taken to

constitute a genre.


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If we were to allow Symons’ understanding of the thriller genre to stand, based, as it

is, on the absolute centrality of socially grounded detection as opposed to general

‘deduction’ (read: ‘abduction’) then the canonic impulse would be sharpened.

Whether the ‘essence’ of the thriller is to be found in detection in social life or in a

general process of ‘deduction’ (read: ‘abduction’), the genre is posited in terms of a

textual ‘dominant’. It has been argued elsewhere (Cobley 2001) that such analysis is

limiting and can work against a dialogical genre theory, despite the fact that it will

inevitably be asserted that genres still have definable features such as heroes, heroines

and outcomes which in some way ‘dominate’ proceedings and have precisely been

the object of investigation for textual analysts in the past. Nevertheless, the idea of a

generic dominant (which grew out of Russian Formalism and was taken up by the

Prague Linguistic Circle) is, one could suggest, incarnated in its ‘strong’ form in

Symons’ view of the thriller. Symons’ dominant is not couched in Jakobsonian terms,

of course, but according to pre-requisites that are somewhat more mundane: a

consensus on a central corpus of texts and their relevance to the history of the genre

based on what is thought to be ‘good’ writing. ‘Tastemaking’ is one part of the

process;2 sketching a theory of ‘generic evolution’ is another part of it.3

Indeed, a false sense of evolution exists in a crucial symbiotic relation to the

maintenance of the dominant syntax of a genre. Towards the end of Bloody Murder,

Symons summarises the evolution of the crime story as a series of points, of which

the following is number 5: “The attempts to break the ‘rules’, partly on the ground

that their literary products were so boring (Francis Iles), partly because they were so

silly (Hammett and Chandler)”. This, of course, is probably the most prominent and

often discussed juncture of the detective story: when the ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Mayhem

Parva’ phase of the thriller was superseded. Yet Symons has propounded a fallacy in

order to construct a tidy model of evolution. The inaugural moment of the ‘Golden

Age’ is consensually placed at 1920, when Christie introduced M. Hercule Poirot in


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her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. In spite of the consensus on the

dating, this in no way sets up a temporal evolution from subgenre 1 (the Golden Age

‘cozy’) to subgenres 2 and 3 (self-conscious detective fiction and the hard-boiled

school) as Symons’ schema seeks to do. Haycraft (1979: 112-180), writing in 1941,

dates the period of both the hard-boiled and Golden Age subgenres from 1918-1930;

there is no need to stress some kind of relation of reaction and transcendence on the

part of the hard-boiled story.4 Clearly, it is a device to shift discussion from

ratiocinative ‘deduction’ (artificial puzzles) to ‘realist’ enquiry (investigation

trammelled by social problems). Both, it might be argued, are better served by an

understanding of the patterns of inference they have in common.

Generic canons and models of genre evolution should be treated with extreme

suspicion within genre theory. At best, they run the risk of being questionable in

detail; at worst, they are thoroughly ahistorical. Furthermore, they are part of a

general paraphernalia of reification which facilitates a mechanical ‘reading off’ of the

‘meaning’ of a given text. As such, they go hand in hand with Symons’

aforementioned idea of the ‘rules’ of a genre, although, in the thriller especially, the

articulation of the rules has at least envisaged a tacit audience. Famously, in the 1920s

and 1940s, authors such as John Dickson Carr (1970), S. S. Van Dine (1974) and

Father Ronald Knox (1974), as well as Howard Haycraft with his spoof ‘Detection

Club Oath’ (1974), attempted to establish generic verisimilitude through an explicit

‘contract’ with ‘the reader’. This was a means to ‘ensure’ fair play between the

participants in the act of reading so that the narratives’ puzzle(s) could be solved

rationally. The way Carr and other writers of detective fiction ‘rules’ characterized

the generic contract was direct and traditional: sender, message, receiver. ‘Implied

authors’ ‘narrators’, ‘narratees’, ‘implied readers’ and ‘real readers’ do not figure in

such contracts, let alone the vagaries of ‘noise’ which have dogged communication

models since Shannon and Weaver.


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Perhaps more famous still as an example of the attempt to ground thrillers in rational

rules is Conan Doyle’s revelation in the December l900 edition of the Westminster

Gazette, that the idea of writing about a detective came to him around 1886 when he

had read some detective stones and thought they were nonsensical because the plots,

often thin, unimaginative and imitative - either revolved about coincidence or relied

for their denouement on the authors revealing vital clues that had previously been

hidden from the readers (Booth 1997: 104). Yet what the comments of the rulemakers

and Conan Doyle suggest is nothing to do with the intrinsic, dominant character of

the thriller but, rather, an attempt to impose a particular complexion on a corpus. In a

sense, Knox, Van Dine et al wished to institute a more rigorous contract for reading, a

contract which, in fact, is based on deduction. Carr’s insistence, for example, that the

detective story contract constitutes ‘a duel between author and reader’ (1970: 230) is

actually a reduction of the genre to a narrative puzzle. (As will be suggested below,

Carr also has a fairly one-sided outlook on puzzles here). Concomitantly, Van Dine’s,

Knox’s and Haycraft’s demand for strictly naturalistic means and a prohibition of

withholding evidence in thriller narratives, implies that the genre should be (all too

easily elided to is) dominated by a logical resolution of a textual enigma.

The obvious point is that the prescriptive ‘should be’ aspect of the rules reveals in its

very iteration that the genre is not made up entirely of the dominant procedure in

question. More pointedly, though, for the present discussion, is the fact that the

thriller, if it does contain some central syntactical features, is not unproblematically a

genre of deduction. From the supposed outset, as Rosenheim (1997: 68) notes, the

revelation of the ape as the culprit in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 story, ‘The Murders in

the Rue Morgue’, is a profound act of bad faith which contravenes detective fiction

‘rules’. Indeed, Rosenheim quotes Poe on this very issue, specifically on his own

‘puzzle’ narratives:


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Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the

express purpose of unravelling? These tales of ratiocination owe most of their

popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not

ingenious – but people think they are more ingenious than they are – on account of

the method and the air of method (68).

Dupin’s ingenuity in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, of course, is borne of

abduction, in his arguing from the surface manifestations of a case to the root of a

possibility.5

Puzzles, codes, logica utens and logica docens

Ronald R. Thomas (1999) has persuasively argued that American detective fiction in

the nineteenth century, contra its British variant, evinced a definite scepticism,

particularly around the node of forensic science. Technologies of sound and vision in

the period facilitated criminal surveillance and provided new semiotic means such as

ballistics and fingerprinting for evaluations of criminal activity after the fact.

According to Thomas, while the British mindset was quick to accommodate such

technologies in a spirit of scientific infallibilism, the American detective remained

uneasy about criminal anthropology’s guarantees of truth. It is perhaps possible in

this frame to say that the American detective partook not only of ‘scepticism’ but also

of ‘pragmatism’. Rather than detectives accepting guarantees of the finite nature of

forensic evidence, the scientific paraphernalia of truth in Puddn’head Wilson or

Hammett’s detective stories is shown to be overvalued and too mechanical in the

activity of detection (see Thomas 1999: 91-110, 240-275). The division between

British ‘empiricism’ and American ‘scepticism’ identified by Thomas, then, is clearly


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an important one when viewed in relation to a theory of meaning such as pragmatism.

Indeed, in his later work, especially the 1898 and 1903 ‘Harvard lectures’, Peirce

manifestly associated pragmatism with the logic of inquiry. However - and especially

in light of what The Sign of Three demonstrated with regard to the congruence of

Peirce’s view of scientific method and the work of the detective figure - such a

dichotomy may be so fundamental in relation to detective fiction that it signifies more

than broadly national patterns of thought.

As has been seen, one of the canonic impulses in commentaries on the thriller has had

at its core a specific view of enigmas. In short, the thriller has been seen to revolve

around the dominant procedure of solving a riddle, puzzle or code. For canon-builders

especially, the history of the thriller has been one of an elaborated syntax of

ratiocination starting with Poe’s tales. Indeed, Shawn Rosenheim (1997) has

suggested that codebreaking is not just at the heart and origins of the thriller but that

Poe is the instigator of a proliferating cryptographic imagination in many spheres.

Poe’s 1843 story, ‘The Gold Bug’, is notable here, but so too is the cryptographic

expertise of the other putative archetype, Holmes, evidence of which is spread across

Doyle’s canon. Puzzles and codes, however, are not as logically straightforward as

they may seem. It is frequently assumed that codebreaking and puzzle-solving

necessarily invoke a linearly conceived logic in which the solution is dependent on

deductive steps.

Recent general works on codes and puzzles have implied that the activities

engendered by both are deeply ingrained in human nature or subjectivity. In this way,

the occasional American marketing designation of the general thriller genre as

‘mystery’ is a good one, since it gives a broad sense of the problem solving and


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knowledge seeking which is featured in various ways in thriller narratives. What

puzzles and codes share with their refigurations in thrillers, though, is a dual logic

that is often required for the process of solving them. Before the twentieth century,

the Enigma machine and computer encryption, the most prevalent forms of ciphers

required ‘frequency analysis’ to begin the process of decoding. The simplest form of

frequency analysis with written ciphers involves identifying the most frequent

occurrences of letters in a cipher – for example, ‘e’ in the English language - and

matching them with the average frequencies of letters occurring in discourse that is

not encrypted. On the surface this seems straightforwardly logical and even

arithmetical. Yet, even with the simplest of ciphers, preceding the multiple

encryptions instituted by Alberti and Vigenère (Singh 1999: 45-100), accurate

reckoning is not efficacious on its own. It can never be certain that the cryptographer,

by chance or by purpose, has eschewed the letter ‘e’, for instance. Frequency analysis

thus proceeds not solely by way of precise correlations but according to an

accumulated store of knowledge of words which enables a decoder to hypothesize

what the message might be. In short, the solution is achieved by abductive inference,

or what Danesi dubs “insight thinking” (2002: 27-35).

Danesi sees insight thinking as “an admixture of imagination and memory that leads

us to literally see the pattern or twist that a puzzle conceals” (2002: 27). Given the

lineage of cryptanalysis and the elevated status of puzzle-solvers in early modern

society, Danesi does not shrink from stressing the apparently mystical aspect of the

process involved in reaching a solution, likening it to clairvoyance. At the same time,

however, he cites Rutherford’s propitious “guessing” of the inside of the atom as

equally characteristic of abductive inference (2002: 28). More generally, Danesi

argues that puzzle-solving calls not simply on ‘intelligence’; instead, it evokes logica


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utens and logica docens, scholastic categories revitalised by Peirce. Along with

Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1980: 66), Danesi describes the former as a rudimentary

logic-in-use which can be practised by all, as opposed to logica docens practised by

scholars, logicians and medical doctors. Logica docens, Sebeok and Umiker Sebeok

argue, is

a logic which may be self-consciously taught and is therefore a theoretically

developed method of discovering truth. The scientist or logician does not, however,

invent his logica docens, but rather studies and develops the natural logic he and

everyone else already use in daily life (1980: 66).

They note, also, that Watson in the Holmes stories enacts logica docens in respect of

his medical practice but is inept in transferring this method to the detection of crime.

Holmes, however, who practices the methods of medicine in general, ensures that “an

element of art and magic is blended into the logic of scientific discovery” (Sebeok

and Umiker-Sebeok 1980: 66). An example of such “art and magic”, of course, is

clairvoyance.

Undoubtedly, the ‘magical’ aspect of puzzle-solving, codebreaking or inference in the

thriller is enhanced by the drama woven into the representation of the achievement.

Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok cite the Holmes story, ‘The crooked man’, in which

Holmes tells Watson of “‘those instances [of detection] where the reasoner can

produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has

missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction’” (1980: 71). This, they

suggest, is akin to the “con game” (where “con” is, for them, the diminutive of

“confidence” but in the present terms might equally be so of “contract”), between


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author and audience. They quote Conan Doyle: “‘The first thing is to get your idea.

Having got that key, one’s next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything

which can make for a different explanation’” (72). The reading or spectatorship of

puzzle solving or abduction is, indisputably, different from the act of puzzle solving

itself, in spite of the element of puzzling and solution finding that the reader might be

compelled to carry out. This is why suggestions that the thriller ‘just’ relies on the

puzzle formula have a very limited mileage.

Nevertheless, this is not to say that the idea of the genre as a specific kind of

enactment of what Danesi calls the “puzzle instinct” should be dismissed. The thriller

is constantly identified as belonging to a distinct historical formation which

corresponds also to the period in which it was to become marketed as a commodity.

Its entwinement with logica utens, however, strongly suggests that the genre

facilitates and dramatizes a potent aspect of human identity that precedes those

formations. Furthermore, the genre does so in a fashion which indicates that an

invitation to readers to participate makes up its very fabric. One can speculate that the

aspect of identity dramatized by thrillers is the ‘desire to know’, also exemplified by

the puzzle instinct; and, without wishing to promote a totalising tendency or run the

risk of saying nothing of worth, one can observe that this desire is universal. In

relation to the genre’s narrative character, though, it seems likely that the gap

between the thriller protagonist’s movement towards knowing and the equivalent

movement on the part of the expectant reader only exacerbates the anxiety and unease

which prompts both movements in the first place. It is, perhaps, also the gap between

two other factors: the logica docens of the professional detective that the contributors

to The Sign of Three see as akin to scientific or academic knowledge, and the logica

utens of the lay practitioner.


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The thriller, paranoia and the semiotic self

There can be little doubt that the thriller has been one of the most pervasive of

popular genres to crystallize over the last two hundred years. It is almost as

ubiquitous and unquestioned as narrative itself. Moreover, the ‘evolution’ of the

thriller has, in fact, been a crystallization rather than a birth (with Poe) and an

exponential growth. The contemporary genre which, it has been asserted above,

comprises a number of subgenres in addition to detective fiction, also betrays the

residues of such established genres as tragedy (for example, the story of Oedipus), the

epic odyssey, the romance, the gothic, chapbook tales of criminality and the

bildungsroman. More directly, the thriller is a residual formation from Newgate

confessionals (collected stories of criminal lives; Knight 1980: 8-20); adventure

stories (tales of travels and exploits, often in remote areas or strange lands; Cawelti

1976: 39-41); ratiocinative tales (narratives of detection where intellectual

questioning is paramount; Cawelti 1976: 80-105, Knight 1980: 39-134, Moretti 1988:

130-56); memoirs of police operatives (as in those of Vidocq; Knight 1980: 26-37);

sensation novels (narratives which revolve around a mysterious hidden secret, for

example, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White [1860]; Stewart 1980, Rance 1991,

Pykett 1994) and, later, among other subgenres, hard-boiled narratives (tales which

are characterised by a particular ‘trimmed-down’ style and complementary

worldview; Marcus 1975, Ogdon 1992, Willett 1992; see also Cobley 2000: 55-77).

So heteroglossic is the thriller as a genre that it is difficult to argue against Knight’s

contention that it embodies the realisation and validation of a “whole view of the

world” (1980: 2).


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The thriller’s heteroglossia, in fact, ensures that the view of the world that the genre

embraces is a fairly varied one. However, if one were looking for the structure that

facilitates this view, it is likely that the word ‘paranoia’ would reside at the forefront

of the search. In contrast to the formulation of Symons’ and others, then, this might

be considered the ‘weak’ theory of the generic dominant, even though it takes the

‘strong’ view of generic structure as the start point for its understanding of the

facilitation of narratives. Jerry Palmer’s Thrillers (1978), probably the most

persuasive of ideological/structural analyses of genre (cf. Wright 1975, Roth 1995),

puts paranoia and conspiracy at the very centre of the genesis and structure of the

thriller. Whilst it can be argued that the paranoid fear of conspiracy has worn

different political countenances in different social formations or ideological

configurations (Cobley 2000; cf. Hofstadter 1964), the isomorphism of conspiracy

fears – particularly the fear of property theft in the period of burgeoning capitalism -

and the crystallization of the thriller genre seems inescapable. It should be clear, too,

without entering here into an in-depth excursus on the psychological nature of

paranoia, that the kind of fear of conspiracy which plays such a major role in the

thriller is driven by hypothesis, that is to say ‘abduction’. It is no coincidence,

therefore, that Peirce’s famous exposition of abduction as ‘guessing’ (1929) discussed

by Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok concerns an incident, and its subsequent investigation,

in which Peirce’s watch was stolen during a trip from Boston to New York on the Fall

River Line steamship Bristol.

One argument implicit in all of the above is that the ‘minor’ tradition of evaluating

the thriller as a genre pre-dating Poe and encompassing all kinds of detective work

needs to be taken more seriously. In addition to canonisation and reification of the


19

genre, the suggestion that the thriller is bound up with the scientific bearing of

‘deduction’ has occluded an interrogation of the genre’s exemplification of, and

contribution to, forms of subjectivity broadly conceived. It is true that there have been

provocative and stimulating analyses of the genre and its subgenres in relation to

psychological and politico-historical factors (for example, Porter 1981 and Ogdon

1992); but given that abduction was taking place – even in fictional narratives –

before Poe, in the same way that humans were engaged in reasoning before Aristotle,

there is a need to consider the relation of the thriller genre to subjectivity in the

broadest possible sense. One is therefore led to question the general phenomenon of

paranoid anxiety that is entwined with readers’ expectations of the abductive impulse

in thriller narratives, a phenomenon which is dispersed elsewhere, especially across

those genres whose residues can be discerned in the thriller.

In spite of the example of psychoanalysis, the conception of a broad subjectivity

which incorporates paranoid anxiety is not common. It seems that the most discussed

modern theories of the human subject have had a distinct trajectory which, while

identifying anxiety in the human subject, has situated the feeling firmly within a

relatively recent formation. Subjectivity as it has been conceived in so-called

‘continental thought’ revolves around the dilemmas of the post-Enlightenment

human. Modernity has brought increasing ‘risk’ to humans, along with the necessities

of hypothesizing ‘risk assessments’. It has also intensified social relations and

increased the extent to which symbolic systems and power in all its guises suffuse the

private lives of individuals. Modernist faith in rationality has been a servant of an

illusory unity of the subject, denying differences derived from that which is beyond

rationality, such as human desire. Above all, though, the human subject has been seen

to be at the mercy of ‘language’ variously conceived as national linguistic formations,

habits and traits and, occasionally, as an innate psychological or biological


20

mechanism. All of these arguments are now fairly well rehearsed (see Benhabib

1992; Cascardi 1992; Elliott 2001; Giddens 1991; Taylor 1992). Yet, in light of the

putative resurgence of interest in biology in the late twentieth century which, at one

pole, comprises the excesses of evolutionary psychology and its popular reception,

and, at the other, the advances that have taken place in biosemiotics, subjectivity must

be recast.

Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of the ‘semiotic self’ provides a programmatic re-

visioning of the concept of subjectivity. It is also particularly apposite, I would argue,

for the purposes of understanding the pervasive nature of the thriller genre. Sebeok’s

exploration of subjectivity takes place mainly in four published essays beginning with

‘The semiotic self’ (1979) and ‘The semiotic self revisited’ (1989), both reprinted as a

brace in his 1991 book, A Sign is Just a Sign, and ‘”Tell me where is fancy bred?”:

The biosemiotic self’ (1992) and ‘The cognitive self and the virtual self (1998),

reprinted as a second brace in the 2001 volume, Global Semiotics. As in numerous

places elsewhere in his work Sebeok demonstrates the centrality of medicine and

medical practices to the history of understanding signs. Like Ginzburg in his essay,

‘Clues’, Sebeok puts medicine at the centre of a shift in human understanding. For

both, not only does medicine involve the reading and interpretation of signs which

constitutes semiotics, it also deals with kinds of signs which, implicitly at least, are

fundamental to human biological and cultural functions. Firstly, medical symptoms

are ‘nonverbal cues’ – they can be read without necessarily being discernible to the

subject who harbours them. As such, these signs share much in common with the

nonverbal cues which might pass between a human and ‘intelligent’ animals in such

cases as that of ‘Clever Hans’ (Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981); they also share

characteristics with the signs that Peirce seems to have encountered when ‘guessing’

or ‘abducting’ the thief of his watch (1929; 271-3, 280). Secondly, in an apparently

synechistic fashion, there can be a continuity between physical symptoms and

supposedly larger, complex and systematic mental experiences such as subjectivity.


21

It is appropriate, then, that Sebeok begins his stimulating but laconic essay on ‘The

semiotic self’ by pointing out the economy of Freud’s definition of anxiety. For Freud

and Sebeok, anxiety is a sign and, more specifically, an indexical one. It is integral to

the workings of the immune system of an organism which maintains a distinction

between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. According to Sebeok, the immune system harbours a

kind of ‘memory’ based on biological discrimination, but also operates another kind

of memory, anxiety, whose domain is patterns of behaviour. Anxiety is activated

when the self is menaced and this can be triggered by signs that might “take a quasi-

biological shape, such as the olfactory trace of a leopard predator for a baboon prey,

or be of semantic character, such as some verbal assault whereby a stranger presses in

upon the territories of the Self” (1991: 39). Indeed, one precipitator of anxiety

mentioned by Sebeok is the constraining factor by which physical symptoms are

resistant to verbalisation and narrativisation in doctor-patient interactions (2001: 123).

The brute physicality or indexicality of symptoms requires an abductive

interpretation, an activity which Sebeok also sees as central to the maintenance of

self, inevitably in relation to an other:

Any self can and must interpret the observed behavior of another organism solely as a

response to its interpretations of its universe, ‘behavior’ meaning the propensity that

enables it to link up its Umwelt with those of living systems within its niche (2001:

126)

The act of interpretation, he adds, is an act of “assignment”, that is, the elevation of

an interpreted phenomenon to ‘signhood’. It is also self-maintaining or ‘autopoietic’

(2001: 126).

Anxiety, it would seem, is the key sign mechanism of selfhood. In his essays, Sebeok

focuses on this, love and the self-apprehension of body size in the maintenance of the


22

self. Yet anxiety’s role in the immunological system appears to be pivotal. It is worth

replaying Sebeok’s summarized propositions, here:

(1) There are at least two apprehensions of the Self:

(a) immunologic, or biochemical, with semiotic overtones;

(b) semiotic, or social, with biological anchoring.

(2) The arena of the immune reaction is contained within the skin; the arena for signal

anxiety is normally between the perimeter of the Hediger ‘bubble’ and the skin of

the organism, the former containing the latter.

(3) Invasion of (a) is initially signalled by the immune response, of (b) by anxiety,

with the latter serving as an early warning system for the former.

(4) In evolution, (a) is very old, whereas (b) is relatively recent. There is a

corresponding advance from a purely metonymic nexus to one perceived as causal

efficacy.

(5) Communicational errors occur in both processes, and may have devastating

effects on the Self (1991: 40).

Anxiety, one could say, is an indexical sign whose cause is another sign and which, in

turn, generates further signs. One could also suggest that, as an ‘early warning

system’, it is a peculiar form of preliminary abductive inference, a form which, like

all abduction, is far from foolproof but which is nevertheless crucial because there is

so much at stake in the maintenance of the self.

It is not difficult to see how conspiracy and the paranoid fear of conspiracy have

suffused modern life. As a feature of post-Enlightenment subjectivity, it seems self-

evident that the growth in property holding, along with the laissez-faire spirit and

competitive individualism imbricated with the establishment of a liberal bourgeois

hegemony in the nineteenth century West, catalysed those fears. In an epoch of

rationalism, anxiety about irrationalism has come to undermine the symbolic systems


23

which have so pervaded the life of humans. Yet anxiety runs deeper than the social

systems in which it is embedded. As a sign, its very primordial nature renders it

fraught with potential. For this reason, Sebeok’s identification of two apprehensions

of the self is far from reductive. Instead, it provides a facilitative way of thinking

subjectivity which does not need to eschew biology when proceeding from a semiotic

premiss.

Historically specific fears do not appear to be sufficient to account for the almost

immeasurable potency and ubiquity of the thriller, even if they do provide a basis for

the genre’s crystallization as a set of expectations in readers’ imaginations. The

contributors to The Sign of Three implicitly see their observations on a modest scale,

as a comment on the homologies of evolving methods of detection and the logic of

scientific inquiry. However, these analyses deserve amplification: at the very least,

they indicate that the power of an almost omnipresent genre is to be found in its broad

searching nature, an anxious quest for knowledge which not only underpins the

notion of science but which might be the basis of human subjectivity itself.


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Notes

1 It is worth noting how some commentators on the history of the thriller persist in a

conventional history in ignorance of the re-formulation of the genre offered by The

Sign of Three. Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, seems to be well loved,

but few thriller commentators see fit to engage with its theoretical underpinnings.

David Lehman’s The Perfect Murder (2000), for example, discusses the novel but

fails to mention The Sign of Three or any of its premisses; Dove’s The Reader and

the Detective Story (1997) does the same; Thoms’ Detection and its Designs (1998)

also discusses The Name of the Rose and lists The Sign of Three in the notes as a

helpful volume (although, unhappily, the subtitle is given as “Dupin, Holmes, Pierce

[sic]” in both the notes and the references); Van Dover’s You Know My Method

(1994), a discussion of detection and science, unavoidably mentions The Sign of

Three (on page 85), but seems very confused about Holmes’ method, defining it

mainly as ‘deduction’, but sometimes ‘induction’; Panek’s An Introduction to the

Detective Story (1987) fails to mention The Sign of Three and sticks to the idea of

Dupin and Poe as engaged in ‘deduction’; Julian Symons’ second and third editions

of Bloody Murder (1985 and 1992), though influential, are too lightweight to carry

comments influenced by The Sign of Three; while more specialized academic

histories of specific areas of thriller history – for example, Soitos’ The Blues

Detective (1996), Nickerson’s The Web of Iniquity (1998) and, most regrettably,

Cobley’s The American Thriller (2000) – do not see fit to broach the issues raised by

Eco, Sebeok et al; one major academic history of the thriller, Thomas’ Detective

Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999) also omits mention of the arguments

in The Sign of Three although the volume is noted as a good guide to the semiotics of


25

detective fiction. The creditable exception to all the above is the discussion of

abduction and narrativity in Pyrhönen’s Mayhem and Murder (1999).

2 Alastair Fowler gives a general overview of the process when he says that

Two particular cross-sections of a genre’s time-worm [sic] mainly interest critics.

These are: (1) the original generic state when the work in question was written; and

(2) the state in the critic’s own time. Intentionalists may be concerned to reconstruct

1; but every critic inevitably relates the work to 2, the genre he knows (1982: 51).

3 Frequently, critics, literary historians and, especially, historians of generic texts,

identify a line of development culminating in the period in which they write. An

influential take on thriller and gangster films will, for example, identify the final

ascent to grace of the subgenre in the present moment (for example, see the

discussion of Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather in Shadoian 1978: 12); works on

the ‘structure’ of the thriller identify its contemporary apotheosis (Palmer 1978;

Mandel 1984); likewise, a work on African-American detectives will close with a

chapter on the ‘black anti-detective novel’ (Soitos 1996). Writers on the topic of

generic ‘evolution’ are very reluctant to countenance the idea that genre fiction can in

any way be ‘ahead of the times’ or even contemporary with them, in a manner which

seems to be reserved for valorized fiction. The precious few commentators who do

envisage this possibility – Thomas (1999) is a good example of how productive

suspension of high cultural prejudices can be in this respect – usually implement a

thematic rather than an evolutionary perspective on genre.

4 If one looks to the magazine Black Mask as an anchor for the hard-boiled school one

finds that it was founded in 1920 by Nathan and Mencken and the first hard-boiled


26

detective, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams appeared in 1923 (Ruhm 1979 viii-ix).

Nevertheless, Haycraft, writing only eighteen years later, is so keen to credit

Hammett that he overlooks Daly’s paternity (1979: 169), introducing an evolutionary

model of his own. But apart from any of all this, the crucial ingredient to which

Symons is probably referring in his summary point is Chandler’s much-vaunted

vilification of the Golden Age story, which did not actually appear in print until ‘The

Simple Art of Murder’ was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944 (Gardiner and

Sorley Walker 1984: 14; see Chandler 1950; convincing reasons for Chandler’s

indisputable centrality to most thriller histories are offered by Knight 1980: 138).

Indeed, subgenre 2, ‘self-conscious detective fiction’ - associated with Francis Iles

according to Symons - can be dated especially at 1926 with the publication of

Christie’s own Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? if not earlier (see Bayard 2000).

5 Although, cf. Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1980: 32, 54), on the differences between

Dupin and Holmes.


27

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Semiotics of paranoia: The Thriller, Abduction and The Self

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