<TITLE: Text, Bild och Samhälle
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: humanities
DISCIPLINE: Swedish philology
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE02A
NOTES: continued in CDIS020, session also includes presentation CPRE02B

RECORDING DURATION: 20 min 35 sec

RECORDING DATE: 16.8.2002

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 25

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S1: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Finnish; ACADEMIC ROLE: junior staff; GENDER: female; AGE: unknown>


<S1> in er <FOREIGN> svenska </FOREIGN> , alright er social critique has become an essential theme in contemporary contemporary detective fiction , awareness of er social issues is indeed such a central characteristic in particularly in nordic detective or crime fiction that er discussion of what whether these novels can be related to as a contemporary a contemporary form of novel of society (xx) has emerged during the past few years and why not crime definitely is a social issue erm naturally also the central theme of contemporary detective fiction but instead relating to crime as singular phenomena produced by evil individuals as was done in the earlier representatives of the genre and er crime and criminality are now thematised from more comprehensive and very respected taking into account and questioning a variety of social er factors produced by different social environments and structures the perspective on criminality as a social issue prima- -marily produced by social factors simultaneously introduces subtext that can either support of refute the social critique of the surface level in er this paper i want to look at one of the subtexts that interests me (xx) contemporary er contemporary detective fiction that of the body the body i will er concentrate on belongs to henning mankell's well known detective kurt wallander in the first wallander novel novel faceless killers <FOREIGN> mördare utan ansikte </FOREIGN> it was er first published in 1991 er if i asked you to erm describe wallander i expect the descriptions would contain words like middle aged overweight divorced occasionally heavy drinking bad eating habits problems with digestion et cetera and true the immediate characteristics of wallander's embodiment denote (xx) and wounded- woundedne- @woundedness@ woundedness up to the point er that at times it is hard to believe that a person with all this bodily harm can get out of bed in the morning and carry out his tasks as a detective with great success as wallander does so why is he so wounded , on the other hand and so successful on the other is there yet another subtext to his embodiment a text that ties together his fragile body male body with his performance as a detective yes there is i would argue and the text is that of masculinity er what is being (carved) in the human flesh is an image of society writes mary douglas the body according to her can be seen as a symbol or a metaphor of society the human body being a (reflection) of these social structure in small in our social reality we are used to divide bodies into male and female depending on the genital northo- morphology er this is because our social reality is constructed according to the regular er regulatory fame framework of gender the governing principal of which is sexual difference bodies according to this logic are either male or female and the definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman in turn are reflected on bodies producing them as male or females er attaching features of masculinity or femininity to them this is why the body can be regarded as an essential social process a process that as douglas suggests is an image of the rules regulations and values that simultaneously construct the body discourse , so my main questions are how does this show in contemporary detective fiction that is keen to reflect social development what kind of gender discourse do these contemporary novels of society produce and how does this production take place when seen through the embodiment of the most central figure the male detective protag- protagonist er as i already mentioned er the main detective protagonist i want to concentrate on in in this paper is kurt wallander and my aim is to present a a a very pragmatic approach to his embodiment one way of making the body visible engendered and intelligible as a textual phenomenon basically er the body can appear in a wri- in a written text in two ways firstly it can be referred to explicitly which means that the whole body or some part of it is mentioned in the text for instance quote <FOREIGN 0:06> unquote here it is the face that gets explicitly mentioned secondly the body can appear as an implied body in symbols or metaphors like cars motion like running bodily functions (xx) (defecating) sickness and pain et cetera er an example of an implied body could be quote <FOREIGN 0:08> unquote so the body is not explicitly mentioned here in this e- example it's only sort of present in it , er the explicitly explicitly mentioned body is the kind of body i aim to concentrate on now today and er as i already mentioned my approach is very pragmatic when i started to write my doctoral thesis i wanted to find a relatively straightforward way to get a hold of the detective's body so er what i did was that i (finally) simply counted all (body parts) mentioned in the novel , in this (novel) , so i found out that in er faceless killers kurt wallander had 38 different body parts some of which were mentioned several times er in different contexts others a few times or some of them only once wallander's head was mentioned 36 times his hands er 19 times his face 18 times his eyes 15 arms 11 and his forehead ten times to give a few examples , er having done the counting it occurred to me that er i could really what i could do er was draw a picture of the detective based on the body parts i had found in the novel er in order to visul- visualise and make more tangible the image of his embodiment and er this methodological solution proved not only great fun but also quite revealing and er i want to think of the picture as a as a sort of interface a device to help to to bridge the gap between the mental images produ- produced by the text and a concrete representation , so er , this is what kurt wallander looks like now this is a a the the image is a sort of a prototype so you shouldn't think about this picture as a picture of of kurt wallander it's a prototype based on the body parts mentioned in the novel . now the obvious question at er this point is in what way are these figures , er and the the picture (based on revealing an interesting) what do the figures and the picture tell about wallander's embodiment in relation to his masculinity and his detectiveness naturally all these body parts er must be underlined as as part of the context when a body part is mentioned in the text it has a particular function it is mentioned because it is somehow constructive of the context it appears in at the same time the body part itself is invested with meaning as part of its context that comprises not only the body but even the text as a whole but even that is not enough since the approaches of meaning creation takes place on extra-textual levels too as er jonathan culpeper states the readers culturally specific prime knowledge as well as as his or her individual characteristics are crucial when constructing the meaning of the text so er the construction of the representation of the body is based on both textual and individual factors all of which are embedded in certain certain social discourse our conceptions of embodiment in in the western culture are (notably) uniform we tend to relate to the body according to logic that is shared or understood as intelligible by more or less more or less all people in the western societies as mentioned earlier we tend to take it as a self-evident fact that there are two kinds of bodies male or female although this fact as argued by judith butler for instance can be seriously questioned we also tend to think due to the normative body discourse we are embedded in that some bodies are better than others that some some bodies are too tall some too short too fat or too thin or that some bodies have too little hair on their heads or other parts of the body penis or breasts too small or except in the penis too big this is also paid attention to by leonard J davies who further mentions that we also have the tendency to assign good or bad labels to body parts good parts could be for instance hair face lips eyes hands and bad sexual organs (xx) organs underarms , er well in in faceless killers the head is the body part that becomes most central the head as such is is mentioned 36 times in addition other parts er like the face the eyes the forehead the ears the brain et cetera that also belong to the head somehow or we could say emphasise the importance of of of the head it is basically a good body part the head is the home of the thinking i the rational subjectivity (xx) emphasised in western thinking the i that is defined to be a white heterosexual man representing white middle class masculinity but what then is blundered head like and what does it tell about his masculinity cultural masculinity er to begin with wallander has different kinds of heads firstly a concrete head that is approached from the outside a head that receives blows gets bruised or bleeds secondly his head has an inside an inside that suffers because of wallander's urge for heroism this feel head feels the pain forced by the blows it aches it is a feeling suffering head showing that the main harness of heroic detectiveness indeed has fractures er this head is a victim of detectiveness an object that displays the consequences of wallander's profession wallander's third head is a psychological system a head with ideas thoughts images emotions or it could be like that because it is a detective's head it would be natural to assume that it be filled with plenty of rational thinking clues and evidence in nice logical order however that is not the case er this really happens only once er when he method- methodically goes through the second murder murder case in his head on page 189 the second time when the head is referred to as a site of mental capacities the he's singing a strauss waltz in his head er wallander's fourth head is an object to be related to it can be shot at or it can be a marker of distance between wallander and often dead death like er when he gets stuck hanging with his head less than one metre from the ground , so most of the time wallander's head is an a- is an aching head a bruised and a bleeding head this pain being caused by his effort to fill the ideal of traditional heroic masculinity characterised by performance and even better performance but how does bruises blood pain and heroic masculinity fit together in fact very well no pain no gain is one of the central slogans of tough masculinity the bruises are not only the natural price to be paid for heroic identity although pain is a fracture in the heroic harness it is at the same time constituting of the hard masculine identity so what about la- the lack of rationality and brilliant logical thinking it seems that wallander's body becomes a site for the kind of masculinity that emphasises action instead of rational thinking in an armchair in front of a fireplace he is by no means an action hero but his main performance and the wounds forthright er constitute his masculinity through the body in a way not very different from ma- er heroes in action he turns his wounds his suffering his endurance into a heroic act thus making a wounded hero but neverthe- nevertheless a hero (from himself) this way his embodiment although characterised by flaws and weakness in fact supports traditional tough masculinity er the detective's body can be become visible through being explicitly mentioned but at the same time it can become visible by not me- being mentioned we tend to relate to bodies in certain ways due to our prime knowledge we construct textual bodies as normal bodies if nothing else is mentioned by normal i mean bodies with two arms and and two legs ten fingers and toes two er two eyes and a nose in other words bodies with no obvious handicaps like missing missing limbs when a character is mentioned for the first time in a novel er , or or in other written text the reader provides him or her with limbs that belong to a normal body image or those this al- although these body parts lack explicit textual ref- reference not all fingers and toes have to be particularly referred to in order to guarantee their existence neither does it have to be particularly pointed out that the fictional character has two legs to help the reader to experience him or her as as a two legged person the reader normalises the body image in his or her mind and provides the character with what leonard called phantom limbs er that inherently belong to the normalised body image of the character although these body parts are nowhere mentioned so if we look at this picture and rely upon our prime knowledge about the male body we immediately realise that something important is missing wallander has no penis no nose either but i'm not going to talk talk about that this time although the penis is the strongest singular marker of maleness we can think of since it is the body part that determines with which gender the child is socialised into it is absent from this picture however this is quite normal and er when keeping in mind the associations with hard masculinity in connections connection with the head the absence of the penis in the picture can be expected wallander's picture lacks the penis but it would be difficult to claim that he is not a man because his maleness is is implied through the reiteration of masculine practices we recognise as male performances wallander is a man without a penis or actually a man with an invisible penis that becomes visible in his (phallic) masculine (gender) performance like er when wallander turns his woundedness into a marker of male power his lack of penis can s- can also be seen as constitutive of his hard s- hard masculine image the penis is the most is most powerful when it is invisible as susan warder pointed out pointed out and indeed when the vulnerability and the ambiguity of the real penis is hidden its cultural counterpart the phallus can take over the phallus is always hard the penis is not the penis can fail the phallus cannot , er i have now i've talk about talked about two body parts and given an account of er the meanings produced through them with with a framework of gender one of them the head is mentioned most often in faceless killers in our culture the the head is regarded as the locus of male rationality and subjectivity it is a good body part i have also paid attention to another body part that has a central significance for maleness the penis that although marked by absence in my picture becomes visible and powerful in symbolic forms the interesting thing is that both the head and the penis in their representations point towards traditional forms of phallic masculinity and it seems that in this novel the social critique that is so overwhelming on the level of the rhetoric mostly vocalised through wallander has not yet penetrated the surface of the detective's body wallander as a character supports the traditional assumptions of gender and of masculinity at least what comes to this embodiments . thank you </S1>
<APPLAUSE>
