The Art of Criminology
Joseph Conrad, in his 1907 story The Secret Agent, provides this dialog:
“You would call that lad a degenerate, would you?”
“That’s what he may be called scientifically. Very good type too, altogether, of that sort of degenerate. It’s enough to glance at the lobes of his ears. If you read Lombroso—”
The speakers are discussing a feeble-minded character who plays a crucial role in the narrative. It is Conrad's reference to Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) that is signal. Conrad appears to surrender total authorial discretion, in a work of fiction, by linking it to the literature of fact. Facts, that is, insofar as they were accepted as such 115 years ago.
It is like an admission—even a confession—by Conrad. While today a law enforcement officer would be laughed to scorn for the mere mention of Lombroso, in 1907, his theories had the authority of scientific discovery. What, today, would be roundly dismissed as profiling, was a harmless trade secret of writers of fiction, dramatists, opera librettists, comic satirists, political orators—artists of all kind. Lombroso writes in earnest of the typical criminal profile in his Criminal Man, published postumously, in 1911:
"Painters and poets, unhampered by false doctrines, divined this type long before it became the subject of a special branch of study. The assassins, executioners, and devils painted by Mantegna, Titian, and Ribera the Spagnoletto embody with marvelous exactitude the characteristics of the born criminal; and the descriptions of great writers, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Ibsen, are equally faithful representations, physically and psychically, of this morbid type."
This sort of thing had been going on for along time. Was Lombroso first to point out the fact, or was he but the first criminologist to have his theories dismissed as unscientific? Charles Dickens wrote, in his 1846 Pictures from Italy, what might be characterized as ethnic profiling. A pattern emerges. It seems to be in the nature of a class contradiction which culminates finally, dramatically, in a class conflict. The arts are political.
It would be more politic to refer to it as culture—a contemporary euphemism for the arts. Before positive criminal identification, which includes fingerprinting, blood typing, accurate records, and more such advances, the distinctive character of a man was his identity. The classical music of the 19th Century is noted for the development of the musical motif (sometimes spelled motive), nearly to an extreme. Listened to which, without stage setting, without libretto, sung in a foreign language—for example, played on one of the newfangled gramophones—the entrance of each character in the performance could be identified by his distinctive motif. Lombroso writes:
"Just as a musical theme is the result of a sum of notes, and not of any single note, the criminal type results from the aggregate of these anomalies, which render him strange and terrible, not only to the scientific observer, but to ordinary persons who are capable of an impartial judgment."
It can be argued that a personal identity is constituted of particulars. It can be so argued precisely because any such characterization can be countered. According to the rules, there is not one, unique, personal feature. An identifying trait may be shared by many individuals. The odds for it are good. As a totality of particulars the candidate who possesses the most will come out on top of a slate of runners-up. It is him. Bet on it. A sharp distinction is then to be made between the candidate for the best seller list—and for jail.
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