Literature as Equipment for Prosecution

[X-posted to The Valve]

When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize, I complained about conservatives' sudden, easily explicable interest in contemporary theater.  ("So now you care about literature," I whined.)  Turns out politicos aren't the only ones who develop an intense but fleeting interest in literary criticism.

Police do too.

Seems the British author John Fowles has run afoul piqued the interest of Austrian police investigating the eight year ordeal of Natascha Kampusch, the young woman kidnapped when she was ten-years-old and held captive until she escaped last week.  According to The Scotsman:

Police said they were investigating whether [Wolfgang] Priklopil knew about John Fowles' novel The Collector, which tells the story of a man who kidnapped a girl and hid her in a secret basement cell in the hope one day she might fall in love and marry him.

"We have received several tips about the book," said Gerhard Lang, a senior police officer. He said no copy of the novel had been found at the house.

The "tips" notwithstanding, one wonders what the police want with The Collector.  Do they think it the pedophile-kidnapper's equivalent of The Turner Diaries?  (The "novel" which inspired Timothy McVeigh's "patriotism.")  Or do they—and I mean this seriously—do they believe it offers insight into Priklopil's psyche?  If so, is that not the ultimate backhanded compliment? 

"You depict the sick mind better than any of your peers.  We commend you on your substantial artistic accomplishment and hope it will be admissible in a court of law."

If that is what they think The Collector to be, literature suddenly means as much as its most strident supporters claim.  It is the work of an incisive mind peering into the depths of the human soul (however inhuman its content may be). 

Mostly I think the Austrian police are looking for a blueprint, a formula, something which will dispel the idea that an actual human committed this crime of his own accord.  Systems console weak and weary minds, providing elaborate explanations for the simple but unfortunate fact of human depravity. 

This desire for pigeonholable explanations isn't limited to those immediately involved, however.  Sometimes, banishing the banality of evil  from the realm of possibility happens at great remove:

Austrians, perhaps as a legacy from Sigmund Freud, place a great deal of importance on psychiatric help after trauma, so much has been made in the reporting of the case on the need for special psychiatric treatment.

Who needs Freud more now, I wonder.  The captive or her saviors?

Comments

[Mathias]

Interesting, and it would seem that the Freudian model would serve just as well analysing the modern society that insists on scrutinizing every petty detail in absurdum.

[Apostrophe policeman]

"When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize, I complained about conservative's suden, easily explicable interest in contemporary theater."

I wonder if he's has kept it up?

[maria grech ganado]

A work of literature ripples out of its basic subject-matter to reflect on universal themes. The Collector is not only about the psychology of Clegg and the employment of his lottery money to kidnap the far more imaginative and intellectually inquisitive Miranda. Fowles himself underlines this by suggesting the book (which is narrated by both protagonists from their different perspectives in vastly different styles)is a contemporary re-presentation of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' - the contemporary Miranda even calls Clegg, Caliban.
I think that whether Natasha's captor actually read the book or not is interesting because it is a case of reality imitating fiction instead of the other way round - the novel was turned into a play, as also a film with Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. However, in both cases (reality and fiction) the ultimate impression I am left with is how sad the world is when freedom, youth and innocence are overpowered by a lack of imagination - how sad it is too when loneliness is capable of twisting minds, or physical or financial power to overcome more fragile beings (as Clegg's butterflies).
In the long run both reality and fiction illustrate a condition which is esentially human for all of us, as is the compassion both girls feel/felt for their captor. Both Miranda and Natascha had freer minds than their tormentors, it seems, so I'm glad freedom won in reality if not in the fiction.