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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
But the manor house, ultimately, was hard to give up. It was too lucrative for the storyteller, and there was too much fetish value associated with it. And so as the novel moved inward, toward the more psychological realm of early modernism, its locales moved inward too: back to the estates of Henry James, and then later, Forster and Waugh. The organic connection to the land, and to the mass political movements of the time, are abandoned for the crisp clarity of the Jamesian conversation, with its intricate choreography of moves and countermoves, its subtle insights and betrayals. Eliminate the broader system to which the country house connects, and you get a narrative of pure mental abstraction, a clash of characters and not classes.
From there, it was not far to get to the whodunit. Do away with the Jamesian psychological intricacies, and the endless syntactical contortions, and borrow the inspector figure originally developed by Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle and voilá -- you have your Agatha Christie drawing-room mystery. "The true fate of the country-house novel was its evolution into the middle-class detective story," Williams writes. "It was in its very quality of abstraction, and yet of superficially impressive survival, that the country house could be made the place of isolated assembly of a group of people whose immediate and transient relations were decipherable by an abstract mode of detection rather than by the full and connected analysis of any more general understanding." Like many of its real-world specimens, the literary country-house detached itself from history and politics, from its original organic connection to the land, and became an ornate backdrop for murder most foul -- like a kind of narrative exoskeleton, abandoned by its original hosts, and now inhabited by a lesser organism.
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In "Gosford Park" Altman faithfully re-creates the manor-house whodunit shell, while simultaneously reuniting it with its original host. On a formal level, "Gosford Park" turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of the 19th-century novel, and in particular by a narrative device that was essential to the novel's social reach, its efforts to achieve what Williams called a "more general understanding" of its extraordinary historical moment. That device is the inheritance plot, which is as omnipresent in the 19th-century British novel as the adultery plot was in the French.
The inheritance plot was a kind of conceptual glue that helped the novelist connect an increasingly fragmented society, creating an interlinked web of convicts, dashing young urbanites, ancient nobility, factory owners and tenant farmers. It underwent a dazzling array of permutations, but its general shape was a reliable one: By the end of the novel, a long-suppressed familial line is unearthed, linking two different social groups, and usually restoring some sort of misplaced inheritance to its rightful owner. The device could be hackneyed, to be sure, but it enabled the novel to expand beyond the increasingly isolated worlds of specific social classes. At its best -- in "Middlemarch," or "Felix Holt," or "Bleak House" -- it became a powerful tool for social commentary, usually exposing the moral corruption of the social elite, a way of novelizing Marx's line about the nightmare of dead generations weighing on the brains of the living.
The inheritance plot offered an escape route from the claustrophobia of the manor-house narrative; it translated the social betrayals and violence of the age into the familial realm that the novel had traditionally restricted itself to, without sacrificing the broader scope that was required to do justice to 19th-century life. If you wanted to write about both factory workers and the landed gentry, you couldn't simply invite them all to a shooting party; you needed another device to connect those increasingly disconnected worlds. You needed the secret histories of the inheritance plot.
And herein lies the genius of "Gosford Park." The film manages to embed an inheritance plot straight from the pages of "Felix Holt" or "Our Mutual Friend" inside the shell of an Agatha Christie whodunit. Without giving too much of the plot away, the movie's climax unearths a dark story of ruthless class exploitation, disguised paternity and the injustices of factory life -- without ever leaving the grounds of Gosford Park itself, save the first five minutes of the film. The 19th-century novel needed to abandon the great estates to capture the larger dynamics of British society, thereby leaving a profitable opening for the middle-class detective story to exploit. "Gosford Park" is a kind of return of the repressed: the manor house whodunit reunited with its long-lost ancestor, the inheritance plot. It makes for a beautiful symmetry: The past returns to haunt the characters of "Gosford Park," just as the inheritance plot structure returns to enliven a long-moribund genre.
About 10 years ago, Altman staged his Hollywood revival with "The Player" -- a postmodern sendup of Hollywood's hollow men, where every plot twist segues into a movie pitch. Since that film's release, deconstructed genre films have become a tired genre in themselves (reaching a low point with this year's "Not Another Teen Movie"). "Gosford Park" suggests an exit strategy from this postmodern hall-of-mirrors: You revive a dead genre, not to showcase its essential hollowness, but rather to connect it to its original, and more vital, roots. It's a kind of literary reconstruction, and a hopeful one at that. Just when you expect a mock Miss Marple to totter into the dining room, you find George Eliot instead.
