Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Secrets Not Revealed: Possible Stories in The Woman in White
the harmony of its internal design. In contrast to the pleasant security
of this secluded space of domestic order, the moral setup of Fosco’s
world is pervaded by a disturbing miasma of doubt and disorder,
relentlessly re-including all the alternative options, all the negatives
and roads not taken, that conventional wisdom invariably, if inadvertently,
attempts to block out. In his world, therefore, the whole “claptrap,”
of proverbs and self-consoling sayings by means of which
“[s]ociety” seeks to varnish and preclude any thoughts on the potential
inefficiency of the “machinery it has set up for the detection of
crime” is radically threatened to lose its safeguarding force (210). As a
consequence, in Fosco’s world none of these sayings can any longer be
quoted without being immediately questioned. “Crimes cause their
own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram),
will it?” (210). These questions gesture at an unacknowledged
dark side of current knowledge, admitting the possibility that the real
as it is, is not quite as it is widely imagined to be. They expose the
contingency of the public world order by confronting it with a version
of what it might be. In short, they infuse the sphere of the legal and
official with an inkling of the illegal and unofficial that any social
system constitutively needs in order to render its own dealings distinct.
Paying attention to this secret side requires a particular practice
of viewing or reading the ways and means by which cultural distinctions
are made, as Fosco emphatically makes clear:
“Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers
are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever
discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported,
and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found; and
what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who
are discovered and wise criminals who escape.” (210)
Even “the few cases” that are shaped into a mediated form sometimes
tend to remain unfinished and ill-explained, retaining unaccountable
elements and bewildering clues that resist to fit into a logical plot.
What is more, these unresolved issues testify to a whole dimension of
negative cases that are never reported at all. Heeding these requires to
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