His Bloody Project
There is apparently no suspense at all about whodunnit in Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae. Roderick tells us himself that "I have no wish to absolve myself of responsibility for the deeds which I have lately committed" (15)--those deeds being the murders of Lachlan Mackenzie and his two children, Flora and Donald. Of course, as Burnet's reader is already aware, the authenticity of the text in question--a found manuscript in the classic Gothic/historical fiction tradition--is up for grabs, regarded in some elite contemporary quarters as a "hoax" (2). Burnet presents himself as no more than the memoir's editor, supplementing Roderick's's purported memoir of his life and crimes with witness statements, a reconstruction of the trial, and an excerpt from the (fictional) autobiography of a (real) Victorian criminal psychologist, J. Bruce Thompson. This sort of documentary gamesmanship tips the nod to a long line of "authenticated" novels stretching back to the eighteenth century (e.g., Walpole's The Castle of Otranto), and may remind some readers of, among other novels, James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner--a historical Gothic with an infamously unreliable narrator and some darkly humorous takes on the materiality of evidence. Macrae isn't Hogg's sinner (in fact, his religious faith is pretty much non-existent), although Burnet alludes to that narrative road not taken in the form of one witness at the trial, the dour Presbyterian clergyman Mr. Galbraith, who argues that "[m]y observation is that the boy is enslaved to the devil, and if proof is required we need only look to the deeds he has committed" (229). But the novel has related fish to fry.
His Bloody Project engages with multiple questions having to do with unreliability and evidence, both at the level of history (who witnesses to what happens in this tiny village in the Highlands?) and form (what does unreliability imply, especially when everyone agrees, the narrator included, that he's guilty?). The novel is set in a real village, Culduie, occupied by largely impoverished crofters; Thompson, when he visits, notes with disgust that all but one of the houses look like "byres or pig-sties" (175). Culduie is managed by a local constable, who reports to the estate's factor, who reports to the laird, Middleton, an arrangement ripe for exploitation--not least because constable, factor, and laird actually have little regular contact beyond what is necessary. The area's history and current economic situation emerge in only shadowy form from Roderick's narrative, so that he is unable, for example, to parse the implications of Flora's warning that Middleton's "livelihood depended" (106) on escorting wealthy men on deer hunts. Scraps of folk tradition remain in the form of the charms and visions associated with local women like Roddy's sister Jetta and their deceased mother, along with the local assumptions about how crofters ought to be treated. Another local crofter, explaining why Lachlan Mackenzie's decision to reassign land from the Macraes to another family, can only say, "it was not done" (207), which leads one Scottish paper to contemptuously observe that "his baffling adherence to the idea that land should be allocated on the basis of tradition rather than utility was yet another example of how the intransigence of the Highland tribes is bringing about their own demise" (208)--a "modern" response that somehow manages to overlook the devastating effects of the Highland clearances. Mackenzie's purportedly utilitarian local reforms, which involve penalizing the crofters for violating various rules and requiring additional labor from the men, clash badly with the crofters' cultural expectations about land and communal obligations. Moreover, when Roderick and his father visit the factor to stop Mackenzie's actions, they discover that he has been citing rules which don't exist in written form: "The regulations exist because we all accept that they exist and without them there would be anarchy. It is for the village constable to interpret these regulations and to enforce them at his discretion" (102). Mackenzie's interpretations of this unwritten social contract are, despite their maliciousness (especially in regard to the Macraes), in line with mid-Victorian assumptions about profit, discipline, and labor; the difficulty, of course, lies in the underlying assumptions about that "we," as "we" have clearly drifted apart. Throughout, it's clear that the crofters are granted no authority to speak out about or interpret their life experiences unless they affiliate themselves with the assumptions of middle- and upper-class authorities, Highland or Lowland. Thus, Mackenzie gains the factor's respect because his behavior so completely aligns with expectations; similarly, Thompson immediately offers some measure of respect to Mrs. Murchison (as does the audience at the trial) because of her tasteful dress and relatively refined manners, while the working-class witness Ishbel Farquhar also comes off well because she is appropriately "modest" and embodies "the best virtues of Highland womanhood" (236). Typically, Roderick's memoir is, we are told, edited and rewritten as a sensational chapbook, turning him into everyone's popular fantasy of a brutal, uncivilized Highlander.
But what about that memoir? Since there is a secret about Roderick's guilt, let's gone below the fold.
WATCH
His Bloody Project engages with multiple questions having to do with unreliability and evidence, both at the level of history (who witnesses to what happens in this tiny village in the Highlands?) and form (what does unreliability imply, especially when everyone agrees, the narrator included, that he's guilty?). The novel is set in a real village, Culduie, occupied by largely impoverished crofters; Thompson, when he visits, notes with disgust that all but one of the houses look like "byres or pig-sties" (175). Culduie is managed by a local constable, who reports to the estate's factor, who reports to the laird, Middleton, an arrangement ripe for exploitation--not least because constable, factor, and laird actually have little regular contact beyond what is necessary. The area's history and current economic situation emerge in only shadowy form from Roderick's narrative, so that he is unable, for example, to parse the implications of Flora's warning that Middleton's "livelihood depended" (106) on escorting wealthy men on deer hunts. Scraps of folk tradition remain in the form of the charms and visions associated with local women like Roddy's sister Jetta and their deceased mother, along with the local assumptions about how crofters ought to be treated. Another local crofter, explaining why Lachlan Mackenzie's decision to reassign land from the Macraes to another family, can only say, "it was not done" (207), which leads one Scottish paper to contemptuously observe that "his baffling adherence to the idea that land should be allocated on the basis of tradition rather than utility was yet another example of how the intransigence of the Highland tribes is bringing about their own demise" (208)--a "modern" response that somehow manages to overlook the devastating effects of the Highland clearances. Mackenzie's purportedly utilitarian local reforms, which involve penalizing the crofters for violating various rules and requiring additional labor from the men, clash badly with the crofters' cultural expectations about land and communal obligations. Moreover, when Roderick and his father visit the factor to stop Mackenzie's actions, they discover that he has been citing rules which don't exist in written form: "The regulations exist because we all accept that they exist and without them there would be anarchy. It is for the village constable to interpret these regulations and to enforce them at his discretion" (102). Mackenzie's interpretations of this unwritten social contract are, despite their maliciousness (especially in regard to the Macraes), in line with mid-Victorian assumptions about profit, discipline, and labor; the difficulty, of course, lies in the underlying assumptions about that "we," as "we" have clearly drifted apart. Throughout, it's clear that the crofters are granted no authority to speak out about or interpret their life experiences unless they affiliate themselves with the assumptions of middle- and upper-class authorities, Highland or Lowland. Thus, Mackenzie gains the factor's respect because his behavior so completely aligns with expectations; similarly, Thompson immediately offers some measure of respect to Mrs. Murchison (as does the audience at the trial) because of her tasteful dress and relatively refined manners, while the working-class witness Ishbel Farquhar also comes off well because she is appropriately "modest" and embodies "the best virtues of Highland womanhood" (236). Typically, Roderick's memoir is, we are told, edited and rewritten as a sensational chapbook, turning him into everyone's popular fantasy of a brutal, uncivilized Highlander.
But what about that memoir? Since there is a secret about Roderick's guilt, let's gone below the fold.
WATCH
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SPOILERS
At first glance, Roderick's self-presentation is notable for its cool detachment, its almost complete lack of passion. This absent passion includes, it would seem, a lack of any interest in sexuality, or, for that matter, any awareness of sexual implications; the reader may wonder uneasily about his desire to sleep in his sister's bed or his willingness to imagine her naked, or even more uneasily about why, after their mother's death, "Father decreed that Jetta should sleep in the back chamber with him as she was now a woman and merited a degree of privacy from her siblings" (29), but Roderick clearly feels no concern. Nor does he understand what the oafish servant Archibald Ross implies when he volunteers to take Jetta "for a turn round the back of the inn" (116). It is only when Roderick presses his face into Flora's hair, after she has rejected his marriage proposal, that he experiences "a great coursing in my groin" (124)--an expression of arousal that, in Roderick's phrasing, is also strangely detached from the body, as though Roderick was observing his desire instead of feeling it. Indeed, it is just as detached as Roderick's report on an extremely important scene: walking in on Mackenzie having sex with Flora on the table. Roderick does not ask about what he has seen--was this by mutual consent? extortion? violence?--and, indeed, is upset only by Mackenzie calling him "boy" (65). Roderick clearly knows what he has seen, but does he displace his anger by reacting to a minor insult, or does he really not experience any feelings at all about the event itself? Not surprisingly, Roderick later fails to recognize what the reader will have guessed, that Jetta is pregnant; it is only once he sees his father brutally assaulting her that he realizes the truth.
And here is the novel's key revelation, or, rather, its key absence. In his--again--detached narrative of the murders, Roderick carefully notes that he moves Flora's corpse to the table "with her legs hanging from the end" (149), after which he cleans up some spilled potatoes before going on to kill her little brother. The details seem orderly and complete, with the potatoes supplying a Barthesian reality effect. Still, it's hard not to remember that after Jetta had sex with Mackenzie, she sat up with "her feet dangling above the floor" (65). And in fact, Roderick's narrative neglects to explain, or even mention, a rather important detail about Flora's body: "a number of lacerations and bruising to the public region," with the result that "[t]he soft outer parts had been quite pulverised and the pubic bone was broken on the left side" (157). This moment of erasure is further complicated when Thomson asks him about the injuries, to which Roderick can only respond "I do not recall inflicting such injuries" (173). The reader now has to make a judgment call: does Roderick's narrative lie by omission, or has he genuinely suppressed this memory? Roderick himself has been all too willing to own up to selective editing: for example, when he explains how he let one of Mackenzie's sheep become injured, he leaves out a moment at a waterfall where he fantasizes about his sister stripping down (31), but includes being stung by a hornet because "it might be thought that it was this that had distracted me when the ram had wandered off" (37)--a storytelling strategy that anticipates the combination of omitted violence/included small detail in the later memoirs. Moreover, Mrs. Murchison tells Thomson and Macrae's lawyer Sinclair that her husband had caught Roderick masturbating while staring in at their daughters (180), which further undercuts Roderick's near-total omission of erotic desire from his own narrative. It's no wonder that Thomson, turning out to be the world's worst expert witness--Sinclair probably should have watched Law and Order first--argues on the stand that Roderick "was driven not by a quasi-noble desire to protect his father, but by his sexual urges towards Miss Mackenzie" (259).
Now, what's interesting about all this is that the novel effectively puts the unreliable narrator on trial--not just Roderick, but the technique itself! As Sinclair wants to get Roderick off on a plea of insanity, the trial focuses not on whether or not he committed the crimes, but instead on his state of mind at the time. The collaborative effort of constructing Roderick's state of mind--by the witnesses, the lawyers attempting to guide the testimony, the judge doing the summation, the jurors deliberating--necessarily highlights the interpretive process and its contradictions. Thus, Sinclair gets Murchison to declare that Roderick is "daft" (208), but the prosecutor, Mr. Gifford, equally gets the schoolmaster to say that he had never perceived "any signs of insanity in the prisoner" (211). By the same token, Sinclair certainly doesn't ask either of the Murchisons about Roderick's peeping tom activities when they're on the stand (for obvious reasons), so that bit of evidence goes absent from the official narrative of the case. The reader is stuck in the position of the jurors, who must somehow identify a "state of mind" to which they have no direct access other than the (equally external) witness testimonies, which in turn have been carefully (if not always visibly) shaped by the lawyer's questions; Thomson's rogue behavior on the stand is a bit like an author rebelling against an editor with control issues. To make matters worse, Thomson is himself an arguably unreliable narrator, in that for a twenty-first century reader his "scientific" arguments about race, class, and criminality primarily indict him on a charge of mid-Victorian arrogance and bigotry. Yet that reader is also likely to agree with Thomson's interpretation of the case, which certainly makes things awkward. Given how unpleasant Thomson is, with his overt contempt for both Roderick and the crofters more generally, associating him with the more "modern" interpretation of Roderick's actions may make some readers engage in some quick second-guessing. At the same time, readers may equally want to bring in a verdict of "not proven" when it comes to Roderick's conscious "ability to deceive and dissemble" (260) when it comes specifically to matters sexual--raising questions of trauma and repression, for example. But like Thomson and the jurors, we would still be making Roderick's unreliability reliable...