Intermediality and Criminological Writing

[This post gathers some preliminary ideas developed during the RHUL Research Training Programme in Interart/Intermedia methodologies]

The interplay between criminology and literature was one of the defining features of late nineteenth-century Italian culture. On the one hand, novelists assimilated and appropriated scientific ideas, while, on the other hand, criminologists engaged with the literary sphere in various ways. The case of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), the founder of the Italian school of positivist criminology, which focused on the physical body of the delinquent in the quest for biological explanations for criminality, is remarkable, and raises interesting questions of intermediality.

Within Lombroso’s criminological work, scientific and literary discourses intertwine and overlap. For instance, in order to prove that a woman’s maternal instincts are stronger than her affection towards her husband, he presents five literary examples of how easily widows remarry, including Shakespeare in Richard III. The criminologist does not simply cite literary works to validate his own scientific conclusions, but he enacts a process which we could call the ‘Gothicization of science’. Gothic narratives of criminal transgression are central in his construction of the concept of criminal deviance.

An excellent example is Lombroso’s famous description of the autopsy of the born-criminal Giuseppe Vilella, originally performed in 1871. Firstly, he employs the motif of metaphoric enlightenment – ‘this was [… a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal’ – which may remind of the ‘flash of light’ that bursts in upon Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818). Secondly, he describes the criminal as ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity’, which include ‘the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, drink its blood’. Here, Lombroso seems to associate the born-criminal with the literary vampire, a Gothic creature that re-emerged in the late nineteenth century in novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Arguably in the attempt to reach a larger audience, Lombroso uses narrative techniques and incorporates in his supposedly purely scientific writing many of the trappings of literary and visual Gothicism. Ultimately, this contributes to fictionalising his texts. In this respect, intermediality is understood in the sense of intermedial references, which constitute, as explained by Rajewski, specific strategies that contribute to the media product’s overall signification. Precisely like those novelists who operate a musicalization of a literary text, or try to imitate certain film techniques in literature, Lombroso evokes elements and structures of a distinct medium – the literary Gothic – always through the use of its own media-specific means – the conventions of science.

Whilst there is no border-crossing as such, Lombroso’s essentially literary prose affects the scientific quality of his works. It comes as no surprise that many contemporary scientists criticized him because he tended to privilege the imaginative over the scientific. His texts, along with those of other Italian positivist criminologists who equally engaged with literature – including Enrico Ferri’s I delinquenti nell’arte (1896); Bernardino Alimena’s Il delitto nell’arte (1899); and Scipio Sighele’s Letteratura tragica (1906) – may thus be fruitful to uncover the extent to which, by the end of the century, literary elements and Gothic strands had become functional components of criminological writing.

References:

Hiller, Jonathan R. 2013. ‘Lombroso and the Science of Literature and Opera’. The Cesare Lombroso Handbook, ed. by Paul Kneper and P.J. Ystehede. London: Routledge.

Lombroso, Cesare. 1911. Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: Putnam.

Pittard, Cristopher, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, London, Routledge, 2011

Rajewsky, Irina. 2005. ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, 6:43-64.

Rippl, Gabriele. 2015. ‘Introduction’. Handbook of Intermediality. Literature, Image, Sound, Music, ed. by Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter.