Carver’s story frames several themes that help better understand both Ratsby’s study of 49 Duncan Terrace and a wider debate on criticism. First is the husband’s uncanny ability to retain and recite historical fact in the absence of any material evidence. Second is his apparent ability to deduce the author of the letter through traces in the text – ‘Take this word talked for instance. That simply isn’t the way she’d write talked!’ 4 . Third is the act of losing the letter. Last is the latent violence implied in Blackbird Pie , which a policeman refers to as a domestic dispute. Surface/Depth Key to this study is the relationship between surface and depth. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, in their 2009 work Surface Reading , explore a renewed interest in ‘modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths’. 5 They believe that analysis dependent on the concealed has neglected the surface. Vital to this is the role and function of the critic: ‘if criticism is not excavating hidden truths’ they ask, what exactly does it add to our experience of an architectural present? Telling us of his ability to memorise facts in Blackbird Pie and how he is able to ‘recall every word of what I read’, 6 the husband proceeds to recite pages worth of dates, battles and wars. This presentation of facts with no judgement is perhaps one answer to Marcus and Best’s question — some expect the critic to be able to fastidiously date any piece of architecture as taught through Pevsner’s ‘Treasure Hunt’, acting as a sort of historical taxonomist. Studies of the surface need not be so prosaic.
Ratsby’s description of the rooms in 49 Duncan Terrace in ‘Blackbird Pie’ mirrors Carver’s character’s deadpan recital of facts, but rather than connect them to or arrange a broader sense of history, they relate only to events in the house itself: ‘I could hold forth with great confidence if called upon to talk about the texture of the floor... each mark of paint and each scratch left by a chair leg...in the dining room a shutter hangs at an angle where two screws have come loose from the wall...’ This descriptive tone continues throughout Ratsby’s text. Implicit is the idea that the most accurate description of the operations of contemporary architecture is not something that must be extracted by the critic, but something immanent or latent in the architecture itself: ‘depth is continuous with surface’. 7 In 49 Duncan Terrace, many of these surfaces, from bubble wrap and packaging to the smooth plastic coverings on clothing, jar with the clean, neat lines of the modern addition. Marcus and Best look unfavourably on what they term the ‘suspicious detective’ who, in looking past the surface and moving straight to an analysis of details often misses that which lies in plain sight, an unsuccessful method which Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter ‘continues to teach us’. With Dupin, Poe laid the groundwork for the basic conventions of the modern detective story. In the search for the missing letter, the police, anticipating it to be hidden cleverly, search everywhere, in what Jacques Lacan termed an ‘exhaustion of space’. 8 The twist, of course, is that the letter is there in plain sight all along, and it is simply a failure to read the surface that means it is not discovered sooner. An excess of suspicion would seem to be the police’s downfall.
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prepared for AR by N Ratsby. Drawings courtesy of Niall Mclaughlin Architects
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