“It is a great pleasure to write the word:” thus Henry James starts his 1882 essay on Venice. To write the word is to inscribe the name; to inscribe the name is to evoke the place; to evoke the place is – well, “a pleasure.” Or simply – pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? And what is the complex relationship between place, name, and word? In that essay James goes on to assert that “of all the cities of the world [Venice] is the easiest to visit without going there.” He is referring of course to his – to our, to everyone's – inescapable saturation with images and associations of Venice from books and pictures. Venice, of all cities in the western world, is the already written, the already seen. The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently pre-empts the place, and, as I shall suggest in relation to Proust, the word finally pre-empts the name. In the discourses with which Proust and James were familiar the word/name “Venice” was a site of semantic excess, over-filled with desires, anticipations, dreams, expectations, experiential appropriations. At the same time it was a site of semantic evacuation, disillusion, loss, deprivation, decline and declinations, experiential expropriations.

I hope to redeem the banality of the second half of my title by immediately particularizing the modern self of which I speak. Forced into high heels, skirts, and corsets, women suffer what Veblen calls “mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.” Writing eight years after Veblen, Henry James in The Amerian Scene, his account of his 1904 travels in America, finds that the American woman “in her manner of embodying or representing her sex” has become “a new human convenience, not unlike the ingenious mechanical appliances.” In 1947 in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the manner in which a teenage American girl keeps “the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation…” as bearing witness to “man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus…personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” One thread connecting these images is the commodity status of women under late capitalism. All three moments can be said to register the depleted subjectivity of those who, in Adorno's words, “have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed all the more entirely by the sphere of consumption.” But this convergence should not obscure significant differences among all three writers, especially between Veblen on the one hand and James and Adorno on the other.

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

Under the Mormon scheme of things in 1831, somewhere in Indian territory (somewhere it was thought, west of Independence, Missouri) a city was to be built by those who accepted the gospel restored through Joseph Smith, Jr., God's prophet for the latter days. It was to be a city of refuge – a place where the saints would be safe from both the corruptions of the day and the judgement that was to fall upon the world – and a city of righteousness, endowed with the Spirit of the Lord.