Pre-Dawn Bayou Visions

Sarah and I woke up about 4:30 a.m., half an hour before my alarm would wake me on teaching days if I needed it but hardly ever does because I’m usually awake before it goes off. First order of the morning: go outside with puppy. Side yard is a lake of melted snow, parking area a flooded skating rink. Drip, drip, drip. Will it be possible to negotiate driveway to road this morning? Will ice give way to mud by late afternoon? Back indoors, Sarah made short work of her breakfast, and I picked up CRUSADER’S CROSS to read the last few pages I’d been too sleepy to finish last night.

What does Louisiana crime fiction have in common with the philosophy of both Immanuel Kant and Confucius? James Lee Burke’s main cop character, James Robicheaux, has seen the worst. He did his tour in Vietnam and is routinely called to crime scenes to view murder victims. His own violence sometimes frightens him. Despite all this, he attends AA meetings, falls in love, marries, and takes comfort in his natural surroundings and his pets (a cat and a three-legged raccoon) because--like most of the damaged protagonists of the hard-boiled murder mystery subgenre (distinct from the cozy, tea-drinking subgenre)—he has not given up his dream of order, of law, of Eden. Robicheaux does not live in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, but then none of us does. Nevertheless, the vision guides him, as in this passage from somewhere in the middle of the novel:

“But why brood upon the bloody work of neocolonial empires on a summer night on a leaf-blown street that belongs back in the year 1945? Why not fall in love with the world all over again…? Outside, the night was unseasonably cool, scented with shade-blooming flowers, the giant live oaks along the sidewalks lit by streetlamps, Spanish moss lifting in the breeze.” The vision, within reach for a few minutes or hours, is one of a peaceful world.

The truth is, Dave Robicheaux never fell out of love with the world. His era was the bloody confusion of Vietnam, not what must have looked to him in comparison the clarity of World War II, 1945 bringing that war to its rightful, victorious close. His Eden is overlaid with a veneer of civilization, and he struggles with disorder within as well as without, but he is still wanting the disparate parts of his world to love each other or at least to live in peace with each other. Sewage backs up after heavy rain, but brown pelicans reappear over the swamp, too, as he had hoped they would. He never permanently loses sight of what could be in the often dismal face of what is.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative works the same way. It isn’t how people reason all the time but how they would if the moral universe operated under natural law, and that vision of peace and harmony guide our sense of what could be. In Kant’s day, science was just coming into its own, yielding predictability thanks to order in nature. I think of the vision of Confucius, where perfectly ordered society on earth would mirror a perfect heavenly order. What would Kant and Confucius have made of chaos theory?

It is in crime fiction, paradoxically perhaps, that the vision of possible order and harmony lives on, surviving in the most fetid swamps of human depravity. Detectives searching out murderers in mystery novels don’t throw up their hands and theorize about what they can’t know. They roll up their sleeves and go to work.

In the end, for Robicheaux, his small personal island of beauty and love and clarity offers him “gifts enough.” He has been through hell but survives, a happy man. The reader knows that there will be future threats and that Robicheaux’s happiness will require further defense, so the comfort and satisfaction on the last page of the novel comes not simply in being given a character’s temporary happiness but in the knowledge that, because of who he is, he will hold onto his dream in the future as he has in the past. We want to drink ice tea beneath that sheltering live oak tree and believe in a world at peace with itself. We want to have the courage to make it right when it goes wrong.