Existential Subjects in Sinister Situations

Providence and chance, how these relate to appearance and reality, are staple themes of Eric Ambler’s (1909-1998) novels. Ambler resists the modern and postmodern urge to intellectualize at the expense of reality itself.

Ambler brings an ingenious literary/philosophical appeal to the novel of detection that lifts the genre from its pre-World War I action-reaction mode. The intellectualizing of reality aspect in his novels does battle with the open-ended superstructure that is human reality.

The writer as amateur spy naively attempts to control reality, whereas reality proper, Ambler suggests, cannot be tamed. This is the case with Charles Latimer, the protagonist of A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939). Reality, what presents itself as the world-at-large, is akin to the logic of the inductive method, with its seemingly endless drip of evidence, contingencies that ultimately narrow human existence to probability. In the objective world, possibility and chance deliver us to probability, not the neatly cropped classical deductive logic that writers explore in fiction.

Ambler realized this early on in his career and sought to develop these themes with literary flair. So, I ask, what is the relation between logic, especially the deductive method, and the structure of literary notions of chance? Also, how does literature appropriate contingencies in human reality?

Eric Ambler begins A Coffin for Dimitrios with a description of the dual effect that providence and chance play in the lives of ordinary people. Early on in the novel he tells us:

It is one of those convenient, question-begging aphorisms coined to discredit the unpleasant truth that chance plays an important, if not predominant, part in human affairs.

It is not an insignificant fact that A Coffin for Dimitrios was first published in England under the title The Mask of Dimitrios in 1939. The mask theme is a figurative technique that veils Dimitrios’ illusive persona. Dimitrios’ identity remains a faceless persona that is shrouded in mystery. The mask is a symbol for the moral confusion of modernity, a labyrinth of ‘who’s who’ in the murky criminal underworld.

While many people have heard of Dimitrios, few have ever seen him, given his aliases and care for concealment. Dimitrios’ apparent lack of ‘genuine’ existence draws Latimer, the writer of intrigue novels, into the hunt for this specter of a man. This is a dangerous literary experiment. Where is the Ariadne’s thread that connects Dimitrios to the real world? Where does Latimer begin his search for this shady individual? How does chance bring together the lives of these two persons?

Admittedly, a voluntary giving up of free will to mere chance is not a safe way to uphold convictions. Chance takes away our primal freedom as sentient agents that embrace free will. Ambler calls this “an unpleasant truth.” This truth cannot be understood in its immediacy. There is a time-lapse quality to the realization that chance requires the passage of time to bear fruit. 

Chance plays the role of spoiler in Ambler’s novels. The British writer pays heed to this aspect of reality. However, the passage of time is not the common-sense chronological ordering of reality that humans take for granted. Ambler’s readers are treated to the dialectical complexity of consciousness’ quest to resolve the antinomies that reality creates. Ambler does not suggest, let us be clear, that the importance of free will ought to be downplayed. He merely rattles our belief in providence with stubborn chance.

Relegating the security and comfort of providence to blind chance is a high- wire act. Ambler does not disregard a reasoned account of reality, any more so than the extra care a pigeon takes when walking on a window ledge. Accidents only happen to rational beings, he suggests. Man is an existentially-driven being that must contend with objective reality. That is Ambler’s point.

Notable historians of ideas, Polybius, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, have proposed a vision of human life as an open-ended drama – narrative – that is played out by individual persons. The idea that life, viewed from within, is the real essence of history, is the crux of Ambler’s statement on life and literature. He writes, “The fact that a man like Latimer should so much as learn of the existence of a man like Dimitrios is alone grotesque.” This vulgarity cites the unexpected interaction of these two individuals; a world where the rules of social engagement have been turned on their head.

Ambler suggests that in a utopia, the lives of these diametrically opposed people, would never cross. He develops this theme through the disinterested voice of the narrator of A Coffin for Dimitrios. Modernity has leveled the social/political world to such an extent that a university professor/writer, Charles Latimer, can come into direct contact with a cold-blooded criminal, Dimitrios. This is an indictment of modernity in at least two respects: First, the post WWI social-political order ‘shrunk’ the world politically and culturally. Secondly, this new Weltanschauung now necessarily governs the rules and mores of engagement in the world. Latimer suffers from the ‘pulling-in effect’ — let us call this – which these social conditions play on the innocent and unsuspecting. To be pulled-in by circumstances that are not of our own design make us lament our loss of control.

The immediacy and transparency of human reality does not allow us the luxury of total understanding of its terms. This goes against the logical demands placed on the writer by the craft of writing. Latimer is excited about his search, which he intends to keep literary in scope. However, his interest in Dimitrios’ life is doomed to failure from the start. The narrator explains what is at stake in Latimer’s ideals and actions.

Ambler’s six best novels were written at the start of World War II. This new world order that pays allegiance to the state underscores the value of individual autonomy:

The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his  control is always fascinating. It is the essential element in most good theatre from the Aedipus of Sophocles to East Lynne.

The philosophical implications of Ambler’s novels are enlightening for several reasons: First, consider that philosophical concerns are most effective when entertained in non-explicitly philosophical discourse, and not in obtuse texts. Secondly, and most importantly, what makes a situation or concern philosophical does not owe its profundity to ‘theory,’ rather the pathos that informs the questions at hand.

Providence and chance are fundamental aspects of Ambler’s novels. Because Latimer is an ordinary man who is faced with extraordinary circumstances, he becomes lost in a maze of endless deception. The entanglement of ever-new circumstances launches him into a maelstrom where appearance dictates what is real.

Latimer’s descent into the underworld of ruthless intrigue pins reason against crass immorality. Latimer does not understand the queasy aspects of human life and the blind dictate of chance. Ambler posits: the more that Latimer views himself as being in control, the more ruthless and deceptive his fate seems. 

Ambler suggests that Latimer’s literary conventions are a dangerous luxury. This literary convenience is afforded to Latimer, but not to Colonel Haki, given the exigencies of real-world crime investigation. The scope of the investigation, according to Haki, is determined by the particulars of the case at hand. A failure to understand this is reminiscent of Kant’s contention that transcendental knowledge comes from the immanent awareness of our own thought. Reflection must first come to terms with the chaos of sensations – the transcendent – what amounts to the physical world. In other words, reality dictates, through reason, what prudent course of action to embark on. The passive voice of Ambler’s narrator offers a forewarning:

…He had gone into the business believing his eyes to be wide open, whereas, actually, they had been tightly shut. That, no doubt, could not have been helped. The galling part was that he had failed for so long to perceive the fact.

The interplay of appearance and reality is a key component of this literary genre. This is paradoxical. Ambler suggests that people who lead a life of crime do not write about it. On the other hand, outsiders to this world never ‘see through’ the inner workings, regardless of their theorizing.

As if the decision to seek out the life of Dimitrios is not challenge enough, Latimer runs into a further problem. A heavy-set man shows up in his hotel room. The man wants to know what Latimer knows of Dimitrios. When the man, Mr. Peters, tells Latimer that Dimitrios owes him money, Latimer becomes confused. Latimer had come to regard the dead Dimitrios as his private academic problem.

He had come to regard Dimitrios as his own property, a problem as academic as that of the authorship of an anonymous sixteenth century lyric.

Mr. Peters tests Latimer’s knowledge of Dimitrios’ past, also what he knows of him of late. Mr. Peters tests Latimer’s knowledge to inform Latimer that Dimitrios is alive. This development further rattles Latimer’s grasp of reality. Latimer’s grip on what he hitherto thought real begins to slip.

 Latimer’s a priori notions of human nature do not stand up to the force of a posteriori reality. This problematic, construed in Kantian terms, make manifest Latimer’s concerns. ‘I think’ is what Kant calls the pure ego – the self trying to make sense of its experiences. However, the pure ego cannot exist encapsulated within itself. At any given moment, the pure ego, the ‘I think,’ which thinks abstractly, must manifest itself in the world. It must do so as an empirical self, a subject that must respect its spatial-temporal surroundings. This is the foundation of the reason/life dichotomy.

While Latimer’s presuppositions about real-world detection spring from his literary method, Colonel Haki is a professional investigator. These methods do not have to be mutually exclusive. The difference is that aspects of real-world crime can inform literary detection, while the same is not true of literary methods that aim to solve real-world crime. Probability is stubborn. Latimer encounters a dialectical process that remains incomplete. Latimer cannot apply to detection what Kant calls “the fundamental principle of dialectical reason.” To do so would necessarily invoke the finished stage of the dialectic: synthesis. This would make his method a closed-ended deductive process.  

This does not suggest that a close-ended method is fruitless within a literary framework. It just suggests that the desired results cannot be achieved a priori. This becomes apparent to Latimer. He makes adjustments to his ‘experiment’ in deduction. The narrator explains:

He had a choice of two courses of action. He could go back to Athens, work on his new book and put Dimitrios and Marukakis and Mr. Peters and this Grodek out of his mind. Or, he could go to Geneva, see Grodek (if there were such a person).

Latimer’s realization, halfway through the novel, is an admission that things have gone too far. Latimer becomes aware that he is no longer in control of the situation:

The first course was obviously the sensible one. After all, the justification of his researches into the past life of Dimitrios had been that he was making an impersonal experiment in detection. The experiment must not be allowed to become an obsession.

Having served as a member of the British Royal Artillery Regiment as a corporal, also called a bombardier during World War II, Ambler uses worldly language. Another reference to literature and reality becomes apparent, when Latimer asks Mr. Grodek if he had ever read any spy stories. Grodek, the master spy who is simply known as G, answers in the negative by stressing that spy stories seem too naïve to him.

On one hand, Latimer happens to be at the right place, at the right time. Having been present at Madame Chavez’s home, he gets to meet Colonel Haki. Is this providence or chance?

Traditionally, thinkers have answered this type of question by paying attention to the outcome. When the outcome is a regrettable one, chance is dealt the responsibility. Ambler is cognizant of this inconsistency in our quest for praise. Latimer’s indiscretion, like all forms of indiscretion, is a case of shortsightedness. Latimer is only concerned with the next sentence he writes and not the next real-world victim. This brings to mind the last chorus in Sophocles’ Ajax, where the chorus says, “What men have seen they know; but what shall come hereafter no man before the event can see, nor what end waits for him.”

The irreverent Friedrich Nietzsche, pondering the question of the will to truth, can help us:

Indeed we come to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will — until we finally came to a complete stop before a a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? even ignorance?

The seduction of seeking for that which is beyond our grasp is a strong motivator of human behavior. This is the single greatest reason that most people read novels. Regardless of genre, literature allows us to live in a world of the imagination, employing conventions that are not acceptable in the real world. Literature is often a hazy, but eloquent mirror to experience, which is more often than not disorganized and unforeseeable. Kingsley Amis, who argues that serious writers and thinkers do not have to be pedantic and serious all the time, contends that literature is a consummate source of excitement because it makes light of our personal temperament. Amis explains:

Let me hark back now to my remark about the universality of the secret-agent figure as a focus for daydreaming. I have no psychological training, so I can only tentatively suggest that what I will call the secret-agent fantasy is marked by being totally portable. Even the keenest fantasist will find that the amount of vicarious life he can get through books and films and television is limited.

The point is not so much the value of literature as therapeutic escapism, but that most people read for enjoyment. However, enjoyment does not preclude either seriousness or meaning. Greek tragedies are not light in their themes. Yet, readers and theatergoers alike take delight in the construction of the work itself, the subtle, and not-so-subtle truths it brings to light. Few people take enjoyment from a ‘piling-up’ of bodies, as some critics contend. Latimer is a perfect case in point. A Coffin for Dimitrios is about a reader who is also a writer that tries to leap beyond the bounds of daily routine. Latimer wants to taste what it would be like to experience what he writes. Eventually, he becomes confused by the fine line that separates appearance and reality.

Latimer is surprised to find out that Mr. Peters is really named Petersen, a member of Dimitrios’ drug peddling gang. This is the point in the novel when Latimer’s confidence builds. He sheds some of the artistic conventions that have kept him in the world of fiction. He is no match for the criminally experienced Mr. Petersen. Latimer lacks the necessary know-how to make him an effective player in the underworld. Mr. Petersen informs him that Dimitrios is alive and is known to go by the alias of Monsieur C.K. The dead man Latimer saw in the morgue with Colonel Haki was a man named Manus Visser, who was wearing Dimitrios’ Carte d’identité. Latimer reflects on good and evil, one night when he finds himself in his hotel room unable to sleep:

But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of good and evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good business and Bad business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewiste and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.

Latimer is out of place in the criminal underworld. He is, we are told, “like a person who has strayed into a museum for shelter from the rain.” He becomes confused. Literature is no longer something that he can control, instead reality takes over. Finding himself in a narrow predicament, Latimer thinks the game is over for him. His literary experiment turns out to be a nightmare. The sensible thing to do is to call the police:

He was left with a choice. Either he could go back to Athens and leave Peters to make the best deal he could with Dimitrios or he could stay in Paris to see the last act of the grotesque comedy in which he now found himself playing a part.

“Straying into a museum for shelter from the rain” sheds light on the theme of appearance and reality, and the subjective gulf that separates the two. Latimer’s mind, reeling with uncertainty, can only make allusions to a film he once saw – not to reality proper.

The end of the novel finds Latimer and Mr. Petersen sitting in a semi-dark hotel room awaiting the arrival of Dimitrios, who has been blackmailed into paying them both a million francs. When Latimer sees Dimitrios for the first time, he is surprised to realize that the criminal is not what he expected. Dimitrios’ demeanor is calm and collected.  He displays great acumen in matters of the underworld, even though Mr. Petersen has his reservations as to just how intelligent he truly is, when he utters, “Ingenuity is never a substitute for intelligence, you know.” This is an important point that should not go unnoticed. Amber suggests that formal logic is a series of clever and ingenious mental exercises that cannot be justified in the real world, where contingencies cannot always be predicted.

Dimitrios shoots both men. Petersen manages to get several shots off that mortally wound Dimitrios. As Dimitrios lies down, gasping for breath, he says, “in the end one is always defeated by stupidity. If it is not one’s own it is the stupidity of others.” This is the rhyme and reason of A coffin for Dimitrios.

Ambler reserves the sharpest shards of skepticism about the nature of reason for a life-long criminal. Paradoxically, Dimitrios has spent his life planning how best to manage the aspect of human experience that he embraces.

A Coffin for Dmimitrios is brought to an uncanny dialectical conclusion. Latimer writes an explanatory letter to his friend Marukakis. Latimer tries to make sense of his ordeal. He demonstrates a newly won wisdom about the affairs of the real world and the place of subjectivity in the objective logos that orders human reality. He implies that he has become more confounded than ever “by the difference between the stupid vulgarities of real life and the ideal existence of the imagination.”

Latimer can return to writing without owing alliance to the troublesome illusion that reason and reality have anything to do with each other, as far as literature is concerned. These conditions, he states in his letter, will continue to obtain as long as, “might is right, and while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment.”

Print