Bones to Read: An Interpretation of Forensic Crime Fiction

"The Man in the SUV" - Season 1 - Episode 2 One of the most striking features of the new visual culture is the growing tendency to visualize things that are not in themselves visual. (Mirzoeff: 5) The anthropological forensic crime fiction is a detective genre which is primarily concerned with investigating human bodies. In the hermeneutical process of reading the bones (i.e. studying, interpreting, understanding, embodying), the most enduring record carrier of one's individuality, supported by a rhizoid network of scientific disciplines, the anonymous corpse becomes a personalized victim. The present discussion is based on the novels of Kathy Reichs. Sooner or later, the corpse in a detective story (like everywhere else) becomes mere bones, but in one particular form of detective fiction, bones become men. I am particularly interested here in Kathy Reichs and her successful Temperance Brennan series. Reichs' novels are interesting for several reasons: on the one hand, they are admittedly simply a captivating read, on the other hand, however, the novels undergo a peculiar deformation. The novels were adapted for the Bones series by Twentieth Century Fox, on which the author herself collaborated . In 2006 Max Allan Collins published a novel "based on the Fox television series . . . featuring the character created by Kathy Reichs" with the title Bones Buried Deep, which displays a curious mixture of the novels of Kathy Reichs and the serial. In this article, I propose to examine the narrative interconnections and permutations, as well as this genre of anthropological forensic crime fiction more generally, juxtaposing it with the Crime Scene Investigation franchise (CBS, 2000 Present) . The Bones series appeared on a television market which had already been conditioned by CSI and forerunners such as Quincy and Prime Suspect. A relatively stable format of the forensic crime TV-(soap)novel had thus established itself with representative types of characters, investigative methods, and techniques of visualizing (places, procedural methods etc.), which resonate as reference points in all subsequent productions in this genre.

The title Bones to Read - like the verb to read - implies several aspects: first, the primary literal meaning, then the cognitive interpretation, and finally, a certain instrumental "reading-off". Bones assume a central position within the texture of the narrative and in the visual depiction of the stories, they are read - understood, interpreted, exploited and embodied/in-bodied. This reading of bones is amplified in the context of the hermeneutical principle, so that the reading is not simply a process but also includes the material itself which is read; the forensic specialist is a hermeneutical reader, and the forensic laboratory is a hermeneutical laboratory. From the phenomenological point of view, this process is nearly corporeal, thus also associating it, for example, with pornography or the horror genre . Here, however, I am primarily interested in the aspect of embodiment, which can be described by the rhetorical figure of Prosopopoeia, a feigned presentation of characters and things through the attribution of qualities such as speaking and listening, thereby giving a face to the absent and dead . To these aspects of "reading" may be added reception by viewing that which has been labeled the "CSI effect" and which I take to be the pretension of understanding of the layperson. One difference between CSI and the Brennan-series (i.e. both the novels and the Bones television series) lies in the fact that Bones is an adaptation of the novels, whereas CSI produces novels, comics, video games etc. Collins' novel represents an interesting juncture between these two points. Beginning from the adaptation of Reichs' novels into film, I wish to consider here the characteristic features of the anthropological forensic detective, and the manner of his transformation from book to film and the implications of this transformation. I begin, then, with this characterization of the anthropological forensic detective (in many points the forensic detective in general), with particular reference to Kathy Reichs' novels, which I take here to be exemplary. I. What do I do? I dig up bodies. I look at bones. (Reichs 1998: 160) The (anthropological) forensic crime novel is a relatively young form of crime fiction. The following elements are characteristic for this genre: as a rule, the discovery of a more or less decayed body or of a skeleton precipitates the investigation. The crime scene or place where the bones or possible organic remains are found in some sense retains the body even if it is no longer there. The identity of the remains is always investigated by the forensic pathologist (or forensic archaeologist). During the investigation, a network of several scientific disciplines is created in order to discover the cause of death and, if possible, the identity of the body. The anonymous body becomes a personalized victim, who is the centre of the investigation - he or she is the reason for and the object of the investigation. At the same time, however, the body is present in a sense only indirectly; on the surface of the "plot", there is science, an instrument of investigation, which is also a character in the forensic crime novel. The minute clues are significant, yet these cannot be seen with the naked eye, so that in order to make them visible, one often has recourse to complex technical equipment. The scientific procedures are described in detail, usually in the words of the specialist explaining them to someone less skilled. It is important that such an investigation is never conducted by one person alone, but always by a team. The victim is situated at the centre of the story not only because it is not especially concerned with the criminal, but also as a result of a cultural perception: social status and the right to have the truth revealed are ascribed to the victims human rights and a face are conferred

on them. Paradoxically, though, there is also a changing conception of the human body: the lifeless body is in effect little more than organic material to be investigated, dissected, cooked and scanned. The way in which this matter is treated might readily appear to contradict the very values which motivate it. Test samples are taken from the bones, for example, for genetic or biochemical analysis, evidence of violence is sought, such as the use of a saw. The bones are placed under the microscope, sent to different laboratories, marked and measured, and thereby various information is obtained: who or what the person was, their age, where and how they had lived. Teeth also afford important information, whether all or only a few. In her first book, Dj Dead, Kathy Reichs made the marks of a saw a key to the investigation. One after another, five dismembered bodies of women in various stages of decomposition are found in different places in Montreal. The forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan examines the bones minutely and arrives at the conclusion that all of the women were murdered by the same person. She explains this to a policeman involved in the case. An entire chapter describes how Dr. Brennan examined the bones in the histopathology laboratory, from which I quote only a fragment: I laid the first bone down, cleaned the spatula and syringe, tore off the used sheet, and began the process anew with another bone. As each mold hardened I removed it, marked it as to case number, anatomical site, side, and date, and placed it next to the bone on which it had been formed. I repeated the procedure until a rubbery blue mold sat next to each of the bones in front of me. It took over two hours. Next I turned to the microscope. I set the magnification and adjusted the fiber-optic light to angle across the viewing plate. Starting with Isabelle Gagnon's right femur I began a meticulous examination of each of the small nicks and scratches I had just cast. The cut marks seemed to be of two types. Each arm bone had a series of trench-like troughs lying parallel to its joint surfaces. The walls of their floors were straight and dropped to meet their floors at ninety-degree angles. Most of the trench-like cuts were less than a quarter of an inch in length and averaged five hundredths of an inch across. The leg bones were circled by similar grooves. (Reichs 1998: 162). From this passage, we can observe that it is no longer human beings who are the subject of the narrative, but bones and pieces of bones. The pieces of bones are handled in a particular way and then observed with the aid of a microscope, whereupon the results are compared and a conclusion is drawn: the marks on the bones were made with a saw. The marks of the saw, which provide detailed and decisive information about the death and the murderer, are not on but in the body. The human body has the same importance as other clues such as dust particles, hair or photography. The clues are fragments of a decaying body rather than material traces of the murderer himself. Ultimately, the body becomes an integral part of the scene of the crime, in which the course of the crime can be read. The evidence is read off the bones long after the crime, long after the soft tissue is gone, long after the person with his or her unique life story is buried in the literal sense of the word. This one last untold story lies embedded in a texture which survives longer than anything else of man, longer than his name, the memory of him, in the most resistant record carrier, in the longest and the least eradicable memory - in his bones. II. Television produces "reality" rather than reflects it. (Fiske: 21)

The object of the principal occupation of the forensic anthropologist becomes a name and a character of the series - Bones. Dr. Temperance Brennan incarnates the name, or vice versa, as she is called Bones by her partner in the investigation, FBI agent Seeley Booth. Whether or not the script writers intended this word play around the word and name Bones and the job of the forensic anthropologist and the resonant meaning of the incarnation vs. the decarnation of the dead to the bones is less significant than the fact that the serial thereby develops a quality and standard unknown to CSI. Unfortunately, the script writers scarcely seem to make use of this additional qualitative layer. Bones already mark the serial in the opening credits: the viewer sees eyeless skulls and single bare bones next to the faces and bodies of living actors and actresses making gestures and in motion.

Opening Credits Bones are also pictorially meaningful: rooms of the laboratory, where much of the stories take place and which is an anti-world to the "real" one outside in the "mean streets", are not only places where the bones are studied but also a space for exhibiting them. Bones constitute the space, since the walls in some of the workrooms consist of shelves where bones are stored behind plexiglas in a milk-colored light. They gleam through the walls and almost give the impression that the lab is inside the body of a huge creature. Bones both occupy and create spaces. The other characters in the serial form a close-knit unit of brilliant experts, almost another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Incredibles or any other comic-team of the overqualified: Dr. Jack Hodgins, an entomologist who (according to Collins) "knew more about spores and minerals than the science department of your average university" (Collins: 156); the young, talented assistant to Brennan, Zach Addy, who is on his way to a double doctor title; and Angela Montenegro, Brennan's artistically gifted best friend, who is "the lab's true computer whiz" (Collins: 61). Their private lives and interests are scarcely depicted, so that as characters they are constructed as Roberta Pearson describes: the television character's paradoxical personhood lies precisely in his abstraction from the rest of the design. Each tiny fragment does not contain the sum of the whole, but rather becomes fully intelligible only when juxtaposed with all the other tiny fragments in all the other scenes in all the other episodes in which the character appears.

Not only are the characters formed from the entire narrative of the series, they incarnate institutions: Science, or the laboratory, which pars pro toto is Brennan, while her counterpart or her partner is another institution which is embodied by Agent Booth, namely the State, legislature, executive and judiciary in one. In the series, both institutions are encoded and marked by spaces, Brennan by the lab, Booth by the FBI office. Both the serial and Collins' novel devote attention to the staging of spaces, including bodily spaces, and the body itself. This can be seen especially well in Collins' novel; in the television series, one reads what the viewer is shown. Each time a new character enters a scene and thus becomes "visible" (with the exception of reported telephone conversations), Collins describes her or his appearance in detail, especially the suits of the men, so that the style gives clues as to the character's qualities or his or her vocation. This is what we first see of a character, and it conditions how we see them. An interesting signification of physicality occurs here with the opposition of this "dressed" condition of the series characters to the down to the bones "undressed" state of the victims. It is precisely at this point that the difference between the novels of Kathy Reichs and the much more visually oriented medium of television becomes clear: the first person perspective in Reichs' novels allows the character of Temperance Brennan to merge with the background, although she is continually present; the main focus of the story lies on the bodiless victim, not least because of the attempt to "re-produce" the victim's body, to trace it, to read off the bones, to resurrect as it were the man with his human rights, to finally give him back his name. One of the "inventions" in Bones is the 3-D simulation, or, as it is called by Collins, the 3D imaging process, which reconstructs the sequence of events or the face of the victim as criminalists do with clay or special computer programs (and here, one inevitably thinks of the socalled CSI shot). Those visualizations are prepared by Angela with a program which she developed herself; certain interpretive and artistic abilities are required here, and this is her domain. She is also responsible for the hypothetical reconstruction of the face of the victim by drawing. In the episode The Boy in the Bush (Season 1, Episode 5), she comes to the verge of quitting her job, because this time the victim is a child and she struggles to observe his face and body as closely as if she were touching him and at the same time to distance herself emotionally from the tragedy of the death of a child. Dr. Goodman, a director of the Jeffersonian anthropology institute, asks her how she would describe her duties. She answers: "I draw death masks," to which the director replies: You discern humanity in the rack of the ruin of the human body. You give victims back their faces, their identities, you remind us all of why we're here. In the first place, because we treasure human life.

Pilot - Season 1 - Episode 1 He is not speaking simply of her: he is at the same time placing her back within the team, which she wanted to leave; and he speaks of the institution. Those 3-D images, with their touch of the unreal and the farfetched, are a sign of the free artistic interpretation of a reading of evidence. They are a vision, which is made observable and which must convince. They create a simulacrum, for the person they display is not there anymore. This is not a reconstruction but a construction, which must work the wonder of convincing the viewer of the reality of the displayed. The guarantee of that reality is the institutional frame of the scientific laboratory. The 3-D simulations reestablish once again the science-fictional character of the space in the serial. This space unites the real and the impossible under the promise of science, and the simulations suggest a high technical standard and the infallibility of the investigation, almost a divine power with the aid of technology and science. This is a "divine" laboratory, where the dead awake, tell their story and then lie down again in peace. Other aspects of the series, however, suggest the seeming inhumanity of science, for example, the amputation of a finger from the hand of a mummified corpse, so that the finger can be treated with a conventional fabric softener to soften the dried skin and so gain a fingerprint for the identification of the victim; or the army of bugs which are responsible for "cleaning" the bones from the organic remains in record time and which themselves reveal particular substances in the tissue of the victim. This "inhumanity" is a trait of the science that governs the show almost as a character in its own right and whose body parts are the scientists. Any mistakes which are made are those of the human agents and reveal their limitations, not the limitations of science itself. Unlike CSI which, as Sue Turnball writes, "not only fascinates, but which also promises knowledge, truth and certainty" , Bones promises only the visual.

III. The most important problem facing the semiology of images: can analogical representation (the "copy") produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols? (Barthes: 135)

The viewer sees something that looks like a corpse, precisely in order to show a corpse, but it is not a corpse; it is an actor or a dummy, and the viewer knows that real corpses are not shown in a fictional serial. If he does believe, he becomes completely involved in the game of television in which, surely, he should believe. The effect of authenticity is based on a kind of bilateral pact between the viewer and the institution of television (including the actors, the script writers, special effects and make up departments etc.): the success of television is predicated on the belief of the viewer or on his suspended disbelief -and the viewer believes that television would not show something which is inauthentic if authenticity is promised. That which is shown is both authentic and fake at the same time. We might contrast such depictions with a genuine forensic manual for the specialists. It is not easy to look at a real corpse; one has to learn it. The novels of Kathy Reichs depict science as an instrument, central and, as mentioned, on the surface of the narrative, dominant, yet it remains only an instrument. In the television series, it has become a character, and the series is its show, the character science displays itself in its different forms, it surprises, disappoints, scares, shocks. In the novels, humanity is the central element, the humanity of the body, which extends to include the frailties of the protagonist, such as an indulgence in alcohol, her affections and resentments, impulsive behavior, and so on, which contrast with the inhumanity of the crime.