Art of murder

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The Art of Murder (also considered The Murder as Fine Art ) is an essay by the English author Thomas De Quincey in which he explains that murder can be an art form. His intellectual prerequisite is that art is viewed as amoral and is only committed to aesthetics .

De Quincey, best known for depicting his opium addiction in his book Confessions of an English Opium Eater , published his essay in the February 1827 issue of Blackwoods Magazine in London. He remarks ironically:

If once a man indulges in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

De Quincey's theme is not the observation, prosecution and punishment of murderers, but the consideration of murder according to aesthetic criteria, like a work of the fine arts: after morality has been satisfied, the connoisseur can pause to determine the degree of brutality or finesse to evaluate in the execution of the crime, as with any other human expression.

reception

De Quincey's essay had a great influence on the crime and horror literature from Poe and Baudelaire , who read De Quincey intensively, to the surrealists Borges and André Breton , who wrote a foreword to the translation of the book into Spanish and included it in his “Anthologie des Black Humor ”. In a Spiegel review, the literary critic Joachim Kalka calls De Quincey the “patron saint of the crime novel” and “all the texts that interpret the murder aesthetically as a problem with an elegant solution. De Quincey casually throws us back on the actually frightening question, at which the coziness ends: What do we like about it so much? "

De Quincey's idea has inspired at least one real murder, the murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb , as well as a number of books and films, such as Alfred Hitchcock's film Cocktail for a Corpse ( Rope ), Meyer Levin's novel and film Compulsion and the The novel The Opium Killer by David Morrell , in which the author De Quincey is one of the main characters.

The title of Peter Whitehead's film "Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (2009) alludes to De Quincey's essay. Whitehead himself says about his film “The central element of the film is the murder of an 'ideal' victim. I wanted to investigate the CIA's influence on British culture based on misinformation. I took inspiration from Thomas De Quincey's two novels, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and I think it's about fear and control. Or better said: about the fear that the state is spreading in order to take control. "

literature

  • Thomas de Quincey : On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts . Essay. [First reprint] in: Blackwood's Magazine . 1827. A second version, supplemented by an afterword, appeared in 1839, which was followed in 1854 by a further version extended by a post scriptum .
German: The murder is considered a fine art . Translated by Alfred Peuker. Preface by David Masson. Bruns, Minden around 1920. (German first edition.)
Edited by Ursula Fischer after the translation by Alfred Peuker. Edited and introduced by Norbert Kohl. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-458-31958-1 .
Revised by Gerhild Tieger. Authors' House Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-932909-42-9 .
  • Roxanne Covelo: The Art of Murder and Ars Rhetorica: De Quincey's Essay as Mock-Encomium. In: Studies in Romanticism. Vol, 58, No. 1, fall 2019.
  • Gernot Krämer: Considered murder as a fine art. On the aesthetic valence of a motif in Thomas de Quincey, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Schwob. Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 1999, ISBN 3-89528-237-5 .
  • Heather Worthington: The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction. Palgarve MacMillan, New York 2005, ISBN 1-4039-4108-4 , Chapter 1.4 .: Conoisseur of Crime. De Quincey's Defense of the Murderous Art.

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ Thomas de Quincey: A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts . In: Blackwood's Magazine. November 1839.
  2. ↑ Gernot Kramer: The murder regarded as a fine art. On the aesthetic valence of a motif in Thomas de Quincey, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Schwob. Aisthesis Verlag, 1999.
  3. ^ Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Fiction. Interviewd by Ronald Christ, 1966. In: The Paris Review. 1967.
  4. ^ After it was first published in 1940 by Éditions du Sagittaire in Paris, it was republished in 1947 with a few additions
  5. ↑ Joachim Kalka: The game with fear. In: Der Spiegel. No. 3, 2003, accessed April 22, 2020.
  6. ↑ IMDb .
  7. ↑ Peter Whitehead, quoted from: Terrorism considered as one of the fine arts. crew-united.com., accessed on April 17, 2020.

Web links