Crime and Fiction

Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang

Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang

• Where do we begin with Fischer’s strange and odd novel?

• I suggest we begin by looking at the title in the context of the titles of his other work:

Fischer’s titles

• The titles favoured by British novelist and short story writer Tibor Fisher (b. 1958) offer a useful point of introduction to his oeuvre. They have a decidedly defamiliarising effect. Under the Frog (1992) baffles us unless we know that it is an idiomatic expression translated from the Hungarian, signifying the worst kind of place to be. The Collector Collector (1997) bemuses us as meaningless echolalia. Most readers are taken slightly aback by the title of his collection of short stories, Don’t Read This Book if You’re Stupid (1999). Voyage to the End of the Room (2003) strikes us as odd by yoking together nouns that denote spatial extension and limitation. Similarly, Good to be God (2008) appears anomalous, perhaps because it jars with our conception of divine benevolence, i.e. God’s disposition to do good.

Fischer’s titles• The Thought Gang (1994) is no exception to Fischer’s taste for

defamiliarisation. The somewhat unusual title of the novel constitutes a first indication of the making strange and replacement of familiar conventions that is the novel’s main objective. The title suggests a concern with the relationship of two entities or activities that we usually consider unrelated. On the one hand, it deals with thinking, philosophy and ideas. On the other, it concerns crime, transgression, and misdemeanour. Thinking involves contemplation and reflection, often on your own, but the intensely private activity of thinking is undertaken for the public good. Gangs, on the other hand, are associated with action and, more over, with actions of violence that do not benefit the community, but serve private ends. Gangsters are public enemies. What gangs and philosophers have in common is detection. The former are objects of detection, the latter subjects.

Fischer’s titles

• The novel’s title, then, echoes the notion of detection.

• Make a list of examples of subjects and objects of detection in The Thought Gang

• (max 400 words)

Detection and Reading

• Reading, of course, is a form of detection.

• Make a list of examples of reading in the novel (max 400 words)

Ways of reading

• When we read novels, we are usually reading for the plot, i.e. we are constantly processing the information we receive in relation to what has gone before and what is coming.

• We try to make sense of what we read as a unified whole where all the bits of information fit in.

• Typically, we try to unearth the story (the chronological sequence of events) behind the plot (the sequence in which the novel present the events).

Ways of reading• I guess you can do that with The Thought Gang• But the result is a chronological series of highly weird and accidental

events united under the heading of Eddie Coffin: In his early twenties, because of an unhappy love affair with a girl called Zoë, Eddie Coffin gets extremely drunk and ends up in the custody of the police for the possession of kiddy porn. This feeds into his career as a university professor, which began at the age of thirteen with his purchase of the Greek – English Lexicon, and he gets tenure. As a don, his main contribution to philosophy is the systematic and successful embezzlement of an international research foundation. Eventually, he is discovered and has to flee to France, intending to eat and drink himself to death. However, every single defrauded penny goes up in smoke and, in order to go out in style, he embarks on a sprey of armed robberies with his new found companion, Hubert. After a series of succeful bank jobs, the novel ends with his retirement from crime and the possibility of doing philosophy again.

Ways of reading

• The above summary is far from complete. But is does underline the highly odd sequence of events that constitute the novel.

• Ultimately, while the events are entertaining in an absurd manner, the novel seems to invite a different kind of reading

Ways of reading

• The epigraph of the novel is taken from Liddell and Scott’s Greek – English Lexicon.

• The very first sentence of the novel outlines the police hammering down a door.

• These two signifiers have the notion of ”entry” in common

• Thus, the reader’s entry into the novel is mirrored by the text.

• Find other examples of literal and metaphorical entries in the novel (max 400 words)