What happens to detective fiction when the sleuth fails to decipher the clues, investigate the crime, and discover the truth? How should we approach mysteries which “do not permit themselves to be read,” as Poe famously wrote in “The Man of the Crowd”? This book seeks to answer these questions by addressing texts which frustrate the readers’ desire for narrative closure and, in various ways and degrees, call into question the very possibility of reliable knowledge.
In doing so, this book aims at establishing the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that I call the metacognitive mystery tale. The main goal is to delineate a corpus of texts presenting “unreadable” mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective-story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs—the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text—that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties explored by the genre. The selected corpus, composed of some of the genre’s most emblematic avatars as well as of less usual suspects, accounts for the specificity and heterogeneity of authors who, in different but related ways, have addressed a number of issues underlying the acquisition of knowledge. Following three major intertextual matrices based on the concepts of the “ unreadable” city , the dark grotesque, and the sublime, respectively, this book brings together texts by writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Horacio Quiroga, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, Iain Sinclair, and Roberto Bolaño under the banner of the metacognitive mystery tale. This approach represents an opportunity to gather canonical and barely academically studied works and provide new perspectives on stories dealing with the darker, more anxious aspects of investigations led by unsuccessful sleuths.
This volume adopts a retrospective point of view from the postmodern era to the first half of the nineteenth century, at a time when writers already raised questions about the possibilities and the conditions which determine the acquisition of knowledge. As will become clear, the comparative approach adopted here relates texts to each other through the lens of a genre which is less “metaphysical” than “metacognitive” to the extent that it stages unfathomable mysteries in which the very processes of cognition are constantly threatened and undermined from within their own generic, discursive, and narratological contexts and intertexts.
Which texts, then, can be considered the predecessors to “meta-detective” literature?1 Patricia Merivale has affirmed the importance of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd ,” a “metaphysical gumshoe story” (1999, 101) that she relates to Hawthorne’s “ Wakefield,” another story dealing with a missing person who is desperately pursued through labyrinthine city streets. The wanderings of a sleuth in the expanding urban world recall the figure of the Benjaminian flâneur turning into an “unwilling detective” (1973, 40) gifted with superior interpretative powers that enable him to “read” the urban crowd. Driven by “his improbable pretensions to epistemological control” (Brand 1991, 7), the flâneur believes that he is able to classify and typologize the many individuals that surround him, an activity which, for him, has more to do with “genuine empiricism” than with any form of speculative reasoning (Benjamin 1973, 39). Nevertheless, like Wakefield in his eponymous story, he also “exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever,” becoming ipso facto “the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 1974, 140).
In a metacognitive mystery tale such as “The Man of the Crowd,” the detective-flâneur is often confronted with his own interpretative failures as well as with the impossibility of accounting for and comprehending the phenomenological reality in its complex and multiperspectival totality. Such a globalizing quest tends to collide with the imperatives of abstraction and selection—it is fundamentally arbitrary and thus potentially dangerous. Overall, these stories emphasize the perverse nature of the thirst for knowledge as an end in itself (a craving which also characterizes many heroes of the traditional detective genre such as Sherlock Holmes) once it becomes divorced from any attempt to restore justice and moral order.
This book offers to append two further “ unreadable” texts to Merivale and Sweeney’s corpus collected in Detecting Texts (1999) and based on “Wakefield” and “The Man of the Crowd”: Melville’s “ Bartleby” and James’s “The Figure in the Carpet.” “Wakefield” (1835), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “Bartleby” (1853), and “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) have been perceived as oddballs for their time as well as within their creators’ œuvres. Adding “unreadable” texts such as “Bartleby ” and “The Figure in the Carpet” to the corpus of early meta-detective stories calls for a reconsideration of the definitions of the genre liable to accommodate tales which, for their part, would seem to reject classification, most notably on account of the sheer variety of existential, epistemological , and ontological issues they raise. The book’s purpose, however, is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the writers who may have contributed to the metacognitive genre (a task which seems impossible). Rather, Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge wants to be the first monographic attempt at outlining a general picture of some of its major contributors and offering close readings of their emblematic texts.
This study begins its investigation in the nineteenth century, when detective fiction emerged, and moves back and forth in time and space to produce a comparative analysis of texts from the early nineteenth century to the present day as well as from North to South America, and from France to Great Britain. Such an inquiry should contribute to the appreciation and recognition of a genre that reveals a darker and fraughter facet of detective fiction: what happens when the mystery remains unsolved. Despite their differences, “Wakefield,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “Bartleby ,” and “The Figure in the Carpet” present “unreadable” mysteries that undermine the teleological models on which most detective narratives are based. They also offer, by means of the grotesque and the sublime, original starting points to the examination of a lineage of texts that challenge the very possibility for literature to try to convey indisputable truths.
Part I presents a theoretical outline of the different notions that will be applied to the close readings in Parts II, III, IV, and V. After a brief return to the origins of crime fiction, distinguishing the mystery tale from the detective story, this chapter addresses the different theories that have sought to account for alternatives to the traditional whodunit grouped under the banner of metaphysical detective fiction. Chapter 2 further justifies the terminological clarification which gives this book its title by acknowledging that the metacognitive dimension of such texts lies, in different but related ways, in their ability to question and subvert the characters’ motivations and their aspirations to closure. In doing so, it also focuses on the important role played by the figure of the flâneur and the idea well expressed by Benjamin that “[t]he original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (1973, 43), thereby restating the importance of the urban scenery in the crime genre as a whole.
Another essential trope of these stories consists in casting doubt on the capacity of language to apprehend and convey the full range and complexities of human personality, emotion, and experience. Chapter 3 thus shows how the concept of the sublime and the many theories attached to it appear as relevant tools to describe texts which, in Edmund Burke’s words, excite the ideas of pain, danger, and terror, producing “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (1958, 39). As Philip Shaw has argued, returning to Burke’s initial thought, “we resort to the feeling of the sublime” as soon as “experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear” (2006, 2). In other words, “the sublime marks the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these limits” (2006, 2). More bluntly, the sublime is a concept used to describe “an experience that is excessive, unmanageable, even terrifying” (2006, 4).
The concept of the sublime has often been linked to that of the ridiculous or the grotesque. Here, one ma...