cambridge-crime-fiction

laura marcus
McHale uses The Name of the Rose as a way of conceptualising the nature of
the divide between modernist and postmodernist fiction. ‘A modernist novel’,
he argues (in my view reductively), ‘looks like a detective story. Classic detective
fiction is the epistemological genre par excellence.’ 51 Modernist fictions,
from Henry James to ‘the late-modernist epistemological quests of Joseph
McElroy’, ‘revolve round problems of the accessibility and circulation of
knowledge, the individual mind’s grappling with an elusive or occluded reality’.
Eco’s novel would seem to be part of this grouping, and to dramatise
an epistemological quest, but in its construction of a detective who fails it
properly belongs with the genre of the ‘anti-detective novel’, and with those
fictions which ‘by deliberately crippling the detective story’s epistemological
structure,...ineffect evacuate the detective story of its epistemological thematics’.
‘What rushes in’, McHale asks rhetorically, ‘when the anti-detective
story empties the detective model of its epistemological structure and thematics?
What else but ontological structure and thematics: postmodernist
poetics.’ 52
McHale locates the ‘postmodernism’ of The Name of the Rose in its
metafictionality and ‘its relative ontological “weakness” vis-à-vis its own
author, whose presence it reveals “behind” it’; in its strategies for destabilising
the projected world of the novel itself, including deliberate historical
anachronism; in its characteristically postmodernist themes of labyrinthine
and disorientating space and of displaced apocalypse, in which a parallel
is drawn between the destruction of a book, figurative (through the exposure
of its fictionality) or literal, and the destruction of a world. Finally he
argues, however, that the novel cannot be located as either modernist or
postmodernist, and that ‘it calls into question the entire opposition of modernist
post-modernist’. 53 It is an ‘amphibious’ text which serves to trouble
the literary-critical tendency to reify categories which can never be anything
but ‘literary-historical discursive constructs’. 54 This argument has some relation
to Teresa de Lauretis’s more cynical claim that ‘in The Name of the
Rose Eco wants to “have his carcase” – he wants a mystery both with and
without solution, a text both open and closed, an epistemology with and
without truth’. 55
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked
Room) also deploys and subverts the conventions of detective fiction, and
in particular the private eye novel, in its explorations of identity, authorship
and narrative. In all three parts of the trilogy, the central figures (only one of
whom, that of The Locked Room, isafirst-person narrator) are called into
service as detectives in ways familiar from the fiction of Raymond Chandler
or Dashiell Hammett: a phone call, a visit from a mysterious stranger, a
letter. Yet from the very start the interpellations do not establish and secure
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