The metaphysical detective story (like the detective story proper) also plays

a major part in the history of literary theory. As shown by the suggestions for
further reading that conclude our volume, the poetics of traditional detective
fiction has long been a popular and provocative topic among literary critics.
Theorists have always been fascinated by the genre, of course, from Poes
own classic essays on literary closure to Roger Calloiss formalist study of the
detective story as a game, Geraldine Pederson-Krags Freudian reading of it
as repetition of the primal scene, and Ernst Kaemels Marxist analysis of it as
a product of capitalism. But recent critical interest in the detective genre
dates, in particular, from Jacques Lacans famous reading of Poes story in
The Seminar on The Purloined Letter (1956; trans. 1972), which generated
not only a notorious chain of ripostes---by Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson,
and John Irwin, among others---but also new critical approaches to
deconstruction, intertextuality, and psychoanalytic criticism. Other theorists
have used detective fiction to illustrate the hermeneutic code (Barthes 7577, 84-88), the importance of closure in Western culture (Kermode 19-21),
the ways in which narratives tell stories (Brooks 23-27), and the ways in
which readers read them (Prince 238). Heta Purhonens recent book, Murder
from an Academic Angle , systematically analyzes such theo- [end of p. 6]
retical approaches to the genre. And two previous essay collections have
documented the extent to which traditional detective stories and literary
theories mutually illuminate each other: Most and Stowes The Poetics of
Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory and Walker and Frazers The
Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary
Literary Theory.
Detecting Texts builds upon and expands these critical foundations in
its work with the newer metaphysical genre, one that is inherently linked to
literary theory. Metaphysical detective stories themselves explicitly speculate
about the workings of language, the structure of narrative, the limitations of
genre, the meanings of prior texts, and the nature of reading. Indeed, some
literary theorists have even chosen the metaphysical genre as a rhetorical
mode in which to advance their theories: consider Ecos The Name of the
Rose (1980) or Norman Hollands Death at a Delphi Seminar: A Postmodern
Mystery (1995). For these reasons, metaphysical detective stories present
special challenge to the literary critics. As Richard H. Rodino has remarked,
critics must try to match the fluid relations, risk-taking, uncouth energies,
and nonpositivistic hermeneutics of metaphysical detective fiction which
exegetical activity that is equally energetic and rigorousand [that] engages
in dialogical relations with the fresh orthodoxies promulgated by these

works. Accordingly, the contributors to Detecting Texts use an eclectic range

of approaches in order to analyze the already self-analytical genre of
metaphysical detective fiction: literary history and influence; genre theory;
reader-response and reception theory; deconstruction, hermeneutics,
intertextuality, and narratology; phenomenology; psychoanalysis; cultural
studies; and the philosophical insights of Blachot, Foucault, Freud, Heidegger,
Lacan, and Peirce among others.
These various approaches also help to situate the metaphysical
detective story within the ongoing critical debate about postmodernity. The
genre offers a useful way to understand postmodernism as a theory, a
practice, and a cultural condition. Holquist speculates, intriguingly, that
postmodernist literature---which he places after World War II---uses detective
fiction a recurrent narrative subtext in much the same way modernism uses
mythology (165). Certainly, the writers who are most identified with
postmodernisms formal characteristics (even if, like Borges and Nabokov,
they began writing at the height of modernism) also helped to create the
metaphysical detective story. The genre exemplifies postmodernisms
concern with intertextuality, pop-culture pastiche, metafiction, and what John
Barth famously called the literature of exhaustion (29). The metaphysical
detective storys affinity for self-reflexive hermeneutics is also typically
postmodernist (Hutcheon, 81-82). Indeed, Spanos labels this genre the
paradigmatic archetype of [end of p. 7] the postmodern literary
imagination (154). And Tani even suggests that because metaphysical
detective fiction frustrates the expectations of the reader, transforms a
mass-media genre into a sophisticated expression of avant-garde sensibility,
and replaces positivistic interpretation with an acknowledgement of mystery,
it is the ideal medium of postmodernism (40)---and, furthermore, that Good
contempoarary fiction and anti-detective fiction are for the most part of the
same thing (148). (Merivale, pp. 6-8)

Themes and Structures

This volume surveys the characteristic themes of the metaphysical detective
story: (1) the defeated sleuth, whether he be an armchair detective or a
private eye; (2) the world, the city, or text as labyrinth; (3) the purloined
letter , embedded text, mise en abyme, textual constraint, or text as object;
(4) the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer meaninglessness
of clues and evidence; (5) the missing person, the man of the crowd, the

double, and the lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; and (6) the absence,
falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of any kind of closure to the
investigation. (Merivale, p. 8)
***
Subjectivity presents a special problem fro metaphysical sleuths.
Detecting a singular identity is difficult in a postmodern world of forged
papers and empty names, as Sirvent confirms with the parodic onomastics of
the post-nouveau roman , Ramsay with the extensive variations upon the
name Morgan in Robbe-Grillets fiction, and Botta with the ambiguous
referents in Modianos Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978).
***
The detectives failure to identify individuals, interpret texts, or, even
more to the point, solve mysteries, is characteristic of the metaphysical
genre. All of our essays deal, in one way or another, with what Black calls
(de)feats of detection. The detectives failure means, moreover, that the
mystery remains unsolved and the text incomplete. This absence of closure
is necessarily discussed in every essay, but is central to the arguments of
Nealon, Sirvent, Ewer, and Botta. (Merivale, p. 10)