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Intertextuality and structuralism:
Two figures of confusion

Le cas navrant du roman policier comme
tentative d'approche de la littérature populaire

The sorry case of the detective novel
as an attempt at popular fiction

(A response to Moez Lahmédi's essay)

Okuba Kentaro
Translation: Cristina Johnston

 

In Europolar 6, Moez Lahmédi presents a study in which he reduces the writing of detective fiction to an intertextual game. Critical essay, brilliant paradox, striking summary or cold beheading? It is difficult to say, and we cannot use here the argument that the complex technical language used renders it susceptible to interpretation. That would mean that the essay was not formally accomplished: but it is set forth as a scientific text and we may still consider the univocality of language to be of prime importance to scientific rigour. After all, the pedants are less those who use a particular jargon, than those who employ science to settle old scores.

This is perhaps not Mr Lahmédi's deepest intention, and I will not accuse him unjustly on this point. However, it does seem important to me to return precisely to the question of the validity of his exposition, since the latter is susceptible to unpleasant interpretations.

 

A summary of the case

The author sought to study, through a particular case study, that of detective fiction, the method of analysis referred to as intertextuality, which consists in seeking in the text, and thus in the written sign, a typology of the processes of construction of the novel.

Let us recognise the premise of the author according to which – and we find here much which is drawn from the work of Eco – the written product is more important that the creative idea, and let us follow the demonstration of ‘detective' intertextuality, according to Mr Lahmédi's shorthand terminology.

This intertextuality is certainly different, because it functions on the basis of the development of pre-existing texts, which, for the author, form the material base for his future collage and grattage. Like the medieval copyists, the ‘detective' author recuperates the paper from old texts in order to wash it and to retranscribe other works.

At this stage of the demonstration, I propose to refer to him as the ‘gluer', in order to distinguish him from the novelist.

The author, noting the reductive intention of the palimpsest, intervenes to remind us of the other aspect of intertextuality as a game of reading, with the individual reader, depending on his/her level of general culture, either succeeding or not in relating the text being read with other, previously read texts. Needless to say, this phenomenon is independent of the literary genre and of the book itself, as Mr Lahmédi himself recognises.

Except that the detective novel frequently refers to other novels from the same genre, thus creating a dynamic of repetition. The reader who thus discovers in one work figures from one or more other works will be inclined to enter into the game, the ‘contract' which is thus established and which adopts the status of a natural process of reading.

We should note, according to Mr Lahmédi, that the systematic repetition might result in a fossilisation of the genre in the short term, and we should thus suppose a meta-textual dynamic. The inventiveness of the detective ‘gluer' lies in his ability to write the same book, except for the ending, in such a way as to procure an element of surprise for the ‘contracted' reader. Of course, should we wish to analyse the method used, the element of surprise, in itself, forms part of the contract and the ‘gluer' is lucky to find such benevolent readers.

This being so, how did we arrive at the present situation?

Firstly, according to the author, because the detective ‘gluer' needs to take texts and to give them a degree of value as clues. By dispatching them skillfully, arranging them in a meaningful collage in the style of the first Cubists, the ‘gluer' enables the avid reader, keen to find familiar points of reference, to progress through the text. Because this function as clue is then joined by a reflexive function: the reader who reads these pieces he already knows, perceives himself as a reader now and as a reader before , and rejoices in this mirror effect. Of course, this argument seems weakened if we consider that, since the intertextual function of the text is fundamentally palimpsestic in the detective collage, the psychological distance between the pieces – which is in fact always the same, since nihil novi sub sole – rapidly approaches zero.

One final argument is that this type of method is peculiar to the detective ‘novel'.

 

The investigation

Here we find clarified, then, we might say, the specificities peculiar to intertextuality in detective fiction: a purely formal game which serves as a process of creation which, if not tautological, is at the very least exclusively endogenous, with the element of surprise for the reader guaranteed.

There is no reflection on the value of the creative idea, nor even on the political will of the author to ask, within the extreme freedom of the detective genre – Imre Kertèsz, Ismaël Kadaré, for example – questions about the loss of humanity peculiar to totalitarian systems; at the very most, Manchette is quoted but is this really grounds for satisfaction? In Mr Lahmédi's notebook, an excellent example of an intertextual structure, is it not written that Manchette should be cited for all political points? Neither is the formal adventure carried to its highest degree of abstraction by Paul Auster's New York Trilogy quoted.

And this idea, so peculiar, expressed with such confidence, that there is no enigma in the novel, and perhaps no reflexive function.

In the name of what argument should we follow Mr Lahmédi's incomplete statement: Genette, Barthes? Structuralists, if we think of them in that way, men who think of the constriction of content by the supremacy of stylistic structures. Yes, but have they explained that this structure holds only for some detective novels? Why and how: these are the little questions which should be asked in a constructive argument, and which are not only evoked here. We could take, for instance, the situation of literary texts in the 17 th century and the intertexts of the day: Latin authors in lingua originalis , if you please, mythology, the Bible. So, my dear old Racine, with your five hundred words and your intertexts, are you an author?

Or perhaps, and it is simply an error of framing, Mr Lahmédi is thinking of Gérard de Villiers and his 164 novels, which are veritable enigmas in themselves: how can normal people always dive with such pleasure into water that always looks the same? Perhaps Mr Lahmédi is even trying to understand/curb the value of popular fiction, without really knowing how to describe or analyse it. In any case, we can reproach him for adding to the confusion he was supposed to have been settling.

 

The verdict

As a reader, and as a bookworm, I am always unfavourably impressed by the ability of researchers to kill pleasure, as though this space of freedom, of relaxation, and of rêverie, in a Bachelardian sense of the term, was epidermically unbearable to them. I am equally amazed to read, in the tradition of the inexhaustible Eco, the strange portrait of the reader of detective fiction: a man who always rereads the same thing and who, at the same time, contemplates himself reading. A magnificent example of solipsistic abnegation.

Mr Lahmédi is not the worst culprit among them but he is, consciously or otherwise, on the side of the vivisectionists. To present oneself in a group of readers and authors to crush, without any rigorous method, the object of their pleasure, to bring writing a book to the level of a game of cut and paste, these are processes which class him among the brighter elements of the generation to come. It is a shame that he chose the sorry case of the detective novel to carry out a cold attack on popular literature: for him, it is already a lost cause (forced laugh).