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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
A notable aspect of contemporary fiction is the increasing importance acquired by the detective as a literary figure. From World War II up to today he has transcended a narrow role played in a narrow genre to become the symbol for man's existential quest and puzzlement in the face of mystery. If science fiction is the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the future of our technological society, the detective and a new form of literary detective fiction have lately become the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the present, since mystery is not only, too obviously, in the future but, more subtly, in the present. While science fiction lacks a character typical of the genre who may embody and possibly transcend its purposes, the detective novel thanks to the multifold aspects of its “ordainer”—the detective—has progressively risen to literary prominence through the apparently paradoxical negation of its original functions.
1 Jorge Luis Borges' La muerte y la brujula (1942) narrates the story of a detective who reconstructs the clues left by an assassin and shows up in the place where he knows that the next murder should occur, only to be the victim; Carlo Emilio Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (1946) describes the shabby routine of a police commissioner in Fascist Italy in the late twenties, a sexual murder, and the inability of the police to make sense out of the "awful mess;" Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes (1953) is the story of a detective who knows that a murder will be committed in a certain place at a certain time and gets there to prevent it, but then is himself the one who shoots the victim.
2 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, New York, Bantam Books, 1967, p. 128.
3 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 87.
4 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 65.
5 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 129.
6 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 59.
7 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 128.
8 Concerning this concept of the "marvelous" as a phenomenon that implies a supernatural intervention, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1975.
9 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 137.
10 William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel, New York, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 196.
11 Hjortsberg, op. cit., p. 130.
12 Hjortsberg, op. cit., p. 227.
13 Hjortsberg, op. cit., p. 34.
14 Hjortsberg, op. cit., p. 1. (The italics are mine).
15 Hjortsberg, op. cit., p. 172.
16 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 120.
17 As in The Crying of Lot 49, names have in Falling Angel self-mocking and symbolic meanings: Angel is no angel, the combination of tough private eye and black magic priest (Favorite); the name also ironically implies tha his identity is related to his soul. Johnny Favorite, alias Jonathan Liebling, is a favorite, a pet of his audience, a phony public image with an ugly personality behind the facade. Lucifer himself was God's favorite, the angel he loved the most before his fall from Grace. The Crossroads Detective Agency implies that the life-roads of Angel and Favorite intersect and become one. On New Year's Eve 1943 the first act of the doubled Favorite-Angel is in fact to ask Ernie Cavalero, the agency owner, for a job. Louis Cyphre (whose name in the novel is spelled in different ways—Cypher, Cipher, Cyphre—like Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49) has a very significant name as well, since cipher means zero and, as Cyphre himself savs, "zero [is] the point intermediate between positive and negative, is a portal through which every man must eventually pass." (p. 177). Cyphre is Angel's "portal" from "neutrality" (zero) to damnation.
18 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 91.
19 Pynchon, op. cit., p. 128.
20 Tzvetan Todorov, op. cit.
