The Detective Novel at the Juncture Between Order and Chaos

Abstract

This article maintains the thesis that the detective novel is an apology for the rationality of liberal society and the ideological legitimization of its institutions. The article provides this argument through a textual analysis that seeks to understand the conditions of production, and the reading processes of the genre, in order to identify those elements that define the construction of the self-representation of liberal society around which this literature crystallizes. The genre exhibits the norms of political correctness central to the British Empire, ideas which today are known as Victorian morality, and which serve as exemplary guidelines for social conduct, but which hypocritically conceal the norms and customs characteristic of the era. Likewise, classic detective fiction illustrates the logic and systematicity of scientific research structure around the positivist rationality that emerges from the English empiricist tradition. The rationalist and individualistic character of the protagonist is also posited as a representation of the Cartesian anthropological model. Furthermore, the article analyzes the ideological ambiguity of a literature that foregrounds both the private detective as a representative of the institutional order, and the elegant delinquent whose misdeeds could be interpreted as chaos or mockery of that order.