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If we subscribe to the writings of detective-story theorists (for example, the rules set forth by S.S. Van Dine), Borges and Casares's Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi appears completely "heretical." It has been said that the stories constitute a parody of Chesterton, who, in turn, parodied the classic detective story from Poe on. The Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Paris) recently determined a matrix of the previously conceived detective-story plots (murderer = butler, murderer = narrator, murderer = detective, and so on) and discovered that a book in which the murderer is the reader has yet to be written. I ask myself whether this scenario (revealing to the readers that they, or rather we, are the murderer) might not be at the heart of every, great book, from Oedipus Rex to Borges's short stories. But it is certain that Borges and Casares, in 1942, found an empty space in Mendeleiev's table of detective-story plots: the detective is a prison inmate. Instead of solving the crime (committed in a closed room) from the outside, the detective, locked in a closed room, must now solve a series of crimes committed on the outside. |
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The idea of a detective who solves the case in his own mind, on the basis of a few clues provided by someone else, is part of the detective-story tradition: consider Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, to whom Archie |
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First published in German as "Die Abduktion in Uqbar," Postscript to Sechs Aufgaben für Don Isidro Parodi (Munich: Hanser, 1983). The nonscholarly purpose of this postscript explains the reasons for a vulgarization of Peirce's idea of abduction. Translated by Juliann Vitullo and Guy Raffa from the Italian version in Eco 1985. |
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