Abstract
In this essay, readings from three different areas are made to intersect in order to produce a conjecture. The first area is social-scientific methods and in particular recent discussion on theorizing. The second area is a sub-tradition that inspects crime and detective fiction as a reflection on social scientific research. The third type of readings are literary analyses of detective fiction. The conjecture is that a book of fiction—Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives—can be used to think about a surprisingly unnoticed moment in discussions on social scientific theorization, namely the role of reading. New ideas in social science often require a self-genealogical work. When making new theories, social researchers need to read their antecessors in order to situate their work so it can actually make sense as a social scientific contribution. The fictionalized inquiry presented in The Savage Detectives can be read as a reflection on this specific theorizing operation.
Thanks to Christian de Cock, Sine Nørholm Just, and Fabian Muniesa for helpful comments and conversations.
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Notes
- 1.
For example: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to the art of montage” (Benjamin 1999, p. 458).
- 2.
Criminology is oriented to the massive construction of archives, which, Ginzburg explains, connects two forms of knowledge production. Criminal databases are archives of unique individual files and forms of individual identification (like ear patterns and the fingerprint). They are also used in the construction of abstract statistical types and categories. The best example of the latter is what in that time was known as ‘composite picture’ (Ginzburg 2004), which was a technique in which individual pictures were assembled in order to construct a representation of a category. For example, a set of photos of individuals who have committed crimes could be used to construct a representation of the category of the criminal.
- 3.
There is a second dimension in Boltanski’s argument which is not essential for the discussion here but that is worth mentioning. In Boltanski’s view, crime stories can also help us to think about the possibilities of a critical social scientific stance. Most crime stories, Boltanski proposes, end up with a conservative twist. For example, the stories of Sherlock Holmes show that, despite initial appearances, each case has an explanation, which does not require going beyond the liberal individual representation of society. However, there is also a type of narrative (Boltanski has a chapter on Kafka’s The Trial) that pushes the conventions of the genre to elicit in the reader a critical attitude in relation to the accepted depiction of the world in which they live. Boltanski thinks critical sociology could learn from this type of story. It could be argued that what some of the other chapters in this book aim to do with Bolaño’s 2666 is what Boltanski proposes to do with The Trial.
- 4.
- 5.
This does not mean, either, that the analyzed writers wrote their books thinking of these kinds of problems: it is safer to assume that scientific methods were not among their priorities. An interesting case is Binet’s (2017) recent The seventh Function of Language, where the police detective in charge of the investigation has to recruit a semiologist in order to investigate the death of Roland Barthes. The detective’s method of inquiry requires a reflection on literary research. However, perhaps like the thoughts on scientific methods Poe puts into the narrator of his detectives stories, after reading the book, the sensation is that rather than reflecting a scholarly interest in research methods, the characters’ reflections are tricks to construct the intrigue.
- 6.
Economic historians Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-khah (2017) suggest that modern espionage stories (think for instance of Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest) can be seen in the light of the neo-liberal conception of knowledge. The hero here is not, like the neo-classical homoeconomicus, someone who can coldly produce an informed rational explanation of the situation in which she or he is. Instead, he or she is placed in an intrigue in which only limited and local information will be available.
- 7.
Trelles Paz writes in response to previous work that questioned the existence of an original detective literature in Latin America. The discussion is not relevant here, but some of the arguments were that local crime fiction only repeats what is done elsewhere and that it does not work in a context where the population cannot really trust the police force.
- 8.
“Un lector de novelas policiales que escribe sobre la matriz de genero produciendo un relato que puede ser leído desde el policial” (Trelles Paz 2008, pp. 237–238).
- 9.
As far as I know, the only traditional detective piece in Bolaño’s oeuvre is his short story ‘El Policías de las Ratas’ (which is included in the collection El Gaucho Insufrible (Bolaño 2003), see also the chapter by De Cock et al. in this collection), although the detective is not a human but a rat (playing perhaps with the fact that in Chilean slang the investigation police is informally known as ‘tiras’ [strips], which is sometimes inverted as ‘ratis’).
- 10.
Bolaño himself was explicit about his interest in detective fiction. For example, Bolaño explains in an interview how he cannot avoid using devices such as a ‘creating an intrigue’, [“Siempre deseo crear una intriga […] Introducir alguna de las tramas clásicas de género, sus cuatro o cinco hilos mayores, me resulta irresistible”, (Bolaño quoted in Trelles Paz 2008, p. 248)]. He even compares himself and his work with that of a criminal investigator: “Me hubiera gustado ser detective de homicidios más que escritor” (Bolaño quoted in Trelles Paz 2008, p. 270) [“I would have rather liked being homicide detective than writer” (my translation)], and one of his poems includes the following verse: “I dreamt I was an old, sick detective and I was looking for people lost long ago. Sometimes I’d look at myself casually in a mirror and recognize Roberto Bolaño” (Bolaño 2013, p. 137).
- 11.
Those characters given more entries are Amadeo Salvatierra with nine, Joaquín Font with seven, Luis Rosado with five, and Felipe Müller and Jacinto Requeña with four each.
- 12.
This is in fact an option presented in a fine bachelor thesis (Vargas 2004). The main clue here is that actually in one of the monologues in the second part -the story of a Chilean living in Barcelona who found the way to win the lottery twice- the speaker directly addresses Belano. It is clear, however, that, while many other speakers talk about Belano, they do not talk to him.
- 13.
“Los detectives de Bolaño, pues, como en sus poemas, como en sus sueños y como en la mayoría de sus ficciones, son poetas en búsqueda permanente de otros poetas pero que, a su vez, serán objeto de búsquedas posteriores que repiten las circunstancias y las carencias singulares de las suyas” (Trelles Paz 2008, p. 287).
- 14.
Interview conducted in 1999 by Cristián Warnken for a Chilean TV show called ‘La Belleza del Pensar’. It is on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4opmK0SO-J8. A transcription of the conversation is available online in this blog post: https://garciamadero.blogspot.com/2010/06/roberto-bolano-en-la-belleza-de-pensar.html.
- 15.
“En principio se intenta que un lector común y corriente lea el texto y le guste, y se entretenga. Pero –claro– un texto que lo leas y te entretengas nada más, que esa sea la finalidad del texto, tiene una vida cortísima. Los textos tienen que tener espejos donde ellos se miren a sí mismos. En donde el texto se mire a sí mismo y vea también que hay detrás suyo” (Bolaño in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4opmK0SO-J8).
- 16.
“Y "Sensini" más que un cuento –propiamente un cuento– es una instalación. Es decir "Sensini" si no gana –el cuento "Sensini"– si no gana el premio que ganó, era impublicable. La apuesta literaria de "Sensini" no se cumplía al cien por ciento en la escritura de la obra. La apuesta literaria se cumplía ganando el premio, que era darle la vuelta total a lo que en la obra se estaba contando.” (Bolaño in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4opmK0SO-J8).
- 17.
Here, about Gombrowicz and the active construction of the reader in contemporary writing, I follow Ricardo Piglia (2014b), in particular his essay ‘El Escritor cómo Lector’.
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Ossandón, J. (2020). Reading as Theorizing. A Conjecture Based on the Savage Detectives’ Mode of Inquiry. In: De Cock, C., O’Doherty, D., Huber, C., Just, S. (eds) Organization 2666. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29650-6_3
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