Detective as Sign and Signifying Process
Detective Fictions
Earl Jackson, Jr.
Fall 1996

The "Detective" as Symptom and as Signifying Process


The picture of the detective and the detective fiction genre we just formulated - the self-isolating individual with special cognitive powers and a privileged one-way gaze at the world - is a result of a variety of beliefs, textual traditions, and social and cultural practices, values, fears, and fantasies. From this perspective, the "detective" and its "fiction" is a sign of these processes at work, one might call it a symptom of a certain condition of the social context in which the figure arose.


But this is only half the story (if that). Because the "detective/fiction" is both a sign produced by those discourses I just mentioned, but it is also a system of signification - a system which produces meanings, signs, etc. I want to be very clear about these terms and the loop I'm drawing out here. Consider the detective on a case.


The detective has to look at a world where the things that he sees mean other things.Things mean things. And not necessarily what they "say." Literature, as an institution and as a critical tradition assumes that texts are important when they mean something other than what they say. I want to broaden to include all forms of cultural expression - not just literature. And I do this for a variety of reasons.


  • [1] We cannot assume that the "detective novel" is "literature." - Now this does not mean they aren't worth reading. It means that this form has developed outside of the discourse of literature and its value systems and there its modes of signification and "meaningfulness" require approaches that are not limited by "literature-bound" critical methods.
  • [2] We have to be able to be as interpretatively flexible as the detective we're reading - by that I mean that the detective assumes everything is capable of meaning things and that critical reading is something one does through a broad range of everyday experiences.
  • [3] In the course of an investigation, the detective may interrogate many people. Among them, may be the guilty, who falsify or omit information in their speech. But they may "slip up" and reveal their guilt without knowing it. And the other parties may tell what they know, without realizing the full significance of their information - they may not realize that certain details in their stories provide "clues" to the detective leading to the solution of the mystery.


We have here a theory of language and meaning that is fairly rich and worth considering carefully. From [2] Above, we can infer that in this theory of meaning, the detective assumes that:

  2. [i] any thing at all - either physical object or an action, a mood, a presence or an absence - may be a sign of something else.
  4. [ii] the meaning of a sign is not necessarily apparent
  6. [iii] the meaning of a sign is not a natural relation, but determined by historical events and specific contexts.


From [3] above, we can infer that in this theory of meaning, the detective assumes:

  1. [i] language has two functions: (a) communication (b) secrecy.
  3. [ii] an utterance often means something other than it appears to mean;
  5. [iii] an utterance often means more than it appears to mean
  7. [iv] the excessive meaning of the utterance may be beyond the speaker's knowledge or control.


Synthesis.


Let's take the symptomatic emergence of the detective fiction from the previous page, and the theory of meaning the detective enacts here, to see what disciplines and critical theories we might engage in our readings here.



Let's click HERE to find out what they might be.