- Title
- Retrieving the exiled reference: Fred Vargas's fetishization of ancient legend
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Romance Studies Vol. 27, Issue 2, p. 133-144
- Relation
- http://maney.co.uk/index.php/journals/ros
- Publisher
- Maney Publishing
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- This article offers an analysis of the writerly reading praxis of Fred Vargas’s favourite, or fetish, detective, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. This praxis will also be shown to be that of a fetishistic detective, whose modus operandi we compare to the critical stance of the flâneur of Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century prose poems. The response of the poet of Les Petits poèmes en prose will be revealed to be that of Freud’s fetishist, a mediation of traumatic present and a reconfigured, mythological past. In L’Homme à l’envers (1999) Vargas’s detective will be shown to engage actively with the murder text, his writerly reading ultimately making him co-author of the crime alongside the murderer. This textual performativity will be paralleled to the engagement with modernity that is the very substance of prose poetry; and what Nikki Santilli terms the ‘exiled reference’, the abstract stuff of verse poetry, will be shown to be simultaneously opposed to and always already repatriated into its existential counterpart.
- Subject
- detective fiction; fetishism; flâneur; modernism; prose poetry; Fred Vargas
- Identifier
- uon:6790
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/805094
- Identifier
- ISSN:0263-9904
- Full Text
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