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Lacan, Don Juan, and the French Detective
Hanna Charney
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 1986, pp. 15-25 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.1986.0027
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526274/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Lacan, Don Juan, and the French Detective
Hanna Charney
SGANARELLE
“ La belle croyance [et les beaux articles de foi] que
voilà! votre religion, à ce que je vois, est donc l’arith
métique?”
Molière, Don Juan
U
NE LETTRE ARRIVE TOUJOURS À DESTINATION,” 1
Lacan says in his “ Séminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée,’ ” echoing
Jacques’s pronouncement in Jacques le fataliste'. “ Mon capi
taine ajoutait que chaque balle qui partait d’un fusil avait son billet.”2 In
Diderot, the proliferation of the stories of Jacques’s amours is inscribed
in the erotic distance between the knee, where the bullet hit him, and a
more vital place where it might have suppressed him as well as his stories.
The ironies of the Capitaine’s statement form the structure of contrasts
between a simple determinism and the suspense of the stories. Similarly,
the simple path of the letter suggested by Lacan’s concluding sentence
contrasts sharply with the labyrinthian detours of the signifier.
The schematic brevity of narrative in its simplest form is a persistent
theme from the medieval romance to contemporary fiction, with the
histoire policière as well as the love story its most telling illustration.
Godard, in Détective, clearly allies the two patterns—love and detection
—from the start, before an anarchic series of adventures follows the
schemata set out at the beginning.
Among the first shots in Détective, we see a young couple tenderly
embracing, while a male voice comments that “ these two” don’t seem to
move. The theme of love as the same immutable story is put in a nutshell
at the very end, when another young couple shares the recognition:
“ l’amour est éternel.” Another early scene quickly parallels the first
ones. The “ uncle,” a haunted figure who looks like a cross between
Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, rises from his chair and demon-
1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 53.
2. Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste in Πuvres romanesques (Paris: Garnier, 1959), p.
493.
VOL. XXVI, NO. 2 15L ’E spr it C r éa teu r
strates the crime committed some time previously: A man walks into the
room, takes aim at the Prince, and shoots him. The uncle is obsessed
throughout the film with finding the “ solution,” although thè younger
man in the room had immediately concluded: “ Il n’y avait aucune
raison.”
It is to this narrative context that I would like to restore Lacan’s
“ Séminaire.” Shoshana Felman argues for Lacan’s literary relevance in
“ On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of
Psychoanalytical Approaches,” 3 which illuminates the correspondences
between Poe the Poet, the Poet in “ The Purloined Letter” (Dupin and
the Minister) and Lacan the Poet. Cannot Lacan point the way as well to
the detective, the French detective in particular? If it is indicative that
one of the most important psychoanalytical texts of Lacan deals with
Poe’s model detective story, cannot this gesture be reversed, pointing
psychoanalysis back to detective fiction?
“ Ce qui importe, c’est ce qu’on ne comprend pas”4: Leopold
Charney highlights this principle in Lacan’s approach, and shows its
inherent relation, in the “ Séminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée,’ ” to the play
of the simple and the complex. In a detective narration, detection nor
mally moves from the complex to the simple: the solution. The narrative
movement, however, is the reverse: from the simple to the complex. The
tension between these two directions parallels that of “ Freud’s Master-
plot,” 5 as Peter Brooks analyzes it. But Lacan’s aim is not the (simple)
solution of a mystery. Lacan’s truth, as Leopold Charney demonstrates,
is in another register.
In “ The Purloined Letter” (according to Lacan) the letter is there,
then substituted, then restituted. In that movement, no mystery con
cerning meaning or content has been revealed except that, precisely, of
the circulation of the letter. Nothing irreparable has happened—nothing
at all has literally happened—which detection would attempt to eluci
date. In a classical detective story, the typical crime is murder, the sign,
3. Joseph H. Smith, ed., The Literary Freud: Mechanisms o f Defense and the Poetic
Will (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980).
4. Leopold Charney, “ Modes of Lacanian Fragmentation in Three Texts,” Joseph
Reppen and Maurice Charney, eds. The Psychoanalytic Study o f Literature (Hills
dale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1985), p. 238.
5. Peter Brooks, “ Freud’s Masterplot: Questions of Narrative,” Shoshana Felman, ed.
Literature and Psychoanalysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982).
16 SUMMER 1986C h arney
almost from the beginning, of the irreversibility of the event. The solu
tion can never be, in that sense, a restitution or a return. The detective
thrust, on the epistemological level, is directed to its own end, with its
impetus also an end (the murder).
It is exactly a plot in a classical sense of the word that Barbara
Johnson brings to light in “ The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Der
rida” 6: Crébillon’s Atrée, whose trace, in “ The Purloined Letter,” is the
much quoted “ Un dessein si funeste,/S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne
de Thyeste.” Johnson summarizes succinctly: “ Atreus, whose wife was
long ago seduced by Thyestes, is about to make Thyestes eat (literally)
the fruit of that illicit union, his son Plisthenes. The avenger’s plot may
not be worthy of him, says Atreus, but his brother Thyestes deserves it”
(p. 466). The crimes, buried underneath “ The Purloined Letter,” form a
“ signifying chain” in Lacan’s symbolic order and, displaced from sub
ject to subject, return to their sender, the queen. The repetition compul
sion, which is the frame of Lacan’s “ Séminaire” as well as of Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (“Wiederholungszwang” ) can only per
petuate itself: The murder has been suppressed, only its sign, a letter,
remaining to circulate indefinitely until it is “ replaced.” The system
made evident by the buried plot is that of revenge, with the crime return
ing to its perpetrator through another crime; a duel is one of its
paradigms.
The dualities which Lacan highlights throughout can be seen in this
context. Barbara Johnson explains how Derrida, in his critique of
Lacan’s “ Séminaire,” tries to refute Lacan’s triangular schemata, since
“ ‘The Purloined Letter’ is traversed by an uncanny capacity for
doubling and subdividing” (p. 470). The purpose here is not to add
another (fifth) voice in the controversy, but to pursue Derrida’s clue for
another purpose. It is not only Poe’s “ Letter,” but Lacan’s “ Séminaire”
which is haunted by doubles, as the “ Introduction” abundantly shows.
If Leopold Charney convincingly illustrates how crucial the triadic struc
ture is in Lacan, the point here is that the play of the double irrepressibly
manifests itself nevertheless, a purloined letter invisible only for being
too visible.
In connection with the game of even and odd, Lacan speaks of the
predicament of the player “ pris [. . . avec son adversaire] dans l’impasse
6. Literature and Psychoanalysis.
VOL. XXVI, NO. 2 17L ’E spr it C réa teu r
que comporte toute intersubjectivité purement duelle, celle d’être sans
recours contre un Autre absolu” (p. 72). Derrida rightly accuses Lacan
of omitting the narrator in his structure: All his parallels to Poe’s “ The
robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber” are in a dual
mode, with subject pitted against subject.
Lacan’s pattern perfectly reflects (and elucidates) the battle between
the two masterminds in Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès by
Maurice Leblanc.7 “ Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès . . . La
France contre l’Angleterre . . . Enfin, Trafalgar sera vengé!” exclaims
Lupin, who initially thinks he has an advantage because “je connais sa
façon de se battre et il ne connaît pas la mienne” (p. 71). As in Lacan’s
game, knowledge of the other is the first illusory triumph against the
odds. Soon Lupin admits: “ ce satané Sholmès va me donner du fil à
retordre. Mais je vous jure qu’il n’en a pas fini avec Lupin” (pp. 80-81).
The game will never end. The adversaries, still mutually respectful,
remain inalienably opposed in the last pages: “ Voyez-vous, maître, quoi
que nous fassions, nous ne serons jamais du même bord. Vous êtes d’un
côté du fossé, moi de l’autre” (p. 246).
Both Lupin and Sholmès feel the other’s gaze on them: “Lui me
reconnaîtra [says Lupin]. Lui, il ne m’a vu qu’une fois, mais j ’ai senti
qu’il me voyait pour la vie, et qu’il voyait, non pas mon apparence
toujours modifiable, mais l’être même que je suis. . .” (p. 72). Sholmès,
despite his ordinary middleclass appearance, is the archetypical detec
tive: “ On croirait que la nature s’est amusée à prendre les deux types de
policier les plus extraordinaires que l’imagination ait produits, le Dupin
d’Edgar Poe, et le Lecoq de Gaboriau, pour en construire un à sa
manière, plus extraordinaire encore et plus irréel” (p. 74). Sholmès is the
English other, but doubled by the confrontation with Lupin, his only
worthy adversary; the transposition of the beginning letters of his name
(from Sherlock Holmes to Herlock Sholmès) indicates this mirroring
from the start. The Sholmès-Lupin relation illustrates very well Barbara
Johnson’s caution: The notion of the double can be deceptive, and what
appears to be “ 2” can conceal an inalienable “ 1.”
If Arsène Lupin’s mysterious doings keep their secret to the end (and
beyond) it is because Lupin and Sholmès are equal and incompatible.
Lupin, protean in his disguises and transformations, is consistently
7. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1963.
18 S u m m e r 1986C harney
elusive, his art of disappearance a continual play of absence-presence. If
he seems to have an edge over Sholmès at the end, it is because he would
have succeeded in making a restitution without a trace:
—Ah! mon cher maître, que vous avais-je dit? Le mal est irréparable maintenant. N’eût-il
pas mieux valu me laisser agir à ma guise? Encore un jour ou deux, et je reprenais à Bresson
la lampe juive et les bibelots, je les renvoyais aux d’Imblevalle, et ces deux braves gens
eussent achevé de vivre paisiblement l’un auprès de l’autre, (p. 244)
“ L’être même que je suis” is transparent, but actions retain all their
opacity. Analogously, in the even-odd game, Lacan analyzes the rela
tions of the complex to the simple in mathematical terms, leaving the
irreparability of events buried underground. “ Le mal est irréparable
maintenant,” Lupin says accusingly: Obviously, evil is not, for him,
irreparable ontologically; it only becomes irreparable because Sholmès
has made it enter into the economy of detection.
Neither Lupin nor Sholmès is a French detective. One is a criminal
(relatively speaking), the other an English detective presented by a
French author. Who are the great French detectives? Leblanc cites
Gaboriau’s Lecoq and Poe’s Dupin. As soon as we probe a list such as
this, a network of paradoxical intertextuality reveals itself. Gaboriau’s
greatest claim to fame is perhaps to have influenced Wilkie Collins,
whose exemplary The Moonstone set the pattern for the English detective
novel; Dupin is the French detective of the American Poe, considered by
many to be the father of the (mainly English) detective story; Sholmès is
Leblanc’s version of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, an Englishman if
ever there was one. Any modern reader would add Maigret, the Parisian
Inspector (and later Commissaire) memorably created by his Belgian
author Simenon. Is Christie’s Hercule Poirot a French detective, albeit
Belgian?
This tendency of some detectives to be foreign is symptomatic of their
conception: The detective is the Other. In novels of the English-derived
tradition, however, he is not Lacan’s “ Autre absolu.” In Jerusalem Inn,s
a recent detective novel by Martha Grimes, there is an interesting conver
sation between an old priest and Superintendent Jury at the beginning of
the investigation. The priest, a reader of such works as Sémiotique et
Bible, tries to explain a structuralist interpretation by drawing a
8. New York: Dell, 1985.
Vol . XXVI, No. 2 19L ’E spr it C réateur
“ semiotic square,” in which he makes an X. “ ‘The semiotic square. We
live by contraries, don’t we? Life, death. Thought, nonthought. We
think by contraries.’ To each corner he added a letter, the same letter—
M” (p. 21). M stands for mystery, but before Jury leaves, the priest
replaces the M by an H at one corner (the victim’s first name is Helen):
He has answered Jury’s question on his own beliefs, which are more
psychological and Freudian. “ ‘If one studies the text, notices the omis
sions, the slips, the gaps—’ His old eyes sparkled like Waterford glass as
he smiled at Jury. ‘—a policeman should appreciate that!’ ” (p. 24).
“ Hasard sur toute la ligne!” asserts in contrast the opening sentence
of Simenon’s Le Fou de Bergerac,9 Maigret appears, in his presentation,
to bear more resemblance to English detectives than to a Lacanian sub
ject. Universally considered to be one of the most fully realized charac
ters in the literature, Maigret’s presence radiates throughout the works in
which he figures. What has repeatedly puzzled critics is the gap between
this character and the incoherence of the detective action. Julian
Symons, for example, says: “ Why should a plot of Simenon’s ILeFou de
Bergerac] be singled out for its improbability, it may be asked? . . . One is
disconcerted by things in Simenon that can be taken for granted in John
Dickson Carr, just because Simenon’s characters are convincing as real
men and women.” 10
Maigret, like many English detectives, is a point of view in the
Jamesian sense. In Le Fou de Bergerac, physically incapacitated in his
sick-bed in a hotel room, Maigret becomes a kaleidoscope of impres
sions, thoughts, and states of mind. The sounds, the comings and goings,
the lights, the smells of the town of Bergerac come to him through the
windows of his room and the hotel corridors, his visitors, his moods and
fluctuations. He draws diagrams for himself and thinks about the
mystery—until, characteristically, the movement of the work changes
radically as the “ solution” is near. Here is one of his notations:
Duhourceau: fou?
Rivaud: fou?
Françoise: folle?
Mme Rivaud: folle?
Rosalie: folle?
9. Georges Simenon, Le Fou de Bergerac (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1982).
10. Mortal Consequences, A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New
York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 146.
20 S u m m e r 1986C h arney
Commissaire: fou?
Hôtelier: fou?
Leduc: fou?
Inconnu aux souliers vernis: fo u ? (p. 103)
Echolalia madly resounds here—and it occurs to Maigret that perhaps
madness doesn’t come into it at all. It will, however, be part of the
answer, but in a fairly incidental way. Madness is one of the taboos of
English detective fiction, since it throws all possibilities of psychological
reasoning into an area such as Lacan’s interpretation of Poe’s calcula
tions, Lacan being convinced that “ Poe, en bon précurseur qu’il est des
recherches de stratégie combinatoire qui sont en train de renouveler
l’ordre des sciences, avait été guidé en sa fiction par un dessein pareil au
nôtre” (p. 75). The symbolic determinism which Lacan posits behind
chance (hasard) could be similarly seen in Maigret’s inevitable successes.
Maigret often repeats that he has no method, and indeed there is no
apparent link between the character that he is and his detective activity.
The argument here is obviously not that Lacan has influenced the
French detective, but that he represents a comparable view of the sub
ject. If there is a source of influence, it is certainly Poe himself, also
reflected or refracted in Valéry’s M. Teste, perhaps the most non
narrative of all narrative characters. The “ mystique sans Dieu” is at the
opposite pole to the detective: He short-circuits the whole process of
approach to the mystery. “ Vita Cartesii res est simplicissima” : M.
Teste’s life, like Descartes’s, is “ simple.” Simple like Dupin’s solution?
Like the circuit of the letter, once revealed by Dupin, Poe, and Lacan? Is
it simple by elision—of the kind symptomatized by Descartes’s vertigo,
poignantly described by Georges Poulet? Arsène Lupin’s life is certainly
as complicated as any imaginable (or unimaginable); this does not tar
nish his transparency for Sholmès.
If the simple truth of Lacan’s “ Séminaire” is indeed in another
register, we could say that the simple and the complex, here, are two
aspects of the same thing. In that sense, Lacanian subjectivity is incom
patible with the multiplicity of voices which Bakhtin sees as characteristic
of the novel. In a classical English detective novel, the law is the imper
fect but ultimate paradigm of justice. In “ The Purloined Letter,” Lacan
puts the King in that place, “ cette place [qui] comportait l’aveuglement”
(p. 49). “ Disons que le Roi ici est investi par l’amphibologie naturelle au
sacré, de l’imbécillité qui tient justement au Sujet” (p. 50). The
VOL. XXVI, No. 2 21L ’E spr it C réa teu r
“ imbecile” is not only blind, but incapable of action. And Dupin, in that
same place, “ va enfin tourner vers nous la face médusante de ce
signifiant dont personne en dehors de la Reine n’a pu lire que l’envers”
(p. 52). “ La face médusante” that Dupin turns toward us is reflected in
Lyotard’s “ disjunction,” which is also “ médusante” : “ Medusa
immobilizes, and this is theoretical pleasure. Theory is pleasure upon
immobilization.” 11
Is Dupin-Lacan paralyzing and paralyzed? Lacan draws attention to
Dupin’s glad acceptance of money for his services. This fact, a good
indicator of his role in the action, also distinguishes Dupin from other
subsequent detectives: the traditional English amateur, detached and a
priori uncommitted; the professional policeman, whose job it is to do the
investigation; the private investigator, who, in some cases, has to strug
gle with his conscience. The money is an anonymous exchange value
which circulates like the letter. It neutralizes the shame of acting “ au gré
des liens dont je noue tes désirs” (Écrits I, p. 52), and therefore obviates
any struggle.
“ In the novel [says Georg Lukács], meaning is separated from life,
and hence the essential from the temporal; we might almost say that the
entire inner action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the
power of time.” 12 This struggle, of which points of view are an integral
part, corresponds, in most detective novels, to the complexity of the mid
dle, where the tension between detection and narrative point of view is
strongest. Justice, or “ a certain kind of justice,” as Patricia Moyes has
her Inspector Tibbett call it, is the sign in relation to which the classical
detective works; and justice is a compromise of subjective antinomies. In
a sense it is the opposite of the revenge pattern, which produces an
indefinite series, out of control, perpetrated in a “ signifying chain.”
Justice does tend to be blind everywhere, but the detective, in most
novels, is not; his or her work, in a compromise with justice, consists in
endowing it with partial sight. There, the detective is not identical with
the law. In Lacan’s “ Séminaire,” the Minister and Dupin seem to be
interchangeable “ in that place,” the place of the law: “ Or c’est la même
question dont l’a interrogé celui que Dupin maintenant retrouve au lieu
11. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, “ For a Pseudo-Theory,” Graphesis, Yale French Studies,
No. 52 (1975), p. 115.
12. Georg Lukács, The Theory o f the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1971), p. 122.
22 S u m m e r 1986C harney
marqué de l’aveuglement” (p. 51), so that Dupin becomes powerless
(and feels a “ rage de nature manifestement féminine” [p. 51]) against
the “monstrum horrendum,” the sign of the criminal.
This place of blindness seems to be connected with Don Juan rather
than with Oedipus.
Telle est la réponse du signifiant au-delà de toutes les significations:
“ Tu crois agir quand je t’agite au gré des liens dont je noue tes désirs. Ainsi ceux-ci
croissent-ils en forces et se multiplient-ils en objets qui te ramènent au morcellement de ton
enfance déchirée. Eh bien, c’est là ce qui sera ton festin jusqu’au retour de l’invité de pierre,
que je serai pour toi puisque tu m’évoques.” (p. 52)
How and why does “ l’invité de pierre” make his voice known now, just
after the quotation from Crébillon’s Atrée (the buried plot of “ The
Purloined Letter” ): “ . . . un dessein si funeste/S’il n’est digne d’Atrée,
est digne de Thyeste” ? Both patterns—that of Crébillon’s Atrée and that
of Don Juan—are of revenge. “ L’invité de pierre” exacts his inexorable
payment, as Atreus did.
Monique Schneider discerns “ Le spectre de Don Juan dans l’écriture
de Freud” 13 even under the guises of Hamlet as well as Oedipus. She
quotes, in that connection, a “ schème privilégié”
[qui] caractérise d’ailleurs ce mouvement de dispersion donjuanesque: le schème de la
“ liste” . Liste dont Shoshana Felman dégage les implications:
Je crois au signe + , c’est-à-dire au principe d’addition. J’accumule des femmes,
j ’additionne des épouses, dont le catalogue des noms, comme le dit Sganarelle, serait “ un
chapitre à durer jusqu’au soir” (I, I). (p. 213)
Although Schneider’s argument leaves me somewhat dubious as to its
relation to Freud,14 the Don Juan pattern seems to apply extremely well
to Lacan’s text and its intertextual ramifications. Maigret’s case (in Le
Fou de Bergerac, for example) turns out to consist of a series of purely
“ additional” events which have as little connection with one another as
Lupin’s exploits. In the Don Juan scheme, addition, analogous to what
Camus calls quantity, is the principle which joins—or rather, in
Lyotard’s terms, disjoins—the present with the present.
13. Didier Coste & Michel Zéraffa, eds. Le Récit amoureux (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
1984).
14. Marie Balmarie’s L ’Homme aux statues, which also develops a Don Juan theme in
Freud, seems to me more congruent with the complexities of Freud’s thought, despite
some flights of fancy in the biographical reconstructions.
VOL. XXVI, NO. 2 23L ’E spr it C réateur
The overriding importance of the present in Don Juan’s career, so
fully and lyrically developed by Kierkegaard, is also Camus’s recurring
theme not only in “ Le don juanisme” but throughout Le Mythe de
Sisyphe. And this temporal link explains the Donjuanesque disjunction:
It becomes a refusal to engage in the complexities of sequence, inter
sections, projections, the very texture not only of detective novels, but of
novels in general. If, as Kierkegaard says, Don Juan is a perfect charac
ter for opera, he does not fare well in the novel. The functions of “ la
place où il est” in Lacan’s “ Séminaire” lead to succession, but also
imply the interchangeability of characters: Dupin and the Minister,
perhaps Dupin and the King, and ultimately Don Juan and the
Commander.
Godard’s “ detective” is also a seducer, we learn, albeit a gentle,
avuncular one. And if he has managed to find his solution (by no less
than a miracle, in these chaotic substitutions and replacements) he
whispers it beyond our hearing in his dying moments: his own solution,
at his own death. It may not be impossible to speculate that this solution
is similar to the mathematical unravelling of the game of even and odd,
to which Lacan’s text returns as to a leitmotiv: a simple solution to a
complex problem, the head-and-tails sides of the same coin, the two
faces of Janus. Meanwhile, we see how the uncle has been shot, but what
about the Prince? At any rate, the “ Prince” we see in the film is a
gangster rather than an innocent victim, so that all the bullets misfire, in
love and in death, except that, in a sense, they do reach their destination,
like the purloined letter. Derrida replies to Lacan that all letters do not
reach their destination; but Lacan’s, precisely, does.
The great paradox in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle—death
as the destination of life—raises unending difficulties and has elicited
endless comment. The essay itself reproduces the movements it speaks
of: hesitation, contradiction, returns to “ an earlier state of things,” and
a steady advance nevertheless, concluded by these lines:
“ Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.” (What one cannot reach by flying,
one must reach by limping.” )
“ Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Siinde zu hinken.” (“ Scripture says it is no sin to limp.” )15
15. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York and
London: Norton, 1961), p. 58. The editor adds: “ The last lines of ‘Die beiden
Gulden,’ a version by Rückert of one of the Maqâmât of al-Hariri.” (The translation
is my own.)
24 S u m m e r 1986C harney
These may harken back to Jacob’s fight with the angel as well as to
Oedipus in a valorization of limping arduousness. These lines referring
to Freud’s text and reasoning also refer to the process under discussion,
the vast detour (Umweg) of life itself, a loop of différance fraught with
complications.
“ The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we
were already in a position to replace the psychological terms by physio
logical or chemical ones” (p. 54). But obviously what matters to Freud,
rather than the possible simplification of the terms, is the difficulty of
the question. “ Ce sont les questions qui font le philosophe,” Valéry
says. It is the problem, the puzzle, the enigma of murder that charac
terizes detective fiction; the solution is a donnée of the genre, in which
great detectives rarely take pride. Unlike Don Juan, these detectives do
not have the last laugh, nor even the next-to-the-last one. It is generally
not their voice that is heard at the end. They are most of all good
observers (one of Dupin’s traits which Lacan neglects); like Freud, good
readers; like Peter Wimsey, good listeners:
Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern [of the Concerto in D Minor],
every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but
inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.16
“ La nature n’a pas de mystères,” Valéry notes. Such minds do not pro
duce exemplary detectives of mysteries.
Hunter College and Graduate Center
City University o f New York
16. Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (New York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 381.
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