Antoine Dechêne

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

This chapter examines Auster’s The New York Trilogy through the lens of the legacy of psychogeography and situationism. An analysis of the Trilogy is also a good place to start discussing important traits of the metacognitive genre such as the figure of the detective-writer, the doppelganger, locked rooms, transparent mirrors, reflective windows, and, of course, the city background which frequently makes the detectives feel, in Baudelaire’s terms, “anywhere out of the world.”

Jorge Luis Borges’s Textual Labyrinths

This chapter presents close readings of Borges’s most famous meta-detective stories: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Death and the Compass,” and “Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth.” I argue that these stories share the ramifications and complexity of the labyrinth, a leitmotif that determines both their themes and structures. My point is that the texts’ essential ambiguity ensues from the paradoxical nature of the labyrinth itself, which works as a paragon of both order and disorder, design and arbitrariness: a very rational figure when observed from above, but an infernal structure in which the detectives inevitably get lost as soon as they cross the maze’s threshold.

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

This chapter opens the discussion of the grotesque with an examination of Melville’s “Bartleby,” whose eponymous protagonist stands out as one of the most inscrutable characters in the history of literature. Here, I primarily focus on the figure of the living dead as well as on the scrivener’s subversive use of language as an uncompromising stance against the too positivistic world he lives in. A comparative reading of “Bartleby” as a metacognitive mystery tale in which the cognitive tension is nourished by the forces of the grotesque should help understand a text that rejects interpretation without, for that matter, imposing a final meaning upon its “empty scrivener.”

Enigmas of the Sublime and the Grotesque

This chapter introduces three important concepts liable to help one deal with texts which certainly reject classification and interpretation: the sublime, the grotesque, and, to a lesser extent, the abject. Based on theories by Burke, Lyotard, and Kant among others, the concept of the sublime is used in this book to describe the cognitive failure of the detectives facing the ungraspable nature of human experience. The related concept of the grotesque, apprehended through Bakhtin and Kayser, is studied as a literary mode which emphasizes and further distorts the anxiety and horror that the lack of solutions generates in metacognitive mystery tales. Lastly, the abject, understood in Kristevian terms, appears as the most extreme form of existential and intellectual privation experienced by the detectives.

Horacio Quiroga’s “The Pursued”

Quiroga’s “The Pursued” is a relatively unknown story by a largely underestimated Uruguayan writer which explicitly deals with the diagnosis of mental instability and the rejection and solitude of those who desperately try to convince society of their sound minds. After a brief introduction to the author’s life, this chapter argues that Quiroga’s novella can be read as a rewriting of “The Man of the Crowd” and an exploration of what might have happened if Poe’s convalescent narrator had been able to talk to “the genius of deep crime” that he stalked.

Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”

Part IV addresses the concept of the sublime and the feelings of madness and solitude that ensue from it. Whether described as an extremely powerful feeling, a privation, or an abyss, the sublime is a relevant trope to examine the different aporias that lie at the heart of each metacognitive quest. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes “The Figure in the Carpet” in a way that highlights the perverse and destructive curiosity of a literary critic who desperately tries to grasp a writer’s secret and is always comically and horrifyingly prevented from reaching his goal, consoling himself with the ignorance of others. James’s tale introduces the theme of madness and questions the very possibility of indisputable truths.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”

Going further back in time and adopting a self-reflexive loop structure, this chapter concludes this monograph by addressing a pre-Poesque text describing another interesting “urban castaway”: “Wakefield.” In this short story, Hawthorne introduces a protagonist who is both a failed incarnation of the flâneur and an archetype of the missing person, ultimately embodying an urban quest for one’s identity. This story perfectly serves as a non-conclusion to this book since Wakefield’s quest does not gratify him with the rewards of interpretation or knowledge nor does it prevent him from becoming a universal “outcast.” Like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” he is a detective, criminal, and victim in one, searching for his identity and “murdering” his former self under the not less guilty and inquisitive gaze of the narrator and the readers.

Samuel Beckett’s Molloy

Beckett’s Molloy provides an interesting standpoint from where to analyze the close connection that exists between the grotesque and the abject as well as the motif of the “strange loop,” while also humorously capturing the potential dehumanization, the perpetual disintegration and privation of the human becoming inhuman in an endless process of non-becoming. In this chapter, I focus on Molloy’s grotesque behaviors and the abject depictions of his body. I also discuss, through the character of Moran, how Beckett’s detectives can be seen as other “William Wilsons,” doubles who do not only mirror but also influence each other. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of the use of language in the novel.

From the Metaphysical Detective Story to the Metacognitive Mystery Tale

After a brief return to the origins of crime fiction, distinguishing the mystery tale from the detective story, this chapter addresses the different theories that have sought to account for alternatives to the traditional whodunit grouped under the banner of metaphysical detective fiction. It further justifies the terminological clarification which gives this book its title by acknowledging that the metacognitive dimension of such texts lies, in different but related ways, in their ability to question and subvert the characters’ motivations and their aspirations to closure.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”

A book dedicated to the metacognitive mystery tale could not exist without a detailed analysis of one of the most (if not the most) important stories in the history of the genre. Based on Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” this chapter seeks to establish a chronotope of the metacognitive mystery tale by examining the urban environment in which such narratives take place. I especially focus on the figure of the flâneur described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, moving from Paris to London and New York, before addressing, in the next chapters, two paragons of postmodern literature, allegedly one of its initiators and one of its closing figures: Borges and Auster.