| Authentic detective fiction is characterized by the presence of four "bound motifs"--a precipitating enigma, a detective figure, a process of detection and a solution. Two principles--the hermeneutic codes as described by Roland Barthes and the division of the narrative into investigated and investigative sequences--determine the arrangement of the defining motifs. This formula carries with it the expectation on the part of the reader that the rupture represented by the precipitating enigma (often involving a crime) will be rectified through the agency of the detective figure and a status quo will be restored that is cognitively, psychologically, socially and morally satisfying.;Contemporary authors have used the traditional detective genre, an automatized formula, as a starting point for works that question the possibility of restoring order to an essentially chaotic and unpredictable universe. By violating so characteristically reassuring a formula, this message becomes all the more salient. This process can be seen to operate, with increasing complexity, in A Coat of Varnish by C. P. Snow, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov. In Snow's novel, all of the detective features are fulfilled with the exception of a definitive solution. In Chronicle, satisfying solutions to a number of mysteries are also absent, but the deviation from the detective formula also involves the displacement of detective motifs to other features of the narrative. Finally, in Nabokov's work, all of the detective motifs are only apparently satisfied, and the detective nature of the novel is undermined and contradicted. |
