Detective fiction as the paradise of the non-hegemonic sciences: Fernando Pessoa’s detective novels

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2011

Authors

Maria de Lurdes Sampaio (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, discontinuities, metaphors between science and literature, ed. by Alessandra Calanchi, Gastone Castellani, Gabriella Morisco and Giorgio Turchetti (Göttingen, V & R Unipress Gmbh, 309 pages)

Pages: 145-163

Scientific classification

FOS: Humanities > Other humanities

CORDIS: Humanities > Literature > Comparative literature

Other information

Abstract (EN): Detective fiction as the paradise of the non-hegemonic sciences: Fernando Pessoa’s detective novels / Well-known are the statements of the famous French forensic scientist, Edmond Locard (1877 – 1966), about the importance of Sherlock Holmes’ methods on the development of criminal investigation in real life.He evenwrote an essay entitled “The police method of Sherlock Holmes”, where he stresses the importance of Holmes empiric attention to fingerprints, to almost invisible hair and to all kind of scraps of things left in the scene of the crime and which provide detectives with factual evidence. In 1929, Régis Messac published the impressive and lengthy [extenso] book Le “Detéctive Novel” et l’ Influence de la Pensée Scientifique, where he engages in a detailed study on the relationship between the development of (positivistic) sciences and the emergence of the modern genre of detective fiction. Neverthless, his definition of “detective fiction” is rather limited, since he only takes into account those narratives where investigation is based on deductive and logical methods. In this paper, I intend to study the role of the non-hegemonic sciences in the detective methods (i. e. not derived fromthe Galileo’s mathematics paradigm, or what, in a happy formulation of Fernando Pessoa – dating from his earlier English fragments – we might call “Microsophie: The Science of the Minute” (as, for instance, graphology). In this sense, I follow Carlo Ginzburg theories about the “paradigma indiciário” (“evidence paradigm”), which emphasize the role of Medicine’s approach to clinical cases as a model for detective fiction and also the importance of “abduction”, instead of “deduction”. Therefore, I will focus mainly on the presence of Medicine and doctors (in literal and metaphoric sense) in this popular type of narratives.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific