Les Pièces à Conviction: Perception in French Crime Fiction and its Literary Influence

Abstract

Questions of perception have for a long time held a central place in French intellectual life, from investigations into perception and consciousness by Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, through a psychoanalytic focus on self-image, to more recent preoccupations with photography and the moving image.1 This interest has been echoed by several writers of literary fiction, and the relationship between visual theorists and literary writers has been a topic of critical interest. The author's argument here, though, concerns popular fiction. The author claims that the treatment of perception in the detective story is a special case in literature, that the perception of the physical world in crime fiction is qualitatively different from that usually represented in other literary forms. It is also the author's contention that crime fiction's unique approach ranks it among the influences that have informed the representation of perception in French literary fiction of the later twentieth century.