Retrieving the Exiled Reference: Fred Vargas's Fetishization of Ancient Legend

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the writerly reading praxis of Fred Vargas's favourite, or fetish, detective, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. This praxis will also be shown to be that of a fetishistic detective, whose modus operandi we compare to the critical stance of the flâneur of Charles Baudelaire's nineteenth-century prose poems. The response of the poet of Les Petits poèmes en prose will be revealed to be that of Freud's fetishist, a mediation of traumatic present and a reconfigured, mythological past. In L'Homme à l'envers (1999) Vargas's detective will be shown to engage actively with the murder text, his writerly reading ultimately making him co-author of the crime alongside the murderer. This textual performativity will be paralleled to the engagement with modernity that is the very substance of prose poetry; and what Nikki Santilli terms the 'exiled reference', the abstract stuff of verse poetry, will be shown to be simultaneously opposed to and always already repatriated into its existential counterpart.