“SOMEONE ELSE”: THE GENRE PARADIGM OF DETECTIVES BY GUILLAUME MUSSO

Abstract

The article explores the genre paradigm of the novels by Guillaume Musso, the most popular author of unique detective novels in today’s France, which have already been translated into more than forty languages but have not yet been studied by literary criticism. The dissimilarity from the traditional genre content and canons of detective prose in its various modifications makes Guillaume Musso “someone else” (quelqu’un d’autre), results in his marginalization by literary scholars, whose name is included in the annals of canonical detective literature but is not represented in modern encyclopedias and dictionaries of detective stories. An analysis of the main trends and reasons for such a paradoxical situation is presented in the article. The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of the genre paradigm of the writer’s extraordinary detective novels, which is relevant both in the aspect of building new typologies of detective prose, and in the broader context of understanding French literature in the third millennium, and in the literary study of the original work of the most popular detective in France today, and in the theoretical analysis of the nature of mass culture and the mechanisms of its influence on the reader. The combination of intertextual, biographical, and typological research methods made it possible to identify features of the genre paradigm of Guillaume Musso’s works that differ from the traditional detective genre paradigm. The writer changes the plot-forming situation when the center of the intrigue is not the anatomy of a crime, but the anatomy of society, the analysis of the socio-psychological causes of the crime. Canonical for the system of detective prose characters, the figures of the investigator or detective, who act as representatives of state institutions that restore the just order of things, introduces doctors, writers, psychoanalysts, experts in the history of culture, whom the author imbues with “axiological neutrality”. The emphasis on paranormal phenomena transforms the artistic space of his works, in which an important place is given to a fantastic other space, where the souls of the dead and the living communicate. The combination of two antinomic genre constructions becomes programmatic for the writer: the novel as a love story, where the love intrigue is the plot-creating factor, and the detective story as a narrative of crime-solving. This genre innovation fundamentally distinguishes the genre paradigm of Musso’s novels from traditional detective stories. Importantly, unusual for various modifications of the detective story but characteristic of Musso’s works, is the demonstrative and striking intertextuality that incorporates literature, cinema, music, and the graphics of modern digital texts into the orbit of the writer’s genotext. Musso’s “cinematic writing” is characterized by one of the canonical techniques of montage, the constant shifting of the “camera” focus and the redirection of the reader’s attention from one episode to another, with episodes unfolding in parallel across different locations and time zones. This is underscored by the complex graphics in the novels’ texts, which aim to create a cinematic frame, as Musso’s works essentially function as ready-made scenario plans for both the director and the cameraman. A distinctive feature of Musso’s novelistic prose is indispensable epigraphs, which start the mechanism of a complex game with the reader, who is forced to constantly maneuver between different senses in order to find the right answer. The frame text, atypical for a detective story and typical for Musso as a component of the genre paradigm of his novels, has important functions in the interactive dialogue of the author with the reader, who through the unraveling of cultural pretexts, through “writing in pictures”, the visualization of electronic forms of modern digital discourse, feels the illusion of complicity in events. “Оther’s text” in Musso’s novels is often represented by archetypes of “soap operas” and classic plots, which have become the part of the stereotypical layer of the collective unconscious of humanity and allow the writer to combine the “expectation horizons” of both elite and mass readers. Intertextuality enables the writer to engage in a “four-handed” interaction with the reader. The principles proposed by the writer destroy the hermeticity of the detective genre construction as one of the most canonical and regular genres, making it impossible to clearly define the genre of Musso’s works. A multi-layered discourse, uncharacteristic of a detective in its various genre modifications, combines different registers and codes from cultural genotexts – literary, advertising, scientific, cinematographic, musical, mass media – maximally expands the reader’s perception, marking the original style of G. Musso’s novels, fantasized in the form of criminal-psychoanalytic suspense. These works reflect processes of intermediality, genre hybridization, and the blurring of boundaries between elite and mass artistic discourse, all hallmarks of postmodernism.

Keywords

• detective prose
• suspense
• intertextuality
• intermediality
• pretext
• guillaume musso