“The Mystery Unsolved, Without Any Attempt to Solve It”: Detective Fiction and Waywardness in Norah Lange’s People in the Room

Abstract

In 1950, Argentinian author Norah Lange published her experimental novel Personas en la sala [People in the Room]; she would later describe the novel (which is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl who spies on her neighbors) as “pure espionage.” This article picks up on this remark and other elements in the text to situate the novel in the context of the detective genre, and specifically as a domestic re-writing of Edgar Allan Poe’s proto-detective narrative “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), famously described by Walter Benjamin as an “X-ray picture of a detective story.” In situating the novel in this way, the article seeks (i) to show how Lange’s novel stands as the culmination of a decade-long series of homages to Poe by Argentinian writers, beginning with “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (1941) [“The Garden of Forking Paths”] by Jorge Luis Borges, and that includes works by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; (ii) to assess the novel in the context of queer theory, and more generally as a genealogically “wayward” text both in terms of its relationship to the evolution of the detective genre and its deviant attitudes toward family, reproduction, and heredity; (iii) finally, to situate the novel in the context of the rising homophobic panic that characterized Argentina under the Perón government throughout the late 1940s.