A Girardian Genre: The Scapegoat Mechanism in Detective Fiction

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In this essay I offer an alternative to the rationalist-scientific distillation of detective fiction by using René Girard’s ideas on the scapegoat mechanism. I explain how the genre is teleologically oriented towards the identification and expulsion of the scapegoat, whom the community believes to be truly guilty and whose removal is regarded as necessary to the restoration of communal peace. The detective here functions as a modern high priest who uses reason and science not as an end in itself but as a means to select a fitting scapegoat, one whose guilt is empirically demonstrable. Next, I use Girard’s remarks on society’s growing sensitivity to various forms of victimization to explain detective fiction’s movement towards more liberal views on crime. The genre has often been criticized for its conservative assumption that crime is rooted in personal moral agency; now, there is a preponderance of detective stories that portray crime as a necessary reaction to unjust social systems, or as mitigated by a psychological condition. In illustrating this section, I present a close reading of F. H. Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles, a Philippine detective novel that features a serial killer who was also a victim of social injustice. In conclusion, I look at how the readers of the genre vicariously enact the scapegoat mechanism. I argue that while it is commendable for society to move towards a more nuanced and compassionate view of criminality, given the ever-present urge to engage in scapegoating in the real world, it is crucial to retain a means by which we could sublimate this urge: through ritual that is the reading of detective fiction.