Mapping the Real. Hermeneutic Obsessions and Textual Short Circuits in some Postmodernist Novels

This paper investigates a particular topic of that narrative genre labelled as ‘metaphysical detective fiction’, which connects two typical postmodern obsessions: the attempt to establish a spacial organization of signs, and the utopia of transforming the real into a text. In his obsessive search for clues, in fact, the paranoid detective – the ‘culture hero’ of this genre – is often seduced by the temptation of reading the elements of the urban landscape as signs, thus transforming geographical maps into textual maps, which supposedly reveal a inner plot of the real. The development of this script is outlined through a series of detective fictions, from Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon, to Don DeLillo and Paul Auster, Umberto Eco and Ohran Pamuk.