1. Cf., for instance: "... both traditions /i.e. the English and the American ones/ provide valid, if competing, versions of the funda- mental mystery of the detective without which the genre can scarsely be conceived. In both, the detective is, in fact, the figure for the reader within the text, the one character whose activities most close- ly parallel the reader's own..." (Most 1983 : 348)
2. On these distinctions see: Dallenbach 1976 : 282-284
3. Cf. Derrida (1988 : 210)
4. I.e. obviously non- sexual
5. The conversion of hysteria follows the way from psyche to soma, but the other way - assigned by Freud to anxiety neurosis (1895 : 342) - is obviously more than problematic
6. This is an instance of the famous Freudian dialectics. In his theory libido is defined by inertia (Tragheit) as well as by flexibility (1933 : 109) - just as anxiety is.
7. This ambiguity stems precisely from the flexible nature of the reader's involvement in the text/primal scene - this participation is a see-saw of activity and passivity.
8. This autotextuality stems basically from the fact that the detective wanders from novel to novel. The question is whether this autotextuality is really that which defines the textual reality.
9. Cf. Derrida 1988 : 186-187
10. Such a provocation is one of the main fetures of Cristie's poetics. Cf. "The Murder is announced" (1950 ),"Hercule Poirot's Christmas" (1938) as the most lucide examples."One has to decide in one's own mind what the pattern of the murder might be, and apply that patternto each of the different people concerned. And then when you've got it taped out the way it must have been, then you start lying your little pitfalls and see if they tumble into them" (Christie 1972 : 133). The gist of the matter is that this act of seduction on which the structu- ral solution hinges bares the arbitrariness of the link between the two signifying entities obscured by Lacan's interpretation of repetiti- on automatism. This technique is made even more lucid in "Death on the Nile". Poirot: "The picture is complete, but you understand that, although I know what must have happened, I have no proof that it happened. Intellectually the case is satisfying. Actually it is profoundl unsatisfactory. There is only one hope - a confession from the murderer" (1960: 206). Jacqueline: "That's proof enough for a logical mind, but I don't believe it would have convinced a Jury. Oh, well - it can't be helped. You sprang it all on Simon, and he ... just lost his head utterly, poor lamb, and admitted everything" (216). The same technique of provocation is central to Derrida's hermeneutics (cf.1991: 154). Understandably, Derrida's commentators as well as theorists of detective fiction prefer to ignore this crucial issue.
11. Cf. Money-Kyrle 1988 : 24
12. Cf. Freud 1909cents : 400; 1895 : 308-309
13. The hermeneutical collapse staged by Christie is crowned by the fact that, on close examination, to maintain, even theoretically, a link between two scenes would in itself mean to subvert the hysterical semiosis which this link should secure. And this because the confession of guilt in the primal scene is achieved exactly by the hysterical technique of free associations: "You see, I really love and understand these young things ... my methods, Mr. Battle, were psychological ... I set a little test for her - a word association ... and finally the child admitted it all" (18-19). Irony resides in the fact that this very technique contemptuously dismissed by Battle in case of his daughter is celebrated by him as Poirot's main weapon: "Keep a murderer talking - that's one of his lines. Says everyone is bound to speak what's true sooner or later - because in the end it's easier than telling lies" (130). Obviously there is no structural reason to oppose these usages as "real psychology" vs. "half-baked stuff" (130). On the other hand, to foreground this opposition in the discourse of the main protagonist means to bare the psychological foundation of allegedly non-psychological structure and thus to expose the gratuitous act on which the structure depends,an act which has come to be obscured by structuralists as well as by poststructuralists. See our paper "The logic of seduction and the illogicality of gift" in the present volume.
14. CF. in the passagecited:"From red Audrey had gone white...", "MacWhirter was taken aback..." etc.
15. According to Eco, "neurosis is excluded from the narrative possibilities" of detective fiction (Eco 1983 : 94). To my mind, the anxiety neurosis is precisely that which structures it.