“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.

Keywords:

• Norah Lange
• detective genre
• voyeurism
• queer theory
• Argentinian literature

1. Introduction

Norah Lange (1905–1972) remains a relatively overlooked twentieth-century Argentinian writer, though her work has enjoyed increased visibility in recent years. The issuing of her Obras Completas [Complete Works] in Spanish, and the translation of her novels Cuadernos de infancia [Notes from Childhood] (1937) and Personas en la sala [People in the Room] (1950) into English, both by Charlotte Whittle, have helped to contribute toward a national and international re-positioning of the author, who has frequently been marginalized in respect to her husband, the modernist poet Olivero Girondo, and—especially—in respect to her friend and distant cousin, the writer and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges.

In this article, I propose to read Personas en la sala in the context of the detective genre, and specifically in terms of what I perceive to be the novel’s domestic re-configuration of the template established by Edgar Allan Poe with his enigmatic proto-detective narrative “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). Lange’s novel concerns an adolescent narrator who spies obsessively on three unmarried sisters (repeatedly described by the narrator as “aventureras,” or “wayward women” in Whittle’s translation) living in the house across the street from her home in the upper-class Belgrano neighborhood. While the female narrator and the suburban, domestic setting contrast with the male-centric metropolitan scenario outlined by Poe, my suggestion is that Lange’s novel not only borrows and adapts the core detective function that is at play in “The Man of the Crowd,” but also that it successfully intercepts, unpacks, and extrapolates some of the tale's underlying concerns: with the choreographies of urban voyeurism, with wayward and homosocial identities that elude approved social typologies, and with the modernist specters of thwarted marriage plots and foreclosed genealogical lines.

Lange’s appropriation of Poe can be further considered in the context of how Poe’s legacy was consciously taken up as a point of reference by Argentinian writers who were close to Lange throughout the decade prior to the novel’s publication. Both as individuals and as collaborative pairings, some of the core members of the Sur literary group (Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo) creatively adapted Poe’s work, though with a particular focus (especially by Borges and Bioy Casares) on the feted analytic mysteries featuring detective Auguste Dupin. By focusing on and magnifying the considerably darker epistemological project that was hinted at in “The Man of the Crowd,” Lange’s contribution to this unofficial Southern Cone celebration of Poe’s centennial follows a road that has generally been less taken by Poe’s heirs, and posits an alternative, more experimental pathway for the detective story.

Throughout the essay, I will therefore seek to mobilize at least three principal ways in which the “wayward” epitaph applies. Firstly, in literary historiographical terms, it offers a way of conceptualizing and situating the story in respect to its deviant re-imagining of detective fiction orthodoxies. Secondly, it speaks to a double transgression whereby the infatuated narrator conducts a voyeuristic investigation into the lives of women who, by virtue of remaining unmarried, breach heteronormative familial and reproductive orthodoxies. Though never stated explicitly, this latter transgression arguably lies at the foundation of the story, providing the impetus for the narrator’s obsessive pursuit. On this basis, I propose reading the text within some of the coordinates of queer theory (the word “queer” being itself etymologically fused with that which is oblique, offcenter, or diagonal). Finally, and following on from this reading, I examine how the story’s resistance to the pursuit of solutions (and even to the articulation of concrete propositions) can be read in a political register. The years leading up to the novel’s publication were marked by a spike in collusion between the Church and the Perón government and by rising homophobic panic, precipitating a series of attempts to further enshrine the traditional family unit as core to Argentine society and to criminalize perceived sexual deviance. In this context, the novel’s persistent wariness toward protocols of interpretation and codification serves as an emblem of its wayward and hence subversive disposition toward the era’s prevailing social and political winds.

2. From Man of the Crowd to People in the Room

Lange was born in Buenos Aires in 1905 and was a key figure in Argentina’s avant-garde poetry scene in the 1920s. Her first book of poetry was published in 1925 with a preface by her relative and friend Jorge Luis Borges, who evokes an image of Lange in a “quinta” or stately townhouse while he himself traverses the city to meet her. As Camilla Sutherland argues, Borges’s short text follows a familiar pattern whereby “male writers often came to be protagonists within reviews of women’s work,” but is also noteworthy, as Sutherland goes on to suggest, for how it “position[s] the two writers spatially,” thereby staging a “gendered opposition between interior and exterior space” (“El pájaro de cuatro notas” 403). To a degree, it was therefore in keeping with then-prevalent stereotypes and expectations that Lange’s early novels were largely autobiographical, consisting of vignettes drawn from her childhood and formative years. However, although Lange would retain this focus on domestic settings throughout her writing career, her depictions of the home have always been unorthodox, and became increasingly so. As María Cecilia Ferreira Prado argues, if her 1944 collection Antes que mueran [Before They Die] had already signaled a turn toward an increasingly ambiguous and de-familiarized version of the domestic, Personas en la sala marked a definitive transition to an even more avowedly experimental mode of expression (175).

The novel centers almost exclusively on the narrator’s obsession with her neighbors, whom she spies on from her family’s drawing room over the course of roughly two months. Early in the novel, she uses an intercepted telegram addressed to one of the sisters from a potential suitor as a pretext to initiate contact with the women, and thereafter pays frequent visits to their home, where she drinks small quantities of wine and eavesdrops on (and occasionally contributes to) their languid conversations and reminiscences. Though she takes pains to conceal this new friendship from members of her own family, they become increasingly concerned by her behavior and eventually send her to spend time with relatives in Adrogué; she returns to find that the mysterious women have upped and left. Lange revealed in a 1968 interview that the novel had been inspired by a portrait of the Brontë sisters that she had seen reproduced in Argentinian daily newspaper La Nación, and the text bears evidence of this visual genesis—the narrator frequently refers to the women as “retratos” [portraits]. Sutherland perceptively notes that in parts the novel even re-creates the private act of creation itself (“El sitio más cómodo” 64). Minor incidents are ornately reworked, employing what Marta J. Sierra terms “oblique or distorted perspectives” in ways that seem to mimic painting (564). Indeed, the increasingly fevered and grammatically involuted mode of narration means that it is often difficult to work out whether the events recounted are real or imagined, leading others (such as Ferreira Prado) to place Lange’s work within the fantastic tradition alongside Borges, Ocampo, and Julio Cortázar.

By virtue of the focus on surveillance, and the way the narrator imbues everything with hidden drama and potential significance, the novel also elicits consideration as a re-working of the detective genre, whose roots are usually traced back to Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin mysteries written in the 1840s. Though on the surface some distance removed from the classic template established by Poe, Lange’s narrator operates as a detective proxy, albeit one who eschews conventional interpretive frameworks. She frequently deploys the term “crime,” though this remains enigmatic as to its intended referent. Early on in her account, she ascribes to the eldest of the women “algo aún no castigado” [“some still-unpunished deed”] (118); this eldest sister is “la que tenía la culpa por haber cometido aquello que yo ignoraba” [“the one guilty of committing the crime I knew nothing about”] (125). She imagines the walls of their home to conceal “un amor o un crimen” [“a crime or love affair”], and their crime as “perfecto” [“perfect”] (135); she observes that the eldest sometimes seems “más culpable que nunca […] como si se hallara al borde de gritarlo todo” [“guiltier than ever (…) as if she were on the verge of confessing”] (203).¹ While this persistent ambiguity concerning the type of crime purported to have been committed is at odds with what transpires in the milieu occupied by Dupin, it has a direct analogue in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a key precursor to the Dupin mysteries and a foundational text for the detective genre in more general terms.

The far-reaching influence of Poe on South American literature has been amply mapped in works by Susan and Stuart Levine (1999) and Emron Esplin (2016), as well as countless studies focusing on single authors or texts. His influence was especially pronounced among members of the modernista and ultraísta poetry movements, and among short story writers in the River Plate region, such as Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Cortázar (Levine 121). In respect to the latter, Poe’s detective stories were particularly influential on works produced by Borges and his circle throughout the 1940s. Whereas previously, the consumption of detective stories in Argentina was regarded as a relatively minor literary activity, it was during this period that Borges and his friend and literary coconspirator Adolfo Bioy Casares launched the El Séptimo Círculo imprint, which published detective novels by Argentinian writers (albeit few in number) as well as translations (Close and Losada Soler 247; Lafforgue and Rivera 17). Borges—nowadays regarded as “unquestionably the first and most significant promoter of detective fiction in Latin America” (Altamiranda 37)—wrote three stories that have been read as “explicit homage” to Poe’s Dupin mysteries (Merivale 309; Irwin). His tale of metaphysical pursuit “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (1941) [“The Garden of Forking Paths”] was deliberately published exactly one hundred years after the appearance of the first of Poe’s Dupin stories. Published the following year, “La muerte y la brújula” (1942) [“Death and the Compass”] opens with an even more overt reference, describing the story’s protagonist Erik Lönnrot, as “a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin” (Ficciones 129). Similarly, in “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto” [“Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”] (1951) Dunraven urges Unwin to “Bear in mind Poe’s purloined letter” as a way of discouraging him from “multiplying the mysteries” surrounding al-Bokhari’s murder (The Aleph 76). It was also during this period that Borges collaborated with Bioy Casares under the pseudonym “H. Bustos Domecq” on their Don Isidro Parodi mysteries, parodic and playful riffs on the “armchair detective” trope which had first appeared in Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), wherein Dupin solves the mystery of a woman’s disappearance without once visiting the scene of the crime (Borinsky 465). Around the same time, Bioy and fellow Sur member Silvina Ocampo coauthored the postmodern detective novel Los que aman, odian [Where There’s Love, There’s Hate] (1946). While the latter might have owed more to the classic murder mysteries of Agatha Christie than to Poe, a little later Ocampo (who was also married to Bioy Casares) published the novella “El impostor” [“The Impostor”] (1948), described by Chris Power as “Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ stood on its head” (s.n.). These texts were homages to Poe, but they also played with the conventions he established, re-working the parameters of a genre which, as Borges famously asserted, lives on (like all genres) thanks to “the continual and delicate infraction of its rules” (Selected Nonfictions 184).

Lange was well connected with Borges and Sur; in a 1968 interview with Beatriz de Nóbile, she described her relationship with Borges as one of the most important influences on her work and claims to have enjoyed Borges’s company “tanto que aceptaba el sacrificio de largas caminatas (con lo poco que me gusta caminar) con tal de poder conversar con él” [“so much that I resigned myself to going on long walks (in spite of how much I dislike walking) so that I could converse with him”] (11). While it is not my intention here to suggest or map Borgesian influences that might inflect Personas en la sala, I would like to suggest that Lange’s novel can be considered in the context the 1940s tendency to reinvent Poe overtly and covertly among members of Borges’s circle, and that the walking discourse that accompanies Lange’s relationship to Borges may not be entirely coincidental to the novel’s spatial coordinates. The specific text that I identify as supplying Lange’s template, “The Man of the Crowd,” was published one year prior to “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” and is narrated by an unnamed city-dweller who idly (but perceptively) watches passersby from the window of a London café. By observing people’s attire and demeanor, he is able to make inferences concerning their social class, occupation, and character. Poe’s narrator claims that although he can only briefly observe each face that passes, “I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (233). That is, until he spots the eponymous “man of the crowd” who, to the narrator’s dismay, appears to be resistant to his interpretive framework. Poe’s narrator confesses his “craving desire to keep the man in view—to know more of him” (233) and so follows him over the course of the rest of the evening, night, and much of the following day, finally deciding toward the end of the story that the old man “is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd” (237). He concludes by comparing the man’s unreadability to an illegible book “that does not permit itself to be read” (229).

In an essay on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin refers to Poe’s story as “something like the X-ray picture of a detective story. In it, the drapery represented by the crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man” (48). “The Man of the Crowd” can therefore be understood as a prototype for the detective story that Poe would more fully flesh out a year later with “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” but also as an exposure of something potentially scandalous (and subsequently concealed) concerning the genre’s underlying machinery, namely, a homosocial compulsion that is indifferent to crime as such (Nicol, “Those who follow” 101). Indeed, only at the end of the story does Poe’s narrator conclude that the person he has been spying on is “the type and genius of deep crime;” in other words, crime is an afterthought, deployed as an alibi to justify the practice of spying. “The Man of the Crowd” therefore throws into relief the moral question which Heta Pyrhönen identifies as the genre’s “voyeuristic relationship to murder, which necessitates, under the guise of detection, prying and peeping by detectives and readers;” the investigation of crime becomes a useful ruse that “renders this voyeuristic activity guilt-free” (55). A reading of the genre that takes “The Man of the Crowd” rather than “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” as its point of departure forces a shift in emphasis and a challenge to the idea that the detective or detective proxy occupies a locus of detached impartiality in respect to the object of investigation. Once this new emphasis is in place, moreover, it becomes easy to discern traces of the voyeuristic impulse in the detective genre proper. Srdjan Smajić for example unpacks the sometimes latent and at times overt scopophilia that is present in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” drawing attention to the “eager delight” and “pleasure” that Dupin expressly derives from deciphering the inner worlds of others (94). According to Jean Copjec’s Lacanian reading of the genre, desire is the hidden element that sutures the gap “between the evidence and that which the evidence establishes,” and so operates as “the principle by which the trail attaches itself to the criminal” (177). “The Man of the Crowd” therefore stands at the origin of a critical strand of detective narrative that invites and even insists upon a troubling of the boundary between detective and criminal.

A considerable number of the story’s defining features find echoes in Personas en la sala, which, in effect, rewrites Poe’s tale from a feminine, domestic and, as I will suggest, more emphatically voyeuristic and potentially queer perspective. The title itself duplicates the nominal structure of “The Man of the Crowd,” with each positing an unnamed person (or people) inhabiting an unnamed archetypical site or location, though with an obvious shift from urban to domestic space. Both texts are potential “X-rays” that manifestly attempt to recast what might otherwise be considered stalking as investigation: in both cases “crime” (or rather the speculated possibility of an imagined crime) is deployed by the watcher as a kind of alibi-in-reverse to justify the act of looking itself. As Lange’s narrator acknowledges, she first spies her neighbors “como si hubiese encontrado, por fin, algo que había buscado mucho tiempo, sin saber qué era” [“as if I’d finally found something I’d been seeking for a long time, without knowing what”] (117). Indeed, Lange echoed the implications of Benjamin’s “X-ray” remark as well as anticipating Copjec’s Lacanian reading of the genre when she later said of her novel: “Es puro espionaje” [“It’s pure espionage”] and described spying as “mi diversión favorita” [“my favourite past-time”] and “un placer enorme” [“an enormous pleasure”] (Nóbile 23).

Lange’s domestic setting is notable too, not only because of the ensuing switch from a perambulatory to a static mode of investigation and from public to private spheres, but because of what each of these inversions potentially says about gender and the “right” to safely roam the modern metropolis, and about the not coincidental view that questions of home, marriage, and children were the only acceptable topics for women writers to address in Argentina during the first half of the twentieth century (Aira 7). Borges’s paternalistic “placing” of Lange in the home is purblind in respect to these wider questions and, for the same reason, Lange’s own remarks concerning her dislike of urban walking might be re-considered in light of her status as the “muse” of the literary groups to which she was affiliated. Concerning the “visibilidad” [“visibility”] that pertained to Lange’s person, Sylvia Molloy suggests that her contemporaries were more prone to “reading” her image than to reading her work (“Prólogo” 10). This outwardly imposed quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness” (to employ Laura Mulvey’s terminology) was at odds with Lange’s own preferred role of secretive voyeur or “mirón” [“one who looks”] (Mulvey 116; Molloy, “Dos proyectos” 288). But while Poe’s pavement-walking flâneur might appear to constitute the signature archetype of the detective function—Benjamin claims that “The original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (43)—the domestic sphere constitutes an important through-line in the genre. As Bran Nicol points out, a consequence of the private eye’s activities is the “intrusive unveiling of feminine space” (The Private Eye 66). For Veronica Pravadelli, claustrophobic domestic interiors constitute, along with urban exteriors, one of noir’s “two opposing poles” (94). In the case of Lange specifically (along with that of Silvina Ocampo), domestic settings were exposed as sites of metaphysical fracture and also, as César Aira suggests, a way of “accept[ing] the cliché” while simultaneously “subverting it from within” (7).

Metaphysical detective fiction generally yields “no solution, or the wrong solution, or an incomprehensible solution, or […] a meaningless and dis-ordered one” (Merivale 309). When read in a detective fiction register, Poe’s story eschews solution in that the narrator is ultimately unable to decipher the man of the crowd. Likewise, the protagonist in Personas en la sala “discovers nothing. She never finds out who the women are, or the obscure drama behind their lives; nor does she make much of an effort to find out” (Aira 36). But the latter assertion could perhaps be reformulated in even more drastic terms: not only does the novel unveil nothing, it posits the act of unveiling itself as subject to a taboo. This implicit taboo is in evidence midway through the novel when the narrator shamefully acknowledges that she has contrived to turn on an overhead light in her neighbors’ drawing room in order to see them better (and is met with unanimous revulsion); in the final chapter, she resolves “de que mi mirada no les supiera de memoria” [“to prevent my gaze from knowing them by heart”] (227). Anything that the narrator does uncover through observing her neighbors is almost immediately obfuscated by her own idiosyncratic interpretations, or else cloaked over by her reticence toward explicit codification. The prolongation rather than resolution of mystery arguably underlines and simply amplifies one of the genre’s enduring (albeit hidden) tendencies, identified by Nicol in Baudrillardian terms as “seduction.” The latter term is described by Baudrillard as “the original crime” and as consisting of a “strategy of displacement” or of leading astray (se-ducere having the original meaning of “to divert from one’s path”) (“Detective Fiction” 461; Seduction 22). The creation and perpetuation of mystery that is facilitated by seductive practices stands in contrast with the more respectable and solution-oriented “production,” constituted by activities that aim to “positivize the world, to give it a unilateral meaning” (Baudrillard, Passwords 23).

The division that evidently separates the narrator from her own immediate family can be oriented around the poles that are proposed by Baudrillard and interpreted in a detective-story register by Nicol: confronted with the basic information of “tres caras en una sala” [“three faces in a drawing room”], the narrator laments that her family members “se contentaría con preguntarme de qué vivían, si eran solteras, cómo se llamaban” [“they’d be content simply to ask me how they made a living, if they were unmarried, their names”], whereas “yo era mejor porque pude mirarlas dos meses sin necesidad de conocerlos” [“I was better, because I had been able to watch them for two months without needing to hear them”] (217). I take this epistemological wariness and the taboo that accompanies protocols of naming and signification to be intrinsically related to (and to take on particular significance in the light of) the narrator’s family’s concern with occupation, marital status, and genealogy. The resulting confluence of factors creates space for potential queer readings which, in the case of Personas en la sala, invite us to attend to the novel’s pronounced emphasis on the neighbor or stranger over familial kinship, on adjacency over genealogy, on childlessness over reproduction, and on the foreclosure of vertical genealogical lines in favor of conceptualisations of the future that are divergent and wayward. As is the case with “The Man of the Crowd” and the scholarship that it has generated, such a reading of Lange’s novel can help to shed new light on the potential for the text to speak to a wider set of societal anxieties.

3. Wayward Genealogies in Personas en la sala

For Bran Nicol, the alternative history of the crime genre that emerges from a reevaluation of “The Man of the Crowd” goes beyond a recurring predilection for spying; it additionally helps to situate the text as a potential nucleus for a complex tangle of literary historiographies and popular socio-sexual imaginaries. Taking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s observations on the recurring trope of the “reversible male chase” in paranoid gothic fiction as a point of departure, Nicol locates Poe’s story at a confluence of gothic and crime fiction, and further posits that there persists a “queer gothic” subset of detective fictions “in which the detective elements are pushed into the background, or dispensed with entirely, in favour of a preoccupation with obsessive pursuit.” In the work of Patricia Highsmith (the primary object of Nicol’s essay), for instance, this strand is characterized by plots which explore psychological development/disintegration and obsessive double chases, and which thereby underscore “the element that is arguably suppressed or contained by the formulae of standard crime fiction: its latent homosociality” (“Those who follow” 102). Sedgwick describes the homosocial as a structure of social relations between persons of the same sex which, in the context of male-dominated societies, play a key role in “maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power” (Between Men 25). However, there is potential fluidity in the roles and intersubjective relations that make up these structures. As Sedgwick notes, “For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being ‘interested in men’” (Between Men 89). Poe’s narrator’s affirmation that “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told” (229) already hints at this blurring, especially when read in the light of Sedgwick’s description of homosexuality as that which is “unspeakable under a homophobic regime of utterance” (Epistemology 161).

The sexual waywardness or anti-heteronormativity that is potentially at play beneath the surface of “The Man of the Crowd” can also serve as a template for reading Personas en la sala, which is similarly founded on a homosocial structure of affiliation. The potentially wayward meaning of this affiliation is supplemented through the novel’s latent discourse on family, genealogy, and reproduction, which in turn intersects with several tropes which are central to queer theory. Underpinning these tropes is a conceptualization of heteronormative time as being predicated on family and reproduction. For example, Lee Edelman decries “the absolute value of reproductive futurism” whereby our collective sense of future-oriented time is a heteronormative construct that is intrinsically biased toward reproduction and therefore conditioned by the figure of the child (3). Similarly, Judith Halberstam views society as uncritically valuing “the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation,” and, relatedly, argues that “we create longevity as the most desirable future […] and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity” (4). By way of an alternative, Halberstam defines the queer as recognizable by “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (6). The “unruly” potentialities of adolescence are brought to the fore in the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton, who critiques the enforced verticality of heteronormative time: “a movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) towards full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (4). In contrast, queer temporalities undermine vertically oriented frameworks that take marriage and reproduction as temporal lynchpins, and instead posit alternative, horizontal, or diagonal modes of relating; in Halberstam’s words, queer time “is a term for those specific modes of temporality that emerge […] once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (20).

Thus defined, one can identify a seam of queerness that runs through the detective genre, patently in “The Man of the Crowd” but also latently in the genre’s more traditionally canonical works. As Barry McCrea argues, the disruptive interventions of detective fiction’s Golden Age sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes into the lives of the hereditary aristocracy enable “a means of understanding the world through an anti-genealogical, queer system based on plotting rather than natural succession, on adjacency rather than heredity” (76). Personas en la sala can be classified as anti-genealogical in some of the senses outlined by McCrea, who posits the figure of the neighbor (qua stranger) as being “opposed to the family” and “the key queer figure in the modernist reworking of narrative form” (20). In Lange’s text, heredity is derailed through the spectacle of the family of unmarried women—described by a member of the narrator’s family as “solteronas” [“spinsters”] (126)—who operate as a constant focal point for anxieties surrounding genealogical continuity. These anxieties are stirred up through the recurrent specters of the women’s unsought or unconsummated heteronormative relationships, “amores a destiempo” [“ill-timed affairs”] (166) which are repeatedly evoked by and for the narrator, albeit sometimes obliquely. To examine this further, I will address the mysterious and mildly tragi-comic courtship subplot which I take to be the novel’s key set-piece. While the possibility that this courtship will result in marriage remains open at the end of the novel, the lack of conclusion carves out an aporia at the core of the text which also serves as a lightning rod for the narrator’s surveillance strategies, and therefore for her discourse on criminality.

The novel’s marriage anti-plot, or anti-marriage plot, commences in chapter 5, when the narrator overhears three women engaged in sending a telegram at the post office, whom she soon realizes to be the three neighbors she has been spying on over the past days. Later that evening, the narrator cunningly intercepts the reply from the telegram’s recipient and is unable to resist reading the message which states: “Iré jueves tarde” [“Will come Thursday evening”]. She envisions the suitor as “de incognito, sin saludos, engreído” […] amparado por tardías libretas de casamiento” [“nameless, arrogant, without even saying hello (…) armed with belated marriage certificates”] and, in the future, “como hombre asentado con un hijo […] su mujer hacendosa” [“as a respectable man with a son (…) his houseproud wife”], before finally confessing “asombrarme de odiarlo tanto” [“I was amazed at how much I hated him”] (132). She delivers the telegram to her neighbors, claiming to have received it in error, and subsequently spies on the suitor’s visit. She deduces that the ensuing conversation revolves around a large white package containing (she imagines) a bundle of love letters from the man to the youngest sister. The eldest gives the envelope to the man, who then returns it to the youngest and departs, whereupon he is intercepted by the narrator, to whom he discloses that “Ha sido una entrevista muy penosa” [“It was a painful visit”] (146). This statement is precisely echoed the following day by the eldest of the women, who tells the narrator that “La entrevista fue muy penosa” [“It was a very painful visit”] (151). The thwarting of the nascent courtship seems to hinge on what the narrator interprets as the “egoísta” [“selfish”] intervention by the eldest: “Pensé que de su muerte dependía que el señor volviese o se marchara definitivamente” [“I thought whether the man came back, or left for good, would hinge on her death”] (144). As the narrator prepares to go away to Adrogué, she is still puzzling over “quién era el señor que las visitó un jueves” (204) [“who the man was who’d visited them one Thursday”] and whether the letters intended for the youngest have been destroyed.

In a sense, then, the “mystery” at the core of the novel can be summarized in terms of whether the youngest of the three women has a marriage proposal in the offing, in spite of the resistance of her eldest sister who once (or so the narrator imagines) “consideró la posibilidad de que alguna se casara y se enlutó brevemente” [“considered the possibility that one of them might marry, and for a while she went into mourning”] (186). However, a reconfiguration of this basic marriage plot in terms of detective fiction yields a different formulation: deviation from or defiance of genealogical and reproductive norms is the “puzzle” (“crime,” even) to which marriage must therefore be the “solution.” Hence, the women’s resistance to the idea of acquiring a telephone due to concerns about their last names appearing in a directory (a marital status giveaway, the narrator reasons). The narrator’s own antipathy toward marriage is revealed through her bedtime practice of “placing” the women in different circumstances. In these imaginings, the women sometimes appear to be on the cusp of an unhappy marriage: “dos figuras que avanzaban por la alfombra roja para recibir su odio” [“two figures gliding along the red carpet towards their hatred”] (136); conversely, the narrator takes pleasure in “sending” these same imaginary figures to a plaza thronged with crowds. In the latter, cosmopolitan settings, the crime of non-marriage becomes pleasurably coterminous with what McCrea calls the “queer interlude” (or the “green world” in Northrop Frye’s terminology) that lies “between the breakdown of one family and the founding of another” and which is characterized “by unchecked erotic impulses, gender bending, and altered or mistaken identities” (10–11). The key instance of mistaken identity in Personas en la sala occurs in conjunction with the queer gothic trope of the double. The narrator repeatedly sees herself doubled in the figure of the eldest sister, whose voice she initially (mis-)recognises as being her own, engendering anxious thoughts of her selfhood enduring “en otra voz, que otra voz me llevaba por calles desconocidas […] conociendo cocinas llenas de humo, y olor a grasa, cubiertas de barcos” [“in another voice, that another voice was leading me down unfamiliar streets (…) entering smoky kitchens smelling of fat, boarding ships”] (129).

The protagonist’s physical duplication in the alluring body of the stranger (rather than in the familiar bodies of her blood relatives) evinces the adjacency-over-heredity principle outlined previously. Her friendship with her neighbors is pursued horizontally—she is literally “habituada a cruzar en diagonal” [“in the habit of crossing the street diagonally”] (115)—while simultaneously forfeiting vertical relationships with family members who are described only in vague and notably disembodied terms as “los demás” [“the others”] (113), “alguien” [“someone”] (113), or “la voz” [“the voice”] (141). Another of the narrator’s visions signals her separation from her family in terms that subtly imply divergent attitudes toward genealogy. As she relates, members of her family are engaged in discussing the details of a remote marriage turned sour; meanwhile, the narrator daydreams of an unknown woman sliding a note beneath her door containing a revelation that her mother is not really her mother. She immediately realizes that “esa señora misteriosa cuyo nombre desconocía, deseaba mi muerte frente a un retrato mío que colocaba hacia abajo” [“the mysterious woman, whose name I didn’t know, was wishing me dead in front of my portrait, which she turned to face the wall”] (140). The message contained in the note, which posits the erasure of the narrator’s maternal blood relation, is obliquely supplemented by the possible symbolism of the reversed mirror, denoting involution and the foreclosure of reproductive futurity, i.e. self-replication. Genealogical verticality is also evidently foreclosed in the lives of the women, who, following the unexpected death of their father, are left with “el amor que no poseía una postrera señal” [“love devoid of any final sign”] (207), and about whom the narrator wonders “¿Quiénes serán sus deudos?” [“Who will mourn for them?”] (158). (She later surmises that she herself would likely be their sole mourner.)

The structuring principle of adjacency further inflects the story’s investigative protocols, which forego ratiocinating methods of induction and deduction in favor of horizontally connected metonymies: meaning is generated not through causal relations, but through physical and lexical proximity. To the extent that the narrator conforms to Brian McHale’s description of the private eye as “cognizer of the world” (147), the milieu that emerges in the wake of her manner of processing her external surroundings is one in which the metonymic weight of adjacency collapses any distinction between coincidence and significance. This means that even hypothetical notions became fraught with danger by virtue of where they might metonymically lead. With her family, the narrator is careful to speak only of trivial topics “a fin de que ningún tema se aproximara demasiado a zonas peligrosas” [“so the talk wouldn’t drift towards dangerous territory”] (143). Even the silence that surrounds this dangerous territory is itself loaded by virtue of proximity; the narrator recalls telephone conversations carried out “con un tono cuidadoso como si temiese que […] personas indiferentes escuchasen lo que no se atrevía a expresar del todo” [“in a careful tone, as if fearing (…) that a stranger might listen in on what it didn’t quite dare say”] (177).

The constant danger of thematic proximity to that which is unspeakable, and the fear that everything is capable of being dangerously adjacent to risky discourse, abets the development of a paranoid hermeneutic on the part of both the detective and the pursued. On her first visit to the house, the narrator reveals that even “El timbre me pareció algo que me espiaba” [“The doorbell looked full of meaning, as if it were spying on me”] (133). For Sedgwick, paranoia is a key analytical tool for the unveiling of homophobic discourse. As Nicol notes, Sedgwick makes particular use of Freud to demonstrate how the paranoid gothic protagonist adeptly navigates homophobia by turning unutterable statements into socially sanctioned ones (“Those who follow” 99). Therefore, a scandalous statement such as “I (a man) love him (a man)” undergoes a series of slippages: “First, ‘I do not love him—I hate him’; second, ‘I do not love him, I love her’; third, ‘I do not love him; she loves him’; and finally, ‘I do not love him; I do not love anyone’” (Epistemology 161). This discourse provides a framework within which to interpret Lange’s narrator’s compulsive and highly mutable declarations of hatred toward the women she spies on. She is alarmed by her own “pasar del amor al odio” [“swing from love to hate”] (139), and the way that “Mi odio se movía todo el tiempo, ocupaba sitios inesperados” [“My hatred kept shifting, occupying unexpected places”] (144); she interprets her own actions as occurring “como si las odiara, como si hubiera querido humillarlas […] a que su odio me persiguiera toda la vida, cuando, en realidad, las quería” [“as if I hated them, as if I’d wanted to humiliate them (…) and for their hatred to pursue me for the rest of their lives, when in fact I loved them”] (182); perceiving herself to be “en medio del peligro […] Pensé en esa frase: ‘Del amor se pasa al odio’” [“in the midst of danger (…) I thought of that saying, ‘Love soon turns to hate’”] (195).

The acutely registered sense of danger evinced by the above lines, along with the recurrent invocation of criminality, hint at a wider sense of the waywardness of the novel’s protagonists: i.e., in respect to the patently homophobic discourse that was intertwined with public affairs at the time of publication, roughly midway through the 1946–1955 reign of Juan and Eva Perón. Gwendolyn Díaz suggests that the links between power, politics and social relations in Argentina were particularly close at the time, “when the relationship between Eva and Juan became a metaphor for the relationship of the Argentinian people to the patriarchal populist leader,” with Eva cast in the public role of as “devout admirer and fervent servant” of her husband (2). The Perón governments enacted “pro-family” initiatives which “favoured the retreat of married women from paid labour and encouraged increasing fertility rates” (Manzano 6). The period was also marked by the intensification of a moralizing homophobic clampdown that had begun earlier in the decade with a series of high-profile raids; the regime was responsible for the shutting down of the capital’s cabarets and homosexual bars, and a 1946 law prohibited private meetings between homosexuals (Jáuregui 163; Sebreli 318).

Lange’s novel makes no mention of the Peróns, nor of events of civic or national importance, nor even of the year in which the action takes place. As Francine Masiello avers, her literary project originates in a withdrawal from world to page: “The body of letters, rather than the social body, becomes the center of her investigations […] estranging the writer from any social commitment” (148–9). And yet, in suggesting that Lange “centers her debates on the representation of the family as if in search of an alternative structure of meaning that eludes control by the state” and that her “protagonists resist incorporation into civil ledgers” (140), Masiello also gestures toward the interpretive framework by which Personas en la sala might be evaluated in a social and political register, albeit obliquely. Despite its cloistered, psychological involutions and presiding atmosphere of atemporal enclosure, the “alternative structures” that are implicitly proposed by Lange’s strange work can be taken as sounding a note of dissent in respect to the type of familial configuration that was at the time being performatively enacted and sometimes violently enforced on the country’s biggest and most visible public stages.

4. Conclusion

That Personas en la sala bears the potential to reach out of the drawing room and into the public arena suggests a potential collapse of the dichotomy between the domestic and public spheres that are exemplified by Lange and Poe, respectively. But the novel’s tantalizingly allusive social content also gestures toward an occasionally noted contiguity between these two realms, “two opposing poles” in the assessment of Pravadelli. In Poe Studies, there are those who highlight the domestic underpinnings of Poe's archetypal narratives of the urban metropolis. In this vein, Catherine Ross Nickerson and Bonita Rhoads both view “the domestic woman’s supervisory faculty as a forerunner of detection,” with Rhoads considering Poe to have “revitalize[d] the domestic ideal of protective surveillance, shifting the sphere of private vision from the family circle to the individual, from a feminine realm to one that spans and complicates both feminine and masculine cultural conventions” (Rhoads 40; 39). For Rhoads, Dupin is defined less by his flânerie than by his cohabitation with his unnamed companion, by his “backdrop of a carefully organized and homosocially reconstrued domesticity.” While the object of Dupin’s attention might be the wider urban environment, his locus of observation is rooted in this domestic realm, making his an “an unofficial gaze, trained from the sidelines, that cuts incisively through the mirage of politicized and commercialized representations flooding the nineteenth-century’s public domain” (20; 22).

Conversely, a significant body of scholarship attests to the public reach of domestic narratives, which in these readings often acquire a Foucauldian regulatory function. Most prominently, Nancy Armstrong posits the rise of a domestic middle-class female protagonist in the nineteenth-century novel who operates beyond the sphere of public affairs but takes charge of a “private domain of culture” where the history of sexuality is shaped (106). Within this private domain, Nicol suggests that the neighbor, specifically, plays the role of “someone who regulates our existence, in a way which upholds social and moral norms and might also assist official disciplinary systems.” Even when this is not the case, “To have a neighbour is to be aware that what we say or do can be overheard or witnessed, and this modifies what we do or say and how we act or speak” (“Police Thy Neighbour” 196). In the U.S. context, it has become common to associate 1950s paranoid domestic thrillers (epitomised by Patricia Highsmith) with muddled Cold War anxieties surrounding political and sexual allegiances, but this association is also relevant to Argentina where, as in the U.S., fears of communism merged with fears of deviant sexuality. The resulting confluence of personal with political concerns enabled the construction of an “enemy within” and the politicization of the nuclear family and its related gender roles. As Valeria Manzano explains, encyclicals issued by the Catholic Church were crucial in fomenting these conservative intersectional imaginaries in Argentina as well as promotion of the supposed antidote: “the upholding of ‘society’s basic cell’, the family” (2; 6).

As will by now be obvious, however, Lange’s teenage mirón remains impervious to recruitment for the purpose of helping to uphold societal norms or of fulfilling the classic, conservative detective fiction role of “seek[ing] to incorporate corpses and criminals into a fiction that legitimates the power of the state” (Fraser Delgado 50). To the extent that Personas en la sala might implicitly gesture toward a paranoid and homophobic public realm, its narrator is careful to avoid the unwitting internalization of a quasi-police function. Instead, her compulsive detecting instincts are paradoxically founded on a preternatural awareness of the dangerous implications of practices of surveillance, note-taking, description, and naming. As Herbert J Brant reminds us in his work on homosexual panic in Borges, twentieth-century homophobic discourse had origins in nineteenth-century debates on health and physiology; homosexuality was “written immodestly on [the] face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away” (Foucault 43), rendering the queer body (in terms borrowed from Edelman) as inherently textual and readable (Brant 7). This framework gives a particularly powerful nuance to Lange’s protagonist’s inherent wariness of discourses of appearance, and her refusal or inability to “asirme” or “latch on to” the women’s eye color or other basic physical features when the question arises (185).

While Lange’s novel can evidently be situated in term of its (albeit often oblique) relation to diverse categories and trends within the crime and thriller genres, there is also a risk that such classificatory reading practices run contrary to what I would identify as the novel’s covert ethos, namely, its resistance to frenzies of codification of that which had previously remained unspoken, and to the over-determination of identities which had been ambivalent. In contrast, Lange’s novel posits a “misterio sin revelar, sin intentar revelarlo” [“mystery unsolved, without any attempt to solve it”] (126) and itself perhaps remains, in another twist on Poe’s template, a book “that does not permit itself to be read” (229). While the space that is delineated by the novel clearly allows for and even invites queer genealogical readings, it does not necessarily facilitate or endorse them. Indeed, this recalcitrance might be considered constitutive of the possibility of such readings, since to engage in any process of decoding in respect to the three women is necessarily to fall prey to protocols of interpretation that favor Baudrillardian production over seduction. As Foucault warns in this regard, “There is not one but many silences” (27). The absence of a fixed solution to the mystery that is posited by the specific silence that emanates from the people in the room (as by the man of the crowd) can therefore be construed in a political register as operating in tandem with Sedgwick’s resolution for Epistemology of the Closet “to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/hetero definitional crisis tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally home” (Epistemology 12). As Lange’s narrator remarks: “Acaso fuesen, simplemente, tres mujeres que se encontraban a gusto en la sala” [“Perhaps, simply, they were three women who like to pass the time in their drawing room”] (157).

Either way, by stepping into the tableau vivant that is constituted by the three mysterious women in the room across the street, the narrator activates a genealogically diagonal move; in doing so, she avails herself of a queer or, at least, wayward temporality that remains unbeholden to socially sanctioned familial configurations, and that posits a contrary space where “quizá me querían, o, por lo menos, donde tenía el derecho de sentarme en la sala como si fuese la mía” [“perhaps I was loved, or where, at least, I had the right to sit in the drawing room as if it were my own”] (159). On this final score, and amid the novel’s general irresolution, one mystery is at least partially resolved midway through the novel, and, though minor, its implications resonate throughout the text as a whole. The mystery arises when the narrator first enters her neighbors’ house. As she prepares to leave, the eldest utters the phrase “Siempre estamos en casa” [“We are always at home”] (133). The narrator ponders over the significance of these words at length, but the question is put to rest by a member of her family, who explains: “Significa que esa persona siempre estará en su casa para recibir a la otra y, si lo quieres más claro, le gustaría que ella fuese” [“It means that the person will always welcome the other into their home, and, to be more precise, that they’d like them to visit”] (141). Interpreted thus, “we are always at home” suggests the existence of not one but several potential homes, some of which elude the monolithic conventions surrounding familial relations. It serves as an invitation to waywardness, an invocation of temporalities that elude the logics of marriage and reproduction and, in the context of the times in which Personas en la sala was written, as a subtle intimation of alternative futures that might yet lie in store.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at Romance Quarterly for their very helpful comments and suggestions in relation to an earlier version of this essay.

Notes

1 All quotes in English are taken from Charlotte Whittle’s translation.