Detectives and Storytellers: On Vulnerability and Care in Leslie Scalapino's Genre Fiction

Detective stories feature prominently in Leslie Scalapino's innovative novels Orion, Defoe, Orchid Jetsam, and Dahlia's Iris. The novels combine narratives of crimes and investigations typical of the detective genre with formal and linguistic disruptions developed and theorized by writers associated with Language Writing. This essay traces Scalapino's experimentation with the detective genre back to her confrontation with Language Writing's exclusionary emphasis on formal disruption, articulated most fully in her 1991 Poetics Journal dialogue with Ron Silliman. Drawing on Nel Noddings's and Judith Butler's theories of interdependence and care, it argues that Scalapino's detective stories foreground the constitutive nature of human vulnerability. In so doing, the essay extends Joan Retallack's, Małgorzata Myk's, and Michael Cross's recent studies of Scalapino's philosophical poetics. It proposes that Scalapino's critical engagement with the conventions of the detective genre informs her layered conceptions of being, experiencing, and conscious subjectivity and argues that her detective novels pursue a series of questions posed by Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin decades earlier: What roles do stories play in inspiring or inhibiting care? Given that vulnerability is a shared condition, who deserves care, and who is responsible for providing it? At what cost?