“Me-ti si compiace di raccontare storie di furfanti”: Bertolt Brecht e il romanzo poliziesco

Abstract

The article analyzes Brecht’s interest in the detective novel – both in his critical essays and in his literary work – as a genre capable of adequately capturing the specific features of the capitalist mode of production.  In the detective novel, the characters’ actions are not expressions of coherent individual identities manifesting through them, but rather reflections of material interests shaped by specific circumstances. Moreover, the unfolding of the narrative from a catastrophic event – the crime – whose causes must be reconstructed, recalls how the contradictory nature of capitalist production, otherwise obscured by a network of fetishized relations, becomes visible through its periodic disruptions, bankruptcies, crises, and wars. It is from such eruptions that any inquiry aiming to grasp the workings of the social mechanism must necessarily begin.