Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Paranoid Fiction

There is a crucial difference between journalistic and scientific inquiry. The former creates a narrative in order to make sense of existing facts. The latter formulates a story which justifies new facts. Journalism is necessarily political in the sense that it assigns relative values to what is already known. Science establishes an alternative politics, that is, it disrupts whatever calculus of values has been agreed upon. As a consequence, no one likes scientists, except other scientists... and not even all of them.

Inspector Croce is a scientific cop. He searches for new facts rather than relying on what is known by convention. He instinctively uses the primary technique of scientific inquiry, what philosophers of science call ‘abduction.’ Abduction is a form of logic which is distinct from both deduction (the derivation of truths from other truths) and induction (the derivation of truths from facts). Abduction derives facts from other facts. More precisely, abduction makes guesses about what must be the case given the existence of known events and conditions. These are called hypotheses.

Abduction shouldn’t be confused with mere intuition. Intuition, a sudden glimpse of a possibility (like a flash from a lighthouse, one of Piglia‘s metaphors ), is certainly a part of the process of abduction, but only on the sense that literacy is a requirement for deduction or sensory capability is assumed for induction. The ‘listening to one’s voices’ must be followed by an ability to formulate an entirely new whole which is ‘bigger’, that is to say, more inclusive than some other description of a situation. This takes courage, first because novelty is mistrusted by others, but also because abduction produces nothing more than a guess until the new fact is verified by other facts.

The scientific cop (and the scientist in many cases) is therefore politically vulnerable - particularly to journalists. He or she is a minority of one who does not align with any alliances of existing thought or interests (these are often the same thing). Hypotheses have no political weight. This condition is a constant regardless of culture. It prevails in the post-Peronist regime of Argentina but also in every other social environment. No one likes the inherent dislocation implied by the discovery of new facts about the world. After all, such facts tend to make everyone look foolish. Suppression, denial and slander are consequently to be expected.

Piglia, according to his translator, has referred to his work as ‘paranoid fiction.’ This seems apt, but not because Inspector Croce keeps an open list of suspects. The paranoia is social. Everyone suspects that Croce’s abductive method could drag them into the mire of a murder. And as the saying goes: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the world, or Inspector Croce, is not out to get you.

View all my reviews