En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi: A novel with a hybrid, postmodern and postcolonial narrative format

Abstract

This papers is based in the hypothesis the Mexican author Jorge Volpi uses in his novel En busca de Klingsor (In search of Klingsor), a postmodern and hybrid detective narrative format. In the first chapter of this study his concept of reality is briefly presented, a concept of reality close to the existentialist philosophers and writers’ concept of reality, who considered it as an ungraspable, contradictory and chaotic one. In the second chapter the post-modern inversion of the classic detective fiction scheme is analyzed in the first place, where the detective-scientific duo Francis Bacon and Gustav Links fails presenting two diverse and contradictory versions of what really happened. In the second place, the biographic antecedents, the psychological profile, the moral conduct, and the research method of both detectives are studied. The first detective is shown as a North American young man, who is intelligent but insecure, and sexually dependent on his lover, while his German assistant and guide, an elderly man, educated in the values of discipline, austerity and nationalism, breaks up with important virtues like fidelity, sincerity and commitment, acting in an ambiguous manner in many domains.