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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 417
crime, has also come face to face with his own blindness; that is, his
inability to see the real murderer from the beginning. As Theodore
Martin puts it, the “detective novel is haunted by disappointment”
(2012: 168) as the detective reader discovers by the end of the novel
that the “mysteries are not solved by logic and deduction but by
some capricious, unforeseeable interpretative leap” (167). In the
counterfactual scenario, the detective reader is haunted by surprises
and disappointments, the surprises that the final revelation exceeds
the reader’s expectation and the disappointments that, even though
the murder case is solved, the real culprit responsible for the murder
is still at large, and ready to wreak further havoc. As Martin aptly
puts it, “by preventing apocalypse, [Landsman the detective]
transforms the end of his narrative into a nonevent, the perfect
absence of any climax” (169).
As a detective, Landsman is also a reader competent in puzzling
together random clues, but in becoming obsessed with the case he is
investigating, he performs “a ‘strong misreading’ we might say
—
performed by one who feels singled out, addressed by it” (Santer,
2001: 132-133). In a similar vein, in investigating Mendel’s death,
Landsman comes face to face with that which has agitated within
every wandering Jew
—
their exclusive entitlement to the land of
Palestine as justified by God's promise
—
and that which has agitated
within every Jewish American
—
Jewish immigrants’ claim to
American citizenship. It is this dream to which they have long been
passionately attached, and the insubstantiality of it which has kept
them biopolitically entrapped and psychically agitated. Mendel’s
death makes it impossible for Landsman to run from his own psychic
agitation and his investigation activates in him a “miraculous”
disidentification with both the ideologies of Jewish and American
exceptionalism, so that he begins to see in his otherwise banal and
meaningless life multiple meanings. It is fair, thus, for us to say that
it is due to Landsman’s strong misreading of Mendel’s death that
Mendel is retroactively made into a Messiah, if not of his generation,
then at least for Landsman. Misreading, in other words, is implicitly