The Irresolution of Genre in Edith Tiempo’s The Builder

The tradition and history of detective fiction in the Philippines remain a slim and largely untheorized terrain, and Edith Tiempo’s contribution to the genre with her fifth and last novel, The Builder (2003), has yet to receive critical attention. This paper takes the novel as its primary text and argues that the quasi-detective and the criminal, both indigenous subjects, produce a critical tension that is illegible to the generic framework of Western detective fiction. While the novel succeeds in deploying genre conventions, such as the analysis of signs through textual and material evidence, the contract of resolution through the assertion of the institutions of law and authority that the genre promises is withheld as a consequence of the Filipino moral and social reality that Tiempo’s indigenous subjects carry. Reading against the grain the novel's epilogue, this paper recovers an unacknowledged project of marginality that the novel produces through its own silences and deferrals.