“Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown. Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction. At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity.   In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.”

This is the beginning of the only obituary of a fictional characters ever published by The New York Times. The text, printed in 1975, the year of Agatha Christie’s last Poirot novel, is not a mere obituary; it is a true biography and critic, of sizable length. On November 3, the fourth adaptation into a film of the novel ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ (first published in 1934) was premiered.

Characters of such force no longer appear in literature or film. I wonder why.

Perhaps because the literary canon has changed, or even the idea of canon has been destructured. Yes, while Agatha Christie’s novels could be regarded condescendingly as minor, “entertainment” literature, the classic canon is there, as a foundation.

And one of the fundamental elements of this canon is the individuality and uniqueness of a human person. People are not an amorphous mass, individuals are not interchangeable, individuality prevails over collectivity. It is the only way for a writer to build unique, unrepeatable, memorable characters. It is the only way to create real, singular human identities, who are eventually honored, when they bow out, like real people on their death.

Oppositely, the modern and postmodern pseudo-canon decrees that human identity itself is a useful, tendentious fiction, a “social and cultural contrast” meant to preserve the power of the “dominant class.” There is no more destiny, just disparate, senseless episode. There is no more free will, just external social influences of class, race and gender. The individual is dead, and literature and film only deal with masses and collectivities. The strong characters still appearing are approached only ironically, for deconstruction purposes, and the result is no longer a portrait, but a caricature.  

Nothing of this is unrelated to economy. Its blood, which makes possible trading, saving and capital accumulation - i.e. the money - has become so thin it’s merely a fiction. When Poirot made his debut, there was the gold standard, and inflationary devaluations meant to artificially cut public debts were condemned as such, not praised as innovative miracles bombastically labeled as “quantitative easing.” The market and the private initiative were free, and boss was the client, not some marketing influencer. Elementary logic was still rated highly. Education still used to build characters. Today, as there aren’t any left, we have to return to old Poirot. 

• When Marketing Penalizes Security

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