Crime narrative topology

Opening words

13 or 14 years ago I started writing The Killers, a novel in which violent action prevailed. I wanted it to be a first-rate literary novel that reflected the nature of the Colombian criminal. At the end of 2021, after many versions, the novel was published by a prestigious publisher. As happens during the elaboration of creative works, during those almost 14 years of work I was not fully aware of what I had written. After I had finished the text, my editor asked what genre it fit into. I questioned several people knowledgeable about literary things who had read my manuscript – my writing does not seek to be inscribed in some thematic genre – and no one knew with certainty what to answer. The only certainty is that it was not a detective novel. I told my editor that, by commercial offer, I would list it in the black genre template. But I was clear that The Killers was not twinned with the classic works of American or European hardboiled or in any of the subgenres, which abound. I couldn’t locate it anywhere.

Investigating what has been produced in my country about the black and police genre, I found that there was very little information, yes many studies on foreign authors, and only one book on the black genre in Colombia. This is La novela policiaca en Colombia, by the well-known German critic Hubert Pöppel, published in 2001 by the University of Antioquia, when he taught there. Getting the complete book was quite difficult (on the Web there are only a few chapters) since the University of Antioquia did not publish it again and the author left the country. I finally made contact with Dr Pöppel at the Universität Regensburg in Bavaria, at the end of 2021. After my assurances that the use of his book would be for essay purposes, he very kindly sent me the rough draft of his book, chapter by chapter.

So I have it in full pdf. Pöppel’s work tracking the origin, reception and development of this genre in Colombia is of enormous value, and is virtually unknown. It is an essential guide for those who wish to expand their field of study of the noir and detective genre, so precarious and fragmentarily studied in our country.

On the other hand, after listening to some interviews with well-known Colombian authors in Spain in 2019, who were questioned in some of those conversations about the state of the crime novel in our country, I realised that they were not clear about what the thing was about, or who had written significant books. They were more lost than I was, to the point of giving the idea that the police-detective genre and the hardboiled are one and the same. Does the crime novel exist in Colombia? At the time I write these words, April 2023, no satisfactory answer has been given to this question, nor is it clear whether there is a ‘development and consolidation of the novel genre’ in our country, which henceforth I shall call “novelistic”. Or if rather, as I propose in this work, what there has been is a certain specific and general continuity in the elaboration of a criminal story, which goes beyond the detective and the noir, which have had, since the second half of the nineteenth century, small developments. However, as A. Carpentier pointed out in 1964, “A great novel can be produced in an epoch, in a country. This does not mean that at that time, in that country, the novel really exists. To talk about the novel it is necessary that there be a novelistic”¹ (italics of the author).

Before continuing, I must make it clear that this is not a work that pretends to do some archaeology, development or state of the detective – police – noir genres in Colombia; far from it. It is focused on giving some historiographical response to a creative act that, over time, extended to one of my concerns when writing any of my books: what is the origin of violence in Colombia, and by and why are we so violent? As these are excessively broad questions, the answers to which are multifactorial, in the long run they became tutelary guides that were connected, in a very strange way, with the literary/narrative creative act. Not in poetic art, which is governed by a different statute even though the narrative comes from the universe of poetry.

In this literary exploration of narrative creativity, I have tried to understand, from classical and contemporary thought, what is the act of writing; what is literature; what is language; what is the story; what the detective – police – noir genres, and what is criminal, not only from my experience (confronting the other, otherness) and my experience as a narrator (entering the other, to be part of that other)², but by turning to philosophy as an autonomous act of knowledge, to its history and its context in the Western world. Trying to understand some complexities such as those mentioned above, in my case, in this book, moves definitively away from maieutics and peripatētikós and the dialectic of Aristotelian lineage that ponders on a par with the master. Very little of what is elaborated in this work has been discussed with the experts in these topics orally. My writing is my way of organising and shaping the shapeless mass of the kháos and leaving the text as clean as possible.

Relevant authors related to this essay:

Germán Gaviria Álvarez

Juanita
Juanito

Index

Opening words

Part One. Genre, intention, fusion

1. Genre

2. Discussion: gender, form, creativity

3. Intention of realistic criminal, police, hardboiled, etc. story: merged

4. Intentions

4.1 Zero intent

4.2 First intention

4.3 Second intention

4.4 Third intention

4.5 Fourth Intention

5. Fusion

Part Two. Origins

1. Almost a starting point

2. From Dime novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to Noir (Criminal)

Part Third. Understanding the Criminal

1. Thinking the act of writing

2. From Dime Novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to the noir (criminal) genre

4. Coda

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Part One

Genre, intention, fusion

5. Fusion

The fusion of which I speak comes from melting, fŭndĕre, melt and liquefy; flow, flŭĕre, flow and fluidise. Integrate the steel will of the writer, the malleability of the paper, of the pencil, of the virtual sheet where each letter flows. It takes place if and only if the writer has, firstly, the adequate knowledge to intentionally carry out an end: write a story, whatever it may be. Secondly, if his inner emotional world is fused, fluidised in turn with previous knowledge. If prior knowledge does not provide an overview of the whole,¹³⁵ it is difficult for the story to happen in the here and now, at this time, without any flashback; in the immediacy. Thirdly, if there are basic physical conditions to carry it out. And fourthly, as the intention towards the story is purer, the story is allowed to be, in the same way as it is left to be, to express any emotion, any complex idea. If one writes overwhelmed with sensitivity, the logos becomes alienated, the story becomes contaminated, it is overshadowed by an excess of emotion. If the opposite happens and it is hatred, the desire for malice, offense, revenge, the story is likewise contaminated until it destroys itself. If there is excessive naivety, the story crumbles like a sand figure before a small wave of water. If, on the contrary, one writes dominated by conceptual densities, for the demonstrative, dialectical desire of the logos, idem. Hence the need for balance; for equanimity; in measure; of harmony between the tidal wave of emotions, of ideas. Writing is also a desire for inner purity, for the confluence of vapours, for violent storms, for intimate waters. Of organic and physical fluids in dynamic, hydraulic, liquid equilibrium. Thermodynamic.

The image of balance, of calm, as expressed by C. D. Friedrich in several of his works, may be that of someone alone at the top of what could be their own world, seen from an exceptional, personal point of view. Only for the eyes of that observer. The second observer, the viewer of the painting, will never know what the character in the painting sees. He only knows that there is a fluid, liquid, rainy, vaporous world. As in Woman Before the Sunset (Or Woman Before the Sunrise), The Traveler Contemplating a Sea of Clouds, Cretaceous Rocks of Rügen. That person alone, with a unique, personal vision, is the writer facing the text that can be elusive, like the mist. Sometimes, in Friedrich, it is the ship at sea, struggling under a storm, which seems to be sinking. That boat is the text. The narrator is the character who observes, the one who is in the frame. And if the character in the painting is blind, does it become a metaphysical painting? Many times, whoever writes is blind to the text: he does not see it until it is finished, until the ship has not arrived at port. The sea, the storm, are mere allegories of the interiority of the writer, and from the environment from which it is removed. Too often, that ship sinks. This sounds like an Aristotelian entelechy,¹³⁶ in the sense that everything that comes from a being is a ‘potential form’, as we saw at the beginning of this writing. Everything comes from a being, an integral whole, integrated, fused. A form that is in potential seems like an unreal thing. It is also the creative act. The creative act has the certainty of not being shipwrecked, if and only if, the writer takes paper and pencil and works. It is the written page that bears witness to the creative act.

The creative act seems unreal (entelechy, gr.), and it is, but, also following Aristotle, it is an endless search for ‘perfection’. When the writer writes, he writes and repeats (Kierkegaard) over and over again, until he aligns with the form that the story was looking for. He obsessively, maniacally delivers himself to find perfection, perfection that is sought not only in the exposition, but also in the treatment of themes, which is always more than one. It is in the knotting of the themes, in their fusion, where the origin of the ambiguity of human life in its apparent daily arrangement must be sought. It is not a knotting that results in an indeterminate ‘grey zone’ of the diegesis, although it can do so. The result is the notion of human limit in opposition to the notion of infinity; between the act and the non-act; between the constraint and the freedom provided by knowledge, in line with the impetus. The more pure, the more stripped of all vanity the writer is, the more there is an approximation to perfection.

The latter is observed in the style, in the personalised use of language and its dynamic, compositional structures. That is, in the form to which a character has been imprinted, a distinctive and unique way of being. Hence, style and character are contiguous words: both are associated with engraving, tearing, printing, marking with an iron. It is what the writer does on the blank page. Such a form makes sense only if the writing materialises in a structured way, but distinguishable from all existing ones. It doesn’t matter what that structure may be. A narrative structure is usually a sequence of diegetic microstructures and/or a recombination of stories of varying length. The structure is a consequence of the internal logic that governs all of the story. It is the whole that determines it. The structure, being the result of the order that the story imposes as it materialises on paper, is unique in itself. And the story or stories are put on paper only at the creative moment, not before. Until then, the writer only has within him a potentiality, a Kháos, a Magma that recalls the metaphysics of the sea where it is impossible to write, to draw any line, to record any letter. A drop of magma, as in a drop of the sea, can contain all forms. That is why, in the art of writing, there are no predetermined formulas, nor structures that the artist can imitate at will. Before writing, the structure of each story is barely a potentiality, something that can be observed from above, like Kafka at the moment when he is writing the first draft of The Castle:¹³⁷

The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing…[is] a leap out of murderer’s row.

Observation of the facts, achievement of a higher species, not a more acute species, and the higher it is, the more unattainable it is from those “ranks”, the more independent, the more it will obey the laws of its movement, the more more unpredictable, joyful, will be your path (newspapers, pp. 547 ‒ 548)

The writer escapes by leaps from those of the murderers, from those who impose a form, when it is focused on the facts, which, in the act of writing, are unpredictable. They are constructed during the act of writing. That is why M. Kundera responds to Philip Roth regarding the form of the novel: “There is enormous latent freedom in the novel form. It is a mistake to think that the essence of the novel is in a certain typical structure.” (Roth, p. 128).

On the other hand, despite being a sort of rhetorical recipe book, it is a ‘manual’ for young people who are starting to write. In times when imitation (even thematic) was part of the writing profession, Horacio warned him of the malleability, the narrative fluidification when talking about his in medias res:

And he doesn’t begin the return of Diomedes with the death of Meleager, nor the Trojan War with the twin eggs.¹³⁸ He always runs towards the outcome, and engages the reader in the middle of the story, as if the reader already knew it. Things that he does not expect to be able to polish by treating them, he leaves; and so he tells and mixes truth and lie, so that the middle part does not differ from the beginning, nor the end from the middle part. (poetic art, 392, §§ 145 ‒ 153) (my italics)

Only Beckett, being Beckett, could write without crossing out. Each work, as he writes, forms its own structure.¹³⁹ Which is, neither more nor less, absolute concentration, absolute creative freedom. For this reason, the texts written by him after 1950 do not deserve his approval,¹⁴⁰ because they had tweaks, they were ‘mere attempts’. But that was Beckett’s style. The rest of the writers, mere mortals, like Hammett, like Faulkner, like J. Cain, crossed out, corrected, tried again. The structure is a manifestation, a consolidation of the style, of the character of that writing. It is the macro form of the style. In the structure, whose foundations are the topos and the chronos, they are a reflection of the notion of form. That, like an architectural work, has value in the part and in the whole, according to the Greek dogma. Every work in its genesis is formless. It Is Kháos.

The topos, being a synthesis of the territory, is an imaginary structuring. It resembles the columns of the story. The diegetic chronos, is also an imaginary structuring, but in symbiosis with the topos, resembles the beams of the story. One depends on the other. If one is not solid, the other is not solid either, and if this happens, the story collapses.

Proust focused the style on the expert handling of substitution rhetorical figures, on a chosen lexicography, on grammar, and on the use of indirect monologue. Flaubert, on the control of syntax through restricted uses of logical connectors. The ‘y’ marks a rhythmic measure and divides a (narrative) frame; the ‘y’ is not used as dictated by French grammar.¹⁴¹ Flaubert makes use of the definite past, the indefinite past and the gerund, as well as some pronouns and prepositions outside of grammar. Borges used a correct (academic) grammar, but abused a cultist, transcendentalist, singsong, epigrammatic lexicography, with an Anglo-Saxon argumentative tone. The style of A. Carpentier, is characterized by the subordinate clause, the baroque adjectives, the baroque cultism, the archaism typical of the chroniclers of the Indies, the periphrasis. The historical reference. Kafka chose clear, concise, precise High German, typical of legal prose, with preference for the use of the comma, before the full stop and the semicolon. For Kafka, very long paragraphs give psychological density to what is narrated. The partition of these long paragraphs into shorter and more “readable” ones has been the work of ignorant editors ‒since Brod’s disastrous editions‒,¹⁴² to deliver a more ‘accessible’ (saleable) text to readers. For his part, Hemingway, in his story “The Assassins”, invents the telegraphic style, of short, effective sentences. Full of meaning. Hammett seems to follow Hemingway’s lead, but he can be rougher, or more pliant. In Sanctuary, long sentences with a complex structure prevail: descriptive narrative. Simple language, accessible to anyone.

Stylistic perfection is never reached, of course. You only get to a certain point. It depends on the standard that the artist sets for himself. Reaching a point that is intended to be very high fills him with a certain gratitude for the result achieved when the book is finished, when it goes to the printing press. It is when the author can not change anything, even a comma.

What it is first written, it is nothing more than a kind of draft, on which he works for weeks on end. Flaubert wants the written page to come out of his hands like a page of marble, engraved forever, with absolute purity, that lives, by its own value, for centuries. This is the dream, the torment, the need that makes him discuss each comma carefully, which makes him deal with an inappropriate word for months, until he achieves the victorious happiness of replacing it with the appropriate expression. (Zola, p. 15)¹⁴³

The book is not finished until the author delivers it to be printed. If it is saved in print in a drawer, if it is saved in a physical or digital file, the book is not finished either. It is capable of being modified in all, or in at least one of its parts. That is, it is not completely perfected, it still has the potential to be. Hence Chartier affirms: “In its humblest and most fragile forms, the print has given, therefore, as the first power, to strengthen handwritten writing and give it new uses.” (2009, p. 29). To be a book, the book must pass from manuscript (scribal culture) to its mechanical, digital (print culture). Or, as Benjamin says, when it’s ready for its technical reproducibility, it becomes a physical book, identical to others, whose content will be bought, acquired in some way by readers who will access its content. That is, when the book becomes part of the printed, public culture, where it will establish new relationships with its author, and with an infinity of texts, of books, his brothers.

It is understood, it is accepted that what is written is written. The publisher cuts the author’s umbilical cord with the book. The book that has just come to life is colloquially called the ‘son’. The author/book relationship is ‘almost’ cut in half, because it can happen, as in the three stories in the book Death Drives the Cart, of Marguerite Yourcenar, that some 40 years pass for the author to recast these stories in Opus Nigrum. And ‘almost’, because even when the author dies, the relationship is definitely cut off. Even after death, the author-text relationship remains in time. If the book is Literature. You cannot understand a text more or less correctly if you do not know the world in which it was written, who wrote it, and how and under what circumstances it was written. What was that person’s life like?

His public life, his private life, his daily life. Whom did he love, whom did he stop loving? It is the call of Oscar Wilde in the aforementioned essay.

It is from the creativity of the writer, not from the sterile classification of trade critics (academicians, publicists), that one should consider whether a work is artistic or not. It is also, from the depth that a text has, from the writer’s ability to merge two or more genres, that one should consider whether the work is literature or simple commercial entertainment; products of common consumption that have nothing objectionable. What could be reprehensible is that a text with little or no artistic value is presented as a literary work. True literary works are genderless. They are a genre unto themselves. They found genres. They establish or suggest another, others. They almost cannot be classified. Besides:

[T]he text does not stop at (good) literature; cannot be captured in a hierarchy or on the basis [sic] of a simple gender division. On the contrary (or precisely), what constitutes it is its force of subversion with respect to the old classifications […]

[T]he text is what reaches the limits of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.)¹⁴⁴ For centuries, specialists have discussed the problem of gender. They insist on the classification of genres. It is not possible that, in the near future, a literary narrative will be read: One, as a simple aesthetic pleasure. Two, for its heuristic value. Three, for the friendly conversation (among friends) between one text and another, between the reader and the written word. Four, for the knowledge it provides, whatever it is. Five, for being the text more than a simple leisure companion, for mere enjoyment. And six, like a sleeping pill, before going to sleep, to enter Kháos of the dream

The writer’s work, as we have seen so far, is centered on the one-to-one relationship that he establishes with the written word on paper, that is, in the finished and published final work. The Greeks of the classical period, who did not theorise and did not know terms to talk about the productive activity of the craftsman (for us, the writer who creates) or his creative process,¹⁴⁵ they only gave importance to the finished product, to the physical work. That is, for the Greeks, what mattered was the work produced, not the artist. I agree with them. What counts is that the text, after a long process of elaboration, is published and delivered to the reader, and who produced it does not matter; is of little use ‒except perhaps for the writer’s own satisfaction‒ a “finished” and shelved work that, by definition, is not finished either (see, supra, Chartier).

After all, the writer and the work are the same thing.

Footnotes

Opening words footnotes

Carpentier, Alejo. “Problemática actual de la novela latinoamericana”, en: Tientos y diferencias. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, [1964] 1987, p. 7. ↑
Han, Byung ̶ Chul. Topología de la violencia. Barcelona: Herder, 2016, p. 49. ↑

Chapter 5 footnotes

Faulkner dropped out of school in the third grade; Hammett at age 14. They had no formal education. But they had the overview of all the stories they wanted to tell. And most importantly: the meaning of what these stories represented in their lives. ↑
Metaphysics, pp 681 ‒ 682, 415b; 712 ‒ 713, 431a. ↑
Cf. Stach, pp. 101-1 2,037 and ss. ↑
That is, the ones that Leda put after being fertilized by Zeus turned into a swan. Of these were born the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux and their sisters Helena and Clytemnestra. This is a clear exaggeration by Horace, to indicate that it would be absurd to go to such origins to recount the Trojan War. ↑
When I wrote the first sentence of Molloy I didn’t know where (sic) I went to. And when I finished the first part, I didn’t know how it was going to continue. Without crossing out anything. I hadn’t prepared anything. I hadn’t made anything.”On. Cit., p.24 ‒ 25. And later, also with regard to Molloy: […] when I finished that first part, I didn’t know how to continue”. (p.47). ↑
Beckett, on. cit.,p.47. ↑
Proust, p.17. ↑
See: Unseld, Joachim. Franz Kafka. A writer’s life .Barcelona: Anagram, 1989 [1982]. ↑
There is nothing more moving than imagining Flaubert with the manuscript of Sentimental Education under the arm. When he takes it from Croisset to Paris in a box of supposedly fine wood (actually common white wood) specially ordered by the village cabinetmaker to transport the last manuscript on beautiful white paper from Holland by train (Cf. Zola, p. 83). ↑
Barthes, Roland. The Whisper of Language. Beyond the Word and Writing. Barcelona: Paidós, 1994 [1971], p.75. ↑
Cf. Agamben, G. Creation and Anarchy. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2019, p. 13. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Chapter 5

Opening words