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

Second Part

Origins

1. Almost a starting point

Already from the epigraph that Giardinelli puts to his book The Black Genre, we have the philosophy that guides the account of what has been, is and will be the history of this genre.¹⁴⁶ But this version ‒the first was published in 1984, and 28 years later the one at hand; that is to say, in 2012‒, is still an inventory, rudimentary and incomplete, of the noir or detective genre ‒ in the American, English, Iberian and Latin American context.¹⁴⁷ The epigraph that, although it is shocking from the start ‒chosen uncritically, clumsily, as if Borges had been a representative of the noir genre in Latin America‒, perfectly shows the poverty of how this genre has traditionally been understood in Latin America. Poverty to which, like so many others, Giardinelli contributes.

In this book,¹⁴⁸ black – detective genre is not understood as a generator of artistic works, possessing an heuristic, a hermeneutic. Crime also does not express one or more concepts of good, evil, or anything from its intermediate zones. Giardinelli does not outline an ethos that at least enunciates one or two ways of understanding evil and justice within society. He also does not see the genre as an expressive form full of artistic, analytical, sociological, legal, and political possibilities. For Giardinelli, the black – detective genre is just another example of a literature that always engages in ‘social criticism’.

It does not say, it does not reveal, it does not go beyond commonplaces, of what this ‘social criticism’ consists of. Apparently, for Giardinelli, social criticism consists in saying that there is social inequality and that the rich are corrupt. That the black novel in Latin America makes ‘social criticism’ is a phrase made in Giardinelli. He sees it as sub, sub, subgenre undifferentiated, stagnant, locked in its own expressive possibilities, that is incapable of opening up to the complexities of modernity. To contemporary critical thought. To the increasingly sophisticated forms of crime. As if the forms that evil adopts ‒and the crime expressed through it‒ were the same in societies as different as the Mexican, the North American, the Colombian. For him, along with R. Piglia, the subgenre in Latin America must be an eternal subsidiary of the North American model.¹⁴⁹ Piglia, in a well-known interview, affirmed that “The stories of the black series must be thought within a certain typical tradition of North American literature rather than in relation to the classic rules of the detective story.”¹⁵⁰ That is, for Piglia, no fusion of genres is possible. Nor is it possible to display any creativity, from which it can be deduced that there is no place for a first-order literary work in which structure the criminal exists. Nor is the crime novel possible as art, as a creator of new forms, but as an imitation of what is already established. Of the rules, of the forms already given. Even with a philosophy, with an aesthetic established within a certain typical tradition of American literature. For Piglia, the creative crime story does not exist. Piglia does not seriously consider Faulkner, Hammett, or Cain, although in his novels¹⁵¹ he uses their techniques.

For Giardinelli, it is only a subgenre whose structure ‘may be useful’ to the larger genre which is the ‘literary novel’ or the ‘serious novel’, as Chandler called it. Dazzled by the enormous mass of thousands, perhaps millions of books by imitators of the masters, he generalises. It does not abstract anything from the reason for the uneven development of the genre in Latin America in some countries. Argentina was one of the first in the 1930s. In others, 60 years later, as is the case of Colombia, in the 1990s. Nor does it try to understand why they developed other forms of the criminal story. Forms that, not necessarily as Piglia wants, ‘should be thought within a certain typical tradition of North American literature’. Well, just like every practice interpretation is unique, each ethos is different. An example is the detective research (praxis) that defines the frontiers of the chronicle to enter the fields of fiction. One thinks, for example, of Operation Massacre, by R. Walsh, whose praxis, whose ethos, from the creative point of view, fix their narrative authority on ethics. As is the hobby of the legion of critics of the line of G. Steiner, and Giardinelli, desperate to formulate distinctions, definitions (see the black genre, pp. 60 and ss.) on the shoulders of the most emblematic writers (not necessarily the sharpest or the most knowledgeable, but the usual ones) of the crime story ‒ detective, thriller, etcetera, etcetera, in an uncritical way. It uses the same revisionist formulas of the softer post-structuralist criticism of the 20th and 21st centuries. Giardinelli is obsessed with the sales figures. Like the vast majority of superficial critics, he confuses success in sales, success in film adaptations, with artistic work.

In the aforementioned epigraph to the black genre, Borges speaks with rarefied nostalgia for the epic, for courage, to refer to the detective story:

I liked cowboy movies and gangster movies (sic). I thought then how curious it is that writers have neglected the epic genre that serves film directors so well. All literature began with epic works that spoke of courage; this is an elementary appetite, like love.

Borges ignores or sets aside ‒which is not surprising given his Manichaean vision, thaumaturge (in the sense of Marc Bloch¹⁵²) of literature and culture in general‒ which were the stories in serials (dime novels and penny dreadfuls) of cowboys, westerns, soldiers, bloodthirsty bandits, as well as poetry, folklore stories, biographies, letters, moralizing texts, romantic novels, etc., from the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, which gave rise, first, to the Pulp and other similar publications. The Pulp, in turn, laid the foundations for the noir detective genre ‒, or as I call it ‘fused’ or simply criminal. We will see more of this later.

On the one hand, Borges says that “All literatures began with epic works that spoke of courage”, which is true. But it is even more true that all the founding epic works of literature (beginning with the The Bible) are plagued by violence expressed in every possible way against all possible beings (humans of all ages, animals, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom). You just have to think a little about Gilgamesh, the work of Homer or Xenophon; there is no need to list more.

In view of that ‘epic’ violence, not in terms of courage but as a manifestation of evil, an evil that leads some individuals to commit crimes against the body, the inner self, and the belongings of others (Schmitt’s notion of friend/enemy), one could say that literature in the West has been founded because evil has found diverse ways not only to be a social narrative with its own domain but also because that narrative is a constitutive part of diegetic (metaleptic, following Genette) accounts¹⁵³ of a culture.

Continuing with Borges, he assimilates ‘courage’, which is an impetuous decision, an effort of spirit, courage, daring, with love. Love is a complex network of feelings, emotions, knowledge. Feelings have a narrative, they are a text that is born from episodic memory. Courage, on the other hand, is an intense, powerful emotion, insatiable like hunger, like thirst. It is hunger, thirst for risk. In many accounts, literally bloodlust. His microphysics are precise. Courage is ‘appetite’, it is action, it is blind forward movement. He doesn’t take a step back. The ‘appetite’ is an impulse that depends on the procedural memory that is somehow satisfied, since it is something that has been learned, in the same way that you learn to eat, to dance, to climb a ladder, or to urinate. This learning is linked to emotion, and emotions lack a continuous narrative. They are eager for the narrative of feelings, since in themselves they have the structure of a Gruyère cheese.

To conclude, what Giardinelli affirms in his book about the western as one of the founding genres of the black novel,¹⁵⁴ is true, but inaccurate.

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. ↑

Part 2. Chapter 1 footnotes

Giardinelli, Mempo.The black genre Origins and evolution of police literature and its influence in Latin America.Buenos Aires: Intellectual Capital, 2013. ↑
There has never been an “Ibero-American” literature, but literature in Spanish. This is not only an uncritical Europeanist denomination, but also gives the idea that there is a certain aesthetic, social, thematic and ideological unity derived from a common language: Spanish. This is wrong. It did not even happen during the Colony, when the Chroniclers of the Indies wrote about America following the Spanish canon, nor in later centuries. On the other hand, the black police narrative models used in Latin America to date have been imported from the United States, England and France, and in the last 20 years, from the Nordic countries, which, from an artistic point of view, They have contributed nothing new. Contrary to France and the United Kingdom, which have been read carefully, Spain has never been a serious benchmark for the Colombian case in these genres. Two major genres have developed in Spain: detective and noir, which include suspense and the thriller. Example of the first is The Flanders Table(1990), by Arturo P. Reverte. And of the second, South Seas (1979), by M. Vázquez Montalbán. Spanish fiction writers and theorists, such as Vásquez de Parga and Coma Sanpere, when speaking of the noir ‒ detective genres, have been, like Giardinelli himself, revisionists ‒not critical‒ of the North American tradition. ↑
From now on I will use this word to encompass what is police, black ‒ police, detective, suspense, thriller, polar, neopolar, etc. That is, works that express evil through crime in general. ↑
Without any blush, although successful in sales, Giardinelli demonstrates it by using these formulas in his novels presented as Literature. They are good works of entertainment. ↑
Piglia, Ricardo. Criticism and Fiction, 1986, p 31. Retrieved (26. 10. 2021). from: https://www.librosdemario.com/criticism ̶and ̶fiction ̶read ̶online ̶for free. ↑
Burnt Silver (1997) and Night White (2010), are indebted to both the classic English detective story, as well as Sanctuary, and in general, of Faulkner. ↑
Bloch, Marc. The Thaumaturge Kings .Mexico: FCE, 2017. ↑
Cf. Genette, G. Metalepsis.Barcelona: Reverso Editions SL, 2006. ↑
Giardinelli, p. 26 et seq.; see chapter “From the west to the Roaring 20s. The definition of genre”, pp. 45 ‒ 53. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Part 2. Chapter 1

Opening words