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 Intention four

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. Thinking Evil

3. Understanding Evil Here

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Part One

Genre, intention, fusion

1. Genre

“In Logic, genre is a category which has greater extension and, consequently, less understanding than another…”³ Art, by extension, is a genre of human knowledge, as are medicine, physics, economics, etc. In the non-specialized tradition, art is considered one more discipline among the so-called human sciences, which are not all sciences, such as Literature, Painting. Literature, in turn, is one more genre within culture. The first definition of genre works for philosophical logic, but it does not work exactly like that for Literature, despite having been born from the need for expression (instinctive, discursive) and the love of knowledge. And because Literature, given its plasticity (gives shape to itself), by definition is open. It is an art that to become enriched needs to absorb all disciplines, in all human areas, without exception. Hence the ability of literature, as art, to fend for itself. The job of philosophy is, to put it in Deleuze’s words, “to fabricate concepts.” That of Literature, given that human language is the only one capable of transmitting factual information, as well as things that do not exist or that we have not seen, heard, smelled, touched, is to expand the field of human experience. To transform worlds. And to make an examination of the dramas that take place in those worlds.⁴ And then, after such an expansion of the field of existence and such an examination of the human, transform such worlds into a document of history, which has life beyond the subject that produced it. Who carries out such production has only relative importance.⁵

That is why the artist is not judged as a human being, nor as a creator. The work is judged. The work is what matters. During German Romanticism and the French Enlightenment, which coincide with the beginning of the Industrial Age and the end of the sovereignty of didactic (moralistic) literature, the triumph of the artificial over the natural takes place. It is when the cult for the ‘cultivated’ person, the artist, takes hold. The personalities who work hard to be cult, belong to the universe of the spectacle, of the ritual, empty of narrative content. Self-staging is a form of insignificance. Over time, the works of these authors become anodyne, until they occupy their rightful place in history. The quality of the work produced today advances towards what nothing means. Hence the scarcity of works of human content that now or in the future, are authentic testimony of life in a concrete now, in an is. Not in a relative era.⁶

Literature is one genre among other genres of art.

Like painting, photography, cinema, music, architecture, sculpture, dance. As an artistic genre, literature has an immense extension. From this, other genres are born: poetry, narrative, theatre, criticism, academic essay, literary essay. Within the narrative, there are the so-called subgenres, which are not as sub as one might believe. Here are the epic, the “cantares de gesta” (songs of deeds), the heroic poem, the novel, the short story, the legend, the traditional tale, the myth, the fable, the romance and all kinds of stories in general. The novel and the short story are divided in turn into more sub, sub, sub. The denomination that is given to them has generated confusion, bizarre classifications. They are also subdivided into several genres according to the treatment of the theme or themes they develop, like love, life, death, good, evil. From these five great themes emerge innumerable sub-topics, as well as combinations, commutations. Hence, it is best to divide according to the intention of the artist. In this way, which is that of the characteristics of the human language indicated above (its ability to transmit factual information, and also of non-existent, supposed and imaginary things) is then that of intention. We find here two types of narratives: realistic and non-realistic, also as subgenres. In this division of the subdivision and subdivision of the genus, we arrive at a fourth and an n level: sub, sub, sub…, ad infinitum.

Among the non-realistic narratives, in which the imaginary, fanciful intention predominates – they come from myths, legends, dreams; as well as from common reality –there are: fairy tales, fantasy, mythical, mystical, phantasmagorical, gothic, paranormal, science fiction, and some others. Among the realists, those that directly extract the narrative material ̶ diegesis, from gr. diégēsis, narrative development of the facts ̶ of facts observable in the everyday, factual reality, are: the travel story, the adventure story, the diary, the letters, the biography, the autobiography, the confession, the historical story, the picaresque, the formation novel (Bildungsroman), the costumbrismo, the social, the legal, the romantic, the political, the naturalistic, the realistic according to the French models (naturalism), English, Italian (verismo), North American, Latin American, German, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, to speak only of the Western Hemisphere. And many others based on journalistic, sociological, philosophical or anthropological research. To these genre is also applied the particle sub…, until you reach a point where, ‘gender’ is always, plainly, a subgenre of a subgenre, of a subgenre.

Thus, we also arrive at a sub, sub, sub, sub subgenre of the novel of inspiration or realistic intention that is the police story, the detective, the espionage, black,⁷ white, pink, polar, neopolar, graphic, until another infinity of subs, which have also been called minor genres. This term does not signify a lack in any way, because every day their creative and mimetic fields expand.

The sub particle also means ‘what is below’, and indicates subordination, a limited extent, a lesser understanding. Any subgenres, e.g., the historical, the fantastic, the romantic, are not beneath anything or subordinated to anything but their own internal logic. They have greater extension and understanding on their own. Historically, countless of these stories have been valid and stand on their own. Moreover, they have been able to found a domain of their own. Its literary validity has depended on its intrinsic and extrinsic quality of, in this case, the historical, the fantastic, the romantic. Think, for example, of Michael Kohlhaas, by H. von Kleist, one of Kafka’s great models; in the foundational tales of the detective genre by E. A. Poe; in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the models of the romantic novel. The form and content of the narrated universe, which are of sophist inspiration (Tatarkiewics, W. p. 262), come from the Platonic diegesis. ‘Diegesis’, is the “[…] imaginary universe where the beings and facts that make up the narrated story are located, so it is fundamentally linked to the concepts of fable or history.”⁸

Or, to put it another way, Diegesis is the internal mechanism of a story set in motion either by the force of style (the way each artist uses words), or by the power of facts, which elaborates a closed world (which is the case of oral tradition turned into written tradition, in which there is a ‘collective style’). That is, Diegesis is the heart of a narrative work. At this point, in which we would enter an infinite succession of narratological discussions talking about sub, sub, subcategories of this and that, what corresponds here is not the reason for so many subdivisions that, in all manuals, and even dictionaries (such as those cited here), are treated differently. Neither by the categories of the diegetic narrator differentiated by Genette, nor by trifles of this nature. Nor of course, a subject so debated in Europe, especially in France and England, from the time of the Count of Buffon⁹ until the first half of the 20th century. If not for the literary fact itself, for its artistic value. For example, if we say that the novella is a minor genre, a subgenre, subsidiary to the long novel, with an extension, with a lesser understanding, could we affirm that The Transformation, a text of about 80 pages with 12-point handwriting,¹⁰ is also minor? How could such a text be ‘minor’? At the moment of its conception, the author thought, narrated and finished a short story, not a novella:¹¹

“On the other hand, today I am sure that I will write to you again, despite the fact that I have to run many errands and that I have to write a story (my emphasis) that has come to mind in bed, in full affliction, and that besieges me from the depths of myself.”¹²

And later, when the story is finished:

“Cry, my love, cry, the time has come to cry! The hero of my story (emphasis added) died a while ago.”¹³

The discussion should also focus on literary quality, which is less a subjective concept than one with strong objective overtones, e. g. its technical and narrative or diegetic depth. That is, the reach of the creative mass that has ceased to be kháos. According to the previous example, it matters little in which genre or sub, sub, subgenre we must locate a narrative. That there is no consensus on what has to do with what a subgenre is, is ratified by the fact that artistic narratives destroy, demarcate genres. They found new genres. It has been said that power generates structures, that violence destroys them. In the case of creativity, the relationship between power and violence is one of biunivocal correspondence. Creativity is the only ontological instance in which power and violence complement each other. They are symbiotic. Creativity is also poiesis, in the original Greek sense of ‘to make, to produce’, ‘to make something with your hands’.¹⁴ Plato never set out to write a novel, not only because narrative art had not even been invented, nor did Plato imagine ever being a novelist, a storyteller. But because his thing was analysis, philosophical argumentation in oral form. Orality favoured discussion, dialectics, the elaboration of concepts. Plato distrusted written tradition because it was detrimental to true knowledge, which is strongly tied to memory, to the ability to repeat a text reliably.¹⁵ Hence the mother of all muses is Mnēmosúne, “Memory.”¹⁶ That is, for the Greeks of the archaic and classical eras, true knowledge was that which could be transmitted orally, not in writing.¹⁷ However, once the Banquet is written, for example, it can be read, perfectly, as a model of a short novel. And, despite Plato, as a model of both philosophical and fictional writing, because there is, throughout the text, a diegesis (a ‘fable’ with perfectly defined structures), an elaboration of human characters, a scenography and an intention to stage some characters to talk about something. In this case, a beautiful theme: love. In the ways of reading a society, of the written and oral tradition, lie the changes of the model of thought, of mentalities. As well as the advances, stagnations or setbacks of the same. It is creativity that is at the heart of the examination of mentalities. Whether a society has a creative mentality or not, causes the synonymy between power and social violence to be attenuated or deepened. When the latter happens, an amorphous mass remains, a kháos. One dough ready to be moulded by another. Or a return to the uncivilized.

The Satyricon,¹⁸ attributed to Petronius (see the “quaestio Petroniana”), written in classical and vulgar Latin, in prose and verse, with three embedded narratives, is considered the first novel of literature in the West. In the Greco-Roman period, numerous plays and bucolic stories were written and performed, intentionally fictional. There is reason to think that Petronius, or whoever, intended to write a satire against Nero and his time. That is, Petronius probably had in mind a concrete expressive form, genre or subgenre (as it is understood today) inspired, in turn, by the Greek iambographs (Archilochus of Paros, Aristophanes, the Cynic School, etc.). These were experts in writing texts in which mockery and the comic, diatribe and violent and offensive speech prevailed, against someone or against society. That this novel, because it is, is considered the first in the West, does not mean that it has founded the novel sustaining subgenres. For a ’novelistic‘ to exist, its continuity as a tradition and the accumulation of written works over time, a sedimentation, are necessary, as well as the development and accumulation of other narrative forms of importance. The specialization of the novel genre took place towards the end of the seventeenth century (didactic or training novel) and the eighteenth (German romanticism), and was consolidated with English realism and French social romanticism in the mi nineteenth century. The European realist novel was born as a fused form, first, of empirical observation (rationalism/enlightenment), and second, of social observation and research (positivism), passion and revaluation (realism) of national realities.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and until the middle of the

twentieth century, there were extensive debates about the ‘desirability’ of the realist novel, and of what was considered an imitative genre: naturalism. Flaubert, for example, was considered a naturalist by F. Brunetière in his renowned study of that time, Roman naturaliste (1883). André Breton (1924), a representative of the new form of creativity of the post-war period, launched strong invectives against the realist novel¹⁹ for its inability – according to him – not only to propose serious psychological types, to paint reality in a positivist and rationalist way (Breton, so fond of spiritualism, had a curious notion of rationality), but for its ‘limited aesthetic possibilities’. It is in this same decade of 1920 that the development of the crime novel takes place. Since then it has been considered by critics in general as a subgenre, spurious by others, of Literature.²⁰

It is time to understand this genre, simply, as another form of literary creativity.

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. ↑
“En lógica se llama género a una clase que tiene mayor extensión y, por consiguiente, menor comprensión que otra…” Ferrater Mora, José. Diccionario de filosofía. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1964, s. v. ↑
Cf. with the appreciation of Ernesto Sábato on the novel, cited in: Valles Calatrava, J. R. and Álamo Felices, F. Dictionario de Teoría Narrativa. Granada: Alhulia, 2002, s. v. ↑
It is only important for an interested (specialized) audience to talk about an author, if there is interest in delving into how, when, where, who and why such a work was produced. For the general public, it must be completely irrelevant or anecdotal who the author is. I will come back to this later. ↑
Cf. Stein, Jean. “William Faulkner”. En: The Paris Review. Entrevistas (1953 – 1983). Barcelona: Acantilado, 2020, p. 110. ↑
The designation ‘black genre’, as understood in this context, has no intention of ethnic discrimination or anything similar. Since the 1920s, there has been talk of crime novels. Roman noir or Série noir (founded by Marcel Duhamel in 1945) as a genre -or subgenre- of the detective realist novel whose plot is focused on violent action, not staging. The ‘black’ of the denomination of this genre (or sub, subgenre …), also refers to the intention, on the part of the writer to write preferably urban narratives in which there is explicit sex, crimes of all kinds, corruption in a variety of social levels, among other topics, using an improper, vulgar language, often lower class, in slang or jargon. In general, the scenarios are the underworld of cities, where there is dirt, poorly lit streets and physical danger. The ‘black’, also refers to a dubious ethic, to the morality of situation or absence of it, to manias or neuroses; In general, the author turns to the abnormal psychology of the human being or society.↑
Valles Calatrava, J. R. and Álamo Felices, F., s. v. The diegesis is clearly differentiated in The Republic. Plato establishes there the modern typology of literary genres. On the other hand, Gérard Genette, in “Figures III […] It links the notion of diegesis both with the narrative levels, differentiating -according to the external, basic or intercalated plane of the story- between the extradiegetic, diegetic and metadiegetic (narrative levels), and with the narrator -according to his intervention or not in the story he tells- in his autodiegetic, homodiegetic and heterodiegetic possibilities. To expand on these concepts, see this dictionary. On the other hand, the words fable, history, in literary theory, refer (according to Tomachevski, see pp. 182 – 193) to narrative content, to the succession of motifs that are organized casually and chronologically. See also: Genette, G. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972, p. 89 ff. As can be seen, the criteria for classifying a text in a subgenre, in addition to the non-extensive treatment of the theme or themes and development of the plot, within the wide range of classifications, obeys more commercial than narratological criteria. ↑
“Le style c’est l’homme même“, a phrase read by Georges ̶-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Comte de Buffon (1707 – 1788), during his dissertation after his election as one of the “forty immortals” of the Académie Française in 1753, a post he held until his death in 1788. The endless discussions on this subject led Proust to claim that Flaubert lacked style, “[…] metaphor can only give a kind of eternity to the style and there is not, perhaps in Flaubert, a single beautiful metaphor” (Proust, Op. cit., p. 13). In general terms, style is what characterizes the writer’s way of expressing himself, his way of writing. It is the set of formal features that characterize a group of works to which typological and historical bases are common. A narrative work without style, it lacks a life of its own. Perhaps Proust can be considered a more powerful writer than Flaubert. But Flaubert’s prose is more modern, more dynamic, fresher than Proust’s, and his style is not founded on metaphor. ↑
The Transformation (Die Verwandlung), a model of a short novel or a long story, was first published as a short story in the monthly magazine Die Weissen Blätter, year 2, notebook 10. See: The Transformation (The Metamorphosis). In successive editions, The Transformation was published with other short stories by Kafka. Robert Musil, who by the winter of 1913 was working at the newspaper Die Neue Rundschau and began correspondence with Kafka, proposed to cut The Transformation for publication in the newspaper, which Kafka flatly refused and was never published there, not even in instalments, as Kafka proposed. The work was finally published in 1915 by the magazine Die Weissen Blätter, when World War I had already broken out. See Kafka, F. The Transformation (The Metamorphosis), p. 110. On the other hand, it is likely that Kafka, a reader of Goethe, has adopted the definition of a short novel, according to which, it “should tell an ‘unheard of event'”. Quoted by Stach, Reiner. Kafka, vol. 1, p. 449. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that, during German naturalism (1880 – 1900), writers had a preference for short stories and novellas. ↑
In Spanish, the criteria for classifying whether any text is a story, a story, a novelette, a short novel, etc., have obeyed the principles of plot limitation and marketing (editorials). In the French language, there are more divisions, such as le récit, le fabliua, le conte, le lay, among others. In Italian, novelles. In English, such, short stories, novelettes, as the editors of The Black Mask began to call in 1925 the slightly longer stories that they began to request from Hammett (Ward. N., p. 135). In Spanish, microcuento, cuento, cuento largo, relato, fábula, leyenda, noveleta, novela corta, classification that has obeyed more to the number of pages (from 60 to 120) than to the nature and structure of the diegesis. To expand on these criteria see, for example, the Diccionario de Teoría Narrativa cited in this essay. ↑
Kafka, F. Cartas a Felice. T. 1, 1912. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984, p. 99. ↑
Cartas a Felice. T. 1, p. 155. ↑
For a discussion of poiesis and praxis as artistic production throughout history, see: Agamben, Giorgio. The man without content. Barcelona: Áltera, 1970, pp. 110 – 166. As we will see later (see below: “Discussion: genre, form, creativity”), poiesis as an artistic production is one among several aspects of creativity. Not the whole, as Agamben wants in his book. Agamben argues in purely Heideggerian terms, but forgetting Caminos de bosque. In this book, Heidegger comes closer to the total concept of creation when he states: “But, manifestly, the being-creation of the work can only be understood from the process of creating.” See Heidegger, M. Caminos de bosque. Madrid: 2010, p. 37. Speaking of Rilke, for Heidegger creation is ‘unconcealment’, ‘illumination’, ‘the openness of a world’, ‘something brought forward, produced’. Id., p. 43, pp. 210 et seq.). ↑
Singing, recitation, memorization: orality. ↑
The passage from oral culture to written culture, in the Greek case, was not a mere technological matter. For further discussion of the significance of this transit, see: Havelock, E. A. La musa aprende a escribir. Barcelona: Paidós, 1996, pp. 41 et seq. ↑
Olson, David R. El mundo sobre el papel. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1994, p. 32 et seq. On the other hand, Plato says in Phaedrus: “And now you, precisely, father who are of letters, by attachment to them, attribute to them powers contrary to those they have. Because it is forgetfulness that they will produce in the souls of those who learn them by neglecting memory since, looking at what is written, they will come to memory from outside, through foreign characters, not from within, from themselves and by themselves.” (Phaedrus, 403, 275a). ↑
Sartre, Maurice. “But who really wrote the Satyricon? ” París: Hors – série de la Revue l’Histoire, nov. – déc. 2002, p. 264. ↑
In the First Manifesto (1924), regarding a passage from Crime and Punishment, by F. Dostoevsky, A. Breton wrote: “il ne m’est laissé d’autre pouvoir discrétionnaire que de fermer le livre, ce dont je ne me fais pas faute aux environs de la première page. Et les descriptions! Rien n’est comparable au néant de celles – ci; ce n’est que superpositions d’images de catalogue, l’auteur en prend de plus en plus à son aise, il saisit l’occasion de me glisser ses cartes postales, il cherche à me faire tomber d’accord avec lui sur des lieux communs”.[I am left no other discretion than to close the book, which I do not fault around the first page. And the descriptions! Nothing compares to the nothingness of these; It is only superimpositions of catalog images, the author takes more and more at ease, he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him on common places”.] Cf. Breton, André. Manifestos du surrealism. Recovery: [12. 16. 2021] from: https://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Manifeste ̶ of ̶ surrealism ̶ 1924.pdf. ↑
André Breton says in his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930): “N’est ̶ce pas une honte de présenter sous un jour intellectuellement séduisant un type de policier, toujours de policier, de doter le monde d’une méthode policière? Crachons, en passant, sur Edgar Poe.” [Isn’t it shameful to present in the intellectually attractive light a type of policeman, always a policeman, and to endow the world with a police method? Let’s spit, by the way, on Edgar Poe.] The translation is mine. Recovered [12. 20. 2021]: http://melusine ̶surrealisme.fr/site/Revolution_surrealiste/Revol_surr_12.htm ↑

arrow_forward_iosCrime narrative topology – Chapter 2

Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Chapter 1

Opening words