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

2. Discussion: genre, form, creativity

In reality, the literary genre is an element of genealogical structuring of written forms.

Before, in the age of human orality, literary forms were recast, fused into the protein mass of the Kháos. They were accidental forms that emerged from literary substance and were then individualised. Form was what determined matter to be something (Ferrater Mora).

The beauty was in the form and in the content, in the differentiated. Posidonius,²¹ distinguished speech from words themselves; that is, the form, from its meaning. The forms then were power; they were generative masses, as is all protein mass. They were one step away from moving towards the act, towards the episode that can be said. For if something can be said by word, it means that there is a principle of fraternity, of warmth, of human verbal communication; communication that can be riddled with certain facts, as well as events supposed, dreamed, perceived, felt (seen, heard, smelled, touched), imagined.

For Heidegger, language is the abode that man inhabits.

For example: I closed my eyelids, after waking up. A phrase or verse that contains an image that can be poetic, narrative, or both. To wake up is to come out of the dream, out of the kháos. The universe of sleep is chaotic, it cannot be purified, structured or separated into its constituent parts. No part of the dream can be dissociated, isolated. It is a whole, like a magma. Being every night a kháos, in the dream the poetry and the narrative of the day merge, as well as the narrative and poetry of times past, those of the present and those of the future. During wakefulness, we are responsible for our actions; during sleep we are not. Not even a sleepwalker is responsible for anything. Deep sleep is the absolute kháos, the generative principle of the new creative wakefulness, the one that will come immediately after sleep.

That is why every time the dream, like art, has its own form. “The forms,” says Remo Bodei, “[…] They become objective measures of all things, products which the perceptual organs or intellect of men see or, simply construct.”²² The transience of the dreamed, and its guarantee of oblivion are, in turn, the nature of the individual kháos, the dream, the dreamed matter; ephemeral, labile in itself, destructible. This destruction through oblivion is taken care of by memory. It is the repeated proof, day by day, that, without the kháos, life dies. To die is to dissolve into the kháos.

To develop a form from kháos is to build something that did not exist.

The genre refers to the genus, –ĕris, ‘lineage’, ‘species’, ‘genre’ (derived from gignĕre, ‘to engender’, Corominas). There is no contradiction between the notion of ‘kháos’ and that of engendering. To engender also means union of forms, to establish a new order from the revolution that takes place when there is mitosis, or when one cell penetrates another. The principle of differentiation, in literature, generating, generāre (producing, causing something), is the first step to rational and irrational specialization: lógos, poiesis. Or to put it another way, to separate the argumentative – modernizing from the mythical – archaic. Lógos is reason; poiesis, interiority capable of being expressed beyond reason, is the search for immortality.²³

In the impossibility of the separation of these two domains, it is where the development of literature has taken place. Poetry, in a contradictory way, is a realm independent of narrative. Narrative is perhaps a larger realm, no older than poetry. Poetry is one of the first experiences of the human imagination, and perhaps, why not, gave rise to the first religious experiences. Only the word serves to differentiate, to name everything: river, forest, mountain, animal, people, pencil, paper, rocket. For the creation of a grammar, as well as semiotics of their own tied to the genesis of the verb, of the poietic. I recall here the words of Heidegger, “freeing language from grammar to gain a more original essential order is something reserved for thinking and poetising.”²⁴ And to establish a unique, unrepeatable order, as it is, for example, with any human biography, however primitive, however advanced it may be. Each human life has its own grammar with which a narrative is elaborated, a unique form not only because “language does not work in just one way”,²⁵ but diverse, because it derives from kháos. In the kháos a physiological struggle takes place to generate and sustain its own existence; a domain: a real and imaginary sphere with its own vital activity. That vital activity is capable of narrating itself. It is autopoietic. Like the cell that penetrates another to form an order between both, a new being, which, in itself, is unpredictable. In the boundless field of narrative, first was the monologue, expressed in the form of silence, which is the inner voice. My voice, intimate, incommunicable, non-transferable; as absolutely mute as it is impenetrable in its content. Then there was the dialogue with oneself, which can be cacophonous/euphonious, structured/irrational, narcissistic/centreless, never infertile. For every dialogue, in itself, engenders some narrative form. For every feeling is narrative. It is a text. In the monologue I refer to myself, I recognize my self, my self is recognized in me. In dialogue I recognise myself in the other, through him. And if it is a dialogue, the other must also be recognized in me. Hence, this double narrative is doubly complex: it generates its own geography, its own topos. An uninterrupted communicational energy since it is in the field of feelings, logos and emotions. They are inseparable. The emotions establish a discontinuous narrative, although they can be read as a perforated text, eager to possess its own story; a coherent, cohesive story, without kháos. Hence, it always seeks to overlap with feelings. Pure dialogue is impossible. At the centre of the dialogue that seeks to be pure, nests the kháos as a destructive power. I recognise, or do not know, the other in me. I make him my friend or my enemy. The friend is someone fraternal. With my friend I share amongst different equals.²⁶ If I compete with my enemy,²⁷ I don’t compete with my friend. The friend is the one whom I can never consider my enemy; the one upon whom I will never commit any injustice; the one with whom there is no centre in dialogue. The word non-narcissistic, not autoerotic, not self-important erases the centre of the dialogue. The friend is the one for whom I have respect, for I can learn from him, even if it’s minimal. “When men are friends, there is no need for justice, but, even if they are righteous, they do need friendship.”²⁸ Friendship “is the greatest of goods.”²⁹ Hence, dialogue is considered the beginning of new khaos. Dialogue is born from the desire to tell something (real or imaginary) to someone, and for that someone to listen. Without that listening, even if it is passive and affirmative, there is no dialogue. There must be understanding, otherness between the parties for the dialogue to exist. In an ellipse, the focal axis passes through two foci. The geometric ellipse can be a metaphor for dialogue. The two foci are the speakers. During the dialogue, the focal center moves continuously towards one and the other focus. The center removes itself. Or rather, it is eliminated by the non-narcissistic, non-autoerotic, non-auto-scenic word. Each speaker gets rid of himself. The dialogue is de‒narcisified. If not, it’s a bream dialogue, a vaniloquio. Dialogue is: ‘I discuss, I convert, I speak through’. To converse is etymologically close to converge,1‘incline’, ‘direct’ (Corominas). Conversing is a principle of fraternity, a desire to be in the other, in the distance of what the other is. To tell someone (from lat.computer,to count arithmetically, to tell in a tropical sense, Drae), which I can do orally or in writing, is also to get away from myself, to return to myself.

Prose as an ordinary form of language not subject to any rule, in the West ‒narrative, descriptive, argumentative‒, due to philosophical needs, tried to separate itself from poetry (inspired, not rational) during the classical Greek period 6 BC, at the time of Ferécides de Syros and the school of Miletus, of non-Athenian Ionian lineage‒, which resulted in semantic fields differentiated from the written tradition. In the sixth century or at the end of the fifth century BC, when the Greek alphabet had already existed for more than 200 years, the Iliad, Odyssey, Theogony, Works and Days had been transcribed. This indicates to us, as I stated above, not only the mistrust of the Greeks for the written form, since they mistrusted its ability to express thought, but to generate knowledge. However, the transition from orality³⁰ to the written text was decisive.³¹ ³² Writing, the textual corpus, reading aloud and the circulation of the written word, meant moving to a new rationality,³³ as well as a differentiation of literary forms (prose, poetry). This new technology, the step of the oral culture to the scribal culture,³⁴ in turn engendered kháos.

Gender is also genesis, genetics, lineage. In the heart of kháos is the original idea of ‘creativity’. Not in the Hebrew ‒ Christian sense. But in the Greek notion of Demiurge.³⁵ being a rectifier of chaos: recasting, non-differentiation, ‘abyss’, ‘immense and gloomy space that existed before the creation of the world’ (Corominas), necessarily leads to giving rise to something that did not exist before, to a totally new narrative, to poetics. Since you can’t order something that doesn’t exist, you can only order, organise, arrange new forms. In the protein mass, as in phylogeny, the development of lineages will soon order the immense field where little by little the kháos will generate new structures of kháos. For in the world, including the excrescences that we will deal with here later,7there are only different forms of kháos . Without kháos, it is impossible to renew what exists, whose order is only relative, or at least transitory. To create is to produce something new that, in turn, will have an autonomous, constant life, which can be interpreted in diverse, inspiring and fruitful ways. Creating is also delving into the fields of significance, even though the first forms have already been forgotten, or have only left their traces throughout history, or their own history.

This is the case of someone who writes a poem, a narrative over and over again until they get the desired text. It’s all about forward repetition. The first drafts are kháos. It is a law, as is the law of entropy, which has its own linear accelerations. The Kháos is the father of entropy, the mother, its procreating power. The totally new does not exist. The new, in terms of physical and mental artifacts (artifact: made with art) from ancient times, is in the semantic field of innovation (Tatarkiewickz, pp. 279 ‒ 296). A mental artifact is language; another, any language, a dialect, a slang. The wheel, the physical artifact par excellence, invented towards the end of the Neolithic period, in its functionality does not differ at all from those of a bicycle. The wheel of the fifth millennium BC is as good as the wheels of a Mars Exploration Rover. What the re-organiser of kháos does is to separate, differentiate, recognize the diversity of forms, and extract forms. Aristotle understood by ‘form’ (morphe, eidos), the essence of everything.³⁶ The essence of the wheel is in its roundness, in its image, not in the materials with which it is made. In the contour of the wheel lies its beauty. The essence of language is in the choice of words, in the way they are combined, how they are synthesized; Ab ovo, the feminine and masculine gender. The interiority of who writes creatively is kháos in its purest, protein state. It is in the changing movement of the protein, where the form is expressed. Well the written word can capture something, but not all of that kháos, to give shape.

Develop, engender an immense and open field, with lights and shadows in which someone with previous knowledge, ex nihilo nihil fit, can produce something, start, give shape to something that does not necessarily come from physical matter, but from interiority and cultural tradition.³⁷ The only exceptions are The Iliad and The Odyssey, in that they have no known ancestors or previous tradition (Havelock, p. 41).³⁸ It is the case of the phileo, Greek: ‘I love’ (philosophy), the elaboration of a form, of aesthetic forms, through repetition as knowledge towards the future (Kierkegaard). The act of writing, of ordering one letter after another to form a lexeme, ‘sun’, for example, is an act of immediate knowledge, of future knowledge. Or the combination of m and a. ‘Ma’, ‘Mama’. It is repetition that, in turn, also thanks to syntax, engenders rituals. Without repetition, in Kierkegaard’s sense, ritual does not exist. The Iliad and The Odyssey are products of oral transmission as a ritual. These poems either took more than two centuries to transcribe, or they reached enough maturity in a society culturally mature enough to put them on paper. It was the powerful acceleration of the written form, which since then has tended towards infinity, which forced such a transition. How many repetitions were there of these two poems, from generation to generation, trying ‒something not impossible then, almost impossible today‒ to be faithful to a set of stories recited in verse? For the Greeks, the diegesis of these poems was real, the facts, the stories, they really happened, they founded their culture.³⁹ Rituals are narrative processes that engender, in their historical evolution, their own acceleration, their own modes of survival, their own structures. They are not static, their semiotic components engender transformations. Hence its desire to remain, its vocation to maintain cultural, family and social ties, from a small human community to the immense mass of individuals on the planet. If rituals are historical knowledge, they are also knowledge of the present (Schmitt,On. cit.., p. 107).

Although there are accelerations that tend towards infinity, there are also those that tend towards zero. When there is a slowdown, there is a lag in literary genres. When the genre becomes static, for example, the art of satire or rhetoric in Rome in the 3rd century, it prints part of itself in other, more elaborate forms. If nothing comes out of nothing in the field of art, as in the field of physical and chemical processes, nothing is destroyed, transmuted, turned into something else. In Literature, the forms whose acceleration tends towards the minimum, their traces, even their ashes, become part of a new form of text. The archeology of art has been in charge of finding such traces in one way or another written, fixed,⁴⁰ in the various genres. An idea of genre is a basic principle of differentiation in the domain of literary creation. I am not speaking here of an idea of classification as a typecasting of a textual production

It is the critic, not the one who writes creative texts (critic:κρινω, kríno ‘distinguish’, ‘separate’ or ‘divide’), the one who puts up fences, the one who divides semantic territories, the one who names genres. The artist disintegrates, and at the same time integrates genres, creates new genres. Today, very rarely is an artist a critic, and when he is, he is almost always a failure or a fool (like A. Breton cited above), unless this exercise is done by a critic as an artist:

[The critic] works with [the same] materials [of the artist] and gives them a new and delicious form at the same time. […] I would really define criticism by saying that it is a creation within another creation. […] is never imprisoned by the chains of verisimilitude. […] Criticism, in its highest form, is essentially subjective and tries to reveal its own secret and not that of others. Because higher criticism deals with art not as expression, but as pure emotion. (Wilde, pp. 45 ‒ 46)

The artist’s relationship with the critic, and vice versa, must become a biunivocal, horizontal, dialogic relationship; non-vertical in which the critic clings in an arrogant or condescending way to himself, or to other interests, not to the microhistorical knowledge of the creation of a work of art. Says Oscar Wilde in defense of the comprehension of the work of art to understand it, to criticize it:

His [the critic’s] purpose will not always be, however, to explain the work of art. […] whoever wants to really understand Shakespeare must first understand his relations with the Renaissance and the Reformation, with the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; you must be familiar with the story of the struggle between the old classical forms and the new romantic spirit, between the school of Sidney, of Daniel Johnson, and those of Marlow and his son, greater than Shakespeare himself; he must know the materials available to Shakespeare and his way of using them, the conditions of theatrical performances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the advantages or obstacles that they offered in terms of freedom; the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s time, its ends, its ways and its rules; he must study the Greek drama and the relationship between the creative art of Agamemnon and that of the

creator of Macbeth; in short: he must be able to link Elizabethan London with Periclean Athens and to have a good grasp of Shakespeare’s true place in the history of drama in Europe and throughout the world. The critic will really be an interpreter, but he will not treat art like a sphinx, expressing himself by riddles, and whose futile secret a man with wounded feet can divine and reveal.⁴¹ […]. (On. cit., pp. 55 ‒ 56)

The critic, according to the structuralist model, is one step behind the artist, which puts him or her in antagonistic positions, not dialogic, not fraternal, not knowing or understanding the work of art. It has been the critics themselves who have put up such barriers. “The artist”, as Faulkner says (Stein,on. cit.), doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” Let’s see G. Steiner’s answer to the question as to the role of the critic:

What we can never do is confuse the genius of the creator with the work of the critic. Pushkin said of his translators that they were the postmen. Of course it’s a great job, but he called them that. My battle is against the post-structuralists who have conflated the importance of creation with literary commentary [!]. The book comes before. Mr. Cervantes, Mr. Lorca and Mr. Shakespeare do not need Mr. Steiner, but Mr. Steiner needs them.⁴²

Steiner is right that the critic needs the artist, not the other way around. But Steiner does not recover the aesthetic analysis of Walter Pater, John Ruskin or Wilde, whom he should have studied at Cambridge. Nor does he use his experience as a narrator, since among his great intellectual and philosophical production he also wrote four novels. When criticising, think like a critic-philosopher, not like an artist. That is why he is not a first-rate fiction writer either. He was a writer, in every sense of the word. Brecht said in November 1922: “Literature is becoming the domain of the literati.”⁴³

Steiner loses himself in useless critical polemics, in ‘battles’ in which there are friends and enemies (Schmitt). That is to say, in battles that end up being a vain political negotiation, rather than an aesthetic approximation to the creative genesis of the work of art. Art has nothing at all to do with politics. When politics touches, it touches art, it inoculates it. It destroys it. The critic’s task is beyond any mediating negotiation. Evaluate the artistic qualities of a work from the microhistory of artistic creation. His job is to be in Wilde’s camp, not Steiner’s, who sees the critic as a subordinate who ultimately negotiates when he loses. Hence the mood and the lack of depth of the literary criticism of Steiner, the writer.

Today, the critic is someone who, at a given moment, going beyond Kantian or post-structuralist criticism, should try to put himself in the position of the artist in order to approach a more refined understanding of the literary work. So, the category of critic as artist ‒that is the ideal critic, with very rare exceptions, today has disappeared‒ is clearly expressed in the aforementioned essay by Wilde from 1891.16In this essay Wilde, without the success he should have had subsequently,⁴⁴ wanted to leave Kantian criticism behind. It was impossible, given later developments. The influence of positive science in the 19th century, which would become structuralism a few decades later, deeply influential in literary theory, prevented it from happening.

Traditionally, the critic’s job since the nineteenth century has been to name literary genres, or invent a name for a new trend, for a time, for a group of writers who have common interests. While the writer erases limits, the critics build walls, invent rules, deduce from the works “constant forms” that do not exist to compete in any way with the artist. Or they overvalue anodyne works, by force of the incorrigible deconstructivist tingling. They make artists feel great because they seem to establish a genre, or subgenre. Good, because they ascribe to it, because they are incapable of their own production. Critics even try to trace a historical development. The history of not only literature, but of any art, is the exclusive power of professional historians. It is a rationalist commitment, according to Bachelard’s expression, and an aesthetic commitment of the critic, to value the dimension of the history of a genre. Hence the demand for a microhistorical work by Wilde that the contemporary critic does not have.

Let’s get back to the gender issue. The fiction writer does not disregard the rules or literary limits. Neither does he follow them on purpose, nor intends to be the great innovator. For the narrator, one of the still unresolved problems of Literature is that of literary genre. I am going to write a short story, a diary, an autobiography, a critique, the narrator tells himself. But what has happened is that this story, this diary, this autobiography becomes a novel. Or, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe, the writer did not know that he was writing a novel. Defoe did not count on the designation ‘novel’, novella which, although it comes from Italy of the sixteenth century, had not spread to eighteenth century England. His writing seemed more like an autobiographical story, a travel book, a falsified journalistic chronicle (four months after being on the market with resounding success, after Robinson Crusoe, not only was there competition, but the veracity of the story was questioned, not its plausibility).⁴⁵ Defoe did not know that he had just written the foundational novel of English-language fiction. But it was “the first attempt to […] make a long work of prose fiction” (emphasis mine).⁴⁶ And the first fiction whose theme is evil expressed through various modalities of social transgression and crime: Moll Flanders, whose protagonist is a woman who practices various forms of crime such as prostitution, theft, lying.

Regarding Coetzee, it can be said that he, like many others, is one of those who plan their work to the millimeter and know, for example, that they will write a metafictional novel⁴⁷ of a certain number of pages, with one or more clearly delimited themes. Coetzee has published, for almost half a century, a book, fiction or essay, with a sustained regularity of more or less 2 to 3 years. He is a writer who, from the beginning, invented a programme and has developed it to the letter. Flaubert also planned obsessively, but without a limited time horizon. He worked on his books for years, almost until he exhausted his strength, until he exhausted the possibilities of the language, until he found the right words. Kafka never made feats similar to those of Coetzee, rather he worked in a similar way – never the same – to that of Flaubert, whom he admired in a special way “The Sentimental Education”. However, as Coetzee sensibly says in a letter to Paul Auster, “I would not be who I am without Freud or Kafka […]”.⁴⁸ “As a writer, I am not worthy of untying Kafka’s shoe strap,” he said years ago.⁴⁹ Genres exist not so that the narrator registers his writing in a ‘line of work’, elaborates schemes, makes a plan, nor so that his work is admitted in a specific area and his book enters a catalogue. As to the sources of inspiration he used, he might prefer to isolate himself at home or write in a bar; to retire to the mountains or lock himself in a Proust-style hotel; to write standing up like Hemingway, at night like Kafka did in search of stillness and silence, or early in the morning like Carpentier. If he puts the typewriter in the kitchen as Hammett did because he had nowhere else to write, to where he moved leaning on chairs placed in the corridor from his bed because he had tuberculosis. It simply speaks of passion, of the irrevocable, inalienable will to write.

A narrator will be able to describe with some certainty how he wrote a literary essay or a fictional text. Where did he go, what did he investigate, who did he talk to, what books did he read, what experiences and experiences made up those moments in his life? Any storyteller can talk extensively, for hours, for decades, about it. What he will talk about vaguely, hesitantly, without much certainty, is exactly what was on his mind every time he sat down to work on his book. From the first day, and the following days, until the day that the already finished ‘manuscript’ (file) was delivered to its editor. I myself do not know how this literary writing will develop and finish, even if its general structure is more or less clear. Right now it occurs to me that I could attach an essay I wrote recently on the literature of the self. And perhaps, why not? I could add another one on the computational novel. I don’t know if I would. So I know with some clarity what I want as the final book. I let the form that, little by little it is adopting, to be protean. Otherwise, it would not be a literary essay, but an academic one, framed in the well-worn Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The academic essay is not creative, not at all. It is a mental contest with the ideas of other authors. A fight in which the winner is not the one who hits the most, but the one with the best memory to cite and the ability to relate. Well, there are no really original ideas, if not mere innovations (Tatarkiewics), mere shameless robberies. Walter Benjamin said about the ideas of others, about his work as a conscious critic of his trade: “In my works the quotations are like robbers lurking in the street who assault the passerby with weapons and take away their convictions.”⁵⁰ The literary essay is protean; it does not try to demonstrate any point of view. It does not fight with anyone, it opens up. It does not negotiate, it does not do politics. It speaks, it converses horizontally with other texts. It recognizes, respects the origin of other people’s ideas. One of the most exemplary dialogues is Fragments of a loving discourse, by Barthes. It is, at first glance, a book of quotations in which there is a clear intention: the love discourse, not only in literature, but in thought. But it’s more. It is a text that invites pleasure, creativity. What was called at the time: an active reading in which the reader is part of the text.

It is not possible to speak of the matter that composes kháos while the work is being composed, while it is slowly fixed on paper by the writer’s art. The act of writing is to see a distant fact previously inaccessible and to try to give it a form through the word. The act of writing is to remember (Kierkegaard) the blank page whilst writing and whilst reading. If one doesn’t remember, the page does not exist; there is nowhere to fix anything. The work doesn’t first pass through a common orality, it comes directly from within the artist. The oxygen in a leaf comes out as a gas, not a liquid: the familiar dry ice.⁵¹ It changes from the solid state to a vapour. Hence it is called sublimation, sublimāre. Hence the sublime word ‘elevated, high’ (Corominas) to raise to a higher degree. But this is only possible through writing. Orally, it is impossible. In orality, the word is ethereal. It is water vapour. In writing, the traced word is a rock, something physical to hold onto. According to the principle of uncertainty or literary indeterminacy, while the writer composes his story, he does not know in what state of artistic sublimation he is. Or, rather, the shapes define his face every time the author writes a symbol, puts a word on paper. Probabilities are perceived instead of certainties. This involves more lateral thinking (De Bono) untrained, because each book is different and the authentic story looks for its own forms. It is when the artist transforms. And he knows it. He knows, and sometimes fears, that there will be infinitesimal or substantive changes inside him.⁵² That is why the artist doubts if he will finish writing the text or not, if he will have the physical and mental strength to do it,⁵³ and in the final form he will have his story. Well the story is what matters, not the artist. If so, it takes place.

Nor does the writer know with absolute certainty what will come of it. Like Hammett, once he finished Red Harvest, said in 1934 of his beginnings as a writer around 1921 or 1922:⁵⁴

I decided to become a writer. It was a good idea. Since I had absolutely no writing experience except letters and reports, I was not weighed down by exaggerated notions of the difficulties that lay ahead. (Ward, p. 101)

In reality, the first-line narrator never knows when, how, or where he begins to write a text. How can we know if every original story is born a long time before being written; before it is fixed on paper, even before the writer takes it into his head to turn it into words. Hammett, when he was working as a detective (1915 ‒ 1922) did not know that he was going to write novels. He knew that he could write stories, stories ‘much better’ than the ones he had read in the newsstand magazines. But he needed his experience as a detective, and of the new editorial demands, to be able to do it.

Much less, in his inner Kháos, in its “primordial emptiness before creation”⁵⁵ (Italics are mine) whoever writes fiction does not know for sure which genre it will be, in which they can better order the multiplicity of fused, recast, linked, chaotic elements. The poet will write poetry, since his world is poeticised. The narrator ‘narrativises’ the world. He turns each experience and each insight, each minutiae, each anecdote, each tiny event, into a narrative fact capable of being written, into a continuum narrative, in his topological continuum. Even, as in Kafka, a deep, desperate, hesitant love letter is a literary fact. Or, as he writes, he follows an image until he unravels its meaning, its sense, its narrative possibilities.⁵⁶ There is a staging of what he sees or imagines and he immediately launches a narrative look, not merely documentary (journalistic, argumentative or dialectical), because in this way he recognizes a deeper level, and for that very reason, more real.⁵⁷ Also, if it emerges from within the artist, there is a redefinition of the previous genres. A literary essay? A novel? A shorter story? Letters, a diary? And within that narrative genre that is the novel, what sub, sub sub-genre will better express what is inside? The intentionally fictional, fantastic, or the intentionally realistic? And if there is a symbiosis?

The writer is, paraphrasing Foucault, the principle of a certain unit of writing.⁵⁸ The inception of a ‘certain unit of writing’ is in the first letter, in the first lexeme, in the first syntax. The only thing that the writer could be clear about ‒at least unconsciously, since it is an inherited knowledge‒, is the language. That, in the vast majority of cases ‒arts are full of exceptions‒, will be that of childhood: the language in all its forms that he heard from before he was born, and now, sucking on his mother’s breast. For example, Kafka wrote in the German of his mother Julie, not in Czech, which was the original language of Hermann, his father.⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ In the intimacy of the writer, as it is the beginning of a certain unit of writing, what happens before such writing? Does abstraction emerge from that Kháos, a mental image that obsesses you, as was the case with Faulkner? (Cf. Stein) The impression of a dream? A phrase that you can read anywhere? An idea when relating one thing to another? When, reviewing his intimate notes that never will be published, does something move him, or does something trigger an irrepressible stream of consciousness, while writing notes in a little pad or something in the palm of your hand? The narrative, being pure potentiality, as a lexeme, word, sentences, paragraphs, is not written until it is finished. And it will not be finished until the artist decides that he won’t change even a comma. The form that this narration will have begins to be with the first word, whether it is the first scribble or the final word. That word and the first syntax are the tone and the rhythm that will define the story that comes to life only as the writer writes. Or better still, as the writer orders the kháos that is inside.

The writer re‒cognizes, re‒orders the forms that bubble up in his head, inside him. At the time of writing, when ordering the kháos, he goes to the previous knowledge of the forms to abandon them definitively. Well, you can’t abandon what you don’t have, when something has not been possessed in its essence. If there is no possessed essence, there is no abandonment. It is not about un‒learning, to learn again. The binomial learn/unlearn is a technology of didactics.⁶¹ It has nothing to do with creativity. Creativity, by definition, is open knowledge, thought, emotion in motion. Knowledge, wisdom and emotion are complex forms of memory. For memory is not simple but multiple⁶² and dynamic; it is not a repository of records but of signs that make sense during memory. Memory is time. It is a chain of moments, it is narration. That is why memory is the mother of muses. At the time of writing, a whole field of knowledge is left aside. Any concept of gender is left aside, for example. All philosophy. All theory. If each work is a new form, the creation is continuous and unrepeatable. A new form expresses itself through his new text. If it happens the other way around, if any form is imposed on the text, the creative potential of the text is destroyed, and the mere shell remains. “There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory,” says Faulkner (Stein,on. cit.).

The story is a piece of the author’s interiority that struggles to fall fully into a physical field; it needs to be fixed onto the blank sheet of paper. Today, the blank page is virtual. It’s not effective immediately. We cannot cross out, blur, erase. Start again if a drop of ink falls; or tear off, crumple, throw into the basket. Put a beautiful white sheet, with a beautiful texture, before us. Caress it with the tips of your fingers. Each letter is now an isolated, reasoned element (key) without cobweb thread, as is the case with handwriting, in which one letter is joined to another. The distance to the white screen is the distance of the machine; of a code that is inscrutable for the writer who is not a programmer. The coding of the virtual white sheet is also an ordering of the language. Now, it is a whole that is part of the logos. Hence, it is more demanding for the poiesis not to be relegated. The cobweb thread, being sticky, a slime itself, drew. It poured, spread, composed, flowed. There was no distance. On the virtual sheet, distance is abstract, that of a number: a number capable of being written, of having a narrative. But he will never have it. Today, this machine aims to ‘correct’ the way we write.

The writer doesn’t choose Literature to fix a piece of itself on paper. It is the matter of kháos which seeks to express itself in that way through someone (the writer) not otherwise, in whatever kind of role it is. It is writing, as a form, that seeks what determines matter to be something. This urgent need to become a form is even above the writer’s natural desires, to the point of resembling an experience, or in James’ terms, a religious insight.⁶³ “Writing as a way of praying”, (Kafka, F.Aphorisms. 96). Earlier, he wrote down in his Diary(03. 01. 1912, p. 221):

You can very well recognise in me a concentration oriented towards writing. When it became clear to my organism that writing was the most productive direction of my nature, everything tended urgently there and left empty all those capacities that were directed preferentially towards the joys of sex, food, drink, philosophical reflection, music. I lost weight in all directions. It was necessary that this be the case, since my forces as a whole were so meagre that only together could they serve, for better or worse, the purpose of writing. Naturally, I did not find that purpose autonomously and consciously; it was she who found herself, and now the only obstacle, but a radical one, that opposes it is the office (my italics).

Faulkner writes:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency, security, happiness, all to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate (Stein, on. cit.)

The act of writing the first letters, sets in motion the psychic intimacy, the inner life enriched by formal and experiential knowledge. Surrendering to the imperious desire to write is the essence of narrative creativity.

This, regardless of how the writer lives that creativity: if as a religious experience, by some chemical inducer (alcohol, a wide variety of drugs⁶⁴) or as a purely aesthetic or intellectual experience. It seems that this new text does not found a world. But it does found it. He does it on the footprints, on the ashes of other texts that he has read, that the artist wrote, that perhaps he forgot that he read or wrote or thought in childhood, in adolescence. Hence the need for an intimate diary, which, by definition, is loyal, is private.⁶⁵ Those memory lapses in the writer, which deep down are not, function as an imbrication, like an overlap. The interior of the writer is a text. Not in vain, even during sleep, the writer sees himself writing. He is also seen as a narrator, as a witness or as the protagonist of narrative events. Of scenes narratives. The narrator’s dream world is a text that can be transcribed, for even in the dream, the writer narrates. The narrator resembles the addict who dreams of consuming. It resembles the slave of a ritual that, day after day, in Kierkegaardian repetition, is forced to tear something out of himself, so that, within himself, that something torn out generates something new. The reading that the artist makes of the unknowable within himself, orders (how does he do it?) and guides his fingers to be write, to be materialized in words; this is the act of creating. This reader, who is then the writer of himself on the page that gradually fills up with forms, knows that “[…] there is no comprehension of a writing, whatever it may be, that does not depend to some extent on the forms through which it reaches its reader.”⁶⁶

The only proof of the creative act that I have just described is the territory, the intimate domain of Memory, Mnēmosúne, which at some point will be public; a closed structure that will be opened to the reader to be seen, read, understood. That closed structure printed on the sheet that is no longer blank displays a material order accessible to anyone, one page after another, from now on, if the book is able to stand on its own. The semiotic of those written symbols is the mirror in which the creative act sees itself. The first-rate writer does not specially ‘cultivate’ a literary genre, although he may. Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Turguenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens, Proust, Joyce, did not cultivate novels, they wrote literature. They composed finite structures whose aesthetic framework was the novel.

In previous authors, their books are more than just novels or short stories; they contain overlapping genres. That is why they are unclassifiable. The genre and its innumerable hybrid variables emerge from writing through the story. For these reasons there is no such thing as chemically pure writing, since there is no chemically pure genre. If chemically pure writing existed, it would be illegible, not intelligible. It would be the impossible ‘writing’ of someone who has been completely isolated from the world, in absolute silence and in the absolute absence of movement, of sound, in an absolutely isolated cave. Where, out of nowhere, sustenance appears, a glass of water. That chemically pure writing would have the imaginary design that Gregor Samsa describes on the walls and ceiling of his room with “[…] a viscous substance that he wore at the end of his legs […]. “(The transformation,p. 60 et seq.). It is el factum loquendi: the pure experience of language. Pure language, which is facticity and transcendentality simultaneously. It leads back to the original Kháos, to the formless magma, which takes place when Gregor writes with his legs. It is the last form, the last proclamation of the last remnants of his humanity. And it is invisible, due to its unintelligibility. If it were visible, it would make anyone capable of reading such human depth go crazy.

Just as anyone can only talk about themselves, no one can talk about the interiority of the other. The writer can only speak of his own literary creativity, not that of others, unless he does so, as Wilde wanted. And you can only do it with his own words, with his own language; he writes led by the nine Greek muses, and their mother, Mnēmosúne. They do it

elevated by their mythical wings, without thinking of any genre. Although to do so, they must be clear about what matter these genres are made of, what their true chemical composition is. If this is not clear, your textual matter will be a pure hodgepodge, promiscŭus, a confused mix, indifferent.

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 2 footnotes

Quoted by Tatarkiewics, p. 262. ↑
Diano, Carlo. Forma y evento. Madrid: Visor, 2000 [1952], p. 22 Preface by Remo Bodei. ↑
Cf. with the argument of Diotima. Plato. Diálogos III. Madrid: Gredos, 1988. ↑
Heidegger, M. Letter on humanism. Madrid: Alianza, 2006 [1946], p. 43 ↑
“We reject only the grammar that they want to impose on us here. The paradox disappears only if we break radically with the idea that language always works in only one way” Cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus logicus – philosophicus. Investigaciones filosóficas. Sobre la certeza (bilingual edition): Gredos, 2099, p. 375, § 304 ↑
This oxymoron expresses the intensity, the clarity, the sincerity of a friendship. ↑
Cf. Schmitt, Carl. El concepto de lo político. Madrid: Alianza, 1991 [1932], p. 56 et seq. ↑
Aristotle. Ëtica Nicomaquea. Madrid: Gredos, 1985, p. 324, 1155ª. ↑
Aristotle. Política. Madrid: Gredos, 1985, p 95, 1262b. ↑
Corominas rightly points out that the verbs “converge/diverge” are Kepler’s invention to talk about light in optics. ↑
Cf. With Olson, David R.The world on paper,chap. 3: “The written culture and the conceptual revolutions of Greece and Renaissance Europe”, pp. 67 ‒ 89. ↑
“Greek literature had been poetic because poetry fulfilled a social function, namely to preserve the tradition according to which the Greeks lived and to instruct them in it.” For this reason, “[…] Plato’s teachings, from the formal point of view, were not poetic [compositions]. They were composed in prose.Cf. Havelock, p. 27. ↑
Chartier, Roger. The order of the books.Barcelona: Gedisa, 1994. ↑
Reece, Steve. “Orality and Literacy: Ancient Greek Literature as oral literature”, in David Schenker and Martin Hose (eds.) Companion to Greek literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2015, pp. 43 ‒ 57. 6In classical Greece, there was no word for ‘creativity’, ‘creator’. Poetry was not art, it had a didactic purpose. The poet was not an artist. But the poet was the one who ‘created’, because he was the one who did new things, brought new things to life. The musicians did not improvise melodies, they were governed by mathematical laws. Music was prescribed for religious ceremonies, for public or private entertainment, or to accompany some forms of poetry. The sculptors had to follow the canon (measure) of Polykleitos for the human figure (Tatarkiewics, p. 280). Painters were considered artisans, their work was understood as mimesis. The Demiurge was the one who brought order in place of chaos, who brought order to all things, the combiner of pre-existing elements, the one who freely makes the world. In the Timeo , Plato speaks of a worker who organises the world with his eyes fixed on the eternal, that is, on the beautiful. The idea of ‘creation’ out of nothing, comes from the Old Testament, from “Genesis”: “1, 1 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…”. Creation in the Hebrew-Christian tradition is based on faith: creating out of nothing. For practical purposes, since the validity or not of this concept is not a matter of discussion in this work, I will use the word ‘creation’ to refer to the production of an artistic cultural good that introduces its own rules. Specifically, I am referring to the writing of first-rate narrative and essay books. That is to say, those texts that ‘create’ the possibility of producing something new autonomously, and represent an advance, a going further in the narrative art of the moment. ↑
Like exclusion, denial, submission of the other, for whatever reasons, through the use of the word. For Lévinas, the mere fact of speaking already implies exerting violence. See: Levinas, E.Between us: essays to think about another. Valencia: Pretexts, 2001 [1993]. ↑
Aristotle. Aristotle I.see: metaphysics.Madrid: Gredos, 1995, p. 263, 1032. ↑
Saint Thomas, when speaking of creation, differentiates what is created by God from nothing (to create from nothing) and what is created by man from matter (to make of the material). Cf. Agamben, G. Creation and anarchy,2019, p. 29. ↑
This is one of the great questions of the ‘Homeric question’. Were these works written or transcribed? Who, who did it? Where did the original poem come from? See: Nagy, Gregory.Homeric responses. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2003. Retrieved [02.28.2022] from:https://chs.harvard.edu/read/nagy ̶gregory ̶ homeric ̶responses/ ↑
The oral cultural tradition in Homer’s time and later centuries (leaving aside ‘the Homeric question’) must be taken in the ritual sense. In the repetition of a poem to be transmitted from one aoido ‒ ‘singer’‒ to another was not only the word spoken, but the sound of the word, the precision of the word, of each dactylic verse. As well as its syntactic and semantic sequences, marked by juxtaposition, the parataxis of elements and the autonomy of the parts. “The epics had been transferred to the papyrus piece by piece, and the organized form in which we know them today had been achieved using both sight and hearing” (Havelock, p. 32). ↑
The text (from lat.textus, plot, fabric) must be fixed on paper so that the narrated story has an existence, a materiality, and can be known and transmitted as (according to Genette, “[…] a closed, ordered, coherent, justified whole, which has a balance and internal tensions and ties with other external systems, both textual and non-textual.” Cited by Valles Calatrava, J. R. and Álamo Felices, F., s. v. ↑
It refers to Oedipus (‘the one with the swollen feet’, ‘the one with the pierced ankles’). ↑
Mora, R., and Díaz de Tuesta, M. J. “Interview with Georges Steiner”, in:Babelia. Madrid: El País, 27. 10. 2001. ↑
Brecht, Bertolt.Diaries 1920 ‒ 1922. Autobiographical notes 1920 ‒ 1954.Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1980, p. 154.16 Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist”. In:Essays. Articles Barcelona: Hyspan American Publishing, 1986 [1891], pp. 13. ↑
Among the many who contributed to insult Wilde, and give flight to criticism, was Borges. He writes: “To mention Wilde’s name is to mention also a dandy That he was also a poet is to evoke the image of a gentleman dedicated to the poor purpose of astonishing with ties and metaphors”. In: Borges, J.L.Complete works.Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974, p. 691. Not content with this, Borges considers him, insidiously, just an epigram writer: “We will never know what epigram would have inspired The Ulysses of Joyce.” And: Wilde (1986),On. cit.., p. 9, in the “Prologue”. Borges read Wilde’s work to criticise him, without understanding him at all. ↑
A ‘fictional pact’ had already been established between the work and the reader. See: Lejuene, Philippe.The autobiographical pact and other studies.Madrid: Megazul ‒ Endymion, 1994, pp.49 ‒ 148. ↑
Coetzee, J.M. Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe”. In: Strange Shores.Barcelona: Mondadori, 2010, p. 30 ̶37. Coetzee quotes Hippolyte Taine in this brief essay regarding Defoe: “His imagination was that of a businessman, not that of an artist”. Then Coetzee says: “He is certainly not an artist, or at least not in the category that Taine has in mind, but neither did he want to be seen as such […] Defoe is a businessman who traffics in words and ideas, with a clear business sense of what every word means and is worth. He may not be original as a thinker, but he has a penetrating mind that is interested in life in all its aspects. (pp. 36 ‒ 37). In any case, Defoe must have been, despite Coetzee’s words, a very original thinker in thinking of books like Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders or Diary of the Plague Year, etc. The essential feature of originality lies precisely in the way an idea is thought of and how it is carried out. ↑
This is the case, for example, ofFoe, Diary of a bad year, Summer and the most recentThe Polish. 21 Coetzee, J. M. y Auster, Paul. Here and now. Letters, 2008 ̶2011.Bogotá Anagrama & Mondadori, 2012, p. 157. ↑
Coetzee, J. M. Navigation charts.Buenos Aires: Ariadne’s Thread, 2015, t. 2 P. 374. ↑
It has happened to famous writers who always tell the same anecdotes about how they wrote this or that book, or wax lyrical about his work. What else would they say if what does not enter the field of poiesis is anecdotal? Just read e.g. the books of interviews with García Márquez, with Alejo Carpentier, or the biography of Coetzee by J. C. Kannemeyer (2012). There are very, very few biographies, memoirs, interviews, etc. in which the questions reveal the creative world of the artist. ↑
Quoted by Agamben, G.The man without content. 167. ↑
Also called dry ice, it is actually carbon dioxide (CO2) in solid state. ↑
Says Agamben: “The idea that working on a work of art can imply a transformation of the author ‒that is, in the last analysis, of his life‒ would have been, in all likelihood, incomprehensible to the ancients.” See Agamben, G. The fire and the story. Madrid: Sixth floor, 2014, p. 89. ↑
For an approach to Heisenberg’s physical principle of indeterminacy in literature, regarding the perception of time and space of a writer, if not of a character, see: Petermann Oliva, José. “The physical principle of indeterminacy in the contemporary novel” In: Humanities magazine [of the Andrés Bello University, Santiago de Chile], 1993, No. 1, pp. 100-199. ↑
Hammett had very little formal education “[…] he left school at the age of 14 to help his family.” He worked various trades: “office messenger on the B & O railroad, newspaper delivery boy, stevedore, nailing machine operator, publicist of “very little seniority” , timekeeper in a cannery, salesman in the hapless seafood business of his father.” (Ward, p. 29). Then the Army paid for a secretarial course to learn typing and shorthand that he never finished, around 1921. That is, when he was already 27 years old. ↑
Cf. Grimal, Pierre. Dictionary of mythology. Greece and Rome. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica S.A., 1989, s. v. ↑
Stach, Reiner.Kafka. The First Years. The Years of Decisions (vol II). Barcelona: Cliff, 2016, pp. 1971 et seq. ↑
Cf. Stach, Op. cit., pp. 1867 and ss. ↑
Foucault, M. “What is an author?”. In: Bulletin of the French Society of Philosophy ,t. 1 LXIV, July ‒ September 1969, p. 84. Foucault says: “The author is, likewise, the principle of a certain unit of writing”. The translation is mine. Recovered [02. 04. 2022] from: http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault319.html ↑
Deleuze, G, and Guattari, F. Kafka. For a Lesser Literature. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1983 [1975]. “A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language, but the literature that a minority writes within a major language.” And later: “The impossibility of writing in a language other than German is for the Jews of Prague the feeling of an irreducible distance from the original Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German constitutes the de-territorialisation of the German population itself, which speaks a different language to the masses as a “paper language” or artificial: even more so the Jews who are part of this minority at the same time as they are excluded from it as “gypsies who stole the German child in the cradle.”, pp. 29 ‒ 30. The concept of these two minor literature authors can be applied, for example, to Conrad and Navokob, Cioran and Kundera, Kerouac, Beckett, Appelfeld and Coetzee, to all those writers who write in their mother tongue. Or better yet, they don’t feel they have a mother tongue. Derrida, in The Monolingualism of the Other, expands these concepts. From the creative point of view, according to Derrida, the question is: what language, what idiom best expresses what I want to say? Dante, by choosing Tuscan and not Latin, as was customary at the time, is a good example of choosing a language to give greater expressiveness to the written composition. ↑
Cf. Derrida, Jacques [1997] The monolingualism of the other.Buenos Aires: Spring, 2009. ↑
Cf. Castro Gomez, Santiago. “On the concept of anthropotechnics in Peter Sloterdijk”. Bogotá: UniAndes Magazine, 2012. Retrieved [08.11. 2021] from: Jan. https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/abs/10.7440/res43.2012.06 ↑
Freud says: “What is essentially new in my theory is therefore the thesis that memory does not exist in a simple but multiple way, registered in different varieties of signs.” Freud, S. Letters to Fließ 1887 ‒ 1904. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1986, letter of December 6. of 1896, p. 218. ↑
Joseph Frank quotes William James, in his Dostoevsky. The Testing Years, 1850 ̶1959: «According to William James, the characteristics of a conversion experience are three: “The dominant one is the loss of all concern, the feeling that all is completely well with one, peace, harmony, the desire to be, despite the fact that external circumstances remain the same. Secondly, “there is the sensation of perceiving previously unknown truths.” Finally, “a third peculiarity of the state of certainty is the objective change that the world seems to undergo frequently”, due to which “a new, fresh aspect embellishes each object”.», p. 185. See also: James, William. The varieties of religious experience.“ Lectures IV and V. The religion of a sound mind”, “ Lecture VIII. The divided self and its process of unification”. ↑
This is the case from S. T. Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, C. Baudelaire, to A. Huxley, A. Artaud, K. Kesey, etc. See: Haining, Peter. The Hashish Club. The drug in literature. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. ↑
In writing, as I have pointed out, what matters is the intentionality of the writer. If they think, even for a second, that their diary will reach posterity, or as textual material destined to be shared with at least one person, the diary is invalidated as private and enters the public sphere. If written as a confession towards himself, without thinking that someone will see that writing one day, with absolute honesty, it will not only be the first seed for a quality literary text, but its author will experience authentic catharsis. Strangely, and logically, the exception is Kafka. His Diary is intimate, it is public, it is autobiography, memory, letter, diatribe, philosophical reflection, confession, literary workshop, chronology; it is a blank page. ↑
Chartier, Op. cit., p. 29. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Chapter 2

Opening words