Crime narrative topology – Chapter 3

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.

Keywords : genre | subgenre | creativity | literary creativity | text | diegesis | writing style | novel | crime fiction | noir novel | detective novel | evil in literature | crime | justice | criminal law

Crime narrative topology

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

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

When I use the word ‘merge’, I mean that the author, consciously/unconsciously ‒how could both states not be simultaneous?‒⁶⁷ has melted two or more subgenres with realistic intention: noir, police, hardboiled, thriller, suspense, mystery, problem novel, black chronicle, espionage, etc.⁶⁸, to write a story whose axis is evil, the intentionally criminal. I emphasise the word ‘intention’ with the meaning of purpose, of thought dictated by the will to carry out an end. The lexical components of intention are: the prefix in: into; tentus: stretched, extended, unfolded; the suffix ‒tion: action, effect. These components, in turn, are related to the inputs: instinct, caution, which by themselves form a creative pairing. 

When written, the ‘instinct/cautiousness’ binomial unfolds. 

As the emotion flows, absolute control of the internalised forms is taken. For a relationship of tension unfolds between the poiesis and the logos who fight for being living matter; to become created in space/time, new in the space/time of the world. In this deployment are found the emotion, the téchnē and the discourse that merge to give an account and reason for things using the text as a means of expression. Otherwise, these elements would destroy the writer. They would plunge him into madness, into insanity. The Kháos interior has to become at all costs written text. It concerns itself with the story that he wandered around eager to find a place for himself outside of the artist, as if she were the crazy woman from the neighbourhood looking for a home. For before it had no place, the text lacked “lucus a non lucendo”, to add another meaning to what Agamben affirms in his text.⁶⁹ He wandered feverishly through a dark, closed forest, which is also a locus, a place. This locus/lucus is the illuminated sheet of paper that icily waits to be filled by the text, a text that boils feverishly inside the artist, and seeks to be more. It is the transformation of what the artist has internalized, made his own, what remains on paper. Physical paper, virtual paper that can then be printed on a machine with a screen. It is the mediation of the physical sheet, palpable by anyone. That which has not been internalised, transformed, is not re‒transformed, redone on paper. Hence, in the unfolding of the poiético and of the logos strict control is exercised by the writer, who, in those fleeting moments of creativity, is god, the lord and master of the story, of everything that happens in it. And he is master of himself, of the powers that bubble up within himself. With regard to what each text expresses in an irreducible, singular, unrepeatable way, which is the inalienable property of the writer, Diderot says: 

quel est le bien qui puisse appartenir à un homme, si un ouvrage d’esprit, le fruit unique de son éducation, de ses études, de ses veilles, de son temps, de ses recherches, de ses observations; si les plus belles heures, les plus beaux moments de sa vie; si ses propres pensées, les sentiments de son coeur, la portion de lui‐même la plus précieuse, celle qui ne périt point, celle qui l’immortalise, ne lui appartient pas ? Quelle comparaison entre l’homme, la substance même de l’homme, son âme, et le champ, le pré, l’arbre ou la vigne que la nature offrait dans le commencement également à tous, et que le particulier ne s’est approprié que par la culture, le premier moyen légitime de possession?⁷⁰

Although creative writing is trapped in its materialisation as a technology, this materialisation is overcome by its desire for a deep understanding of human history, of what is most precious in man, of what does not die, of what immortalises him (la plus précieuse, celle qui ne périt point, celle qui l’immortalise). Writing is an act in which the person who carries it out finds himself, to learn from himself, in the context of the human universe, without any psychologicalism, without any divine mediation; not by some chemical inducer.⁷¹ There he finds his otherness to free it, to return to his natural, comfortable, serene being. It has already illuminated part of the past life, of the present, of the future; or a fusion of one of those two, of the three. The Liberation. The comprehension of something that was inside and struggled to be material writing. It is written (almost always) with the hands that create coherence, not with the monstrous, crazed legs of Gregor Samsa. Kafka, the quintessential storyteller, knew this without a doubt. That’s why he had expelled himself from society. That’s why the bug in The Transformation is a symbol of the mental insanity that occurs when it can’t be written.⁷² It is written in order to see the interiority clearly. So be it for short periods. Lapses that quickly escape if they are not rapidly fixed on the sheet. Lapses of brightness. Structural transparency (of a non-academic, creative grammar) is sought in writing: the exact choice of each word, of each sign, of each tone, of each rhythm. Human love consists of comfort with one another. Love is the simplification of the complex forms of mutual knowledge to deepen, to enjoy it in a simple, natural way. With serenity. To return to the platonic meaning of love: the fusion of one in the other. That only occurs, if between one and the other there is their own, unique grammar, a structural transparency. Art, in the identical sense of love, also consists in making the complex seem natural, the unintelligible, which cannot be known. 

To unfold is to remove the folds; to smoothen, to clarify, to make clear what was obscure or less intelligible (Drae). The artist does it through a story that does not explain, that does not justify itself, that does not ask permission from anyone. It imposes itself. It narrates facts. It doesn’t describe in extensu, no more than necessary, it acts. It downloads luminosity in each word, which must be the most transparent in the language, not gibberish. Without gratuitous cultism, gimmicky. The extensive use of language is refined to its essence in the exercise of writing. Even if it is a language extracted from the underworld, from the street, coarse, harsh, infamous, criminal. Ordinary. For example: “[Snopes] looked up at Horace from his full height, huge, with his air of a half-baked pie.”⁷³  Or raising a luminous image that becomes oppressive, primal, almost metaphysical: [the spring] “It was surrounded by a thick vegetation of reeds and heather, of cypresses and rubber trees where the sunlight, without visible origin, lay, broken in a thousand reflections.”⁷⁴ That rare light, with no apparent material origin, breaks repeatedly at every moment of the novel. 

It works in the same way as alcohols are distilled, over and over and over again, until you find the right expression, even if it’s a crude simile like half-cooked empanada. Raw, disgusting, bloody. Or until reaching some degree of purity, of expressive perfection. Typical of the region, of the time: the sunlight, without visible origin, lay, broken into a thousand reflections.⁷⁵ It is what makes a writer, a time, unique, unrepeatable, singular. Byung ‒ Chul Han is wrong when he says. “It is not [the] singularities that could present a joint resistance to the global”,⁷⁶  Well, it happens exactly the other way around. It is precisely thanks to the exceptional artistic production, singular, the unrepeatable, non-imitative, which stands up to the banal, to filth, to the morality of the situation, to the criminal, to institutionalised evil. To the global‒universal. To the general ordinariness. To the uncritical/equalizing consensus. 

From the beginning of the story ‒when the story has appropriated the refined language it needs to express itself‒, the artist does not leave the characters to their will, he guides them. He takes them by the hand through a world extracted from reality, now re‒elaborated with words that in turn elaborate symbols. Words that unfold in enormous semantic expanses. The artist leads his characters cautiously, instinctively and calculated at the same time, through that world. Until they can walk, so be it on p.275, by themselves.⁷⁷ The three-dimensional space (topos) through which the characters move is usually a synthesis of the topos through which the writer moves in everyday, common life, to which is added one more dimension: time. And to these four dimensions, a fifth is added: fictionalisation: the fictional world created in the story. All extracted from the daily world of the writer. And that common world, from day to day, transformed into a diegesis, becomes a synthesis of its territory. Well, it is also the fictitious territory in which lives each of the characters. Primo Levi says to Philip Roth about writing his novel If not now, when?: “: […] I had the impression (almost hallucinatory) that my characters were alive, around me, behind my back, spontaneously suggesting their feats and their dialogues” (Roth. p. 24). 

The topos in Odyssey is an imaginary topos of the collective imaginary of the ancient world. It is an imaginary of mythical origin based on a mythical cartography. In the key of a fabulous trip. And in a deeply metaphysical sense. From there derives in the West the notion of travel through legendary territories, and of travel as an experience open to the imaginary, and by contiguity, to the ontological.⁷⁸ In Ulysses of Joyce ‒is the first modern reworking of an Odyssey. What comes to my mind is the topos imaginary of a man as a symbol of the open journey in a factual, mappable, real territory (Dublin), not a fable, not a legend. Open to the open in man. Known, inch by inch, by local readers of the time. But it is a journey that has no ending, which is open, experiential, which avoids what is ‘given’ by rationalist thought (positivist of the time), to make sense of the endless journey in search of otherness. Well, it is a trip as an experience with the other, with what is already given, to enter the world of everyday life, and of what has never been imagined before. The open experience of the trip in Ulysses, also leads to the limits of the inner world of its diegesis. That is framed in the memory of a day that will never disappear, as if there were never going to be an end. Or as if it were always the same day, but different. Each new reader, and each reader who remembers the book, parts of it, or some character, releases the scent of time contained in the writing of the story and transforms it into some form of memory. Hence, this novel returns, some 100 years later, as a mythical imaginary, as something that remains. 

The topos in Sanctuary, rather than an imaginary place, is a synthesis of the Mississippi of the second half of the 1920s, since Yoknapatawpha County only exists in Faulkner’s mind as a symbol at the service of diegesis; an imaginary place that acquires meaning as topos when each character acts, moves, moves, lives. It is not a purposely painted naturalistic setting in which the characters act, drink alcohol or smoke a cigarette. It works the other way around: if the character intervenes, the topos becomes symbolic, and attains a factual value. It is this value that is fixed in our memory, making us believe that such a county (Yoknapatawpha) exists. In Red Harvest, the topos is the commutation of the word ‘Personville’, which itself is Hammett’s invention. From the beginning to the end of the novel, Personville and Poisonville are interchangeable; they are a mathematical equality. However, Poison broadens the semantic field of Person. The word ‘person’ is interchanged with the word ‘poison’, an entity that can cause physical damage, moral damage, social damage. This is a topological/ontological permutation. The person, as such, degrades in the same way as the city they inhabit. Evil is a poison that infects the streets, as well as the most seasoned people who fight crime to the point of making them go above their ethical and moral values. The detective says: “It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.” Then later: “That’s what I’ve been telling you. I’m going blood ̶simple.”⁷⁹ It is the imaginary topos of a criminal óntos (όντoς) where there is room for all kinds of crimes. In Western literature, Poisonville is the first archetype of the imagined topos that serves as a canon ‒canon, ‘stem’, ‘rule’, ‘norm’, as a measure of perfect characteristics‒, for the city of crime⁸⁰ of the second and third industrial revolutions of the 20th century, as well as the 4.0 revolution of the 21st century. As criminality is in collusion with established legality, Hammett sows the literary seed to understand evil not in tension with good in a Manichean manner. Nor like the good/bad binomial as a system, a binomial that will operate extensively, definitively intense in Western realist literature since the 1920s. There no evil is presented as anomie,⁸¹ in Durkheim’s sense. The evil in Red Harvest is neither an abstract entity nor a monster, in the form of a black spot that roams the streets. It just emerges from under the skin of each individual as if they had always struggled to get out and express themselves in a violent way. In Western culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction between good and evil. It is the Kantian moral subject (because he has an intellectual and moral disposition) who is the judge and the accused simultaneously, who is forced to follow a moral order as if it were imposed by another person.⁸² Hammett, as well as Faulkner, perhaps without knowing it, say in their novels that this is not so. Evil nests inside the person, in his deep psyche. A psyche that, although inherent to each person, is expressed in different ways, according to each social structure. 

Living with evil 

Evil is an essential part, it is constitutive of society, of the social pact. It is irreducible, ineradicable of the institutionality. Of the system. Of daily life in any society. What’s more, the evil is necessary to legitimise the social order based on civil rights (Cf. Agamben, Exception status). In individual liberties. A society in which the enemy (evil) does not exist would be a non-human society, devoid of any political sense (origin of the law, origin of the social order) as defined by Schmitt. A society in which human passions (drives, animals) do not exist, is an impossible society. Desire, passions, can only be controlled. In addition, as Beccaria points out, “What would we be reduced to if we had to prohibit everything that could lead to crime? It would be necessary to deprive man of the use of his senses.”⁸³ The most that human beings can aspire to is an education of the senses, a deep understanding of their animal instincts, which can be irrepressible, as well as their psyche, which should not go unnoticed, as any animal instinctively would, since in man it would become pernicious. 

Krishna says to Arjuna in “Canto III, Yoga of action”: 

It is the desire, it is the frenzy born of the passionate quality, voracious and extremely harmful. Behold, Arjuna, the enemy of man here on earth. 

And later: 

It has been said that the senses are powerful; but more powerful than they are is thought; superior to thought is intelligence, and even superior to intelligence is the desire. 

Knowing, then, that the desire is more powerful than intelligence, repress the self by means of the Self, O mighty-armed thou, and slay that relentless enemy, which appears in the form of desire and is so difficult to access [ hard to subdue].⁸⁴

A society in which the human being has forever overcome his animality, his irrational world (passionate, desiring), becomes a society without human laws, without a social pact. A society that is beyond the human, that perhaps is of divine order, if such could take place, is, for us today, an impossible society. “S’il n’existait point d’animaux, la nature de l’homme serait encore plus incomprensible”, says the Count de Buffon.⁸⁵

In the violent practices (that today we describe as criminal) of primitive society, they went from their need to wage war to build and affirm their identity and independence as a people,⁸⁶ to be a political, religious fact, of certain individuals or of small organised groups within the community. 

Regarding aggressive practices in a community, Clastres expands: 

Aggression as behavior ‒that is, the use of violence‒ refers to humanity as a species: it turns out to be coextensive with it. Ultimately, in accordance with said zoological property of the human species, violence is identified as an irreducible fact, as a fact natural that sinks its roots in the biological being of man (p. 18). 

As it happened until the Enlightenment, crime was understood from a theistic structure, which in turn developed a moralistic structure. Then, from the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, it ceased to be a closed system centred on kinship and/or neighbourhood relationships (the Mafia understood in the Italian style ‒without being exclusive to it‒, and in the Colombian style) in which there was room to differentiate the good from the bad. This Mafia structure has been breaking down since the 1990s. Blood ties, hermetic group codes, loyalty, political ends, and religious principles no longer count.⁸⁷ “In yesterday’s brothers he suddenly saw [a] a new enemy.”⁸⁸ In the 21st century, crime is not a criminal act, in the sense that it is not a confrontation with the social, legal, institutional order. Constitutional. In fact, the institutionality acts not to maintain a social balance, not to prevail against evil and reduce it to its minimum expression. Today, when we negotiate with the protagonists of evil we suffer loss when we legitimise them as valid actors. That valid actor in front of the establishment is in a position to negotiate. It is not a fight between good and evil, between anomie and the law. That has disappeared; it was a thing of past centuries. It is a legitimisation of the criminal act that is no longer classified as immoral. Acting criminally is part of social life. Crime today is a job like any other that must yield economic benefits. This is the crime of the 21st century in Colombia. At whatever price, above whosoever. 

“A world where you can put a price on everything and where everything has to make a profit is obscene,” says Byung ‒ Chul Han.⁸⁹

But, more than obscene, it is perverse; it is destructive that all must provide an economic gain, it is understood. Obscenity refers to offence, to modesty, to Durkheim’s anomie. To a compensatory system in the sphere of ethics, of morality. To what can be forgotten, ignored, by accepting apologies. Or, sometimes, when an economic figure is accepted to compensate the offence. Like when one breaks an item without intention and must replace it. Like when one insults or destroys objects by not being able to control emotions. Like when one accidentally omits what they have done. Instead, it perversely, intentionally causes harm. The perverse has the character of irremediable moral, physical or mental damage. Irreparable. Irreversible. The damage is done. It is not excusable, it is not fixable with money. Whoever causes evil on purpose knows what he does. He uses some principle of rationality: from the most elementary to the most sophisticated. Like when he murders, mutilates, kidnaps, rapes, psychologically manipulates in a premeditated way. Like when someone knowingly steals or destroys something. As when the word is used to degrade, enslave, humiliate or expel. It is in the sphere of social sanction (penalisation) that punishment must take place, not in the individual on whom the evil has been exerted on purpose. 

We live in a world in which, given the animal/human nature of the human being, given the nature of the Law derived from such nature; the Law, which is an invention of man to live with his fellow men, more or less in peace. And given the conferred structure (from lat., to conferre, ‘take along with’) by this Law to the system (the Law agreed, written, socialised and accepted by a majority, is subsequent to the origin of human societies), it is impossible to destroy or eradicate the evil. Evil cannot be relegated forever, according to the original theistic and Christian myths, to any infernal realm. Nor, as Pascal wanted, “Deux lois suffisantes pour régler toute la République chrétienne [nor of any religious republic], mieux que toutes les lois politiques. même sens”⁹⁰, because if these laws were enough, we would have to deny the animal nature, “concupiscent” (lat. lustfully, to desire ardently; blindly, savagely, predatorily, I add) of man. However, we have to accept the truth that Pascal states in his empirical rationality: 

Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement l’un l’autre. On s’est servi comme on a pu de la concupiscence pour la faire servir au bien public. Mais ce n’est que feindre et une fausse image de la charité, car au fond ce n’est que haine. 

On a fondé et tiré de la concupiscence des règles admirables de police, de morale et de justice. Mais dans le fond, ce vilain fond de l’homme, ce figmentum malum n’est que couvert. Il n’est pas ôté.⁹¹

We live in a new rationality in which the good/bad dichotomy has been replaced by the new frontiers of the human in conflict with its irrationality. As you can see, Pascal admits that we have to live with evil. Concupiscence is concealed by false charity. That ‘figmentum malum is just disguised. It is not suppressed. As it is not possible to ‘suppress’ but to restrain, rationalise, hide the animality of the human being using the imagination.

Footnotes

Opening words footnotes

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

Chapter 3 footnotes

67. It is not simply about ‘deciding’ which narrative subgenre, of those mentioned above, suits the writer best. Decide, from Lat .decīdêre ‘cut, decide, resolve’ (Corominas). The writer, doesn’t ‘decide’, doesn’t ‘cut’, does not skew or rip any genre, or any sub, subgenre. The writer integrates, weaves, interweaves. As he writes, all his interiority is concentrated in the tips of his fingers. “Everything happened between the hand and the page,” muses a tormented Beckett. See: Meetings with Samuel Beckett 1906 ‒ 2006, centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett,pp. 24 ‒25. Whoever writes solves ‘on the fly’, in the best sense of the solvitur ambulando, attributed to Saint Augustine of Hipona. Perhaps one writer in 10,000 ‒this is one more of the various exceptions‒ can write a work without repeating the line over and over again in search of perfection, without reworking anything. Beckett seems (how can one not trust an expert fictionaliser, overwhelmed, muttering, who claims to have a ‘murdered being inside’?) to be among those exceptions. In the grey notebook with rustic pages, whose only written pages are those on the right, indeed, Charles Juliet, Beckett’s interlocutor, confirms it: “Indeed, the text has not been retouched.” See: Beckett, pp. 24 ‒ 25. There was no retouching of the automatic writing of the surrealists either; it was forbidden to do so. It is not by chance that only less than a handful of pages with artistic content remained. ↑

68. The vast majority of these so-called subgenres are vaguely, confusingly defined in narrative theory books and narratology dictionaries, such as the one cited here by Valles Calatrava and Álamo Felices. It is not advisable to look for the definitions of these genera in the Drae, for example. The Drae is an academic lexicographical work, not narratological. Being lexicographical ‒ academic, its philosophy is of a scientific order of the Spanish language. Creativity and generation of literary genres, as well as the grammar that is developed in literary works, have nothing to do with academia. It is the literary works, when the writer makes extensive use of the language like no other professional, of its jargon in general, that provide the raw material for updating dictionaries and manuals, not the other way around. When the writer in Spanish conditions the text, for example, to grammar, as happened in Colombia from the Colony until well into the 1980s, the works become impoverished. They sound false, lifeless. They look like cardboard stories. In the book The Lettered City (1984), published posthumously, Ángel Rama analyses the role of the educated in colonial and postcolonial power structures up to the first bourgeois revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century.

    It was famous in Colombia in the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, for example, the group of ‘grammaticalists’, furious defenders of the language, of unconditional respect (provincial, post-colonial) for the rules of the language and textbook literature. (The Colombian Academy of Language was founded in Bogotá in 1871, the postcolonial-minded writers paying tribute to Spain.) It is due to the way we use words, due to the ability they have or not to name or express something, both orally and in writing, that a word is born, remains, evolves or becomes obsolete. In its poetic art,Horace says: “Just as from one year to the next the forests change their leaves and the first ones fall, so the generation of the old words perishes and, like the young, those that have been born recently flourish and gain vigour.” And later: “[…] human works will perish, and the beauty and grace of words will last so much less. Numerous words that have already declined will be reborn, and those that are now esteemed will decline, if usage so wishes; for in their hands are the discretion, the law and the norm of speech.” (p. 387, § 60 ‒ 63; 388, § 70 ‒ 73). ↑

69. “A clarity that does not have its source in a shining light”. Etymologically speaking Lucus means clarity and designated the place of a free and clear forest, as opposed to the wooded space”. This is the footnote by Flavia Acosta and Edgardo Castro, translators of Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2016, p. 127. ↑
70. “What is the good that can belong to a man, if a work of the mind, the unique fruit of his upbringing, his studies, his vigils, his time, his research, his observations; if the most beautiful hours, if the best moments of your life; if his own thoughts, if the best feelings of his heart, the most precious part of himself that does not die, if what immortalizes him, does not belong to him? What a comparison between man, the very substance of man, his soul, and the field, meadow, tree or vine that nature also offered in principle to all, and that the particular has appropriated only through the culture, the first legitimate means of ownership! (The translation is mine).Cf. Diderot, D. Bookstore Trade Letter, p. 14. Retrieved [03. 04.2022] from: https://psychaanalyse.com/pdf/DIDEROT%20BIBLIO%20LETTRE%20SUR%20LE%20COMMERCE%20DES% 20LIVRES%2041%20PAGES.pdf ↑
71. Alcohol, psychoactive drugs in general. ↑
72. Although the opposite also happens. If the writer isolates himself completely, falls into madness as well, he would write ‘something’ of such proportions that it would be unreadable. ↑
73. Faulkner, W. Sanctuary.Bogotá: Orbis, 1983 [1931], p. 277. ↑
74. Faulkner, W. Op. cit., p. 7. ↑
75. Note the tone, rhythm and alliteration ‘‒light’, ‘‒lay’, ‘‒less’: “[…] in which broken sunlight lay sourceless.” (Sanctuary, p.15). ↑
76. Op. cit,p. 144. ↑
77. As Faulkner says in the interview: “[…] with me there is always a point in the book where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job—say somewhere about page 275. Of course I don’t know what would happen if I finished the book on page 274.” Véase Stein, op cit. ↑
78. For William James (see Supra Varieties of Religious Experience), The foundation of all knowledge and all action is in the individual’s openness to experience, which must be devoid of all prior rationalism. In the act of writing, the writer sheds all previous rationalism to enter a new rationality: that of the story that is born from a necessity of being. ↑
79. Hammett, D. Red harvest, p. 118. Retrieved [01.19.2022] from: ttps://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Hammett,%20Dashiell. On this page you will find the complete works of Hammett. ↑
80. It is necessary to take into account that although Poisonville (1927) is the archetypal city of evil in the Western industrialized world, the eastern plains and the Colombian Amazon are the archetype of the evil (tropical) forest that impels those who inhabit it to practise wrongdoing, in The Maelstrom (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera. It is very interesting to look at both publication dates of the novels, taking into account the geographical and cultural distances. What unites both novels in a surprising way is the way each writer rationalizes both topos, to elaborate, in an absolutely different way, a criminal report focused on evil. To expand these conceptions see my essay: “La Vorágine, a criminal story”, in: Rescues, wrecks and comments, At: germangaviriaalvarez.com. ↑
81. Cf. Baumer, Eric R. “Anomie.” Retrieved [04.10.2022] from: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo — 9780195396607/obo — 9780195396607 — 0006.xml#obo — 9780195396607 — 0006 — div2 — 0001. See also Agamben, Exception status,pp. 123 ‒ 136. ↑
82. Cf. Kant, Emmanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals .Madrid: Alliance, 2008, p 30 et seq. ↑
83. Beccaria, Caesar. Treaty of crimes and penalties. Madrid: The Figuerola Institute [1764], p. d., p. 81. ↑
84. Bhagavad Gîtâ. Translation of the Sanskrit by J. Roviralta Borrell. Barcelona: Type. From Carbonell and Esteva, 1910, pp. 97 ‒ 99. ↑
85. Quoted by Agamben,the open, On. cit., book epigraph. ↑
86. Cf. Clastres, Pierre. Archeology of violence: war in primitive societies. Buenos Aires: FCE, 2004 [1977]. ↑
87. See the “Introduction” of Mob Story,by Salvatore Lupo. Mexico: FDE, 2009 [1996]. ↑
88. Schmitt, C.Theory of the partisan. Madrid: Trotta, 2022, p. 94. ↑
89. Op. cit., p.154. ↑
90. Pascal, Blaise.Thoughts on religion and some other subjects.Recovered [05. 11. 2021] from: https://www.ub.uni‒freiburg.de/fileadmin/ub/referate/04/pascal/pensees.pdf, p. 65, §376-484. “Two laws are enough to regulate the entire Christian republic. And in the same sense.” The translation is mine. The two laws that Pascal refers to are love of God and love of neighbour. ↑
91. “By nature, all men hate one another. Concupiscence has been used in all ways for the benefit of the public domain. But this is mere appearance, a false image of charity; because, deep down, there is only hate. Men have based themselves on concupiscence, from which excellent rules of co-existence, morality and justice have been deduced. But deep down, that evil base of mankind, that figmentum malum is just disguised. It is not suppressed.” The translation is mine. Cf. Pascal, On. cit.., p. 41, § 210‒451, § 211‒453. A bad character, ‘demonic imagination’, ‘inner demon’, ‘bad background’, ‘bad sign’. Of these four translations, perhaps the ‘demonic imagination’ is the one that comes closest to our conception of evil as something that premeditates, that calculates, to cause harm to something or someone. ↑