Crime narrative topology

Opening words

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant authors related to this essay:

Germán Gaviria Álvarez

Juanita
Juanito

Index

Opening words

Part One. Genre, intention, fusion

1. Genre

2. Discussion: gender, form, creativity

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

4. Intentions

4.1 Zero intent

4.2 First intention

4.3 Second intention

4.4 Third intention

4.5 Fourth Intention

5. Fusion

Part Two. Origins

1. Almost a starting point

2. From Dime novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to Noir (Criminal)

Part Third. Understanding the Criminal

1. Thinking the act of writing

2. From Dime Novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to the noir (criminal) genre

4. Coda

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Part One

Genre, intention, fusion

4. Intentions

When the writer stands before the blank page, lifted up by the beautiful or terrible wings of the muses,⁹² in reality it is not that it floats in any evanescent or auric air, much less in any superior ether. He is just a common being, nothing special, as earthly as any other, and he has various intentions.

4.1 Zero intent

Writing is the starting point. It demands from the writer the minimum desirable absolute value: writing a perfect text, a thousand times better than the previous one (Kierkegaardine repetition, Aristotelian principle of perfection). Well, the manuscript that begins to be, and by being it, and not book finished ab obo, is by principle an unfinished writing, susceptible to countless modifications. Chartier says:

[…] the very form of the handwritten book, open to corrections, deletions and additions at all stages of manufacture, from composition to copying, from copying to binding, allows writing at many times […] or for many hands […] (2009, p. 12)

And Fichte, referring to intellectual property, understands it as a creative process:

[…] each textual form has its own course of ideas, its unique way of forming concepts and linking them together… As pure ideas without sensible images not only cannot be thought of, much less presented to others, it is necessary that every writer gives his or her thoughts a certain form, and you cannot give them any other than your own, because there are no other […]⁹³

Well, there will always be a new or previous text that you now want to write or re‒write to fully shape the image, the idea that the writer obsessively carries within himself;⁹⁴ a text completely different from what has already been done, even though it is part of a whole. This whole is the narrative universe of the writer. It is the inner universe fed by an infinity of themes that mature, that are transformed throughout life; themes that overlap, or that constitute an antinomy. Two sides of a coin. A thesis and its antithesis. A weight and its counterweight. Like life/death. Hate/revenge. Violence/calm. Pain/pleasure. Sadness/happiness. So there are issues that are imposed, because they submit to the writer, as well as the fate of the main character or characters.

Given that Romeo and Juliet is based on a story by Mateo Bandello, only Shakespeare could make it what it is. I mean, Shakespeare rewrote Bandello’s short story, used an already given form to give the world something new. Despite what Faulkner thinks about the invariability of literary themes throughout history: “since there is nothing new to be said: Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since” (Stein, op. cit.), no-one, only he, Faulkner, was able to give another dimension to the issue of sexual tension, for example. Well, writing the same stories does not mean writing the identical stories. Far from it, neither in the same way (point of view), nor with the same language (style), nor using the same form (structure, characters), nor giving the same meaning. When the artist incorporates at least some of these elements, his work immediately becomes not only a plagiarism, but second or third rate one.

In the history of literary creation, what matters is the micro-historical, social context in which a story begins to unfold that is desperate to be told. Bliss, expressed, materialised on paper. The theme of the young girl confronting her sexuality and the sexuality of the man has been written about, in literary fiction, perhaps since the time of Helena’s abduction in The Iliad; in Metamorphosis, of Ovid, an example of Latin literature, as well as in chivalric novels; In Shakespeare; in the works of the Marquis de Sade; in Bataille and A. Nin; in Nabokov and E. Atwood, and a long etcetera. Themes, like language and writer, evolve throughout the story. The theme of the young girl (17 years old) who, in the kidnapping, subjugation and rape by means of an ear of corn, confronts masculine sexuality in at least three antagonistic ways,⁹⁵ is a new approach by Faulkner (Sanctuary). I am not sure that Faulkner was aware of the meaning and scope of these themes (sexual desire, rape, infatuation, masochistic fear, sexual projection). There is also no evidence to prove it. Faulkner liked to pass for the uneducated; he was not at all. Instead, I am sure he was a judicious reader of the Bible, and of Shakespeare. I don’t know if it was from the Marquis de Sade. I doubt it. I think he would have been disgusted to read it. Rather, one would think that he was a great reader of Greek tragedy. Regarding this, André Malraux said of Faulkner’s work that “It is the irruption of the Greek tragedy in the detective novel”. Then he added: “If Lawrence gets wrapped up in sexuality, Faulkner gets caught up in the irredeemable.”⁹⁶ However, the way he worked on this theme is unique, unrepeatable. If each text demands its own universe, it means that it makes its own fusions. Each text is autonomous. If you don’t have the individual, unique stamp of the artist, your creativity has been undermined. No creation is pure in its origin. It’s impossible for it to be. Each writer, in different ways, has been influenced by someone they admire.⁹⁷ The greater the volume of influences received, first from one’s own culture, and then from other cultures, the more there is greater sedimentation, greater creative density.

The principle of differentiation is a biological, cultural and technological conquest of the human species. Beyond the style, it is the depth, the sensitivity and the unrepeatability of the poietic moment of how the logos works, what makes a story can only be imagined and written by a special artist, for that person, at a given time in his life, in certain circumstances. It is in the singularity, in the exceptional of the poiesis/logos fusion in which perfection is sought —without ever being able to find it—⁹⁸ in which creativity enters to order the Kháos, to give rise to a new form: a different form, differentiated from what exists.⁹⁹

The ‘zero’ condition of writing is, then, by demanding the minimum absolute value, to write: to write a ‘perfect’ text, whatever it is, a thousand times better than the previous one (Kierkegaardine repetition, Aristotelian principle of perfection, creative principle in the style of Flaubert). There are, therefore, other intentions, not of an absolute order, but necessary, which must likewise be sufficient, like that from which it is impossible to evade.

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 4 footnotes

Catharsis, Cf. Aristotle. Poetic, pp. 373 ‒ 375, §§ 28 ‒ 31. ↑
Quoted by Chartier, Op. cit., 2009, p.34. ↑
Faulkner says in the interview: “In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist.” (Stein, op. cit.). ↑
In Temple Drake’s case, it’s not Stockholm Syndrome. She’s not in love with Gowan to begin with, they’ve just had sex ‘companionate marriage’ (Sanctuary,p. 189), which is a form of promiscuity. Nor does she fall in love with Popeye, the kidnapper ‒ the doubly lascivious, brutal rapist, who inspires fear and disgust in her, rather than emotional dependence. Temple projects violence and the claim of her violated sexuality onto Red. Temple desires Red in an impetuous, passionate way. She falls in love with Red, who in the end is killed by Popeye. ↑
Quoted by Lemaitre, Pierre. Passionate dictionary of black novels. Barcelona: Salamander, 2022,s.v. ↑
Do not confuse the conscious use of the achievements of other artists, with the unconscious influence, non-plagiarism exerted by one artist on another. As we have seen, for example, Coetzee admits the influence, occasionally and in much of his work, of Kafka in Life and Times of Michael K. Dostoevsky’s influence is evident in The Petersburg Master. From Daniel Defoe in Foe. From Tolstoy in the trilogy Scenes from a provincial life. Hammett admitted the influence of Carroll John Daly, who had published, inThe Black Mask, in June 1923, the story Knights of the Open Palm in which, with his character, Rice William, he outlined the prototype of the hardboiled. In turn, Chandler admitted the influence of Hammett, as well as the English police officer. Like every artist, the writer elaborates the new from the knowledge of his predecessors and his work. Umberto Eco metaphorically called these predecessors, these works, “the shoulders of the giants” on which the artist climbs to look beyond. ↑
Says E. Zola, about Flaubert: “When he resolutely began to write, he began by writing very quickly a piece, a whole episode, five or six pages at the most, sometimes, when [he] couldn’t think of a word, in order to not be distracted, he left her blank. Then he would go back to the piece written that way, and then he would spend two or three weeks, sometimes more, passionately working on those five or six pages. I wanted them to be perfect, and I can assure you that achieving that perfection was very uncomfortable.” (Zola, p. 92). Pindar says, according to the quote of A. Camus inThe myth of Sisyphus: “Do not toil, my soul, for an immortal life, but exhaust the scope of the possible.” Exhausting the scope of the possible, for a writer is not necessarily addressing the philosophical meaning of suicide. It is trying to go, each time beyond your creative possibilities. ↑
Faulkner writes: “That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide.” (Stein, p. 89). ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Chapter 4 – Part 1

Opening words