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. Considering the act of writing

2. The three ways of the criminal story

3. Reflecting on evil in the criminal

4. Coda

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Third Part

Understanding of the criminal

1. Considering the act of writing

Let’s go back to one of the many creative principles of literary narrative. The ‘zero’ intent of the writer is to write a text that seeks artistic perfection and the maximum expression of a ‘something’ that happens inside the writer. A ‘something’ (emotions, feelings, ideas, thoughts, etc.) that yes, and only yes, can be expressed through a special, unique type of writing, unique in its macro and micro grammatical structure. Well, in those macro and micro grammatical structures is where that ‘something’ takes shape and becomes a story, in relation to facts that will be the diegetic unique matter, not imitated, that will finally reach the reader. The diegetic matter is a complex fabric of situations, characters, settings, facts, descriptions, linguistic, semantic uses, which is slowly elaborated over a period of time: a few hours, a day, days, weeks, months, years, etc.¹⁸⁷ until reaching the precise point at which the exhausted and satisfied writer says: ‘not one more comma, I have fulfilled as a good scribe, with everything that has been required to be the story that came to me to be written’. This elaboration takes place thanks to a rapture, an illumination, an epiphany; by impulse, by perseverance, by inspiration ‒according to the case of the writer‒, which is prolonged, sustained, deepened or decayed as time goes by, as sentences, paragraphs, chapters are added one by one, etc. in a continuous line. The language through which the composition of each sentence takes place, and in the composition of each sentence, of each paragraph and chapter, has been elaborated over time, from the times that I have just pointed out. It is in this continuous line where the invention, by the writer, of a style to link, hide or eliminate words carried by a tone, by a rhythm (the inner music of the writer); that is to say, it is in that continuous line of language where the own grammar that each story brings with it materialises.

This diegesis has little or nothing to do with manual grammar. It is one thing to redact well ‒anyone trained in grammar does it‒, and another to write well.

Hence, the story, from the first word that materialises on the blank paper (physical, virtual), immediately abandons all grammatology, all desire to write. The writer does not redact. Redacting is ‘reducing’. The writer does not submit, does not reduce to idiomatic formulas what he wants to write. He does not reduce writing to a ‘certain state’ (Corominas) of given grammatical ordering, since all established grammar serves to order, according to that logic of language, messages that are easily decipherable, common, and clear to the vast majority of people. It works in only one direction, its univocal sense. Spanish grammar is an expert system that forces containment, constraint. To the pure logic of the propositional to achieve a syntax, a certain sense that conforms to a given logic. By reducing writing to a certain state, the free associations of words are confined and new meanings, new functions are not opened. New logic. The poietic capacity of the language is packaged in a closed system, which constrains it to the point of destroying its autonomy. Then the writing becomes predictable, stiff, obtuse. It is a swarm of set phrases, commonplaces, hackneyed logic. It is plagued by lexicographical, syntactic, stiffening bars, which impoverish the language, since they restrict kinship relationships (Wittgenstein, p. 225 and ss.) with other forms of language.

On the other hand, language can be promiscuous, but not be absolutely free, as the human can not be in an absolute way. If it were, in the end the human would have to abjure not only all of his culture, but also irrevocably divest himself of language, and live outside the world and language. If the language were totally free, it would result in gibberish, in the alienated speech of the non-literate , since it abounds in literature, but of an aphasia of real life. Nor does the creative writer – though he can and has done so to some extent – liberate language to such an extent that he develops a private grammar. A grammar of this nature would only make sense to the person who issued it, for it would not establish, as Wittgenstein says, any kinship relationship with other communicative forms, not even in their most complex, most related, deepest possibilities.¹⁸⁸ Hence, “we could call sounds that no one else understands «private language» (sic) but I seem to understand’.¹⁸⁹ The language, the grammar of the writer, as well as its fields of superficial and deep meaning, by definition, have to be shared to enjoy the honey and bile of kinship.

The writer, at the moment of creating through his own grammar, expands the realm of the countless logics of the language.

Since creative writing does not reduce language, it does not restrain language. It does exactly the opposite: it unfolds it.

In creative grammar, language searches for meanings, unsuspected paths; paths that only existed in a potentiality. In no way is it ‘discovered’, in no sense, since the creative path does not pre‒exist. For to ‘discover’ is to find what was unknown or lost; that is, what already existed. What was suspended as a creative power ‒to which the concept of containment was inherent‒, is realised. The paths are extracted and put on the blank page by the writer through the act of writing. He fixes them. The writing opens, vibrating in a multiplicity of senses, giving shape to the text which is an exceptional event. For that very reason it is beautiful, because it is born from the human interior. The writer, through writing, seeks to concentrate his inner density in an increasingly free text. Freedom and beauty are synonymous human creations. Both words are also synonymous with the word ‘stripping’, ‘undressing’, taking off what is not its own, or what covers the interiority with a veil. To ‘unveil’ is to know, to release, to free oneself of something. Not giving in to the dullness imposed by the concept, the given form, but rather ‘to be without sleeping’, watching, keeping vigil; being attentive, focused on extracting from yourself. Writing is opening, it is liberation, khartarsis, a purge, a purification, to enter into the open. Hence the need to write, each time, a text a thousand times better than the previous one (Kierkegaardian repetition, Aristotelian principle of perfection). For the manuscript, being handwritten, and not book-finished, ab ovo, delivers something to the writer who, while writing, reading, picks up that ‘something’ that has been transformed by the word.

As a matter of principle ‒since the human being is fallible, it is unfinished‒, each narrative implies an incomplete writing, although it may appear otherwise. It doesn’t matter what he does or how long the artist works, whether a few hours in a minimal text, or a lifetime in a culminating, highly elaborated text. And yet the text will always be imperfect. There also lies the beauty, and the essence, of the creative act, since it is a forever imperfect writing.¹⁹⁰

Reading/writing is a simultaneous and biunivocal act. Reading is ‘choosing’. To speak originally means, ‘to collect’.¹⁹¹ What is it that the writer ‘chooses’ and simultaneously ‘collects’ when he is in front of the page that he waits for while the writing takes place? The verbalized expression, turned into a story, of its internal powers, of its unique and complex world. That product ‒how else could we call that story that emerged almost liquid from the inner universe of the writer?‒; that product (thing produced, made), let’s say, that has dictated its own rules. We must remember this: he has chosen and collected the best of the writer’s heritage. Now the text is there, and it is capable of being perfected, yes and only yes, by the writer. Only the writer knows what it is that he wants to express, and what he wants to hide on the blank page. If for the painter, as Kandinsky affirms, white is a non-color, a non-sound that “sounds like a sound that can suddenly be understood”, for the writer the page that waits for him is the non-sound in which he hides, just like silence. That is why, following Kandinsky, there is never a definitive closure of the process. That is why it is imperfect.¹⁹²

In the same way that the painter hides the white of the canvas with paint, for the writer, writing is also an act of concealment. What is the writer hiding if writing is the maximum openness, and, at the same time, the maximum non-sound; what for him is so obvious that the reader can infer it?

The act of writing, for being arduous, for being persistent, because it is one of the most intimate, purest experiences of the human being, is beautiful. Mutatis mutandis; it is clear then that everything beautiful is not perfect. That perfection does not exist. How could its existence be possible? The appearance of perfection achieved by the artist is a form of beauty. Well, it is a pure experience, carried away, thought from the present, made from the past, elaborated for the future. In the factum loquendi, the pure experience of language born in intimacy, is when a new narrative takes place. A content that did not exist beforehand, which will be a new matter in the world that constitutes us, that surrounds us. This new matter is what enriches the world, since it provides it with other narratives, other senses; without interiority transmuted into ‘something’, without some ordering of the kháos, without poietic thought. In short, without art, the world is a desert where there is no freedom at all; no trace of dignity, no display of human sensitivity or intelligence. A world of mere commerce, of mere consumption. Of mere production and performance of repeated forms to the point of imbecility. Of forms (ideas, thoughts, music, texts, feelings, emotions) recycled, worn out, meaningless.

As all writing is a bidirectional organic system, it is dialogic. It develops kinship relationships definitely, even at the most unsuspected textual levels. It establishes dialogues between the author and his work; between the work and the reader; between the work and other works, and between the author, his works and intimate freedom. It is an affirmation of the different, from that which creates a variety, an infinity of unique content. It is the differentiated, exceptional narratives that are capable of throwing into the world not only new logic, but also of extracting from it new depths of the human. All these new forms are forms torn from kháos.

Creativity, writing, are deployments of a phenomenology of the beautiful, as something imperfect. The beautiful is what has been freed from all concepts.

Footnotes

Opening words footnotes

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

Part 3. Chapter 1 footnotes

Kafka wrote “The Condemnation” overnight, from September 22 to 23, 1912, from 11 pm to 5 am: 6 hours. Although it is not clear when exactly Goethe started working on Faustus, it is believed that it was between 1772 ‒ 1775, and its last revision was in 1832, the year of the author’s death, about 60 years later. Examples of such extremes are many. ↑
Op. cit., Wittgenstein, p.225 y ss. ↑
Op. cit., Wittgenstein, p 359, § 269. ↑
“I am not unaware that extremely sublime geniuses are not usually very pure, because what is refined so much soon converges to the coarse, and it is necessary, as in great opulence, that there be some waste on one side or the other; but it must also be noted that humble and medium wits, just as Hipea face danger or aspire to elevate themselves, it is natural that they more frequently avoid small oversights; and that is why the great talents are in danger because of their high flight.” Cf. On the sublime, Pseudo‒Longinus. Buenos Aires: Printing of May, 1863, pp. 132‒133. ↑
Cf. Agamben, G. The fire and the story. Madrid: Sixth Floor, 2016, p.85. ↑
Kandinsky, W. Of the spiritual in art. Mexico: Premia S.A., 1989, p.73. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Part 3. Chapter 1

Opening words