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

2. The three ways of the criminal story

The essential intention of the crime story writer is to write a text whose backbone is evil expressed through crime. To be able to do so, he extracts narrative material (facts, events, anecdotes, emotions, feelings, gestures, languages, and an etcetera of imponderables) from direct experience and experience already established (readings and events lived at different times). Thus, he uses his own material (from himself) and from immediate reality, making use of techniques such as the retrospective, the introspective, the prospective, heteronomy, etc., and captures in his text¹⁹³ his own concept of evil expressed in the criminal. That is to say, all these powers already decanted within the writer, in the purest Aristotelian sense, cease to be kháos, to be form through the act of writing that it exercises at a given moment, not in another,¹⁹⁴ and turns them into a unique and unrepeatable text. This unique text fixes on paper a fiction the result of which is an original, unpublished vision of the criminal in a person, in a community and/or in a society.

Following the previous considerations, it is understood that, to reach such a point, the writer needs all his strength (physical and mental powers, acts) and definitively distances himself from what is already established, from what exists, and enters the field of textual creativity that it demands to be a new topology and a new tempo. Hence it is not strange that a text of this nature does not necessarily establish kinship relationships (Wittgenstein) with others. They are a singularity, but it is not the rule either: at the purely creative level the rules do not exist, or better, they are those dictated by the text. Only a minority ‒v. gr. the authors cited here repeatedly as models and some others‒, have achieved it by making the literature evolve.

A second way to write a criminal story is centered on direct experience and on documentary research. The composition of the text includes what has been lived ‒ decanted, as well as what has been investigated as documentation (field work and documentary/archive type tracking). You can also use as input what was told to the writer by a third person, by a ‘witness’ of real life. This someone witnessing the facts can be one, two, three people, or a crowd. ¹⁹⁵ Materials that are reinterpreted and manipulated at will by the writer to produce a type of fiction that tries to imitate some reality (the variations of imitation are many). Or to say it with R. Barthes, give an effet du réel [effect of reality] imitating it,¹⁹⁶ a reality that is fictional, even if it is a ‘rigorously historical investigation’.¹⁹⁷ And it is, because in the documentary investigation of the past the writer must use the documents found to develop a systematic imagination of the possible, a style to give shape to that story that must be combined with a certain historical truth, a historical truth that is elusive, that is plagued with gaps that the writer must fill in with his own ‘deductions’, ‘inferences’, or give faith, as Ginzburg says, of a ‘historical mutilation’, of a void. A void that the writer fills to reach the reader. This is the way writers proceed, who write fiction fed by history, travel stories and travelers (chroniclers), and those who write literary essays.

According to this point of view, when the writer uses his knowledge and interiority, he does as much research as possible to write a criminal story; he enters the domain of mimesis. The mimesis, is not creative. It is, at best, innovative, as we have already seen (see supra, Tatarkiewicks), since he works on already established molds: He uses patterns of analysis of criminal types, abnormal psychology, some technique of historical investigation and similar disciplines, which forces the writer to use narrative structures of the beginning-conflict type. ‒denouement in its multiple variants, which are already given.

In the worst case, and this is a third way, since here evidently there is not even any innovation, the writer researches (good or bad) about what he wants to write (a criminal case, for example) and writes a story full of vicissitudes whose simple structure is anomie‒restitution of the altered order (commission and solution of a crime).¹⁹⁸

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 2 footnotes

On the one hand, each finished text, or rather each story, by its nature, contains its own notion of evil. The notion of evil can change, in the same author, from one text to another, since the creative writer is not monolithic. He evolves with each step he takes in writing. On the other hand, each creative text is full of elements not controlled by the writer that, due to their great implicit content, constitute an autonomous reality. This autonomous reality that is created within the text is not what the story tells us directly. It is what is not explicitly narrated or described: e.g.Hammett in Red Harvest or Faulkner in Sanctuary. They do not speak of the mentality of the criminal American in general ‒or of the non-criminal‒ of the 1920s-1930s, but we could extract this mentality by reading those novels carefully. This is an essential point to consider whether or not a novel is first class. ↑
About the entelecheia, Agamben cites Aristotle and the understanding of a hexis “that is, of the power that belongs to someone who has already acquired the corresponding art or knowledge (in the sense, then, in which it is said that the architect has the power to build and the sculptor, to sculpt). Whoever truly possesses a power ‒Aristotle writes elsewhere‒ can both exercise it and not put it into action. Power is essentially defined by its possibility of its non-exercise ‒this is Aristotle’s genius thesis, although apparently obvious‒, according to the image of About the Soul, that is, of its power to remain in the dormant state.” Agamben, G. Studiolo. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2022, pp. 27‒28. In the Spanish edition of this work by Aristotle, About the Soul, the entelecheia, in terms of hexis, is understood as possession, habit, state, power (Cf. About the Soul, pp. 174‒175, §414: 15‒25). ↑
Examples of the first type of literary creator are Hammett, J. Cain, Faulkner, J. Thompson (only in 1280 Souls); from the second, T. Capote, I. Babel, J. Elroy, C. McCarthy, and in general, the work of Svetlana Alexievich, who, for example, for The end of “homo sovieticus” interviewed more than 500 people. ↑
Op. cit.Barthes, 1994, p.179 y ss. ↑
Two exemplary cases of professional historians are that of C. Ginzburg when he affirms: “All that culture was destroyed [that of the 16th century]. Respecting in it the residue of indecipherability that resists all types of analysis does not mean falling into the stupid trap of the exotic and the incomprehensible. It does not mean anything other than attesting to a historical mutilation of which, in a certain sense, we ourselves are victims. The cheese and the Worms, p.24 and Natalie Z. Davis and her The return of Martin Guerre. At the end of the “Introduction” to the 1984 edition, he says: “If I couldn’t find my man [Martín Guerre] (or my wife) in Hendaye, Sajas, Artigat or Burgos, I did what I could to find out, through other sources, the world they must have seen, the reactions that might have been theirs. What I offer the reader here is partly an invention, but an invention channeled by careful listening to the past.” Brackets are mine. In The Thread and the Traces (1989), p.14–15, Ginzburg says: “Fiction, fed by history, becomes a matter of historical reflection, or fiction, and so on. That unpredictable framework can tighten into a knot, a name.” ↑
In this third group we have, for example, J. H. Chase, Boris Vian, H. Mc Coy, Paco I. Taibo II. R. Argemí, P. Lemaitre and an exhausting etcetera. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Part 3. Chapter 2

Opening words