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

Third Part

Understanding of the criminal

3. Reflecting on evil in the criminal

The evil of which I speak is the one that can cause physical, moral, metaphysical damage. This type of evil is premeditated by the narrator or by the protagonists of the drama, and is carried out with the intention to harm one or several characters in an absolute way, such as killing, eliminating a physical body, their history as a person, or doing it partially, since it starts from the simple offense and then escalates, but doesn’t reach the ultimate crime: murder. While it is true that the pain inflicted by physical damage ‒murder, rape, kidnapping, any attack on the body, etc.‒, also results in moral damage ‒one is a consequence of another‒, physical and moral damage can be in such a way that also become metaphysical damage. That is, ontological, since it leads the character (hereinafter, person¹⁹⁹) to the limits of being until the damage caused within it is irrevocable, where it has suffered irreversible splits or has been destroyed. It is when in the person something inside is denatured; something inside is undermined, altered forever, broken, ‘damaged’.²⁰⁰ This damage, which can only be interpreted by the affected person, is subjective, although it can be rationalised, as philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis have taught. However, the fact that it can be elaborated through intellectual or clinical analysis does not mean that the metaphysical damage has been healed, forgotten, or buried forever, since it is not a disease that can be treated and discarded. Hence, at the root of the word ‘damage’ there is also the concept of ‘divide’, and to divide is ‘to cut’, ‘separate’, which in turn shares a root with individuality, which has the character of unity, of indivisibility, for it implies the idea of unity with itself. Ontologically, the rational being seeks the unity of itself, being indivisible. Well, the principle of identity is what gives psychic stability to the human being. In the identity resides self-perception, the world that surrounds him and the internal logic of thought. Self unity is one of the most arduous tasks of being. It is enough for evil to operate, in one of its countless forms, for the division of being to take place.

A crime can affect, given its magnitude, both a single person and their relatives and/or society in general. J. Théry makes the following semantic precision about the fields of private and public crime: “the vocabulary of enormitas [the impious, the criminal, the immoral] did not belong to the specific semantics of the treatment of private crimes (delicta) or public (crimina) in the Roman world, as well as on the other hand did not belong to the treatment of attacks on the law (iniuriae) in general”.²⁰¹ For this reason, following Beccaria, “the true measure of crimes is the true damage done to the nation.”²⁰² To the point of significantly altering the social order, of causing structural imbalances (narcotics trafficking, paramilitarism, a war, an anarchist act, a terrorist act, an assassination, for example) as a whole, as well as in their dynamic interests ( a revolution, for example, that destroys the established social and political order to establish another). Although the areas in which evil occurs are well differentiated in the penal system, the private ones (delicta) and the public ones (injurae) have been treated in the same way. With the regrouping of territorial powers after the fragmentation that took place after the fall of the Roman Empire, the public entered definitively into private life, and did so, in the West, mainly through the Church. The criminalisation of punishable conduct is supported by a moral extracted from Christianity, not from its philosophical essence born and developed in Greece. Locke had already warned about the need for conceptual independence ‒secular and religious‒ to achieve a better balance in the social order.

In the Western tradition, evil has been understood more in the field of religions than as a ‘potential behaviour’ of the human being, which is part of its ‘elemental nature’. We accept this potentiality of evil here as the deep psyche,²⁰³ some gene or genes, education (culture, Freud calls it), historical and social opportunities, selfishness, injustice, beliefs, etc., which has been, is, and should be, increasingly studied from a non-theistic perspective. In reality, the non-religious approach to evil is recent. Perhaps it should be placed with the rise of the rationalist mentality of Locke’s century (the Letter on Tolerance in which he speaks of the separation of religious power from civil, dates from 1689), and with the philosophy of the thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Law (1748), develops J. Locke’s postulates on the necessary division of powers in the State:

Les Loix humaines faites pour parler à l’efprit, doivent donner des préceptes & point de confeils: la Religion faite pour parles au cœur doit donner beaucoup de confeils y peu de préceptes. Quand, par example, elle donne des régles, non pas pour le Bien, mais pour le Meilleur ; non pas pour ce qui eft bon, mais pour ce qui eft parfait ; il eft convenable que ce foient des confeils & non pas de loix: car la perfection ne regarde pas la l’univerfalité des hommes ni des chofes. De plus, fi ce font de loix, il en faudra une infinité d’autres pour faire obferver les premières (t., 2, p. 180‒181) [the original spelling is kept]

And later:

Il faut éviter les lois pénales en fait de Religion ; elles impriment de la crainte, il eft vrai ; mais comme la Religion a fes loix pénales auffi qui infpirent de la crainte, l’une eft effacée par l’autre : entre ces deux craintes différents les Ames deviennent atroces (t. 2, p. 219). On ne doit point ftatuer par les Loix Divines ce que doit l’être par les Loix humaines, ni régler par les Loix humaines ce qui doit l’être par les Loix Divines. Ces deux fortes de Loix différent par ler origine, par leur objet & par leur nature (t. 2, p.228).²⁰⁴

From a historical point of view, it is not surprising that the understanding of evil has been in the vineyard of theology for millennia. Théry notes in his work, for example, that “the formation of the category of enormity²⁰⁵ resulted from a general religious and political dynamic under way in the twelfth century in the clerical sphere”, and later: “[the] semantics of norm and “enormity” (impious, criminal, immoral) were in vogue particularly among lawyers (still all clergy) since the first half of the twelfth century.²⁰⁶ This took place not only because of the need to strengthen another form of religious, political and social control, but, to continue with Théry, “The history of enormity (the impious, the criminal, the immoral) thus reveals the permanent state of potential exception that characterised the criminal offence of the Old Regime” (italics by the author).²⁰⁷

On the other hand, Christianity has been hostile to the senses of the human being, to the point of denying its animal origin, its ordinary (evolutionary) nature, and of imposing a divine origin. To deny the senses of the human being is to deny the latency (‘drive motion’ in Freud) of a human conduct that could become criminal. The dialectic of all religion is founded on relationships of self-transcendence in correlation with divinity since the first human times. With Christianity, there are few religions (such as Islam, of Abrahamic inspiration) that are hostile to individual feelings and seek their self-transcendence in the community. The categories of good/evil, in all religions, emanate from divinity. One of the most harshly reprimanded behaviours of primitive man in any community was to kill, to take a person’s life. “[L]ove,” says Freud, speaking of the primitive, “cannot be much more recent than the pleasure of killing.”²⁰⁸ Well, originally, since there was no explicit community code, there was only an oral order based on blood ties and friendship, of contiguity. The social order as we know it is utilitarian, it is artificial, a ‘mechanical artifact’ (see supra, Tönnies) and its principles are those of competition. This social order is, ultimately, a collective human invention in which each society struggles to be more competitive than another, because, if it were not, its subsistence would be in danger.

Historically, the elements that we have had to understand evil (and its origin) have remained in the religious field that systematically and arrogantly ignored the contributions of science in general. Religious power in the West, as Théry affirms, has established a permanent state of potential exception’, but not suspending the constitutional rights of individuals directly, as would be done in any state of political emergency,²⁰⁹ but supplanting political power (secular) and altering the discourse on the animal nature (criminal, not divine) of man, and it has done so through language, as Théry has shown with his archeology of words enormitas/atrocitas. Christianity has propitiated, fed and maintained Byzantine, obscurantist, uncritical discussions for more than two millennia. It even gives the impression that, in that sense, we are still in the times of Epicurus.²¹⁰ In this programme, because it has been and is a programme, the religious vision has denied significant advances in the understanding of the human psyche and societies, as well as factual reality.

Agamben, a champion of this denialism, writes from the centre of the aforementioned vineyard of Catholic theology. On the one hand, it reduces the problem of evil to a mystery: that of profane injustice (mysterium iniquitatis) denying any theological responsibility. On the other hand, he speaks of injustice as a political matter, not a legal one, nor one of human otherness, but rather a social contract of a theistic nature that can be extended to the category of historical drama (every drama is a staging, why? who? By man, no one more than the theistic man who projects himself into the god) in the causal line of Durkheim. As Agamben says:

I think that if the mysterium iniquitatis is given its eschatological context, political action may once again be possible, both in the theological and profane spheres. Evil is not a dark theological dogma that paralyses and makes all action enigmatic and ambiguous, but rather a historic drama in which the decision of each one is always in question. (2018, p.58) (italics by the author)

Clearly, no new political action in the profane and religious spheres has resolved or will ever resolve the problem of evil ‒with the understanding that it would have to be resolved, but that is another matter‒ nor will it contribute much to its understanding: its causes will always be of cultural (theological) and social (causal) order. Well, rather than being a ‘problem’, as all theologies have put it, evil, as we want to understand it here, can be latent inside any human being. Being a power that, in order to emerge (an emergency is also a condensation of, a sedimentation of, the product of), makes use of the irrational, animal, elemental part of the human being. It emerges even in people who never had the intention nor the real wish of committing a crime, even if they might have fantasised about it.. What ordinary human being has not wished ill on another person, usually for some foolish thing?²¹¹ Saying, for example, “A curse be upon you” to someone, the expression, being wishful, expresses the desire that that person ‒on whom such a curse would fall, unless it is conjured by means of magical passes‒, goes wrong so badly, that you want him to end up in hell, where he will suffer all the evils in the body, and in the damned soul. A curse is a double condemnation because it is valid both for the earthly world and for the divine. But it also refers to the subject as such, since it is associated with evil.

An act is criminal, says Durkheim, “when it offends the strong and defined states of the collective conscience” (p.65), if we consider that the collective conscience is a set of similarities and social interests, which derives its authority from its strength: moral, physical and metaphysical. That is to say, evil ‘offends’ the collective conscience when it violates its authority through crimina of delicta, of the inuiria,of the enormitas. Hence evil takes part of the factual and transcendental reality of each person, of each community, of each social order.

First, Durkheim clarifies:

The crime has not been defined when it has been said that it consists of an offence to collective feelings; among these there are some which can take offence without any crime. Thus, incest is the object of a very general aversion, and yet it is simply an immoral action. The same occurs with breaches of sexual honour committed by a woman [or man] outside of the married state, or with the fact of totally alienating his or her freedom, or accepting that alienation from another. (p.63) (italics and angle brackets are mine)

Durkheim then expands:

All criminality proceeds, directly or indirectly from it [from the authority]. Crime is not only an injury to interests, even serious; it is an offence against a somewhat transcendent authority. Now, experimentally, there is no moral force superior to the individual, other than the collective force. (Op. cit., p.68) […] (italics and angle brackets are mine)

Regarding the offense, Coetzee points out:²¹²

While an obscenity is an offence, it is not necessarily a harm. In particular, an offence is not the same as a minor damage: one and the other are of a different nature. For a jurist in the Mill tradition, someone who is offended, even “extremely” or “deeply” offended, is not necessarily harmed by it.

It is a half-truth of Mill, as well as of Coetzee, who has in mind the South African apartheid, which in turn is another model of the offence. As the personal assessment of the damage is not external but rather subjective, it cannot be affirmed or generalised that an offence does not necessarily generate (moral) damage, as Durkheim says. Not all human beings have the facility or the ability to elaborate (letting go, in Freud’s terms), to rationalise, understand and assimilate a damage received, and therefore expel it from themselves like a bad tooth. And no psychoanalyst or analyst will ever be able to know to what extent his practice with the patient was 100% effective. In fact, a high percentage of people who have undergone some analytical treatment relapse in a proportion well above the average. Hence, this type of treatment lasts for years. Furthermore, in many cultures an offence has caused permanent damage both individually and collectively. For example, for blacks and indigenous people in America (south, centre, north), beyond the slavery to which they were subjected since the beginning of the 16th century, the offence is also in the contemptuous killer, exterminator, of their cultures, of their religions, of the black or indigenous person, of the body of the black or indigenous person, of the individual being of that person, of their identity. Historically, the damage has been systematic, intended, from the first dealings with black and indigenous people. The division, the ethnic separation of the white with the black and the indigenous, in terms of damage, has been so successful that there has been a destruction of its collective community being, returning it to a social being whose ordering and whose ciphers were unknown,²¹³ which has forced them to accept, in good faith and reluctantly (note the aporia), the collective being of the other; v. gr., white. To be validated as individuals and as a collective entity, to exercise real and effective power in society, blacks and indigenous people must validate their power against the white people who will simply tolerate them (see infra). Otherwise, they will have no place of importance within society, a power that whites wield in various ways for the purpose of segregating, crushing, subduing.

In an interview, the Cameroonian historian, Joseph‒Achille Mbembe,²¹⁴ states about the South African and African case in general, especially the ethnic minorities: Today we are all potential blacks. We are susceptible to being treated as an object. During the advent of neoliberalism, the distinction between blacks and whites was abolished de facto. The capitalist economy designates that a part of the population is superfluous, and then it treats it as such, subjecting it to greater risks than the rest. [And further on:] There is a new racism, which not only has to do with ethnic criteria but with oppression and crushing. A crushing, a damage, a destruction both physical and symbolic.²¹⁵

It is also true that not necessarily offence generates partial or permanent damage in the person, in a community or in society in general. On the contrary, said offence generates, over time, the abandonment of negative practices (in the past, corporal punishment of children to stop harmful behaviour, for example), or some learning, either in the offended, in their community or in society. In the offended, helping him to know himself better and to overcome his weaknesses. In society, making the legal order expand its area of knowledge and ordering and/or regulation. Not only because of the type of offence (for example, the use of foul-sounding, discriminatory, vexatious, crude, insulting, degrading words, etc., towards another person), but because in the same society what used to offend such as the rude, the pornographic, as well as the use of words that become archaic or obsolete, are now part of the identity of a community or have become naturalised.²¹⁶

In Europe in the 1900s, for example, no normal, family woman wore a miniskirt or see-through blouse. Nor was it considered seemly for her to go out alone on the street. The women’s swimsuits covered from the collarbones to the knees, or almost. Condoms and sex toys were not openly promoted, although they existed. Even less was there talk of explicit sex, nor were photographs or caricatures of this nature published in the emblematic newspapers of society. That was done in an underhanded way. It was considered to belong to the so-called ‘popular culture’, poor, ordinary, low-born, uneducated, vulgar, from the underworld. Food waste, poverty, environmental pollution, like today, were not considered obscene or pornographic. The ‘obscene’, as we have seen, refers to the offence against modesty, as well as the ‘pornographic’, which at that time comprised semantic fields that had to be hidden, overlapped or denied.

It is assumed that the development (not necessarily development is synonymous with refinement, it can be the opposite of progress: degrade) of the cultural forms of a society should be in line with evolution, going forward with increasing density and moral refinement, with the most information that people have access to; with the increase in intellectual, cultural traffic. But this is not necessarily so either. Rather, it seems that, with the liberalisation of customs, and with the increasingly recalcitrant dynamics of consumption,²¹⁷ a loss of ‘moral density’ has been generated, as well as a moral degradation in the sense of the lack of limits of human behaviour and actions. Perhaps the main reason is that the development and imposition of entertainment ‒converted into an industry since the end of the 19th century‒ has become a form of a form of consumption of man by man, a self-exploitation or self-management of the individual, objectification of the individual for someone to profit, clearly not the individual who has been or is being exploited.

Every society in the West, since the promulgation of the XII Tables of the Law, in the middle of the fifth century BC. Tables who were heirs in turn to the laws of Solon.²¹⁸ It has sought to establish, strengthen, impose the authority of a moral order ‘in a certain transcendent way’ through laws in which people are equal before that law.²¹⁹ It is then a question of a ‘fair and equitable’ legal system that has provided throughout history, with its evolution, a greater moral density to society which, in turn, in its own historical evolution, has densified thanks to the fact that such ordering has contributed decisively to such stability. This social order that maintains the law is based on its punitive function, but also on its mediating and preventive functions, as found from one of the origins of the notion of justice in the West. In Hesiod, he sings the aedo:

Engrave this in your heart. Listen to the voice of justice and completely stop violence. for this law was imposed by Crónida on men:

Fish, wild beasts, and flying birds were given the permission to eat one another, since there is no justice among them. Instead, he gave men justice, which is much better.²²⁰

In the Tables mentioned above ‒influenced by Hesiod‒ the crimina, major crimes, are distinguished, such as murder, false testimony, treason, sacrilege, the judge who allows himself to be bribed. The crimina that were considered very serious because of the damage done to society, were punished with capital punishment or exile. Then there were the delicta, the less serious, private crimes, such as differences between people, land problems between neighbours or animal grazing. These delicta were punished by the victim or by the victim’s relatives, not by the head or heads of the community. The person or persons affected could be compensated financially depending on the seriousness of the offence, which was done directly. At the final stage was the iniuria or crimes with injuries and the furtum¸ theft. For these two, depending on who committed them (freeman, slave, pubescent, prepubescent), the higher instance imposed punishments such as whipping, pecuniary payment or restitution of what was stolen. That is, since the human being has sought others to form a family and later a community, a society (see supra Tönnies), there has been a normative framework ‒implicit and explicit‒ that not only punishes those who offend others, the community or society, but also rewards those who follow the rules or practice ‘good’ customs with social recognition (moral). This practice, in Colombia, has taken place since the very beginning of the Colony and was based on honour, which was the most precious asset and “equivalent to life itself”, because if honour was lost, “life was lost.” (Alzate E., A., p.225).²²¹ The exercise of good customs in each person and in any human nucleus, is what is desired for there to be a social order. Well, all orders are indispensable: political, administrative, legal, educational, cultural, health, military, etc. They are instituted so that there is a coexistence that tends more and more to stability and progress in society. Without instituted orders, no society advances. When the structuring orders are disturbed, dislocated, broken or reversed (anomie), the blame is placed on the evil that emanates from religious morality, not on human nature, nor on the other animal (not ‒ rational) that also constitutes man. It is the moralising (evangelising in the West), predicative, one-dimensional, instructive practices that have made it impossible to recognise otherness and thus take a step towards friendship, and have rather favoured the development of stunted, lazy and superficial human interactions; in short, retarded. Friendship, in social relations, as we mentioned above, evoking Aristotle, is the greatest of goods, what is desired, since it does not imply any written norm and even less the application of the law. According to Benjamin, violence founds the right.²²²

Tolerance, on the other hand, one of the emblematic concepts of the counsellor (out of western white culture), has prevented the recognition of the other, of the being as such. Well, to tolerate (tolĕrare), is to compromise (transĭgĕre), dismiss (dispense) is ‘to bear, endure’, ‘bear with patience’, ‘exempt from something’, ‘set aside ‒’ (apartheid, Afrikaans word of Calvinist lineage), which invites you to stand aside respectfully to avoid some kind of biological, social or political/ideological contagion that the other could transmit. It also invites one to distance oneself from a well-defined position of power, since whoever decides to tolerate (decidĕre, ‘cut’, ‘resolve’) cuts, sections, reaps, decapitates.²²³ By decapitating my relationship with the other, I set myself up as the omnipotent victor and deny all alterity: I am the one in a superior position (of power) compared to he whom I have the goodness to tolerate. It is a frame of magnanimity, like the one a god would have with his flock (the divine is the Lord if, and only if, it has a hierarchical relationship with the earthly, of father and son). The concept of ‘tolerance’, which was born as a consequence of the Religious Wars between France and Spain in 1598, and later became an idea of progress when the French understood that it was better to accept (negotiate) the other’s points of view, from the twentieth century returned to the original Greek etymology. Left behind is the Latin formula, that of the Religious Wars, according to which tolerance is “quality of who can accept”. The truth is that those who tolerate do not necessarily develop the ‘quality of accepting’. Just listening, in magnanimous silence, allows the other to express himself, and if he is interested in the principle of competition, he negotiates with the other the mutual differences in terms of power, not necessarily violent. But it’s not about allowing the other to be. Allowing is granting, condescending, accommodating, giving someone a licence to do something, which gives us, once again, an asymmetric, hierarchical relationship. It is rather a matter of establishing a relationship of mutual equality, among equals, in which there is no room for second intentions or desires for dominance. Finding the point of open understanding of one person with respect to another, of one community with respect to another, since both by nature will always have some kind of difference or conflict that confronts them, has been one of the great difficulties for understanding between people and between human societies.

Following this reasoning, it is understood why the conquests of one people over another occur in violent terms. Crash. Of fierce amalgamation rather than understanding between two different entities. First, people kill each other. A measurement of physical forces then takes place (if it is left, I exterminate my enemy, or I fight until I find someone equal to or superior to myself); then, apply principles of common sense and finally negotiate (since I could not exterminate him, I give in, apply a policy, send an embassy, council, give up my claims, tolerate the other). Going a little further down this path, and trying to carry these general arguments into something more specific, in the case of the Spanish Conquest in America, it is immediately seen that there could be no principle of intelligence between the Europeans and the Americans. This happened like this because simply none of them had the mental or cultural capacity developed enough to open up to the other and their otherness.²²⁴ ²²⁵

It is in the opening towards the otherness of the other when one looks out to the complex: to goodwill, but also to humanity in a certain state, to its bewilderment, to its animality. To enter in the complex requires in any case an open and educated mentality. Not merely intuitive nor filled with mere goodwill; it is not enough. Intelligence is needed, not a desire for dominance; common sense is needed. But we are not ready for it yet. In the transit of the conquest of America, the impossibility of mutual intelligence of one culture with another, since it occurred in violent terms, new forms of offence were learned and developed ‒side by side (since they could not be exterminated)‒ forms of bidirectional offence . These forms of violence for conquerors and conquered were completely new. They didn’t know each other. They were seeing each other for the first time and for the first time in their entire existence they were facing an incomprehensible, stunned otherness, with which there was no possibility of discernment. At best, there was only crude tolerance on either side. Although Clastres is correct when he affirms that “no primitive society (the conquered, in this case) escapes violence”, he falls short. In my view it would have been better to have said that no Society, primitive or modern, has escaped and does not escape violence. Even the modern society of the 21st century in its mentality has not ceased to be primitive. Proof of this is the survival of mythologies: today States and societies are still governed by the foundation and destruction of myths, since the essence of myth is to structure a narrative. The mŷthos is a fable, a legend, a fiction, like that of the hero who saved his people. The hero, as he has been since the invention of the concept, has always been the protagonist of the myth. What has become more complex is the technology of that violence. Clastres affirms it when talking about the war between primitive peoples. Even now, in the 21st century, the irreconcilable differences between States have not escaped the development of various forms of violence that are increasingly complex. For the threat of violence is also the essence of politics. And politics, overcoming the old Schmittian notion of friend/enemy, has in turn developed new technologies, and therefore new and more refined forms of violence. In the aforementioned case of the conquerors and the conquered (Spanish/American Indians), since said conquest was based on principles of injustice and re-education towards and of the conquered, there were mutual transfers. Transfers that were obviously not horizontal or reciprocal. The conquered did not reciprocate with the conqueror. On the contrary, he assumed his defeated condition with submissive “melancholy” and in many cases (without any success) rebelling against that power or only in retaliation. The transference that occurred was not in the psychoanalytic sense, since there was no cure on the part of the conqueror or the conquered. On the contrary, there was mutual contagion, or as I have called it here, ethnic amalgamation. Such contagion occurred consciously and unconsciously, material and immaterial, from the beginning of the Conquest to the end of the Colony, and it did not travel to Spain to wreak havoc there. The havoc stayed here, in the genes and in the culture of each one of the inhabitants of the conquered territory, and, what is more, in the genes and in the culture of the conquerors who didn’t return to their homeland. However, they did not assimilate 100% to the American way of being either.²²⁶ This transfer was full of all kinds of violent content that, over time, has generated others.²²⁷

Starting in 1492, the mutual transfer of violent (criminal) content between the conquerors and the conquered began to settle until it produced violence between the different ethnic groups that merged into the new world (also called “new Christians”: as the racial mixture social status decreased; the purest blood was the Spanish and the most corrupt the black). Violence that is characterized by improvisation, the obtuse, the petty, the cruelty, the treachery and the voracity of the conqueror; due to the stubbornness, the ability to overlap, the low self-esteem, the knavery and the lack of spirit (melancholy) of the conquered. Since 1820, the moment of Independence in Colombia, the said transfer suffered a sudden chemical precipitation. There was a slow but steady transition of violence between fused ethnic groups (the Creoles) directed by the new governments of white ‒ aristocratic lineage in permanent struggle to legitimise themselves in ecclesiastical, military and republican power. Throughout the 19th century, in terms of domination over the civilian population, there was a shift from the white Spanish command to the local criollo command, aware of the economy of the social order based on violence. This new economical system soon revealed itself to be precarious, plagued by new forms and new cycles of criminal violence. This is demonstrated by the fact that, in the period 1821 ‒ 1902, there were eight great civil wars and innumerable and bloody (Spanish heritage) popular revolts, as well as the expulsion of the Jesuits during the government of José H. López (1850). The modern mestizo ‒we are all simple mestizos‒ is a synthesis not only of the genetic transfer that began to take place in 1492, but of the mostly Spanish cultural transfer in every sense of the word. Transfers that could not be otherwise were internalised, refined and tempered according to the way of being of each Colombian ethnic group that had contact with them.

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 3 footnotes

We recall here that, if the writer removes from himself all the diegetic matter, which is the first way to elaborate a creative story, it means that such writing is autobiographical, as we have already seen, which leads us to the fact that, in even unsuspected ways , the text is the real life correlation of one or more real life people. ↑
Indo-European dā, means ‘to divide’, ‘to distribute’, which, in turn, gave rise to the Latin words daps, dapis :a delicacy, originally a portion of the sacrifice of a religious victim that is divided to consume it. Cf.: Recovered [26. O3. 2022] from:http://etimologias.dechile.net/?dan.ar. Harming then refers to the function of eating; that is to say, to divide, digest, decompose, defecate, eject what was previously appetising, desirable, like a fresh apple, for example. ↑
Théry, Julien. “Atrocitas/enormitas. Outline for a Story in the “Enormity” or “Enormous Crime” Category, in Past Artifices. Notions of Medieval Law from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Eleonora Dell’Elicine, Paola Miceli and Alejandro Morin (eds.)). Madrid: Carlos III University, 2017 p.86. ↑
Op. cit.,Beccaria, p.27. ↑
Freud says: “In reality, there is no ‘uprooting’ of evil. Psychological research ‒in a stricter sense, psychoanalytic research‒ shows rather that the deepest essence of man consists of instinctual movements; Elementary in nature, they are of the same type in all men and have as their goal the satisfaction of certain original needs. In themselves, these instinctual impulses are neither good nor bad. We classify them and their externalisations in this way, according to the relationship they maintain with the needs and demands of the human community. It must be conceded that all the motions that society outlaws for evil – let us choose as representative the egotistical and cruel motions – are counted among these primitive ones. Freud, S. “Of War and Death”, in: Complete Works Volume 14 (1914‒16).Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1992, pp.282-283. ↑
“The human laws that are directed to the spirit, must give precepts and no advice; Religion ‒which is addressed to the heart‒ should give a lot of advice and few precepts. When, for example, he gives rules, not for the Good, but for the Best; not for the good, but for the perfect, it is convenient that they be advice and not laws: since perfection does not concern the universality of men or things. Furthermore, if this is the case, it will take down a myriad of others to enforce the first (t., 2, p. 180‒181).

Penal laws in matters of Religion should be avoided; they print fear, it is true; but since Religion has more penal laws that inflict fear, one is erased by the other: between these two different fears the Souls become atrocious (t. 2, p. 219). The Divine Laws should not enunciate what corresponds to the human Laws, nor should the human Laws regulate what the Divine Laws should enunciate. These two forces of Law are differentiated by their origin, by their object and by their nature.(t. 2, p. 228).” Montesquieu. From the Spirit of the Laws. Geneva: Barrillot & fils, 1749, t. 2 p.180‒181; 219, 228). The translation is mine. This book was included by the Vatican in 1751, in the List of Prohibited Books. ↑
“This enormitas which could be said to be strictly post-Gregorian, was progressively replaced by a new one, from the years 1150-1160, which designated a compound character of infraction, defilement and potentially radical subversion attributed to a reprehensible act. This new category remained functional for centuries.” See: Thery, p. 109. Enormity as impiety, criminality, immorality was a category that was used up until the Old Regime to designate the worst and highest criminal conduct of man. Later it changed to ‘atrocious’, as an adjective of the noun ‘crime’, which continues to have a religious content by associating the criminal with the dark, the darkness. In Latin, atrocious comes from atrox, deriv. from ater, black. (Corominas, 1961,s. v.) ↑
Op. cit., p. 111. ↑
Op. cit., p.141. ↑
Op. cit., p.294. ↑
The state of exception in the West had its origin during the French Revolution, as Agamben recalls in his Exception Status. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2003, p.39. ↑
We will not discuss here the widely debated “problem of evil” in theistic terms, which have been based on the trilemma attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius (ca. 245 ‒ ca. 325): “Is it that God wants to prevent evil, but it is not able? So he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but doesn’t want to? So he’s evil. Is he able and willing to do it?

Where does evil come from then? Is he not able or willing to do it? So why call him God? This dialectic, rather than questioning the function and existence of a god, is Manichean, it does not question (not necessarily from a materialist dialectic) the good/evil binomial. It leaves him in the broad, and at the same time obtuse domains of a theodicy. Cf. Echavarría, A. (University of Navarra) The Problem of Evil Retrieved [04.’5.2022] from: http://dia.austral.edu.ar/El_problema_del_mal#toc

From the point of view of literary creativity, the use of the good/evil pairing is a well-known and widespread technique, since the birth of the moralistic story in the West in times of the primacy of the oral story. As an example, all the well-known stories (mythologies) from Hesiod and Homer. More recently, the theme of Dr. Faust ‒who was probably born with another name‒ belongs to ancient Christian folklore that exemplifies the struggle between good and evil. Johannes Faustus was a German astrologer from the 16C, famous for his love of secular knowledge. Using the dichotomies god/devil, goodness/evil, wisdom/ignorance, beautiful/not beautiful to elaborate stories, as engines of the story so that it does not decay, and as an example of what a certain social order should be, is just a formula. purely literary, purely fictional, dynamic. It is also a system of counterweights based on these two propositions of proto-mythical origin. It is not, in itself, a creative principle. It is a technique, it is a theme, and even a purpose to achieve a moralising end. In the case of Goethe, what is at stake is the metaphysical, passionate, aesthetic and traditional meaning of this pairing. ↑
According to the Colombian National Police, the crime rate is higher among people who know each other than among strangers; that is, crime is higher among people in a small community than among people in the wider social sphere. See: Website of the Colombian National Police, retrieved [04.02.2023] from: https://www.policia.gov.co/grupo‒informacion‒criminalidad/estadistica‒delictiva. ↑
There is a lot of rational tolerance among rational secularists towards offence, “because their confidence can provide an explanation for most things, and for the same reason […] they cannot be the object of any method of explanation more global than themselves . Reason, which frames reality without itself being bound by any frame, is a form of power without any inherent sense of what the experience of powerlessness [in the face of offence] can be like. “Cf. Coetzee, J. M. “Taking Offence,” in: Against Censorship. Bogota: Mondadori, 2007, p.19. Angle brackets are mine. ↑
“Social division, the emergence of the State are the death of primitive society,” says Clastres, p.75, op. Cit. In itself, the ‘primitive society’, as Clastres calls it, is actually a ‘primitive community’, since the social-political body does not exist in the communities, since they are not a State. It is precisely for this reason that the destruction that is carried out by sending the black, the indigenous to a social body is doubly harmful to their identity, which goes beyond mere acculturation (offence) and becomes personal, cultural and generational (crime) damage. ↑
Mbembe, Achille. Retrieved [19. 07. 2016] from: El País (Spain).http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/07/14/actualidad/1468494288_101434.html. ↑
P. Bourdieu says: “The effect of symbolic domination (it is about ethnicity, sex, of culture, language, etc.) is not produced in the pure logic of knowing consciences, but through the schemes of perception, appreciation and action that constitute habits and that sustain, rather than the decisions of conscience and from the controls of the will, a relationship of knowledge deeply obscure to itself. “Male Dominance. Barcelona: Anagram, 1998, p.30. ↑
Coetzee asks: “What is there in the realm of pornography [yesterday] that is not [in today’s] mainstream use?” Cf. 2007, p.49. Angle brackets are mine. ↑
For twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, consumerism, as well as poverty, waste, and destructive environmental practices, are obscene. ↑
The law of the XII tables. La Plata: National University of La Plata, 1994.Cf. pp.27‒31. ↑
“The precept nullum crimen sine lege, and the demands that it implies are also derived from the idea of a legal system. This precept requires that the laws be known and expressly promulgated, that their meaning be clearly stated, that the laws be general, both in their declaration and in their disposition, and that they not be used to harm particular individuals who may be expressly indicated (civil death), that at least the most serious offences are strictly interpreted, and that criminal laws are not retroactive to the detriment of those to whom they apply” (Rawls, pp.224 – 225). ↑
Hesiod. Theogony. Jobs and Days. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1981, p.158. ↑
“Honour is the prize of responding, punctually, to what is required by what one is socially.” (p.193) And he continues: “Honour is conceived as a position that offers the enjoyment of privileges that entail a differentiation with respect to “the common”; In its strictest sense, honour requires more than mere acceptance of established social norms. It depends rather on the achievement of superiority and distinction. Carlos Miza Ozcoidi, “Definition of the concept of honor: its entity as an object of historical research.” Space, time and form 4, n° 8 (1995): 193. Quoted by Alzate E. Ana María. Repertoire of Despair. Voluntary Death in New Granada, 1727‒1848. Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, 2021, pp.193, 195. ↑
Cf. Benjamin, W. For a critic of violence. Illuminations iv. Madrid: Taurus, 2001 [1911], pp.23‒46. ↑
Cf. Han, Byung-Chul, 2020.Op. cit. pp.76‒77. ↑
Such a structure was in terms of Spanish prejudice and ignorance towards the natives, and astonishment and fear on the part of the local Indians towards the conquistadors. Astonishment and fear were interpreted from the 16th century on as melancholy, which in turn was based on “the idea of a certain geographical and climatic determinism, according to which the environment fatally imposes on the inhabitants of Spanish America certain physical and psychological traits. The temperament of the Indians would be wild, insensitive, lazy, weak, deficient, degenerate and melancholic. (Alzate E., A., p. 221) ‘Melancholy’ was a concept widely used by chroniclers of the Indians in Colombia to describe the temperament and mood of the indigenous people. The high suicide rate of the natives and black slaves due to the atrocities of the Spanish was attributed to melancholy (Alzate E., A., pp. 211 and ss.). ↑
Still, more than 250 years after the conquest of America, when referring to blacks, Montesquieu contemptuously stated: “Il eft impoffible que nous fuppofions que ces gens‒là foient des hommes, on commenceroit à croire que nuos ne fommes pas nous‒mêmes Chrêtiens” [original spelling retained]. I translate it like this: It is impossible for us to believe that those people are men; if so, we would begin to believe that we are not Christians. Op. cit.,t. 1, p.390. ↑
After 1881, when the Colombian government re-established diplomatic relations with Spain, and up to the present, people have spoken and speak openly and proudly of their Spanish ancestors. Many families of Spanish origin throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have struggled to ‘recover’ their Spanish nationality and have migrated. In fact, today, it is better to be of European ‘origin’ than to be a simple mestizo. ↑
Montesquieu says: “Quel bien les Sfpañols ne pouvoient‒ils pas faire aux Mexicans? Ils avoient à leur donner une Religion douce; ils leur aportèren une fuperftition furiefe. Ils auroient pû rendre libres les efclaves, & ils rendrent fclaves les hommes libres. Ils pouvoient les éclairer fur l’abus des facrificies humaines, au‒lieu de cela ils les exterminèrent. Je n’aurois jamais fini, fi je voulois raconter tous les biens qu’ils ne firent pas & tous les maux qu’ils firent” [original spelling preserved]. I translate it as follows: What good could the Spanish have done for the Mexicans? They might have given them a kind religion, but they brought them a raging superstition. They could have made slaves free, but they enslaved free men. They could have shed light on the abuse of human sacrifices, but they exterminated them. It would never end if I wanted to count all the good things they stopped doing and all the bad things they did. Op cit., t1, p. 223. ↑

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Crime narrative topology – Part 3. Chapter 3

Opening words