La sombra del crimen : de la influencia del género criminal en la narrativa hispanoamericana del cruce de los milenios

Abstract

In this book, I analyze several examples of what I call a “dispersed crime story” in contemporary Latin American fiction. The story develops through motifs such as crime mystery and investigation, but the plot does not evolve consistently; the investigation is relegated to a secondary position in the plot and in the end, it does not get resolved. In contemporary Latin American literature, the mystery genre inspires writers such as Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño or Horacio Castellanos Moya. None of them is a typical detective fiction writer. Nevertheless , each of them borrows narrative material from the crime novel genre to create suspense or insinuate danger. Only few protagonists of these “pseudo-criminal” stories manage to explain and rationalize the mystery of crime and evil. Paraphrasing the Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia, “The whole world is perceived through the filter of crime.” The way in which writers (such as Piglia, Bolaño or Castellanos Moya) exploit the mystery genre is similar to that adopted by many Western authors from the beginning of the twentieth century. Their work has certain contradictory aspects; on the one hand it shows an ambition to experiment, on the other, it responds to the need for an evolving plot. In Faulkner’s fiction, for example, the tension grows according to the rules of a crime story (according to Brian McHale). From the Second Word War onwards, contemporary fiction addresses “pseudo-criminal” themes about the fundamental questions of life: What is really happening? Who is responsible for the evil? Is our life a coherent story or a collection of haphazard events? From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, several authors employ the well-known models of criminal fiction, but it seems to be done only in order to emphasize the potentially deceptive nature of the rational deductive process. In a new criminal modality of the “metaphysical detective story” (Michael Holquist’s term), the reader, instead of following the protagonist methodically towards the revelation of the mystery of the crime, is invited to reflect on philosophical concepts, such as: the search for truth, deceptive clues, the precariousness of the human condition, and the mystery of human identity. The last indicates, indirectly, that the criminal cannot be identified. The individual investigative case turns out to be a philosophical adventure (as in the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as well as in Umberto Eco’s, Paul Auster and Antonio Tabucchi’s novels). The mystery genre conventions allow for the criticism of deductive reasoning, society and politics. In Latin American fiction, from the end of the nineteenth century to date, the mystery genre was manifesting a tendency towards to heterodoxy. The values sustaining the genre’s conventions (such as individual reason and law-abiding governing institutions) have never been strongly grounded in the local, Latin American, collective tradition. Hence, the disposition towards the use of parody, which can be observed in the work of precursors like E.L. Holmberg, Paul Groussac or Jorge Luis Borges. Because of the aforementioned, contemporary works refer to the tradition of metaphysical detective fiction, the one that discredits the possibility of explaining and eliminating evil. However, they also refer to the committed criminal fiction, which emphasizes the powerlessness of the individual towards political circumstances. Some authors keep reworking the tradition of the detective as a “lonely hunter.” Some accompany the criminal, some pin the blame on ordinary people, some create action novel schemes, and others favor intellectual considerations (Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial for instance). In the introduction, I put the term of “pseudo-criminal effect” in the context of present theories of the criminal genre. I aim is not only to use the literary analysis methods, but also to explain the noir convention along with contemporary concepts of late capitalist social mentalities (e.g. Bauman, Giddens, and Beck). In Latin American pseudo-criminal fiction, the cases of aporetic mysteries maintain a stronger connection with the background of regional crisis, both political and social (e.g. Roberto Bolaño´s 2666, Edmundo Paz Soldán´s La materia del deseo, Alonso Cueto´s novels). In the first part, The Pseudo Criminal Effect, I point to the genealogy of the contemporary proliferation of motifs – like crime, investigation, mystery or evil – from classical detective story to present variations. In the second part, The Epistemic Metaphor, I demonstrate how the investigation of crime expands and turns into a cognitive dilemma, what is the relation between contemporary pseudo detectives and the status of knowledge and the truth in postmodern societies. The third chapter, Literature as a criminal profession, presents imaginative concepts of links between the criminal plot and the work of an author, both in fiction and critical essays from Borges and Todorov to Piglia. The fourth chapter, The Psychological Dimension, analyses particular examples to demonstrate that criminal motifs, dispersed as they are today, no longer serve as secular rituals of purification of society from its crimes, as the classical detective fiction used to do. Nowadays, the pseudo-criminal effect emphasizes the instability of social roles (e.g. the identification with the criminal, as in Juan José Saer La pesquisa or in Roberto Bolaño’s novels). In the fifth part, Ubiquity of evil, I analyze the vision of moral and legal chaos present in several contemporary Spanish American works (e.g. Guillermo Fadanelli, Alonso Cueto, Fernando Vallejo, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, and Diego Paszkowski). The final chapter, Reconstruction of History: The Political Dimension of the Investigation, focuses on how the pseudo-detective stories symbolically resolve issues connected with the waves of political and war terror in the recent past of Latin America.