Adiós al detective

7/27/2019 Adis al detective

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La novela negra impregna hoy en da la vida cotidiana; tiene las mejoresposibilidades de resear los conflictos poltico-sociales de nuestro tiempo; penetraen millones de hogares del mundo entero a travs del cine o la televisin [] yes notable cmo ha influenciado a casi todos los grandes escritores modernos, detodas las lenguas y de cualquier gnero. (13)

However grand, it is worth noting that this claim is echoed by the best know Spanishpractitioner of the novela negra, Manuel Vzquez Montalbn, who invoked ErnestMandel to affirm: la nica novela legtima y tica de nuestro tiempo es la policiaca.(qtd. in Braham 143 n 16). In Mandels memorable social history of the crime story,published the same year as Giardinellis study, the Belgian socialist gave a convincingaccount of the origins of the genre, associating the U.S. hard-boiled detective fiction ofthe 1920s and 1930s (representing for him the first great revolution in the crime novel)with a crisis triggered in public life by the imposition of Prohibition and the subsequentrise of organized crime. Social corruption, Mandel wrote, especially among the rich,now moves into the centre of the plots, along with brutality, a reflection of both thechange in bourgeois values brought about by the first world war and the impact of

organized gangsterism. (35) According to this social-historical view, the previouslyrefined detective novel became more sensationally violent, individualistic, lawless andmorally ambiguous as U.S. culture absorbed the cumulative shocks of World War I,organized crime and Depression. Elsewhere2 I have proposed that certain parallels inpolitical and criminal culture may help to explain the emergence of the novela negra inMexico during the 1970s and 1980s, and I trust that everyone involved in this panel willeasily imagine which trends in Latin American public life over the last several decadeslend themselves to examination by the hard-boiled critical consciousness.

When writers such as Taibo and Giardinelli began promoting the novela negra inLatin America during this period, it seemed to them to offer the formula for a criticalliterary response to a comparable but more acute crisis in public life and security inMexico, Argentina and elsewhere. The Latin American novela negra denounced andimaginarily combated the criminal contamination of economic and political institutions,foremost among them, the authoritarian state. In retrospect, perhaps its principledistinction was its attempt to modify the essentially individualistic and populistorientation that rendered the U.S. hard-boiled novel, for all its disillusionment,ideologically integrative in the view of many critics. The classical U.S. privateinvestigator in the mold of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler battled pervasivecorruption and criminal conspiracy as a lone avenger, and rarely did his investigationsindict the national government or the political system per se.3 In contrast, politically-inflected denunciation of state criminality is a pillar of the Latin American variant, andall of you will recognize the refrain in this comment attributed to a police detective in arecent Argentine novel chosen nearly at random: En este pas, la mayora de loscrmenes son obra de militares o policas o ex militares y ex policas. (Figueras 167). Inone explanation of the Mexican neopoliciaco he founded, Taibo cited the followingcharacteristics: La obsesin por las ciudades; una incidencia recurrente temtica de losproblemas del Estado como generador del crimen, la corrupcin, la arbitrariedadpoltica. (qtd. in Balibrea-Enrquez 50 n 5). In short, the Latin American novela negraembraced the critical consciousness of the classic U.S. hard-boiled novel, but oftensought at least a covert politicization of the private investigative enterprise.


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In the several decades of the novela negras development in Latin America, I findit instructive to review how few detective-centered series have been sustained. Serialproduction and marketing has been an industrial norm at least since the novelistic debutof Hammetts Continental Op inRed Harvest(1929), yet differences in literary marketsand the economics of publishing in Latin America surely begin to explain why the only

continuous detective series that I can identify after several years of research are Taibosapparently suspended Belascoarn Shayne series (1976-1993, nine novels) and ChileanRamn Daz Eterovics enduring Heredia series (1987-2003, currently numbering nine aswell). Other detective protagonists such as Leonardo Padura Fuentess Mario Conde(1991-2001, four full-length and two short novels), Rafael Ramrez Heredias IfigenioClausel (1979-92, three novels), and Roberto Ampueros Cayetano Brul (1993-2001,four novels, with a fifth forthcoming) may yet achieve comparable longevity, but mygeneral sense of this genre is that the force of this narrative position is waning. In whatremains of this paper, Id like to offer evidence of this trend and to venture anexplanation of it, referring both to broad theories of the historical trajectory of crimefiction and to cultural conditions currently prevailing in Latin America.

Criminal AscendencyAnglophone historians of crime fiction generally concur in viewing theemergence of 19th century detective story as a mutation of earlier popular literaturefeaturing criminals such as bandits andpcaros as heroes. In the work previously cited,Mandel suggests that the invention of the detective hero represented a dialecticalinversion of previously prevailing literary perspectives on crime, relegating the criminalto role of antagonist and preparing the way for the refinement of the literary form whichbecame the epitome of bourgeois rationality in literature (25-6). In his Marxist analysis,Mandel emphasizes the strongly integrative or affirmative function of the classicaldetective genre with regard to the law and rationality of the bourgeois order. He alsodistinguishes, however, significant differences in the degree of affirmation of bourgeoisvalues and institutions exerted in the various lines of the genre: the hard-boiled is clearlyless overtly integrative, for example, than the police procedural that is still a staple ofU.S. television. What most interests me here, however, is Mandels closing suggestionthat due to cultural developments associated with late capitalism, the general trajectory ofcrime fiction over the course of the twentieth century is ultimately away from affirmationof classical bourgeois ideology and toward moral ambiguity and a disintegrativeskepticism tending toward nihilism. In the closing pages of his study, Mandel asks, Hasthe wheel now turned full circle? Has the systematic recourse by monopolists [monopolycapitalists] to illegal methods, the corruption of themselves and the state apparatus thatdefends their interests, reached a point where the universe of the crime story has beenturned upside down and the criminal has once again, as at its origins, become an object ofsympathy? (129)

To cite only one further canonical view, I will mention that Julian Symonsreaches almost identical conclusions in his studyBloody Murder. From the DetectiveStory to the Crime Novel(1972, revised 1985). He begins his synopsis of the historicaldevelopment of the crime story by defining its first stage as follows: Stories about crimeas a form of radical social protest, in Godwin, Lytton, Balzac. The criminal is seen as ahero, or a victim of social injustice. Steps two through five in this synopsis recount theevolution of the detective protagonist, but Symons concludes his synopsis with the


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eclipse of the detective by the crime novel, in which neither the investigator nor thedeductive process need play a significant role (234). Like Mandel, Symons describes apossible return to origins in the triumph of a new crime novel which, in its social attitude(Varying, but often radical in the sense of questioning some aspect of law, justice or theway society is run 162), resembles popular crime literature before Poe more than it does

the broadly conservative and integrative literature produced by Poes heirs.Recalling my previous observation regarding the political charge of the LatinAmerican novela negra, I would not wish to sound overly reductive regarding theideological character of a genre encompassing so many historical and geographicvariants. What I would propose, however, is that following at least a century of policeascendancy in the international crime story (Mandel 53), we may now perhaps discern atrend of criminal ascendancy, particularly in the contemporary Latin American market.During the period of police ascendancy, ratiocinative, hard-boiled, espionage andpolice procedural variants of the investigative crime novel all maintained to variousdegrees the heroic status and truth-generating function of the detective protagonist whooften remained marginally situated, as the just defender of an ideal bourgeois social

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While the degree of the detectives marginality and alienation may mark theintensity of critical consciousness with respect to the social formation in which a giventext appears, even the politically oppositional Latin American novela negra remainsintegrative inasmuch as it affirms social solidarity and cohesive humanist values againstthe socially atomizing forces of transnational market capitalism. When the detectiveposition fails, however, we are afforded a more sobering glimpse of a contemporarysocial world in which capitalist and consumerist objectification and quotidian violencedefy ideological containment.5

Before proceeding to a brief survey of textual evidence to support my claims, Illpause only to recall that the emergence of the novela negra in Latin America coincidesvery closely with a moment of multiple crises throughout the region. The moment wasdefined generally by the exhaustion of the import-substitution model of state-directedmodernization, the resurgence of authoritarian military regimes in the Southern Cone andelsewhere, and the beginning of the imposition of neoliberal economic policies in nearlyall countries. Debt crisis and austerity measures were among the factors dictating ageneral depression of living standards in many parts of the region during the Lost Decadeof the 1980s, and since then, continued economic displacement has continued to fuel adrastic deterioration in public security, particularly in metropolitan areas. Writing in arecent issue ofLASA Forum, Roberto Follari of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo,Argentina, summarized the current state of regional affairs as follows:

Es cierto, entonces, que cabe entre los latinoamericanos hablar hoy dedesesperacin, y que esto se hace ms patente desde la vivencia diaria ennuestros pases. Desocupacin y marginalidad crecientes, problemas de seguridadpermanentes para la poblacin, aumento del narcotrfico, crisis de la adscripcinnormativa que garantiza el lazo social, corrupcin gubernamental, deuda externagalopantes, presiones de los organismos de crdito... (4)

The causes and local inflections of these phenomena are, of course, well beyond thescope of this essay, but what I would like to emphasize is the existence of an acute andongoing crisis in public security in Latin American cities, where rates of impunity forserious crimes may commonly exceed 90%, as has occurred in Mexico City and Bogot


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in recent years.6 Venezuelan criminologist Rosa del Olmo speaks of el incrementovertiginoso, a partir de la dcada de los 80, en las principales ciudades de AmricaLatina, de la relacin violencia/criminalidd y especialmente la criminalidad violenta,(77) and this boom in criminality, along with the crisis in the reproduction of traditionalsocial norms to which Follari refers, constitute, for me, the necessary backdrop against

which to contemplate the most recent mutation of the novela negra.The Faltering DetectiveIn order to substantiate the notion of criminal ascendancy, I will comment on

some of the previously mentioned spokesmen of the genre and on a selection of recenttexts which seem to disrupt received notions. As the self-proclaimed propietario of theLatin American neopolicial, Paco Ignacio Taibo II has almost certainly done more thananyone else to propagate the genre internationally, yet as mentioned, his nine-novelBelascoarn Shayne series seems to have dwindled to a halt with 1993sAdis, Madrid.Following his death in the third novel of the series and his resurrection for afourth,Belascoarn may be said to have withered like a ghost, and the last several sliminstallments in the series betray a sense of fatigue on Taibos part as the plots become

more schematic, the tone more farcical, and the characterizations and descriptive contentmore perfunctory. Inasmuch as the Mexican neopolicialhas thrived in the work ofyounger writers directly indebted to Taibo, it is worth noting that they have proposedtheir own modifications of his paradigm. Juan Hernndez Luna, for example, stronglyechoes his predecessor in his own definition of the genre, but rejects one notable feature:En mi modesta opinin, es un gnero que a partir de un crimen o una situacin degandallez, permite contar todo un contexto social, una ciudad, independientemente de queresuelvas o no el crimen. Al demonio los detectives y la investigacin. El crimen slo esun pretexto para contar ciudades. (qtd. in Torre 16)

While the prolific Taibo has continued to publish regularly outside the genre,preferring biography and the historical adventure novel in recent years, the second fatherof the Mexican hard-boiled detective novel, Rafael Ramrez Heredia, has followed aperhaps more revealing course. Since publishing three novels (1979, 1985 and 1992)featuring the truly hard-boiled Ifigenio Clausel, has dropped the detective and turned hisattention most recently to one of the newer transnational forms of organized criminalityinLa Mara. The novel deals with Mara Salvatrucha, a gang with origins in Los Angelesand San Salvador, but which preys here on immigrants along the Mexico-Guatemalaborder, a jungle rather far removed from urban one conventionally inhabited by the hard-boiled detective. As in the case of drug trafficking, an extremely common topic in thecontemporary Latin American novela negra, such transnational criminal activitiesdrastically exceed the scope of the private detectives characteristically local and urbanauthority.7

The impasse to which the detective paradigm has led in Latin America is perhapsmost clearly evident in Daz Eterovics Chilean Heredia series, currently the most prolificin the region. The first installment, written in 1985 and published in 1987, under thePinochet dictatorship, ended with the private detectives destruction of a luxuriouscabaret doubling as torture center and his execution of a torturer of high rank in thesecurity apparatus, but since then the fantasies of justice enacted by the Heredia characterhave grown considerably more cautious. Perhaps in deference to a growing familiarity onthe part of both author and readers, the detective is tamed and becomes a more blatant


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champion of the humane individualism to which Stephen Knight refers (see note 5). Iwould suggest that the fissure between the pretense of hard-boiled objectivism in thedepiction of societal corruption, on the one hand, and the generic demand for just closure,on the other, is particularly visible in Daz Eterovics repeated recourse to fortuitousaccidents which eliminate Heredias adversaries immediately following their climactic

confessions, at the narrative moment in which the detective would otherwise have toexercise violence directly himself. InAngeles y solitarios (1995), an assassin and formermilitary torturer dies falling from a balcony in an attempt to escape Heredia, and inLossiete hijos de Simenon (2000), another villain is run over, again while attempting toescape. (It is interesting to note that a serial killer in Taibos inaugural Belascoarn novelalso dies this way, impaled on a fence while fleeing from the detective.)

Elsewhere in the Heredia series, the displacement of narrative justice is achievedthrough a delegation of violence, as when, also inLos siete hijos de Simenon, thedetective wounds a hired killer, but leaves him set up to be finished off by the police inwhat seems to constitute, rather literally, a narrative cop out. This mechanism recurs inEl ojo del alma (2001) when, following the confession of an informant who has betrayed

the Chilean left for decades, Heredia leaves him to be finished off by CIA agents. In anarrative that relentlessly demands retribution, this is an awkward delegation ofresponsibility for it, even taking into consideration Knights observation that the genrealways has depended on constant humane, even romantic interventions contradictory toits assertions of critical objectivity. To me, implausible delegation and displacement ofpunishment suggest to me the failure of the initial conception of a detective hero capableof violent retaliation against crimes of the state. By absolving Heredia of this mission,Daz Eterovic clarifies his moral authority and secures the loyalty of readers, but onlytenuously negotiates the ultimately untenable serial pretext of a solitary avengercombating criminal conspiracies involving powerful bureaucrats, military officials andtransnational corporations.

If we accept that the hard-boiled detective paradigm strains under the weight of itsaccommodation to realistic representation of criminality in contemporary Chile, wherepublic security is perhaps better protected than anywhere else in Latin America8, howwill it fare in nations such as Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, where the precariousnessof public security has been an issue of intense concern in recent decades? Although Ihave addressed Mexico only briefly, I would like to turn now to the Colombia, since itoffers an extremely interesting case study in the relationship between criminality in socialand political life and the production of crime fiction. Scholars of Latin Americandetective fiction seem to agree that despite relatively recent contributions such asSantiago Gamboas notable Perder es cuestin de mtodo (1997), Colombia has nocohesive tradition in the genre. Gamboa, who was encouraged by Taibo to experimentwith the genre given the lack of production in Colombia, has suggested that a literaryform designed to mediate and contain violence so strongly has lacked credibility in acountry so long afflicted by una excesiva proximidad de violencia. (qtd. in Fajardo)

In an interview with Mara Claudia Zamara, Gamboa explains in that order to formulate acredible novela negra, the first condition he imposed was the exclusion of the major factors ofnational violence in Colombia (drug trafficking, guerrillas and paramilitaries) in order todramatize la violencia difusa que deja esa otra gran violencia.9 The second condition was therejection of the private investigator in favor of a journalist protagonist who would provide, he


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explained, a more credible approximation to the immediate reality of Bogot. This is the samedecision made by Chilean novelist, Alberto Fuguet, in his 1996 Tinta roja. In comments whichimpugn the plausibility of the Heredia enterprise, Fuguet explained his motives as follows:

Me pas que leyendo libros de detectives chilenos simplemente no me la crea.Siento que del 70 hacia delante no puedes tener una pistola y pasar piola. Si

encuentro que un to mo tiene una pistola pensara que trabajaba para la DINA.Un detective habra sido poco creble, si iba a hacer una novela negra mejor ponaa un periodista, que es la gente ms negra que conozco, pasada a cigarrillo, esetipo de cosas. Y adems este pas es muy pelador, qu vas a investigar si todo sesabe, especialmente los affaires. En las novelas de detectives siempre hay uno yde ah surge despus el caso principal. Tampoco hay gente tan marginada, es otrotipo de aislamiento. No existe esa cosa de que vives en Cincinnati y nunca hablascon un ser humano o vives sin parientes. (Interview)

While a character carrying a pistol may not seem so implausible in contemporary Bogot,the preference of Fuguet and Gamboa for a reporter protagonist calls our attention to thepersistent problem of the cultural specificity of the private detective prototype, one which

Taibo and Daz Eterovic tend to acknowledge through insistent mockery of their owncreations in the text. Ultimately, however, the unresolved incongruity of the hard-boileddetective protagonist in the Latin American setting, along with as the permanentcontradiction in the neopolicialproject between realism and heroic fantasy,10 swampsverisimilitude, prodding other writers to opt either for alternative models of investigativeprotagonist, as in the cases of Gamboa and Fuguet, or directly for a recentering of thenovela negra on criminal subjectivity, as anticipated by Mandel and Symons. At the endofScorpio City (1998), another novel enacting the defeat and death of a detectiveprotagonist, Mario Mendoza writes of Colombia: En un pas con el 97% de impunidad,una novela policaca con final feliz es pura literatura fantstica. (169)Black Argentina

Surveying the panorama of the contemporary Latin American novela negra, onemay identify cases of prominent exponents such as Ramrez Heredia and the ArgentineJuan Martini who have proceeded from early deployments of hard-boiled detectiveprotagonists (in Martinis case,El agua en los pulmones, 1973) to narratives which centeron criminal incidents and conspiracies but which immerse us directly in a largely lawlessworld of perpetrators and victims without the hygienic mediation of the detective subject(for example, in MartinisPuerto Apache, 2002). Other prominent promoters of thenovela negra in Argentina, have long dispensed with the detective protagonist whileretaining the genres other fundamental features (again, as per Estbanez Caldern, [elintento] de reflejar, desde una conciencia crtica, el mundo del gansterismo y decriminalidad organizada, producto de la violencia y corrupcin de la sociedadcapitalista). Giardinelli, who is, as I have already indicated, the author of the mostcomplete Argentine study of the novela negra, has centered his own novels on criminalcharacters inLuna caliente (1983),El dcimo infierno (1999) andInfierno grande (2003).He describedEl dcimo infierno, about a middle-aged, middle-class couple on a killingspree, as a reflection of la violentizacin de una sociedad en la democracia and ofMenemism (1989-1999) in Argentina. Expresa, explained Giardinelli, lo que ha sidoeste gobierno: una forma de violencia irracional, corrupcin absoluta de valores, unaforma de desesperanza y un vrtigo en la accin irreflexiva. (Interview)


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Giardinellis comments with regard to his own practice of the novela negraplacehim squarely within one of the mainstreams of crime fiction in Argentina, the countryappears to have Latin Americas most extensive tradition of crime literature in both itsprincipal variants. While the ratiocinative detective genre has been cultivated by suchleading lights of the Argentine canon as Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina

Ocampo, Rodolfo Walsh, Marco Denevi and, more recently, Pablo de Santis andGuillermo Martnez, the Argentine novela negra has enjoyed preeminence since at least1973, the year in which Oswaldo Soriano revived Philip Marlowe and inaugurated aboom propelled during the 1970s by Juan Carlos Martelli, Martini, Pablo Ubanyi, SergioSinay, Jos Pablo Feinmann and others. Yet despite the genres prominence in recentdecades, Argentine writers have produced no series comparable to those of Taibo or DazEterovic, and in the hard boiled private detective seems, in retrospect, a relativelyinfrequent and uncomfortable presence in the Argentine novela negra.Novelist andessayist Jos Pablo Feinmann has gone so far as to declare: Hay una caractersticaesencial en la novela negra argentina: no tiene policas ni detectives. (143) RicardoPiglia concurs with only slight reservation: otra caracterstica de estos relatos [policiales

argentinos] es la ausencia (casi unnime) de detectives. La evolucin del gnero estbasada en el desplazamiento y las transformaciones de la figura que lo funda (10). Whatdefines the genre in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s, then, is not the heroicimposition of hard-boiled justice, but rather, as critic Elisa Calabrese states, unaarticulacin de un enigma resistente a la interpretacin, en el que puede leerse laparanoia, la inminencia de la persecucin y la criminalidad del poder, caractersticos delterrorismo de Estado durante la dictadura del llamado Proceso (80).

While I could probably count the total number of hard-boiled Argentine detectiveprotagonists on the fingers of my two hands, and the non-parodic ones on one hand, therepertoire of criminal protagonists populating this literature is almost incalculably vast.Gangsters, professional assassins, common murderers, corrupt policemen and lesserdelinquents have usually served as protagonists of the Argentine novela negra since theinitial flourishing of the genre during the turbulent years of 1973-1976 (see Lafforgueand Rivera 111), and it is commonly understood that this generic insistence on apervasive criminality, unmediated by narrative agents of justice, figured a generalbreakdown in the rule of law and the implementation of state terrorism beginning in thepre-coup period, as Calabrese indicates. Since the demise of the dictatorship in 1983, thenovela negra has retained much of its vigor as a medium for reflection on the legacies ofstate terrorism, the criminal ramifications of political power, and the persistence of socialviolence to which Giardinelli refers.

One genuine hard-boiled private detective protagonist who does appear in theArgentine novela negra, is Etchenaik, in Juan SasturainsManual de perdedores(1985/1987) andArena en los zapatos (1988), but it is worth noting that the character isarchly rendered as a retiree and grandfather and that he is nearly as self-consciouslyderivative as Sorianos appropriated Marlowe. In a study centering on the Etchenaiknovels, it is Ana Mara Amar Snchezs conclusion that the late 20th century LatinAmerican detective is characterized not only by an intense awareness of his own genre-constructedness, which is at odds with realist credibility, but also by his narrativedisplacement and by the systematic failure of his investigative enterprise. He is doomedto lose because in his hard-boiled urban environment the most powerful criminals wield


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political power to maintain impunity. Con este proyecto perdedor, writes AmarSnchez, con esa imposibilidad de ganar, se hace cargo de un rasgo del policial de fin desiglo: la mayora de los textos de este perodo dan cuenta de este fracaso, de esa prdidadel poder que sufre el protagonista del gnero. (70) It is my contention here that thisdebilitation of the Latin American detective protagonist has been accompanied by the

ascendancy of the criminal protagonist not only in the recent novels of genre stalwartssuch as Giardinelli, Martini, Ramrez Heredia, and Piglia (Plata quemada, 1997) but alsoin the work of younger writers who have stripped the novela negra of the residualquixotism inherent in the neopoliciaco championed by Taibo, Daz Eterovic, Seplvedaand other nostalgic leftists.The Post-Detective Era

Today, the reality of radical urban insecurity has superceded and disabled theconventional function of the detective protagonist: the semi-sanitary moral mediation ofcrime. What remains is the hard-boiled narratives frank depiction of violence, itsevocation of ugly, marginal urban environments, and its Darwinian or nearly distopiansocial view. Narrative subjectivity, decisive in establishing the texts and the readers

understanding of the urban violence at the center of the novela negra, shifts away fromthe detective, that agent of justice rendered according to a semi-legal individualistic malecode of honor, to the criminal and his or her acquaintances. Following a general trend inmass media entertainment toward morbid spectacularization (in sensationalistic newscoverage, action and horror movies, forensic investigative television series, thrash anddeath metal music, gangsta rap, cumbia villera, etc.), what sustains the contemporarynovela negra as a vital literary genre is our ever franker enjoyment of spectacles ofviolence, and the understanding, especially among Latin American writers, that thefiction of the Law presently offers a majority of citizens little protection from the harshrealities of contemporary, often corrupt, neoliberal capitalism.

In contemporary Latin America, I see the hardest boiled fiction of urban violencebeing written with virtually no mediation between the subjective position of thenarrator/reader and that of the perpetrators of violence in the text. Here Im thinkingespecially of the prominent Colombian novela del sicariato and its disenchanteddepiction of extreme urban violence, as exemplified by Fernando VallejosLa Virgen delos sicarios (1994), Jorge Franco Ramoss Rosario Tijeras (1999), Arturo Alapes Sangreajena (2000) and Mario MendozasRelato de un asesino (2001) and Satans (2002), butalso the dirty realism peddled by Cuban provocateur Pedro Juan Gutirrez. In cinema, asimilar aesthetic of dirty, hard-boiled albeit spectacularized realism is evident in anemerging corpus of important films dealing with the criminal activities of young residentsof the hardest barrios of the hard cities:Rodrigo D: no futuro (Victor Gaviria, Colombia,1989),Ratas, ratones, rateros(Sebastin Cordero, Ecuador, 2001),Pizza, birra, faso(Adrin Caetano / Bruno Stagnaro, Argentina 1997),Fuga de cerebros (Fernando Musa,Argentina, 1998),Amores perros (Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, Mexico, 2000) andCidade de Deus (Brasil, Fernando Meirelles, 2002) based on Paulo Linss 1997 novel ofthe same name. Though clearly hard-boiled in their attention to marginal urban lives andto cultures of violence, these novels and films nonetheless shift focus away from themelancholic modern detective subject toward new, abject postmodern subjectscharacterized by their affectlessness, their consumerist depoliticization and their guiltlessand alarmingly natural exercise of violence.11


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In conclusion, I would like to return to the issue of the general Latin Americansocial and cultural context sketched by Robert Follari in the comments quoted earlier inthis paper. It is my view that the disabling of the detective protagonist and the ascendancyof the criminal subject in the contemporary Latin American novela negra is a usefulbarometer of the general decadence of liberal and populist values during the neoliberal

transformations of the 1980s and 1990s. Argentine sociologist Ana Wortman hassummarized the cultural effects of the recent neoliberal transformation of Latin Americansocieties as follows:

se configur un discurso pragmtico instrumental economicista que produjo unnuevo tipo de sociedad. Exclusin social, anomia social, atomizacin social yprdida de lazos, desintegracin, crisis de identidades, distribucin inequitativadel ingreso, descrdito de las democracias ante la incapacidad de resolverproblemas, corrupcin de las instituciones polticas, acrecentamiento de formasdelictivas, constituyen rasgos definitorios de los procesos socialeslatinoamericanos de las ltimas dcadas que asumen en nuestro pas unamanifestacin trgica. (135)

Amid such radical cultural and social displacements and a general crisis of modern liberaldemocracy, it is entirely unsurprising that the novela negra would indeed return, asMandel and Symons predicted, to its origins in the fiction of popular criminal heroes. Thecritical realism of recent crime novels by Martini, Giardinelli, Ramrez Heredia, Mendozaand others presupposes the omission of the detective subject, and in those few cases inwhich the detective subject persists, as in Daz Eterovics Heredia series, it does so ratherclearly to the detriment of the critical realism proposed.12

In the late 1970s, Borges lamented what he saw as the decadence of the detectivegenre in the United States, observing that it had degenerated into a realism of violence,thus betraying its origin in Poe as a fantasy of the intellect.13 Particularly in LatinAmerica, Borgess preferred mode of detective fiction as orderly intellectual puzzle haslong seemed precious and anachronistic, if not obsolete, yet now it also seems to me thatHammett and Chandlers blunter fictional mode of detective justice has also largely failedas an imaginary containment mechanism within the realism of violence that Borgesdenounced. Hard-boiled narrative remains prominent in contemporary Latin Americanfiction as a medium of reflection on the new urban violence, but largely gone isChandlers redemptive, chivalric vision of the detective hero as cynic and outsider, butalso man of honor and populist avenger.14 What is left is the sharp, hard language, thesordid and sinister atmosphere, the description in criminal underworlds, and thesensational narration of a violence no longer understood as a social transgressionrequiring investigation and punishment, but rather as a prevailing norm of behavior, atool for survival, a fundamental instrument of power, and as an entertainment in itself. Inan article published thirty years ago, before the definitive postulation of the LatinAmerican neopolicial, Carlos Monsiviss ridiculed the idea of a Latin Americandetective novel, and sadly his principle argument against it is more valid today than ever:lo excepcional, lo desusado, he wrote, no es que un latinoamericano resulte vctima[del crimen], sino que pueda dejar de serlo (3).


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Notes1 Since issues of subgenre variants and taxonomy are not my central concern here, Iwont dwell on the distinction, but I will acknowledge that a refinement of taxonomycould provide an alternative approximation to the question of the detective failure or

displacement with which I am concerned.2 Policing the Criminal State. Paco Ignacio Taibo II and the Mexican Detective Novel.Talk delivered at Center for Cultural Analysis, Carnegie Melon University, Pittsburgh,PA, in October of 1999.3 This is Fredric Jamesons conclusion in his well known 1970 article On RaymondChandler. According to Jameson, Chandlers novels capture the converse, the darkerconcrete reality, of an abstract intellectual illusion about the United States. The federalsystem and the archaic federal Constitution developed in Americans a double image oftheir countrys political reality, a double system of political thoughts which neverintersect with each other. On the one hand, a glamorous national politics whose distantleading figures are invested with charisma [] On the other hand, local politics, with its

odium, its ever-present corruption, its deals and perpetual preoccupation with undramatic,materialistic questions such as sewage disposal, zoning regulation, property taxes, and soforth. [] everyone is convinced of the dirtiness of politics and politicians on the locallevel [while] national politicians (with the occasional stunning exception) seem to bebeyond personal self-interest [] As in certain types of mental obsession anddissociation, the American is able to observe local injustice, racism, corruption,educational incompetence, with a practiced eye, while he continues to entertain boundlessoptimism as to the greatness of the country, taken as a whole. (129-30) Jamesoncontends that Chandlers dark vision of the local power apparatus reproduces thispolitical double standard and that for all its muckraking and cynicism, the classic hard-boiled novel thus remains, like other detective fiction, essentially a form withoutideological content (124).4 According to Dennis Porter, The detective story promotes the heroization of theagent of surveillance in his struggle against threats from within [society]. Works in thegenre always take a stand in defense of the established societal order, then, even when, asin certain hard-boiled novels, they uncover corruption among prominent citizens andpublic officials. And the cause of such generic conservatism is to be found in the firstplace at the level of the structure of the action. [] The point of view adopted is alwaysthat of the detective, which is to say, of the police, however much of an amateur theinvestigator may appear to be. In a detective story the moral legitimacy of the detectivesrole is never in doubt. (125)5 It is Stephen Knights contention, inForm and Ideology in Crime Fiction, that detectivefiction incorporates an irreconcilable contradiction between pretensions of objectiverealism and rationalist empiricism, on one hand, and ideological consolation of humaneindividualism on the other (177). Without the formulaic narrative production of justresolution, Knight suggests, the objective and documentary mode of detective fictionwould develop a patter of existential, even nihilistic writing (176). What I amsuggesting that we may witness in contemporary Latin American crime fiction isprecisely the elimination of the constant humane, even romantic narrative interventions


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(190) which brightened the otherwise bleak, disenchanted, objectified world of theclassical novela negra.6 International studies indicate that in recent years, even following peace accords and theformal transition to democracy in many countries in Central America and the SouthernCone, Latin America has remained one of the worlds most violent regions, surpassed

only by sub-Saharan Africa, which includes Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo. In the case of Mexico City, we find a documented explosion incrime rates over the last 25 years, leading to a radical deterioration in public security andan impunity rate recently estimated at 97% of all crimes reported (Rotker 7). A recentNew York Times article on massive anti-crime marches in Mexico City reports as follows:Most of the people taking part in the marches on Sunday said they felt no better offtoday than they were four years ago. Impunity, they said remains a fact of Mexican life.Police are just as often predators as they are protectors. Government officialsacknowledge that an overwhelming majority of crimes go unreported, and the justicesystem resolves less than 5 percent of reported crime. (Thompson) Venezuelan scholarRoberto Briceo-Len observes that In almost all of Latin America violence is among

the five top causes of death, and is the first cause of death in several countries: Brazil,Colombia, Venezuela, Salvador, Mexico. He adds that The increase in the rate ofhomicides in Brazil and Venezuela started during the eighties, and in Mexico at thebeginning of the nineties. He characterizes this new violence as predominantly urban,and related to other ordinary crime such as robbery. Rosa Del Olmo notes that,according to the Organizacin Panamericana de la Salud, Latin America has the worldshighest murder rate (77).7 One the weakest installment in Taibos Belascoarn series is Sueos de frontera, inwhich the detective democrtico e independiente mexicano travels to the Mexico-U.S.border to investigate a disappearance involving traffickers. Belascoarn climacticallydestroys a silo containing 430 tons of marijuana, but his parting reflection regarding thisfinal sin final seems to acknowledge the absurdity of setting a private investigator tocombat international drug traffickers: Y l qu haba estado haciendo all? (105).8 Criminologist Luis Gerardo Gabaldn documents that during the late 1980s and 1990s,Canada and Chile had the lowest murder rates in the Americas, with Chiles averagingless than one third that of the United States (247).9 Gamboa elaborates: para la escritura lo ms importante es la credibilidad. Una vez unescritor amigo mo, Paco Taibo II, me pregunt que por qu aqu no haba novelas negrascon esa realidad tan negra, entonces yo le dije, no, no hay todava. Yo quise hacer una,pero no me atrev a hablar de realidades que yo no conozco, y sobre las cuales la gente enColombia est mejor informada que yo, porque seguramente careceran de credibilidad.[] yo lo pens y dije: no, yo no lo puedo hacer, entonces no habr violencia directa,pero si habr una violencia perifrica, no estar el monstruo, pero s estar lo monstruoso,rodando todo el tiempo. (Interview)10 The fundamental contradiction between the realist initiative and the heroic fantasy ofjustice is evident in Taibos pitch of the neopoliciaco to Gamboa, as the latter recalls it ina the interview already cited: nosotros vamos a contar la verdad, y adems en nuestroslibros van a ganar los buenos, como dice Paco, as sea solo en la literatura. Theimplausibility of this triumph is acknowledged in the title of Gamboas novela negra.


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11 Surveying the work of young urban Spanish novelists and filmmakers of the 1990s,Cristina Moreiras Menor discerns there the gaze of the abject subject, one whichfocuses on a present characterized by its own isolation and on the foreignness ofhistorical experience. It is a horrified gaze that hides its own dread through a fascinationwith violence and a perpetual acting-out designed to conceal the absence of meaning and

eliminate any possibility of demonstrating affect. Affect is now represented as an apathythat becomes intolerable due to its inability to express itself. Hence indifference and therepresentation of this (vicariously experienced) affliction predominate. (138)12 In a valuable study of the detective novel in Cuba and Mexico, published after Isubmitted the proposal for this paper and which I read after writing half of it, PersephoneBraham supports my thesis almost too closely. The detective novels future in Cuba andMexico, she writes in her epilogue, is uncertain: generic markers like the serialdetective are disappearing even as crime-fiction narratives proliferate. Leonardo Padurasuggests that there is no more detective genre, only agnero negro: a black genre thatrepresents crime, chaos, and the alienation of a not quite modern condition. (102)13 Actualmente, el gnero policial es realista, de violencia, un gnero de violencias

sexuales tambin. En todo caso, ha desaparecido. Se ha olvidado del origen intelectualdel relato policial. (Borges 79)14 But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neithertarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is thehero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet anunusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honorby instinct,by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the bestman in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about hisprivate life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr. (Chandler 20)

Works CitedAmar Snchez, Ana Mara.Juegos de seduccin y traicin. Literatura y cultura de

masas. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000.

Balibrea-Enrquez, M. Paz. Paco Ignacio Taibo II y la reconstruccin del espaciocultural mexicano. Confluencia 12.1 (1996): 38-55.

Borges, Jorge Luis.Borges, oral. Buenos Aires: Emec, 1979.

Braham, Persephone. Crimes Against Persons, Crimes Against the State. DetectiveFiction in Cuba and Mexico. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004.

Briceo-Len, Roberto. Violence and the Right to Kill. Paper presented at RisingViolence and the Criminal Justice Response in Latin America: Towards anAgenda for Collaborative Research in the 21st Century. University of Texas,Austin, May 6-9, 1999. 28 July 2004.


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Calabrese, Elisa. Gestos del relato: el enigma, la observacin, la evocacin.Historiacrtica de la literatura argentina. Volumen 11. La narracin gana la partida. Ed.Elsa Drucaroff. Buenos Aires: Emec, 2000. 73-96.

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. The Simple Art of Murder. New York:

Ballantine, 1972. 1-21.Del Olmo, Rosa. Ciudades duras y violencia urbana.Nueva sociedad167 (mayo-junio

2000): 74-86.

Estbanez Caldern, Demetrio.Diccionario de trminos literarios. Madrid: AlianzaEditorial, 2001.

Fajardo, Jos Manuel. El desembarco de la novela negra latinoamericana.El MundoCultura 7 julio 1997. 23 April 2002

Feinmann, Jos Pablo. Estado policial y novela negra argentina.Los hroes difciles:la literatura policial en Argentina y en Italia. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1991.143-53.

Figueras, Marcelo.El espa del tiempo. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2002.

Follari, Roberto. Acerca del futuro de LASA.LASA Forum 34.3 (Fall 2003): 4.Fuguet, Alberto. Interview by Roberto Merino.El Metropolitano 17 junio, 2001. 28 July

2004.

Gabaldn, Luis Gerardo. Tendencias y respuestas hacia la violencia delictiva enLatinoamrica. Violencia, sociedad y justicia en Amrica Latina. Ed. RobertoBriceo-Len. Buenos Aires: CLASCO, 2002.

Gamboa, Santiago. Interview by Mara Claudia Zarama.El Pas (Cali) 28 July 2004

Giardinelli, Mempo.El gnero negro. Ensayos sobre literatura policial. Mxico D.F.:Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana, 1996.

---. Interview by scar Enrique Ornelas. Mi libro refleja la corrupcin absoluta delmenemismo.El financiero 27 abril 1999. 28 July 2004

Jameson, F.R. On Raymond Chandler. The Poetics of Murder. Detective Fiction andLiterary Theory. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 122-48.

Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.


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Lafforgue, Jorge and Jorge B. Rivera.Asesinos de papel: ensayos sobre narrativa policial. Buenos

Aires: Colihue, 1996.

Mendoza, Mario. Scorpio City. Santaf de Bogot: Seix Barral, 1998.

Monsivis, Carlos. Ustedes que jams han sido asesinados.Revista de la Universidadde Mxico 27.7 (1973): 1-11.

Moreiras Menor, Cristina. Spectacle, trauma and violence in contemporary Spain.Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies. Ed. Barry Jordon. London, Arnold,2000. 134-42.

Piglia, Ricardo. Prlogo.Las fieras. B.A.: Clarn / Aguilar, 1993. 7-11.

Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime. Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven:

Yale UP, 1981.Rotker, Susana. Cities Written by Violence. An Introduction. Citizens of Fear. Urban

Violence in Latin America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2002. 7-22.

Symons, Julian.Bloody Murder. From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. NewYork: Penguin, 1985.

Taibo II, Paco Ignacio. Sueos de frontera. Mxico D.F.: Planeta, 1999.

Thompson, Ginger. Hundreds of Thousands in Mexico March Against Crime.NewYork Times 28 June 2004, late ed.: A3.

Torre, Gerardo de la. Los neopoliciales mexicanos. Casa del Tiempo14.49 (1996): 10-21.

Wortman, Ana. Globalizacin cultural, consumos y exclusin social. Nueva Sociedad175 (septiembre-octubre 2001): 134-42.

Adiós al detective

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