ISSUE 15 La Novela Policial Hispánica Actual July, 2006
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ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual July, 2006 La primera sección de este número ha estado a cargo de Cristina Guiñazú ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 TABLE OF CONTENTS La novela policial hispánica actual • Glen S. Close Muertos incómodos: the Monologic Polyphony of Subcomandante Marcos • Renée Craig-Odders Sin, Redemption and the New Generation of Detective Fiction in Spain: Lorenzo Silva’s Bevilacqua series • Cécile François Andrés Trapiello y Los amigos del crimen perfecto (2003). El género policiaco entre homenaje y distanciamiento • Guillermo García-Corales Las crónicas de Heredia sobre el Chile actual en las novelas neopoliciales de Ramón Díaz Eterovic • Iana Konstantinova Exploring Reality and Fiction through Postmodernist Crime Metafiction: A Case Study of Roberto Ampuero's Los amantes de Estocolmo • Judy Maloof The Chicana Detective as Clairvoyant in Lucha Corpi’s Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Cactus Blood (1996), and Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999) • Francisca Noguerol Jiménez Neopolicial latinoamericano: el triunfo del asesino • Franklin Rodríguez The Bind Between Neopolicial and Antipolicial: The Exposure of Reality in Post- 1980s Latin American Detective Fiction • Víctor Pablo Santana Peraza La serie Belascoarán Shayne a través de Muertos Incómodos • Gisle Selnes Parallel Lives: Heterotopia and Delinquency in Piglia’s Plata Quemada • Eun Hee Seo La inaccesibilidad del pasado y el dialogismo como su alternativa: La muerte del Decano, de Gonzalo Torrente Ballester 2 ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 • Patricia Varas Belascoarán y Heredia: detectives postcoloniales Ensayos/Essays • Ana Maria Amar Sanchez Literature in the margins: a new canon for the XXI century? • Sandro R. Barros Otherness as Dystopia: Space, Marginality and Post-National Imagination in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios • Jacinto Fombona Palabras y desconyuntamientos en la narrativa de Fernando Vallejo • Gladys Ilarregui Asunto detectivesco: libros prohibidos y formación del canon en el México colonial • Cecilia Ojeda Fracaso y triunfo en Los vigilantes de Diamela Eltit • Steven L. Torres Cultura y posmodernidad: la recepción de El eterno femenino de Rosario Castellanos • Scott Weintraub Beyond Allegory? Reading Lumpérica’s "White" Theater of Linguistic Cruelty Notas/Notes • Tiffany Gagliardi Trotman Eduardo Mendoza’s La aventura del tocador de señoras: ex-centric eccentricities and moral ambiguity in Barcelona society • Amarilis Hidalgo de Jesús Tantos Juanes o la venganza de la Sota de María Luisa Lázzaro: La fragmentación cultural de la historia • Natalia Jacovkis La ciudad neoliberal en la novela negra argentina: Puerto Apache, de Juan Martini 3 ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 • Leona Martin Entre La antología de poetas hispanoamericanos de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo y Los parnasos de la Editorial Maucci: Reflejos del ocaso de la hegemonía colonial Reseñas/Reviews • Hugo Hortiguera Valverde, Estela. Perfumes letales y banquetes eróticos: Los mundos de Teresa Porzecanski Entrevistas/Interviews • Craig Epplin /Phillip Penix-Tadsen Cualquier cosa: un encuentro con César Aira 4 ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 Muertos incómodos: the Monologic Polyphony of Subcomandante Marcos Glen S. Close University of Wisconsin-Madison The engagement of contemporary Latin American detective fiction with leftist politics has been a commonplace at least since the definitive emergence of the Latin American hard-boiled novel in the 1970s.(1) In the intervening decades, politically specific criticism of Latin American states and their police forces has been cited almost invariably as one of distinctive functions of the local variant of hard-boiled writing that has been termed neopoliciaco by the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II. In an interview with Juan Domingo Argüelles more than 15 years ago, Taibo provided one of the most succinct and sound descriptions of the concerns of the Latin American neopoliciaco: “La obsesión por las ciudades; una incidencia recurrente temática de los problemas del Estado como generador del crimen, la corrupción, la arbitrariedad política.” (quoted in Balibrea Enríquez 50 n.5) In the introduction to her Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons, one of the best and most current critical studies of the neopoliciaco in English, Persephone Braham has characterized its political vocation thus: The neopoliciaco is more overtly political and leftist than the American hard-boiled novel […] Latin American writers have adopted the genre in the years since [1968] precisely because it permits a critical scrutiny of their social institutions in the light of modern liberal principles and their late-twentieth-century manifestations in the ideological narratives of neoliberalism and globalization. Contemporary Hispanic detective fiction is an explicitly ideological literature with international connections. Its leftist politics were honed in the international student movements of 1968, Spain’s post-Franco transition period, Argentina’s Dirty War, and the Cuban Revolution. (xiii, xv) 5 ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 Despite the intensity of this engagement, hard-boiled Latin American detective fiction has rarely been written in direct service of a specific political platform. The obvious exception would be the case of Cuba, where the detective novel was officially promoted as an instrument of revolutionary socialist ideology beginning in 1972 and with lamentable results, as Braham recounts in her study. In light of this history, Muertos incómodos is in some respects an extraordinary contribution to the burgeoning corpus of Latin American detective fiction. First published in installments in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada between December 5, 2004 and February 20, 2005, and then in book form in April of last year, this text invites attention not only as the revival, after an eleven year hiatus, of Mexico’s most prolific and successful detective series, but also as the product of an unprecedented and intriguing collaboration. The novel was coauthored by two celebrities of the Mexican left who have never met in person: the aforementioned Taibo, author of more than a dozen detective novels and primary international advocate of the Latin American neopoliciaco, and Subcomandante Marcos, the masked revolutionary leader of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas. In commercial terms, Muertos incómodosis already a success, having attracted, by Taibo’s count, 600,000 hits to La Jornada’s website during the twelve weeks of its publication and increasing Sunday sales of the paper by at least 20%. Although critical reception has been less than favorable,(2) the novel has already appeared in book form in Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Barcelona, and an English translation is due out from Brooklyn’s Akashic Books in September of this year. In practical terms, sales of the novel will benefit Enlace Civil, an independent non-governmental organization working to improve the living conditions of indigenous communities in Chiapas, since Marcos and Taibo agreed to donate their royalties. As an aesthetic and political proposition, however, I find Muertos incómodos considerably more problematic, for reasons I will attempt to illustrate below. 6 ISSUE 15 La novela policial hispánica actual (July 2006) ISSN: 1523-1720 Unmistakably divided in both tone and narrative discourse, the chapters contributed alternately by Taibo and Marcos offered not only an almost literally up-to-date commentary on contemporary Mexican politics and the Zapatista situation, but also a panorama of the primary repressive abuses committed by the national governments of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and, more recently, of the Partido de Acción Nacional, over a period of several decades.(3) As in prior novels, Taibo, who is also a popular leftist historian, orients the investigation toward historical issues relating to the Mexican government’s systematic use of clandestine and paramilitary forces to repress political opposition beginning in the late 1960s. To this familiar project of the recuperation of repressed historical memory, Marcos adds his own urgent concerns with the military containment and paramilitary harassment of the Zapatista movement since its public appearance in January of 1994. Together, Taibo, the genre novelist and historian of revolution, and Marcos, the reflective revolutionary and master of postmodern propaganda, stretch the conventions of the detective novel genre in an effort to restore and inflect public memory of episodes long repressed and denied by official discourse. In the novel, these include, primarily, violent attacks on the 1968 student movement, the “dirty war” against Mexican guerrillas in the 1970s, and the more recent massacre of pro-Zapatista peasants by paramilitary gangs in Chiapas. Ultimately, the novel fragments under the intensity of this “will to memory,” as the authors fail to accommodate decades of denunciation in a single coherent investigation and under the pressing practical constraints of the weekly-installment format, but more worrying than any vagaries of plot are the politics of narration. It is difficult to begin to analyze this novel, written by two authors with sharply differing political commitments and literary habits, without treating it as two distinct texts sutured together