Noir as Politics

Through a markedly realist aesthetic based largely in the subgenre of the "hardboiled" detective novel and the iconic "film noir" movement of the 1940s (both essentially products of the Depression-era U.S.), Spanish-speaking writers were able to confront the ideologies of their governments, as well as the current state of social affairs and politics in various countries that were undergoing periods of massive political and economic upheaval as they began to enter into a much more globalized world economy during the late 20th Century.These political structures included dictatorship, institutionalized revolution, or democratic transition.What was it, though, that drew so many authors from very diverse countries to this trope?Answering that question may also shed light on its appropriation in other parts of the world as well.Noir or novela negra [black novel] stories enabled their authors to arrive at a more genuine rendering of their national situations.In part this is because detective narrative permits a fictional uncovering of the true state of sociopolitical relations, power structures, and contemporary injustice in Latin America that pushes against the official policies of forgetfulness and media-dictated culture.It also allows the questioning of truth in a more general sense, showing in its later, self-reflexive iterations the inability of the deductive method (on which classical detective fiction is based) to explain the world.In doing so, it indicts liberalism (and neoliberalism by proxy) along with developmentalist visions of history.Even modernity as a whole and its attendant metanarratives are undermined by some of the most recent variants, such as the work of Roberto Bolao, which traverses Chile, Mexico, and Spain, but in this article I will focus only on those authors who closely follow the original model.The hardboiled, or "private investigator" figure would be adapted first in Mexico, and then in many other countries, as the entire region began the process of assessing the fallout from the totalitarian regimes of the second half of the 20th Century, whether in Socialist Cuba, Mexico, Spain, or the Southern Cone.Arguably the most influential offshoot of the larger crime fiction genre, "hardboiled" detective fiction has inspired countless novels and films the world over, and has proven itself to be an extraordinarily flexible form, well-suited to reflecting developments that transcend both history and place.Theories abound about why it would eventually enjoy such success, with the more prominent ones pointing toward its realist aesthetic, urban settings, and strong sense of disenchantment with the tenets of liberal society-as well as New Deal efforts to reform them .They also indicate a larger societal hunger for justice and a desire for reform, however tainted by cynicism these might be.The appropriation of the hardboiled subgenre in diverse Hispanic countries is in some ways perplexing.To be sure, the writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortzar in Argentina had self-consciously utilized the "classical" detective trope to great effect (e.g.Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie).What was it, though, about the lonely private eye in his fedora and trench coat walking down a dark, rainy North American street that resonated so much with writers in countries as different as Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, and Chile?Even if the causes for its adoption are not always clear, there are enough commonalities to begin to draw some conclusions.A pattern that has

Criticism · Detective fiction · Narrative · Spanish language · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Latin American Literature Studies