Violence and Patriotism: La Novela Negra from Chester Himes to Paco Ignacio Taibo II

La novela negra trata el conflicto entre las metas idealistas del detective-la busqueda de la verdad y la justicia-y la corrupcion de la sociedad y sus instituciones. Con Hector Belascoaran Shayne, el escritor mexicano Paco Ignacio Taibo II ha inventado a un protagonista que lleva esta formula a un extremo: el detective-terrorista. La violencia es un tema constante en su obra, tanto como norma juridica como un modo de resistencia; tipicamente el crimen se vincula con la policia o el gobierno. Taibo emplea la intertextualidad como signo del patrimonio literario e ideologico; en un texto, el detective compra dos novelas policiales del autor negro norteamericano, Chester Himes. Estas obras sobre Harlem prefiguran la construccion del detective-terrorista: los detectives de Himes son dos policias negros, cuyo trabajo de imponer la ley de los blancos sobre el pueblo radicalmente marginado de Harlem produce una violencia grotesca y macabra. La novela policial en Latinoamerica ha sido tradicionalmente una forma que parodia el modelo anglosajon, debido a una falta de confianza en la ley y la policia por parte de los latinoamericanos. Sin embargo, Taibo sigue a Himes al negar que sus novelas tengan un proposito parodico: se acata a un genero precisamente antiliterario para crear una obra que quede fuera de la legitimidad critica en su pais y, a la misma vez, sea leido por el pueblo. Como Himes, Taibo utiliza la violencia para criticar la violencia de las instituciones y para apropiarse de un territorio discursivo-una patria alternativa-en nombre de los ciudadanos mexicanos. The hard-boiled detective novel evolved as a genre in the United States during the 1920's and 30's, in reaction to the rapid growth of organized crime, institutional corruption and an ensuing disenchantment with the effete British-style whodunit. In the tradition of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled detective is a vigilante descended from the knights of Arthurian legend, whose romantic mission-the search for truth and justice-contrasts tragically with the corruption of his society and its institutions. The outcome of the clash between the detective's personal ideals and the corporate reality is inevitably violent, and dramatizes a greater battle for discursive territory: "the 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power" (Bhabha 2) through the demarcation of an alternative cultural patria. Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II has created a protagonist, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, who stretches this role to its logical extreme: the hardboiled detective as terrorist. Taibo's neopoliciaco novels amalgamate the hard-boiled genre with a critical patriotism that unites violence-as a juridical norm as well as a tool of resistance-with the utopian vision of a recovered patria. This project is driven by the desire to recover radical and popular history, and by extension discursive territory, from its fossilized state in institutionalized discourse. Taibo reveals this ideology directly and also intertextually, through the use of epigraphs and allusions to the reading habits of his principal character. In one story, Belascoaran acquires two novels by Chester Himes, the black1 American writer whose Harlem detective stories are a critical antecedent to Taibo's construction of the terrorist detective. The British humorist G.K. Chesterton condemned the abuse of conventional patriotism to justify imperialism, exclusion, and genocide, and suggested a primordial connection between criticism and patriotism when he wrote in his "Defence of Patriotism" that "`My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, `My mother, drunk or sober,"' (The Defendant 125). For Chesterton, criticism of society and its institutions is the first duty of a true patriot. As writers of detective fiction, Taibo and Himes are patriots in the sense that they adhere to an ideal of locating community in the face of institutional acts that dislocate their respective constituencies. …