Transnational Crime Fictions and Argentina's Criminal State

217 Pages·2013·2.04 MB·English

Transnational Crime Fictions and Argentina’s Criminal State

by
Juan Caballero

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In

Comparative Literature

In the
Graduate Division
Of the
University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Francine Masiello, Chair
Professor Natalia Brizuela
Professor Michael Lucey

Spring 2013

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Abstract
Transnational Crime Fictions and Argentina’s Criminal State
by
Juan Caballero
Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Francine Masiello, Chair

My dissertation proposes a new understanding of the dictatorship novels of Ricardo
Piglia, Juan José Saer, and Manuel Puig grounded in their shared appropriation from
popular crime fiction. Across the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s, a wide range of popular crime
fiction was translated, written, theorized, printed and reprinted in Argentina, and these
popular genres grew steadily in readership, visibility, and cultural legitimacy. These
genres were largely dismissed as insipid forms of mass-culture entertainment by
contemporary criticism, however, and their relevance has been downplayed by literary
history to this day. My study of the novels of these influential authors restores this
context in order to highlight their appropriations from these undervalued narrative
traditions, in which they found incipient forms of social critique and unique modes of
representing history and the social order. In three genre-focused studies, the
dissertation maps out vernacular sources for these authors’ formal experiments, linking
a generational fixation on "active reading" to a contemporary reconsideration of
sensationalism and melodrama; the problematics of historiography to the tenuous
boundary between crime fiction and crime journalism; and, finally, the polemic
psychoanalysis of violence to the unpleasures of the lurid psychological thriller.
Beyond reconsidering one generation of Argentine literary history and its relationship to
popular culture, this work also functions more generally as a case study in how avant-
garde literature poaches forms from popular culture in order to access the imagination
of "the masses". The dissertation begins with a brief pre-history of crime fiction in the
work of Jorge Luis Borges and the generation immediately before that of Puig, Piglia,
and Saer. Borges put one form of crime fiction at the heart of his epochal project for a
speculative and "irreverent" modernism in the 1940’s, yet emphatically rejected any
other direct contact with mass culture. When the next generation challenged Borges’
taboo on melodrama, they did so by shifting their focus from the least melodramatic
forms of crime fiction to the most melodramatic ones. Thus, I focus on the forms of
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social critique particular to these melodramatic crime narratives, such as the
spectularized martyrology of Puig’s Boquitas pintadas, the small-town naturalism of
Saer’s Cicatrices, and the gendered sentiments of Piglia’s early short fiction. These
works are read against melodramatic intertexts that were being reprinted and
reconsidered in that period: James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, William Faulkner's Light in
August, and Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos, respectively.
Honing in on that boundary between fiction and journalism, the dissertation then plots
out various conceptions of the author in true-crime fiction, creative non-fiction, and the
more overtly polemic testimonio tradition against the backdrop of the Cold War. This
entails a detailed consideration of the legacy of bridge-figure Rodolfo Walsh, whose
populist works of crime-fiction and reportage redrew the boundaries between the
literary and the popular spheres. I read Piglia’s nostalgic and ironically testimonial Plata
quemada (1999) as a working through of Walsh’s legacy, updating his Cold War ethics of
writerly veracity to the age of television and to the postdictatorial problematics of
memory. Similarly, I read Puig’s Beso de la mujer araña (1976), his Maldición eternal a
quien lea estas páginas (1980), and Saer's Glosa (1986) as three distinct explorations of
the readerly psychology of sensationalism and of the limits of testimonio. In these
works, confession is considered as an inadequate mechanism for the memory work
demanded of literature by post-dictatorial society.
Finally, the dissertation attempts to provide a tentative theory and genealogy of the
three psychological dictatorship thrillers written by Puig, Piglia and Saer, constitutively
marked by readerly affects of paranoia, doubt, and menace. Drawing from Piglia’s
evolving definitions of “paranoid fiction” and its generically diverse sources, I frame
these thrillers as affective-manipulative hybrid texts responding to the historiographical
impasse of totalitarianism. Starting with Puig's prescient psychoanalytic thriller, The
Buenos Aires Affair (1969), I look to Hitchcock's Freudianism and the vernacular of the
thriller as sources for a tradition, beginning with Puig, of psychopathologizing Argentine
fascism. I consider Piglia’s Respiración artificial (1980) not only as a novelistic critique of
psychological and linguistic transparency, but also as modernist form of thriller following
Puig’s lead. Saer’s novelistic representation of life under the menace of totalitarian
violence, Nadie nada nunca (1980), is an equally hybrid of diverse cultural narratives
structured by a rhetoric of aporia, combining high philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the
most base pop-culture fantasies as equally inadequate approaches to the
psychopathology of the criminal State. These polemical experiments in the limits of
narrative representation are the culmination of a generational project of
historiographical and novelistic experiment, the scope, scale, and importance of which
fails to come into view without a restoration of the cultural context of their production
and an expansion of the purview of literary studies.
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Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1
Partial Maps .................................................................................................................................................... 1
The Chicken-and-Egg Problem of Genre Theory and Literary Genealogy ........................................................ 3
Borges & International Modernism: A Specifically Argentine version of the "Great Divide" .......................... 7
The Raw and the Cooked: Crime Fiction and Fantastic Literature ................................................................. 10
Chapter 1: Melodrama, Naturalism, and the Legibility of the Social ............................................................ 14
Chapter 2: The Legacy of Rodolfo Walsh and the Historical Horizons of Genre Fiction ................................ 16
Chapter 3: The Criminal State, the Thriller, and the Literature of Paranoia .................................................. 18
Endnotes ........................................................................................................................................................ 21
Chapter 1: Melodrama, Naturalism, and the Legibility of the Social ............................................................. 24
Introduction: Melodrama as suprageneric mode and as social representation ............................................ 24
The Curious Case of James M. Cain, founder and first master of the melodramatic roman noir .................. 27
Mildred Pierce: business melodrama as psychopathology of Capitalism ...................................................... 32
The critical fortunes of Boquitas Pintadas: having your folletín and parodying it, too ................................. 37
Jugarse el todo por el todo: A folletinesque reading of Boquitas Pintadas ................................................... 43
Cicatrices: Juan José Saer’s intertextual maze of passions ............................................................................ 50
From La invasion to “Luba”: the melodramatic machinations of Piglia's femme fatale ............................... 59
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 70
Endnotes ........................................................................................................................................................ 71
Chapter 2: The Legacy of Rodolfo Walsh and the Historical Horizons of Genre Fiction ................................. 80
Introduction: Crime fiction as crucible for facts, fictions, and author-functions ........................................... 80
Walsh’s Theory and Practice of Literature: Literary Genre and Historical Truth ........................................... 84
Two Walshian Parables: Class, Autocritique, and the Limits of Fiction ......................................................... 93
Piglia’s aesthetics of truth: from a hard-boiled “Walsh” to a self-effacing “Brecht” .................................. 103
Plata quemada: Walshian truth and Brechtian voices in the age of televised talking heads ...................... 110
Puig: Testimony and Confession, Active Readership and Readerly Complicity ............................................ 121
Saer’s forensic memory: modernism and formalism of the testimonial genre ............................................ 132
Conclusion: Truth-Effects and Truth-Genres ................................................................................................ 136
Endnotes ...................................................................................................................................................... 140
Chapter 3: The Criminal State, the Thriller, and the Literature of Paranoia ................................................ 156
Introduction: A Paranoid Genealogy across Genres .................................................................................... 156
Puig's Psychoanalysis: Joycean Pastiche and Paranoid Active Reading ...................................................... 160
Puig's Hitchcock: the pleasures and the subjectivity of Psycho ................................................................... 163
Excursus: The "psycho-thriller" genre and the doors opened by Hitchcock's serial-killer ............................ 166
Puig's Sadomasochistic Zeitgeist: A Psychopathology of History ................................................................ 168
Saer's Nadie Nada Nunca: Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le voyeur as Serial-Killer Intertext ................................... 173
Sadism, Serial Killing, and Enlightenment in Saer’s Nadie Nada Nunca ...................................................... 178
Respiración artificial: A Paranoid Reading of the Historical Present ........................................................... 183
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 190
Endnote ....................................................................................................................................................... 192
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 200
ii

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without a great deal of input from an army of
thinkers, reader, and writers. My committee (Professors Masiello, Brizuela and Lucey) has
talked and thought me through a seemingly endless series of problems at every level of
abstraction, most of which are visible somewhere in this work. Every reader of substantial
portions of these chapters has left a mark on my thinking, and I would like to thank them all:
Mayra Bottaro, Julia Chang, Dan Nemser, Paul Norberg, Ezequiel de Rosso, Mari Vendetti, Travis
Wilds, Sebastian O. González, and Allen Young. The work was largely completed thanks to
monetary support from the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate Division at
U.C. Berkeley.
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Introduction
Partial Maps
We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound
intentions and immutable necessities . But the true historical sense confirms our existence
among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference.
—Michel Foucault, "History, Genealogy, Nietzsche," in The Foucault Reader, 891

This study began with the simple recognition of a pattern for which I found no place in
the historical and critical narratives available. Namely, I noticed that many experimental
Argentine writers whose projects evolved and matured during the late 1960's analyzed and
refigured contemporary history in a shared idiom appropriated from North American popular
crime fiction. For some combination of political, economic, intellectual, and especially cultural
reasons, many of this generation's writers seemed to be turning to crime fiction as a way of
narrating, allegorizing, and analyzing the contemporary moment. This moment, which gets
bounded in most histories by the lead-up to the "años de plomo" on the one side and the
"transition" to democracy on the other, comprise Argentina's "dictatorship years." (The phrase
is often used to generalize a wide range of interlocking dictatorships throughout Cold War Latin
America post-1959, but in this work I use it in its specifically Argentine sense). Manuel Puig,
Ricardo Piglia, and Juan José Saer seemed a particularly fruitful subset of those authors for the
wide range of genres they worked in and from, but also for the very different readerships they
reached over the course of their somewhat parallel developments; only in retrospect do they
seem "contemporaries" in the usual sense. A specific conjunction of conditions and traditions
made this borrowed and retooled foreign idiom a natural choice for these three authors, and
for a wave of contemporaries and followers as well.
These appropriations from crime fiction served a wide range of purposes, yet through all
the disparate forms taken, the field defined by them still coheres structurally as well as
thematically and topically: these related experiments with crime genres were exceedingly
timely responses to common problems of representation. To better trace the evolution of this
topical and historiographical mode of writing crime fiction, I resisted the tendency to map its
terms onto those of other critical narratives. I have largely assumed the reader to be passingly
familiar with the generic and cultural currents which usually suffice to map out this period:
postmodernism and "pop" irreverence; the 1960's quest for alternatives to realism; the
novelistic psychology of "terror" used to narrativize State Terror and the pan-Latin American
"dictator novel"; the Boom's elaboration of an aesthetic proven on the international market;
the 1960's "novel of ideas" and shifting roles of public intellectuals; the cultural "arms races" of
the Cold War; Argentina's special penchant for "exilic" protest literature. There was something
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specific to the crime genres that exceeded all these narratives of intellectual history, or rather,
how these authors retooled the crime was hard to explain in the terms of these narratives.
There was another time-honored critical narrative, situated somewhere between hero-
worship and pragmatism, that provided half an explanation of how North American crime pulp
became so important for Argentine literature. It can be summed up as follows: Jorge Luis
Borges declared crime fiction important and it has been important for Latin American literature
ever since. Borges's relation to crime fiction is a key foundation and subtext of this work, and it
has already been the subject of a number of studies and monographs, many of which appear in
the endnotes here. Although Borges is the fourth most cited author in this study, I have tried to
resist the temptation of centering this study on Borges's work, which would essentially frame
the three later authors as variously rebellious heirs of Borges's interest in crime fiction. Instead,
the name "Borges" comes to serve as a watchword for the broader literary establishment
against which my three authors define themselves and whose concept of literature they
variously strive to transcend. Borges's writing functions here not just as a precedent but also as
a literary standard for Puig's generation, entirely "classical" well before Borges' death. Below, I
will sketch out Borges's personal theory and practice of crime fiction in the 1930's and 40's in
broad terms: specific aspects of this overview will be elaborated on by each chapter's
generically more specific lens. This argumentative structure mirrors the cultural field of the
1960s and 70s, in which an almost unanimous reverence for the figure of Borges as literary
trailblazer and national treasure coexisted with serious qualms and disputes over the
ideological content of his creative work and the prejudices of his critical work. Particularly in
the 1960's and 70's, discussions of works by Borges, or even of genres like crime fiction that
bore his imprimatur, were often overshadowed by Borges' public endorsement of the Junta and
his deep suspicion of almost all the period's artistic avant-gardes and ideological currents.
Similarly important to establish in advance as a kind of implicit backdrop is the
contemporary phenomenon of the "Boom". Many accounts of Latin American or post-war
Argentine literature shoehorn the entirety of Borges's thinking on detective fiction or crime
fiction into the prehistory of "fantastic literature," an amorphous trans-generic term taken up
by the Boom writers to describe a particular relationship of literature to its social world and to
realism. Often critical accounts inflected by this teleological narrative (where Borges is the
progenitor of the Boom's mythopoesis and ludic narrative structures) collapse the distinctions
between crime fiction, science fiction, and other escapist popular narratives or myths, seeing
them as inert materials and universal formulae ripe for the ludic recombination of the modern
intellectual. This study seeks to position its authors as a countercurrent to that contemporary
cult of the ludic and the fantastic, and to contradistinguish their modes of active reading and
reflexive pastiche from those of their fantastic contemporaries. After sketching out Borges's
legacy below, I'll also schematize the structural differences between the escapist literature of
the fantastic and the range of crime genres studied here. In a word, the fantastic mode
(aligned, in Frye's "ethical" taxonomy, with myth or adventure) is as far removed as possible
from the everyday, while the variously melodramatic forms of crime fiction (spanning the
tragic, the comic, and the realist modes) are all intimately tied to the violence and power
struggles of everyday life.
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Many explanations of the generation-wide interest in the crime idiom proffer or
presume another metahistorical narrative: many critics argue (or glibly assume) that a political
essence and conscious-raising function inhere in the detective genre per se, or in the hard-
boiled school within that genre. (If authors occasionally crossed over into other, detective-less
forms of crime fiction, the story goes, it was only because they'd been lead there by the Left-
leaning detective tradition cut short by McCarthyism). The hasty conflation of detective fiction
and crime fiction plagues the critical literature on both, and for that reason I have largely
structured my study in such a way as to rigorously avoid it. I address detective fiction in
Chapter 2, specifically as it speaks to journalism and non-fiction, rather than as a special case of
realism or as simple one more vehicle for political allegory and persuasion. In the other
chapters, I take seriously those other genres that many critics treat as merely offshoots or
derivatives of more focally investigative fiction.
The structure of this work is not, however, driven by a polemic against these partial
explanations and critical traditions, but rather by a kind of pragmatism: I have tried to let the
study be structured by the categories and divisions that are crucial to the works I'm studying.
Or, to be more precise, it is structured by the different purposes to which currents and tradition
within the North American crime fiction genres are put by these authors who share a historical
context and many of the same publics and readerships. What makes this corpus so interesting,
and so difficult to theorize, is its central the adaptation of North American genres to South
American traditions and low-brow affective manipulations to middle-brow ideological debates.
Theoretically and methodologically, this corpus demands a bricolage of historical explanations
and appropriated formal schemata. In particular, it requires a more precise and complex theory
of these overlapping but distinct genres as they were practiced and read in that period, as well
as a sensitivity to the historiographical nuances of the search for new narrative structures or
ethical stances. While my goal has not been to create a universal or unified theory of these
genres readily applicable to other national contexts, much less of the relations between genres
and publics, I have had to work out some tentative theoretical precepts to offer an
appropriately detailed account of this very international and reflexive practice. My hope is that
this theoretical work might someday be as portable and intelligible to foreign and non-specialist
readers as the novels I've studied have proven to be. Or even if it flatly fails to achieve that
international and intercultural intelligibility, its failure could at least serve as a cautionary tale
about how much precision one can demand of genre theory and literary history, and of how
one can piece together international histories of literature from the partial maps of national
and hegemonic ones.
The Chicken-and-Egg Problem of Genre Theory and Literary Genealogy
The basis of generic criticism is in any case rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is
determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public.[…] The significance
of [an author marking his or her work's participation in multiple genres] is to indicate what
tradition his work primarily belongs to and what its closest affinities are with. The purpose of
criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby
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bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there
were no context established for them.
—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 247-82

Every study of a set of works understood as cohabiting and interacting within a genre is
always, to some degree, a study of that genre and an exercise in "genre theory," the Sisyphean
task of simultaneously defining a genre in isolation (an impossible abstraction) and in relation
to other genres (each as amorphously delimited as the next). The great utility of genres in
organizing literary history and illuminating works is bought at the price of a perpetually-
renewed process of definition and re-definition of those always-tentative genres. Genres
operate at a level of abstraction that never coheres into the certainty of historical fact, nor in
many cases even of pragmatic consensus, as they arise from a never-finished and always
contentious collective work of drawing boundaries and mapping territories. When the
definitions and boundaries of the genre are relatively stable across the decades and rooted in a
kind of consensus, as is the case with the Novel or the Bildungsroman, a little care suffices to
sidestep the definitional quagmires otherwise reserved for a few specialists and literary
historians. But when generic definitions are muddied by ideological debates and the only
consensus is a kind of minimal common sense, a genre can persist for decades without actually
being of much help to literary history. In the case of so amorphous and subjective a category as
the crime novel or detective fiction, closer examination reveals no two historians or theorists to
work from the same definitions or to refer to the same set of works. Indeed, each thinker
seemed to choose one strain or tradition as "central" and definitive of crime fiction generally,
with all other forms framed as hybrids, derivatives, or secondary forms. After observing enough
contradictions between and within theories of the genre, it became clear to me that "crime
fiction" did not refer to a genre but to a tendency at a higher level of abstraction, made up of
distinct genres interacting fruitfully with one another while evolving different forms for
different publics. Thus, what began as a genealogical study in one generation's engagement
with what seemed, commonsensically, to constitute a single "genre" gradually evolved into
three distinct studies of that generation's engagement with three different, yet closely-related
genres.
A useful way of organizing these genres and salvaging much critical and theoretical work
that would otherwise oversimplify and overgeneralize them is to ask of each schema what
heuristics and variables structure it, and to apply its insights accordingly. A useful
methodological precedent for this is Martin Rubin's filmic "genre study," Thrillers, which tries to
build on prior studies of the thriller, all of which treat it as a genre properly speaking, while at
the same time refiguring the thriller as a meta-generic category which includes large swathes of
genres and "cycles" that otherwise have little in common3. To adapt the insights of more
narrowly-defined studies, Rubin organizes them along a spectrum from purely formal
definitions at one end (defining "the thriller" as an affective mode or by specific parameters of
the reader-text relation) to thematic or pragmatic ones at the other (defining "the thriller" by
generalizing commonalities of narrative content, narrative frame, or thematic stakes). He
elaborates his own overarching, meta-generic formal apparatus in terms of the former