SOURCE: Braham, Persephone. “Violence and Patriotism: La Novela Negra from Chester Himes to Paco Ignacio Taibo II.” Journal of American Culture 20, no. 2 (summer 1997): 159-69.

[In the following essay, Braham compares the detective novels of Himes and Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, arguing that each seeks to regain control of radical and popular history and to redefine their discourses.]

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, Héctor Belascoarán 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, Belascoarán 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. Their advocacy of illegal and violent action in the pursuit of this goal reinforces their patriotic status in a undertaking analogous to that of the IRA or the ETA,² in that it attempts to subvert authority through the representation of chaotic practices.

Himes and Taibo use violence to foreground the absurd nature of their basic premise—the detective's pursuit of truth and justice amid the intransigent reality of Harlem and Mexico—as well as to attempt its resolution. Both deny that their exploitation of the detective genre is parodic:³ Chester Himes adopts instead the term absurd to identify his detectives' predicament as agents of the law in a subculture that suffers from a continual state of injustice. Absurdity also describes the divergence of expectation and realization experienced by black people in a racist society. The neopoliciaco as Taibo practices it examines reality—employing abundant references to actual history, news and people—to a point almost beyond rationality, while the violence in the Harlem novels is exaggerated, cartoon-like and macabre, and is meant to demonstrate that Harlem is, as Himes puts it, “a cesspool of buffoonery” (Absurdity 126).

In a reversal of traditional plotting practice, Belascoarán and the Harlem detectives employ violence rather than conventional deductive techniques to propel the action. Fredric Jameson has asserted that in Chandler's hard-boiled narratives “the empty, decorative event of the murder serves as a way of organizing essentially plotless material into an illusion of movement, into the formally satisfying arabesques of a puzzle unfolding” (124). The formula for a typical detective story, whether it is hard-boiled or a classic whodunit, is basically a stable one: “crime + clues + deduction = solution.” In these texts, however, clues and deduction play very little part in the process of detection. Rational, scientific or even traditional hard-boiled methods are ineffective in Mexico and Harlem because neither, as portrayed in these fictions, operates according to the rationalist/positivist tenets that (at least nominally) governed detective narrative in its earlier incarnations.⁴ Criminal motives can be opaque to the conventional logic of detection: in Himes's The Heat's On, a black albino kills his stepfather for saying that black Africans would not accept a white black person like him. Himes's two black detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, are so tough that “it was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed's pistol would kill a rock and Grave Digger's would bury it” (A Rage in Harlem 49). Their method of detection is elemental and usually involves pistol-whipping and shooting suspects with the specially outfitted.38 specials they both carry. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are frequently suspended for police brutality, but almost as often they themselves are the victims of violence. After a thug throws acid in his face in the first novel, Coffin Ed becomes distinctly volatile in his reactions towards criminals, uncooperative witnesses and racist white policemen, and must periodically be restrained by his partner. In one story, believing Grave Digger is dead, his attempts to find the killer turn into a night-long, murderous rampage:

He had gone in with a long nickel-plated revolver in each hand and homicide in his eyes. … He had left a trail of hysteria, screaming jeebies, knotty heads and bloody noses. But it hadn't meant a thing. He hadn't gotten any leads, hadn't found out anything he didn't know. Just a blank.

(Real Cool Killers 174)

Both the violence and the futility of this particular search are typical of the Harlem novels: Ed and Digger's actions rarely seem driven by reason and are more likely to be unmeditated reactions to events over which they have no control. In The Big Gold Dream, Digger and Ed acknowledge that “the Medical Examiner's report, photographs, fingerprints, the findings of the criminal laboratory and all the results of modern police techniques—including police theories—were generally useless in solving murders in Harlem” (56). Taibo, too, states unequivocally that “no existe ciencia ninguna que pueda aproximar a un mexicano a descubrir la verdad” (Ramírez 43).⁵ When his detective finds himself in a typical Chandlerean confrontation, traditional methods are rendered moot:

“Todo había parecido muy claro en los primeros instantes: sacar pistola, patear puerta, entrar cuarto. De acuerdo al guión escrito había que: o sacarle la caca al gordito a patadas, para que dijera el nombre del hotel de la calzada Zaragoza, o envolverlo en una conversación en la que soltara la papa. Héctor se sentía incapaz de ambas cosas.”

(Cosa fácil 109)⁶

As one critic has observed, the relationship of the detective to the criminal in the hard-boiled novel is an inherently unstable one, in which the detective's actions provoke an escalation of violence as the criminal tries to remain undetected (Hühn). Belascoarán's “method” of detection is the obverse of this formulation, in that he deliberately provokes the escalation of violence by harrassing or assaulting his suspects. He states his technique as follows: “Voy a averiguar tanto como pueda y chingarlos tanto como pueda” (No habrá final feliz 101).⁷ Rather than rage, as in Coffin Ed's case, Héctor's violent actions are the result of a vague impulse to provocation which he himself does not fully understand, and which he observes with some detachment while bombing a pornographer's studio: “Porque los finales felices no se hicieron para este país, y porque tenía un cierto amor infantil por la pirotecnia, Héctor fue empujado por esas y otras oscuras razones hacia el desenlace” (190).⁸

Moreover, in these texts, the solution may have little or no causal relationship with the original crime. Raymond Chandler's solutions are inevitably bloody, disillusioning, and complex, but they are fully unfurled for the benefit of the reader: the central mystery is explained; loose ends are tied up, and corrupt or not, an underlying order is revealed. Both Taibo and Himes depart radically from this model in their construction and treatment of solutions. Survival alone is an achievement, as Belascoarán observes in Cosa fácil:⁹

Ningún modelo operaba. Era una jodida broma, pero cuando en seis meses había logrado que lo intentaran matar seis veces, cuando la piel tenía las huellas de cada uno de los atentados, … cuando había logrado sobrevivir aquellos meses, … la broma dejaba de ser un fenómeno particular y se integraba en el país.

(15)¹⁰

Criminals are rarely punished according to conventional processes; instead, the detectives seek exposure of the criminals or restitution to their victims: Coffin and Digger steal a campaign slush-fund and the profits from a spurious Back-to Africa group to give to neighborhood families and children, and let a murderer go because they believed the victim deserved to die. Belascoarán is even further removed from convention: he avoids his clients so as not to tell them the truth; turns evidence over to journalist friends, blackmails criminals into returning stolen goods and gets killed twice, once as Belascoarán and again, by allusion, as a character named Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Taibo's detective is conditionally optimistic in that he believes himself to be acting on behalf of a specific community—“los nativos” or “chilangos”: the natives of the DF, as opposed to “las autoridades” (Adiós Madrid 23)—but Himes is undeniably a nihilist. Unlike Taibo, Himes shows little sympathy for the victims: Harlem is populated by a cannibalistic melange of pushers, gangsters, whores and pimps who routinely sell each other out to white policemen, perverts, and politicians. Community and well-being themselves are suspect notions: as one of his characters says, “A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-O” (Rage in Harlem 20).

Severed limbs are a recurrent motif in Himes, exemplified in this scene, where a hermaphrodite attacks a murderer: “She put her whole weight in a down-chopping blow and sank the sharp blade of the axe into the side of his neck with such force it hewed through the spinal column and left his head dangling over his left shoulder on a thin strip of flesh, the epithet still on his lips.” (148). When a bartender chops a man's arm off in a bar fight, it rolls under a booth, and the man crawls after it to get his knife out of the severed hand and keep fighting (The Real Cool Killers 8)¹¹; in other stories, a thief gets decapitated while fleeing on a motorcycle, a man walks into the street with a knife through his head; and a corpse with a slit throat gets driven through a produce market with its head flapping grotesquely out the back of the hearse.

This estrangement of limb and body echoes a greater estrangement: that of identity. The cultural dislocation experienced by the inhabitants of Himes's texts reveals itself corporeally through violence, but also symbolically through the multiplication of signifiers, the hierarchy and signification of skin colors, gender ambiguity, linguistic indeterminacy and masquerade. Almost everyone in Harlem, except the victims, goes by a “moniker” rather than by his given name, from Coffin and Grave Digger to the Sheik (leader of the Real Cool Moslems), Slick (a bookie), Sugartit (a young girl), Snake Hips (a male exotic dancer), Pinky (an albino), Sister Heavenly (a heroin merchant), Sweet Prophet Brown (a preacher) and the Dummy (a deaf-mute stool pigeon). Janitors and porters go to work with their overalls in briefcases to look like businessmen (Rage in Harlem 134); policemen unwittingly interview a dead woman (Real Cool Killers); a murder victim comes back to life in a later chapter (The Big Gold Dream). The initial crime—the catalyst for violence—usually takes place in the form of a scam: the false sale of a golden Cadillac; a bogus back-to-Africa movement; a gang of fake Moslems; a scam called “the blow,” in which con men claim to chemically “raise” the denomination of money; a gigolo who sells his women's furniture to a Jew while they are at work; and a preacher who gives out “blessed” crumbs of bread in exchange for ＄10 bills. The community is divided into the criminals and “squares,” their stupid, sheep-like victims. The victims in Harlem are always the darkest-skinned, the honest, the pious and the poor. Those who prey on them are usually light-skinned, especially the women.¹²

To the problem of color is added that of gender: Himes's stories are unusually dense with sexually indeterminate characters. Cross-dressing, clandestine homosexuality and hermaphroditism complicate identity and engender red herrings that Ed and Digger must circumnavigate in their pursuit of the criminals: the wife of a homosexual politician dresses as a pimp (Mr. Baron), male transvestites masquerade as old women, nuns (Sister Gabriel), gypsy fortune tellers (Lady Gypsy), and even “landprops” or bordello madams (Big Kathy). By contrast, Ed and Digger are definitively “male”: they carry big.38's instead of knives; eschew costumes and insist on the direct, physical route to discovering the facts in a case.

Language is a further instrument of confusion in the Harlem novels. Dialogue is rarely used to convey information; instead it obscures the truth or deflects the question. The fact that Dummy, the deaf mute, is one of Digger and Ed's best informants, ironically highlights the typical attitude of witnesses towards giving information to the police. For this reason, Ed and Digger always mistrust language as a means of securing information. At times their suspicion of language is assuaged only by depriving a witness of the power of speech: in one scene Coffin Ed smashes out the teeth of a pimp who has been lying to him, and continues the interrogation on what he obviously feels will be a sounder basis, saying: “When the answer is no, shake your head. And don't make any more mistakes” (The Heat's On 146). In a similar situation, Héctor tires of conventional techniques of questioning: “Usted me atraganta señor Cuesta …—dijo Héctor y poniéndose en pie le asestó un tremendo bastonazo en la mandíbula. Oyó el nítido crac del maxilar al quebrarse” (Cosa fácil 189).¹³

Both Taibo and Himes are stylistically indebted to Raymond Chandler, whose Los Angeles underworld slang was a deliberate artistic creation. Chandler was educated in England and, as he put it, he “had to learn American like a foreign language” (Most 134). Himes acknowledged that his Harlem-speak was a literary invention, noting that during his years in Europe his slang became seriously outdated (Absurdity 241). The resulting language is a specialized idiom which identifies its users as members of a linguistically-based, and therefore suspect, community through oblique reference to common evils. The citizens of Harlem speak in a code that multiplies meaning and, at the same time, redirects discourse to the rawness of actuality. “You is going to be happy,” says Sister Heavenly, a heroin pusher who masquerades as a faith healer, to a sick man. “You is going to be happy if you got the faith.” He replies as she jabs him with the needle, “I is got the faith” (The Heat's On 44). A drug peddler masquerading as a Sister of Mercy quotes equivocal scripture as he sells two “tickets to heaven” to a little girl: “And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse” (Rage in Harlem 27). At times, Himes translates this jargon, which must have presented difficulties for his white readers in the 50's and 60's:

He had crashed all the notorious shooting galleries in Harlem, the joints where the addicts met to take their kicks and greet their chicks; where the skinpoppers and the shmeckers (those who used the needle and those who sniffed the powder), the pushers and the weedheads gathered for sex circuses and to listen to the real cool jive.

(Real Cool Killers 173)

Critics have linked the fragmentation of the modern city to the disruption of a cohesive human identity—both individual and collective—in modern urban life (Denning, Berman, Prendergast). Chester Himes's Harlem is not only a fragmented urban space; it, like its population, exists in complete segregation from the rest of New York.¹⁴ It is a city within a city, just as the two black detectives are a separate unit within the (then white) New York metropolitan police force. White policemen are unable to function effectively in Harlem because they do not understand the language and all black people look alike to them.¹⁵ Conversely, a black fugitive panics on leaving Harlem: “When he saw the stone wall surrounding Central Park he realized he was out of Harlem. He was down in the white world with no place to go, no place to hide his woman's gold ore, no place to hide himself” (Rage in Harlem 137). This geographical boundary echoes the racial one. Nora Alter traces a trajectory from the detectives' function as mediators between the black and white spheres in the early novels to one of complete rejection by both, which renders them completely ineffective as detectives by the final novel, Blind Man with a Pistol, in 1969. This trajectory follows major events in race relations, from school-desegregation and other civil-rights actions in the early 60's to increasingly militant movements like Back-to-Africa, Black Power and the Black Muslims. But Chester Himes's political views appear to have been fully radicalized from the beginning: only his external points of reference change. His portrayal of black religious or militant movements as large-scale scams clearly demonstrates his belief that they are merely secondary attributes of racism. As he states in his autobiography, violent action, not language, is the sole viable response to a discourse that is already controlled by the enemy:

Every black person in America knows how to fight racism, whether he will do it or not, whether he will admit to this knowledge or not. Whether he is willing to risk his life for equality or not. Deep in the heart of every American black person is the knowledge that the only way to fight racism is with a gun.

(Absurdity 27)

Far from being perceived as “traitors” by the black community, as Alter and Skinner argue, Digger and Ed inspire fear and respect through the use of violence, and their big guns excuse them from the necessity of resorting to lies or subterfuge. Ultimately, the confusion of identities, so multiplied by linguistic games, equivocal sexualities, scams and masquerades, resolves itself in the universal epithets “nigger” and “mother-raper,” the verbal equivalents of the physical violence with which they alternate. Violence, then, is to be regarded as a response not only to racism, but also to a generic confusion emanating from questions of identity, nationality and cultural affiliation.

Héctor is one-eyed, lame, and covered in scars. Coffin Ed's face is disfigured and all three detectives have been shot repeatedly. More than mere battle scars, these marks are the physical inscriptions of the bearers' marginalized, absurd engagement with a brutal society. The “double alienation”¹⁶ of the police and detective protagonists, who are set apart from their fellow beings by their scars as well as their chosen profession, is to some extent a function of the foreignness (both literal and critical) of Himes and Taibo to the environments they describe. The light-skinned Chester Himes always felt separate from other black people. He was an educated man who spent seven years in jail for armed robbery in 1928. His sense of marginalization was exacerbated by a self-imposed exile in Paris, where he was never able to learn the language (Absurdity 121). Like Chandler, Himes was a compulsive nomad whose essential nationlessness is evident throughout his autobiography, “I never found a place where I even began to fit. … I went through life without liking anyone, black or white …” (155). Even his experience of Harlem was fragmentary: although he visited sporadically in the mid-50's, he mostly lived downtown during his brief stays in New York, describing himself as “black, despised and outcast” (25).

Taibo was born in Spain, and although he moved to Mexico in 1958, he only became a citizen of that country in 1980. Although he certainly considers himself Mexican, he is in some sense an outcast from the Mexican critical establishment. Like Himes, he enjoys critical success mostly outside his own country, and considers Mexican literary criticism to be just another hegemonic discourse.¹⁷ His detective Belascoarán is likewise not native to Mexico: rather, he willfully uses his profession to insert himself into its social, political and historical discourses. He is afraid of leaving the DF: “que fuera del DF era cadáver” (Adiós Madrid 24).¹⁸ As an antidote to official history, the sacred myths and icons of Mexican nationality, (which the Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis has called “petrificación mítica” [Escenas 95]), Belascoarán proposes the interstitial experiences of popular urban culture: frequenting street-vendors and taquerías (where he often gets sick), shopping at the Medellín market, taking merengue lessons in a local arts center, riding the subway, walking the streets endlessly at night, injecting his cases into radio talk shows, TV quiz shows and other popular media. Héctor and his friends speak a distinct Mexico City argot laced with profanity, malapropisms and bad grammar, addressing each other, ridiculously, with the formal “Usted.” Their professions are laughably prosaic—a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewage engineer—but symbolize the multi-layered corruption of Mexican politics.

In Himes's Harlem, violence occurs at an individual level but is meant to dramatize the predicament of thinking black men in a racist society, epitomized by Himes himself. In Taibo's Mexico, violence occurs in a much more overtly wholesale manner, is primarily institutional in nature, and assaults the citizenry as a whole: Algunas nubes recounts the true story of fourteen drug traffickers who were robbed and assassinated by police and dumped in a sewer; No habrá final feliz revisits the Falcons, a paramilitary group who massacred a group of students in 1971; Adiós Madrid recounts the theft of Moctezuma's breastplate from the national museum. As one critic observes, most of the crimes in these stories can be traced to the police: “Sus novelas revelan pistas sobre las relaciones entre policía y violencia, policía y narcotráfico, policía y crimen, que cotidianamente confirma la vida real.”¹⁹ These police are brutal and arbitrary: as Taibo says, “no tienen fidelidad a nadie (…) les gusta joder. No hay nada en el mundo que les guste más que el poder que ejercen cuando aterrorizan a alguien” (Mercado).²⁰ Beyond his own self-defense, Belascoarán's own violent acts appropriate this institutional barbarism and reorganize it on an individual level, in the same way that his individualized historical investigations aim to recuperate history from textbooks written by the power elite. One critic claims, somewhat exaggeratedly, that Belascoarán is “on a permanent hunt for the missing link of the nation's collective identity” (Stavans 1990, 6). It is true, however, that Belascoarán personifies Taibo's interrogation of institutionalized patriotism: he chases down reports of “un tal Zapata, de nombre don Emiliano”²¹ reputed to be living in a cave; visits the house of one of Pancho Villa's 25 wives; and rescues the stolen breastplate of Moctezuma. Taibo contends that his interest in radical history, worker's movements and detective novels all fit together in “una especie de lógica de resistencia del ciudadano contra el sistema” (Ramírez 41).²² This recuperation of revolutionary ideals melds with the detective project in Cosa fácil, where Héctor is assisted by El Cuervo, a night-time deejay who alludes to a the possibilities of a collective venture into deduction: “la gente puede colaborar. No tienes idea de la cantidad de gente que escucha y lo ansiosa que está la gente de esta ciudad de colaborar en algo” (Cosa fácil 102).²³

Taibo describes his detective as “surrealist” because he pursues a neoromantic object, justice, in the face of an atrocious reality: the injustices perpetrated by those in power (Ramírez 42). He admits his debt to Chandler but stresses the new ingredients in the Mexican neopoliciaco genre: “Chandler's character moves within rational histories,” he said in one interview, “whereas mine is surrounded by a chaotic atmosphere, Kafkaesque and corrupt, Mexico City” (quoted in Sherman). Although he may be overstating this distinction, the atmosphere of the DF is a crucial element of the neopoliciaco, and one which almost supplants the action. Much of the action in Taibo's stories takes place at night, in a Mexico City populated by insomniacs and sodden by a relentless, dirty rain. Like Coffin and Grave Digger, Belascoarán often foregoes sleep for the duration of a case: for him, nocturnal activity represents an escape from the corrupt vigilance of institutions. His refusal to sleep is thus constructed as a conscious act of rebellion, and those who share the night with him are his co-conspirators.

Hard-boiled fiction is preoccupied with defining and projecting the feel of the urban medium. If de Certeau and Foucault postulate the ordered representation of urban space as a means of control, then the urban spaces in both Taibo's and Himes's novels have completely escaped these notions of order. The Harlem of Himes's detective novels is an imagined landscape, which he constructed as a topographical expression of the absurdity of the black condition. The geography is apocalyptic, its irrationality accentuated by the extremes of weather which form an atmospheric backdrop to the action.²⁴ Their fragmented, close-up, typically nocturnal visions of the city resist the totalizing view, the reading that is the necessary antecedent to authoritative manipulation. In the following passage from his first detective novel, Himes juxtaposes this bird's eye view of Harlem with the submerged, invisible world of its inhabitants:

Looking eastward from Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of the sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like a voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.

(A Rage in Harlem 93)

The imagery of cannibalism and carrion is reiterated later in the same text, in his description of the 125th Street police station:

Whores buzzed about the area like green flies over stewing chitterlings. … Muggers with scarred faces cased the lone pedestrians like hyenas watching lions feast. Purse snatchers grabbed a poke and ran toward the dark beneath the trestle, trying to dodge the cops' bullets pinging against the iron stanchions.

(113)

The Harlemites in Himes's novels use darkness as they do daylight: life, death, and the elaborate scams carry on throughout the night. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, as their names imply, work the graveyard shift.

Harlem at night is as busy as during the day: “Most of the bars were closed. But people were still in the street. … They came and went from the apartment houses where the after-hours joints were jumping and the house-rent parties swimming and the whores plying their trade and the gamblers clipping chumps” (89).

A further link between the Harlem and Belascoarán novels is the attempt on the authors' part to combat the culture of victimhood through which marginalized peoples are often characterized. In Mexico, the image of the savage, hermetic Mexican popularized by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes (among others) has led to a certain cultural binarism whose basic formula is “chingar o ser chingado.”²⁵ According to Carlos Monsiváis, crime fiction has not flourished historically in Latin America because, among other reasons: “lo excepcional, lo desusado, no es que un latinoamericano resulte víctima, sino que pueda dejar de serlo” (3).²⁶ Taibo tries to combat this construct of Mexico as a culture of victimization by transforming the phenomenon itself into a fulcrum for resistance. Belascoarán's personal identity as a Mexican of the masses—a victim who complains about the price of tortillas and the corruption of the transit police—is the source of his energy and diligence as a detective; the powerlessness of the everyday citizen reconstructs itself into a critical stance that facilitates action:

Esta conciencia social adquirida por motivos emergidos de un humanismo elemental, primitivo, de una valoración de la situación eminentemente superficial, de una conciencia política construida desde el interior del mundo personal del detective, le permitía al menos concebir México desde una perspectiva acre, desde una posición crítica, desde afuera del poder y el privilegio.

(22)²⁷

Balancing his utopian vision of fraternity, however, is Belascoarán's realization that the exercise of his profession is inherently absurd in Mexico, where the revelation of truth does not necessarily alter the fact of injustice. In this context, his identification with the everyday Mexican citizen, formerly a source of empowerment, becomes the source of dislocation and expatriation. Belascoarán's prayer to the goddess of night (whom he implicitly offers as an alternative to other national female icons such as “la chingada” [“the violated”] La Malinche or the Virgin of Guadalupe) at the end of No habrá final feliz reveals his despair of ever realizing his ephemeral patria:

Señora de las horas sin luz, protégenos, dama de la noche, cuídanos.

Cuídanos, porque no somos de lo peor que le queda a esta ciudad, y sin embargo, no valemos gran cosa. No somos de aquí, ni renunciamos, ni siquiera sabemos irnos a otro lado para desde allí añorar las calles y el solecito, y los licuados de plátano con leche y los tacos de nana, y el Zócalo de 16 de Septiembre y el estadio de Cuauhtémoc y las posadas del Canal Cuatro, y en esta soledad culera que nos atenaza y nos persigue.

(125)²⁸

The culture of victimhood was also problematic for Chester Himes. While he always perceived himself as a victim of racism, Himes wanted his detective novels to show black life as absurd, but not pathetic (Absurdity 158). He set himself apart from other black writers, describing Richard Wright's protest novels as “Uncle Tom” writing whose main aspiration was to evoke pity.²⁹ In contrast, Himes intended his texts to be a protest against racism itself excusing all their sins and major faults. “Black victims of crime and criminals might be foolish and harebrained, but the soul brother criminals were as vicious, cruel and dangerous as other criminals—I knew because I'd been one—the only difference being they were absurd” (111).

The brutality of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger is directed primarily towards the black community and is meant to illustrate this attitude, which refuses to excuse criminals on the basis of oppression alone. The criminals that evoke the most rage and hatred are those who ally themselves with white criminals to prey on Harlem; as Grave Digger says to a one of these:

If I find out that you're lying I'm going to kill you like a dog. I'm not going to shoot you, I'm going to break all your bones. I'm going to try to find out who killed Galen because that's what I'm paid for and that was my oath when I took this job. But if I had my way I'd pin a medal on him and I'd string up every goddamned one of you who were up with Galen. You've turned my stomach and it's all I can do right now to keep from beating out your brains.

(Real Cool Killers 102)

If Chandler or Hammett's lonely crusaders were his models, Himes made an anomalous choice in creating his dual protagonist. Not only do Ed and Digger work as a team, they are best friends, next door neighbors, and family men. At times their personal lives become entangled with their professional lives, as when Coffin Ed's daughter gets involved with a gang. Taibo, likewise, endows Belascoarán with a family history, a sister and brother, and three office-mates who sometimes participate in his cases. His clients are often figures from Héctor's personal history. While, as one critic notes, Chandler's Philip Marlowe has the freedom to remain somewhat detached from the crimes he investigates, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, by virtue of being black, have no option but to participate fully in the experience of being so (Rabinowitz 24). This can also be said of Belascoarán, whose willed Mexicanness is a palpable presence in the texts.³⁰ For him, violence, especially that perpetrated by institutions against individuals, is an inescapable part of Mexican experience, and his mission is simply to reply in kind. Belascoarán's choice to be a detective, like Ed and Digger's choice to be policemen, results from his commitment, less to an abstract notion of justice, than to an imagined community. As isolated as they are by their seemingly absurd choice of profession, it is only by the exercise of that profession—whose symbiotic relationship with crime licenses their use of violence—that they are empowered to pursue this patriotic ideal. But in order to do this, Belascoarán, like Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, must “embrace the demonic” (Muller 6). In the end, he admits, a terrorist detective is not necessarily any better than a criminal:

¿No era suya la misma impunidad que la de los otros? ¿No había podido tirar cartuchos de dinamita, balear pistoleros, volar camionetas sin que pasara nada?

Casi estaba por aceptar la tesis del tapicero que repetía una y otra vez: “En este país no pasa nada, y aunque pase, tampoco.”

(Cosa fácil 194)³¹

From Borges and Alfonso Reyes on, critics in Latin America have tried to explain why detective literature attracts the literate reader. Whereas in Spain many have adopted the French intellectual taste for detective stories, Anglo and Latin American critics are often anxious to separate the mass-market detective novel from “serious” literature. Chester Himes was initially very ambivalent about writing genre fiction and only agreed to do so for financial reasons.³² Taibo is clearer about his appropriation of a traditionally “low” form and refuses all attempts to otherwise classify the Belascoarán Shayne novels.³³ He admits absolutely no continuity between Belascoarán and other Mexican detective characters, such as Antonio Helú's Máximo Roldán or Martínez de la Vega's Peter Pérez, who he claims were parodic figures.³⁴ In doing so, he insists on disconnecting his use of the genre from the parodic, hence artistically legitimate, Latin American tradition. His deliberate choice of a formulaic literature is reinforced by his detective's insistence (down to the trenchcoat) on following the exterior conventions of the hard-boiled story, while the transplantation of the genre to a seemingly hostile environment, rather than attenuating this generic connection, enriches the genre.

Fredric Jameson believes that the detective story foregrounds the significance of fragmentary, everyday acts in a way that “high” literature does not, by revealing interstitial, extra-official realities to the half-focused mind. The “right to signify” or construct history from an unprivileged position is the political analogue to the interstitial niche occupied by genre fiction: an ideological objective whose formal modes of expression are to be found in the cross-cultural phenomena of popular culture. G. K. Chesterton argued in his 1901 essay “Defence of Detective Stories” that the detective novel, precisely because it is a popular genre, expresses the soul of a society just as the epic or the chivalric novel did in earlier times, observing that “the first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life” (The Defendant 119). It was Chesterton, who through Borges became of the most influential voices in the formation of Latin-American detective narrative, who observed that the detective novel is not an escapist literature. Rather, it serves to remind the complacent that “we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates” (123).

In 1973, Carlos Monsiváis predicted the demise of the Mexican detective novel, asking: “¿A quién le importa quién mató a Roger Ackroyd … si nadie sabe (oficialmente) quién fue el responsable de la matanza de Tlatelolco o quién ordenó el asalto de los Halcones el 10 de junio?” (“Ustedes” 10).³⁵ Following the model established by the Harlem domestic novels, Taibo appropriates the chaos of the real world by adapting the hard-boiled detective narrative to Mexican political facts. While traditional genre detective fiction is dedicated to the premise of order, in these texts the perpetuation of chaos becomes a tool for reclaiming discursive territory. Himes confessed that he didn't really know Harlem; and said of his invented village that it was “never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books” (126). The two authors' use of the detective genre to articulate a critical ideology pairs mayhem with cultural dislocation: these detectives reject the search for order; instead pursuing violence as both a terrorist act and as a dramatization of their own cultural dismemberment.

Notes

1. Himes's term.

2. Taibo's Mexican detective is Irish on his mother's side and Basque on his father's side; his father was also a terrorist on the side of Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War.

3. Since Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote the Don Isidro Parodi stories in the 1940s, many critics have supported the idea that the Latin American detective novel constitutes a parodical take on the “traditional” detective story, in the sense that it is understood as an appropriation of formal elements proper to existing non-Latin American models. Elzbieta Sklodowska argues this point convincingly, using Todorov's definition of parody, not as a denigrating joke, but rather as a “creative transgression of the model” (175).

4. The historic construction of the detective story as an exercise in logic is usually based on analyses of Edgar Allan Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, while the emphasis on empiricism is usually attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Dupin himself points out the fallacies of abstract logic when applied to moral intrigue; he states in “The Purloined Letter” that his method consists of identifying the suspect as either a poet or a mathematician, in order to anticipate whether his actions will be limited by logic. This method is founded rather on intuition and empathy than on reason. The Mexican-American critic Ilán Stavans makes a well-intentioned effort to theorize a “decalogue” of crime fiction, including among the elements “Lo moral y lo intelectual,” wherein he describes the logic of the genre as follows: “Triunfa siempre la razón sobre la sinrazón y el orden sobre el desorden; indistintamente, sea Poe o Chesterton, lo humano en lo detectivesco termina victorioso y el caos del universo es sometido a un riguroso plano intelectual” (Antihéroes 46). [Reason always triumphs over unreason and order over disorder, indifferently, whether in Poe or Chesterton, the human element ends up victorious in the detective genre and the chaos of the universe is subordinated to a rigorous intellectual plan.] Stavans overlooks the true Chestertonian contribution, which suggests that chaos is the true reality and individual acts of reasoning (or deduction) are poetic abstractions. This is the side of Chesterton that Borges, the great popularizer of detective fiction in Latin America, celebrated, and which we see reenacted in the texts of Taibo and Himes.

5. “There is no science that can lead a Mexican to discover the truth.”

6. “Everything had seemed very simple at first: take out gun, kick in door, enter room. In accordance with the script he now had to: either kick the shit out of the fat guy so he would give up the name of the hotel on Zaragoza, or involve him in a conversation in which he would let slip the information. Héctor felt incapable of either.”

7. “I'm going to find out whatever I can and screw them as much as I can.”

8. “Because happy endings were not made for this country, and because he had a certain infantile love of pyrotechnics, Héctor was impelled by these and other obscure reasons towards the final act.”

9. In Himes's final novel Plan B, which is not part of the Harlem domestic series, Ed kills Digger before being murdered himself. Defending Belascoarán's resuscitation in his fourth novel of the group, Taibo claims that “la resurreccíon es un fenómeno mexicano” (Ramírez 44); that is, the readers willingly suspend their disbelief in order to continue sharing Belascoarán's adventures. But resurrection has another, more political role, which can be traced to a statement made by Chester Himes: “When America kills a nigger it expects him to remain dead. … But I didn't know I was supposed to die” (Muller 2). Himes's metaphorical death in the critical press, like Taibo's, is analogous to Héctor's death at the end of No habrá final feliz; he simply refuses to cooperate with conventional expectations.

10. “No model served. It was a fucking joke, but when in six months he had managed to get them to try to kill him six times, when his skin bore the traces of every single attempt … when he had managed to survive those months, the joke stopped being private and began to integrate itself into the country.”

11. This type of scene was inspired by Himes's compulsive rereading of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (cf. the opening scene) during the period in which he wrote the first Harlem stories.

12. See Robert Skinner's thoughtful analysis of skin color and character in Two Guns from Harlem, 50-67.

13. “You make me sick, Señor Cuesta …—said Héctor and getting to his feet he socked him hard in the jaw. He heard the clean crack of the jawbone as it broke.”

14. Aside from the detectives themselves, many characters—the undertaker H. Exodus Clay, the soul-food queen Mamie Louise,—appear in several novels, alluding to a living continuity which exists outside the texts themselves. This is a technique that we have all become familiar with in our readings of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Gabriel García Márquez's Maocndo, and Juan Carlos Onetti's Santa María.

15. Ed and Digger are also able to get away with violent tactics that, during the '60s, were becoming politically difficult for white police in black communities.

16. Nora Alter uses this term to describe the Harlem detectives' final inability to belong in either the black or white world (16).

17. He organizes the Semana Negra, a congress of detective story writers, in Spain.

18. “that outside of the DF he'd be a cadaver.”

19. “His novels reveal clues about the relationships between police and violence, police and drugs, police and crime, that everyday life attests to.”

20. “They have no loyalty to anyone … they like to mess with people. There is nothing in the world they like more than the power they exert when they terrorize someone.”

21. “a certain Zapata by the name of don Emiliano.”

22. “a kind of logic of resistance by the citizen against the system.”

23. “The people can collaborate. You have no idea how many people listen and how anxious they are to collaborate on something.” This may also be an allusion to the Cuban socialist detective novel, in which the detective is often represented as “the collective.” Taibo refers to this subgenre often: in Adios Madrid, his friend the museum curator is named Justo Vasco after a well-known Cuban detective novelist.

24. See Denning for a thorough analysis of this topography.

25. Something like “screw or be screwed.” For a discussion of the role of high culture in fostering this image of Mexican identity, see Carlos Monsiváis, “Los viajeros y la invención de México.”

26. “What is exceptional, singular, is not that a Mexican could be a victim, but that he could stop being one.”

27. “This social conscience acquired through practices emanating from an elemental, primitive humanism, from a strictly external evaluation of the situation, from a political consciousness constructed from the personal world of the detective, at least permitted him to perceive Mexico from a mordant perspective, from a critical position, from outside the realm of power and privilege.”

28. “Lady of the lightless hours, protect us, lady of the night, protect us. Protect us, because we are not the worst thing left in this city, even though we are not worth much. We are not of the city, nor can we renounce it, we don't even know how to go somewhere else so we can long from there for the streets and the sun, and the drinks of plantain with milk and the tacos, and the 16th of September plaza, and the Cuauhtémoc stadium and the posadas of Chanel Four, and in this dirty solitude that tortures and pursues us.”

29. Himes was enormously bitter towards the American literary establishment for not recognizing his merit, and intensely jealous of other black expatriate writers: “Every other American black living abroad was at least recognized if not helped. But as far as Americans were concerned, I was dead” (144).

30. This also could be a response to the ridiculously Europeanized protagonist of Rodolfo Usigli's Ensayo de un crimen (1944), who eats at Sanborn's and takes tea at Lady Baltimoree.

31. “Wasn't his the same impunity as the others'? Hadn't he been able to throw sticks of dynamite, shoot gunmen, set fire to vans without anything happening? He was almost ready to accept the opinion of the upholsterer, who always said, ‘In this country nothing happens, and even if it does, it doesn't.’”

32. According to Himes, he consoled himself with the thought that he was writing only for the French, who would believe anything about black life in America (Absurdity 102).

33. See Cawelti, Chapter 1, for a discussion of the functions of formula or genre fiction within literature as a whole.

34. Although Himes was the first black writer to write genre detective novels, Taibo was certainly not the first Mexican. From the 1940s on, many Mexican writers attempted the form, although few achieved critical or commercial success.

35. “Who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd … if no one knows (officially) who was responsible for the massacre at Tlateleolco or who ordered the Falcons to attack on the 10th of June?”

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