Introduction: private eyes & time travelers - detective fiction and science fiction from Latin America - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Ilan Stavans

A FEW YEARS AGO A STRANGE, SURPRISING BOOK came to my hands: a collection of Science Fiction stories by American Jewish writers. Accustomed as a reader to the type of shtetl folklore recurrent in the art of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, I was intrigued by the mere thought of Tevyes and Herzogs in outer space. Since memory and the past are par excellence Jewish terrains, to use fiction to point to a technological future is, one might say, an anachronism. Similarly, to discover tales of science and detective fiction by Latin American writers might seem absurd to some. After all, today's readership in the United States is accustomed to a set of symbols and motifs from the region: ill-fated guerrilla revolts lead by dreamers modeled after "Che" Guevara and Nicaragua's Eden Pastora, clairvoyant prostitutes, forgotten generals, butterfly rainstorms, insomnia epidemics. Since the so-called "boom generation" of the sixties, which included masters such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, and the now-eclipsed Chilean novelist Jose Donoso, the impression remains that the literature produced south of the border is thematically monolithic and aesthetically homogeneous: the novel was seen as the region's favorite genre and minority art, and literary subgenera were ignored and consequently nonexistent. Nothing could be further from the truth. Art and literature in Latin America are, have always been, richly varied, ethnically diverse, ideologically explosive. Proof of it is the incredible output, since the late nineteenth century, of literary private eyes and time-travelers; one very few readers abroad know about. Its favorite vehicles are the novella and the short story and its audience, expectedly, is quite young and politically unhappy. Which evidences the challenge of morality, technology, and the future, never totally foreign to the Hispanic intelligentsia.

My own passion for dime novels dates back to my adolescent years in Mexico City, a period in which I discovered the cerebral private eye created by Borges and Nabokov. Under a pseudonym, I wrote a couple of cheap thrillers, still in print, while voraciously reading memorable works by Dorothy L. Sayers and Hemingway. Then, after moving in 1985 to New York City, I was lucky to live in the Upper West Side building housing Murder, Inc., where, not surprisingly, I found an amazing treasure. In the early nineties, after writing a few essays on Jorge Ibarguengoitia, Rafael Bernal (author of the Mexican classic The Mongol Plot), and Rodolfo Usigli (a playwright whose only novel, Rehearsal for a Crime, was adapted to the screen by Luis Bunuel), I published a monographic study on the Mexican detective story (Antiheroes). It still puzzles me that, in spite of common knowledge, a few anthologies of detective fiction from Latin America have circulated in English, including Donald A. Yates's Latin Blood: The Best Crime and Detective Stories of South America and Amelia Simpson's New Tales of Mystery and Crime from Latin America. Yates, who taught for years at the University of Michigan and cotranslated Borges's Labyrinths, was among the first scholars to devote himself to the subgenera and to make examples from Mexico and Argentina available. His collection includes Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Death and the Compass," Hernando Tellez's extraordinary "Just Later, That's All" (part of Ashes for the Wind, the story was used as inspiration by a fellow Colomibian, Garcia Marquez, in "One of These Days"), as well as pieces by Argentineans Rodolfo J. Walsh and Enrique Anderson Imbert, and Mexicans such as Maria Elvira Bermudez, Antonio Helu, and Pepe Martinez de la Vega. Yates also edited Marco Denevi's Rosaura at 10 O'Clock for a U.S. readership, a page-turner long considered a cornerstone of the genre in Spanish. As for Simpson, who is also the author of an academic study on the subject published in 1990, her volume includes a story by Ricardo Piglia, called "The Crazy Woman and the Story of Crime," in which his character Renzi first appeared, as well as pieces by lesser figures like Eduardo Goligorsky, Paulo Rangel, and Arnaldo Correa. Together with this special issue, which offers other examples by the same writers and introduces new names to the galaxy of Latin American detective thrillers, the spectrum of a healthy, well-developed literary tradition should be quite accessible to English-speaking fans of Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade.

The first thing one ought to say about sleuths in Latin America is that, like Pascal's famous sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, the literary subgenera is ubiquitous in television soaps, best-selling high-profile romances, and, more than anything else, daily life. Since morality is ambiguous in the Hispanic world and good doesn't triumph over evil, detective fiction is about intellectual tricks and corrupt authority figures, not about reason mastering the chaos of nature. Indeed, thrillers and dime novels--"beach reading" to many Americans--have been ubiquitous in Latin America since before the forties. More than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere, Argentina is known as the crib of first-rate armchair detectives who, stylistically and verbally Europeanized, devote themselves to deciphering a labyrinthine adventure in a context mentally ambiguous and politically corrupt. Borges was responsible for granting crime stories a high-brow, almost metaphysical status. Alone and in collaboration with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, he imagined bookish detectives like Erik Lonnrot and Don Isidro Parodi, who, from an insulated cell or while playing intellectual tricks, resolve unlikely mysteries through deductive logic.(1) Aside from Borges, Cortazar, who translated Poe's entire oeuvre into Spanish, was also a practitioner of sorts. "Las babas del diablo," masterfully adapted to the screen by Michaelangelo Antonioni as Blow Up, in which a camera acts as private eye, is an ambiguous and ambitious thriller about the relativity of one's own perspective about photography and about the impossibility of finding the truth.