martes, 13 de enero de 2009

THE POLICE NOVEL

By Alfonso Reyes

Of all ugly denominations which have given name to certain novelistic genre very fashion nowadays I rather prefer "police novel". The rest of denominations seem derogatory or limited or unsuitable by some concept. I dared to say about this police novel – and Jorge Luis Borges has remembered it recently in Buenos Aires – that it has been the gender of our times. I did not pretend making a value judgment but a declaration of facts: 1) it is the most read genre of our days; 2) it is the only novelistic genre emerged in our day, even though its antecedents get lost in the past naturally.

It occurs to me to chat a little bit about the police novel, and it gives me chance to a recent experience. An eminent Mexican psychiatrist found me one of these mornings with a police novel in my hand, and we talked as following:
- Do you also read police novels?
- I am a decided amateur. I´m interested in them but they do not disturb me. In the called "official novel" I disturb and shake for every conflict. In the police novel I delight each conflict because it enriches the investigation. In the “official novel” a death can make us cry. In the police novel, in contrast, a death is welcomed because it gives more relief to the problem. The heart rests and the mind works with an enigma logic or puzzle, as with a case of chess. But the work is such a intense that we do not get tired, and furthermore we know, by golden rule, that they are going to give us the solution in the last chapter; then we can be a little bit passive if we want to; we can calibrate by ourselves the attention and energy of our mind which we want to use up.

Finally, the problem does not carry the pain of a logic abstraction but it goes adjusting incarnating in Pedro, Juan or Francisco. In sum, I do read police novels because they help me to take a break, without reaching me to obsess by them, along my journey job with that mute music of a "continued sleep" which does not have nothing morbid; they allow me the psychological unfold which all of us carry inside (and they are important to find an exit for the well economy of the spirit), and it is not necessary to put in action all sentimental resources or pathetic preoccupation which demands the "official novel".

- You are right – said my friend –. In certain cases, and for the same reasons that you have said, I recommend my patients of nervous fatigue to read novels such as these. We approach, by the way, to the mental hygiene which you worked in some article. Are you interested in novels as well as in short stories?
- First of all, I would require that the work should contain certain size in order to persuade me with its aesthetic deceit. The ancient rhetoricians approached several times (Aristotle was the first one) to this issue about the relation between the lawful deceit and the dimension of the poem. In his comments to “The Raven”, Edgar Allan Poe something said about this issue. Perhaps it would not be possible to say something else as the theme is slippery and it escapes from the dosimetry reason. But there is certain relation between the quantity and the poetic quality, which could be of first grade or the hidden grade, of direct order or inverse order. And the kind of police fiction is obviously first grade and direct reason. Victoria Ocampo, who is also great reader of these books, has declared me that she only bears the novel, not the short story. I am a little bit more eclectic, but I subscribe, in general terms, the same principle.
- Is there something written about the police gender that worth reading?
- There is a good essay by Roger Callois, an there are thousand notes and luminous watching in Borges, who, in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares, is giving passport to this gender in Hispanic-American literature, and, we might say, in the Hispanic literature.

Traslated by Sebastian Pineda

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