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XXI. Beatrice Schuchardt – El décimo infierno de Mempo Giardinelli

By January 4, 2022January 14th, 2022Issues, XXI. Narrativa Criminal

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El décimo infierno de Mempo Giardinelli: sujetos de rendimiento, topología de la violencia y topografía infernal en una novela posdetective (pp. 84-98; DOI: 10.23692/iMex.21.7)

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Dr. Beatrice Schuchardt

Beatrice Schuchardt is Associate Professor in the Institute of Ibero-Hispanic Literary Studies at the University of Münster (Germany). Her fields of research include crime fiction studies and its links with trauma, the representations of medial icons on the Internet (such as Frida Kahlo), female Francophone writings from the Maghreb, and migration in Francophone writings from Canada. Other areas of study are the theories and economic protagonists in the Spanish eighteenth-century theater (subject of her habilitation book, which will be published in 2022), and the staging of Spanish-American and Maghrebi immigration in Spanish migration cinema.

 

This article analyzes the novel El decimo infierno (1997) by the Argentine writer and theorist of crime novels Mempo Giardinelli as a ‘post-detective’ novel, a subgenre of Spanish-American crime fiction that emerged in the late nineties of the twentieth century in which criminals instead of the detective or private investigator act as protagonists. The present article suggests examining the topoi of hell and heat from a new angle, which is Byung-Chul Han’s philosophical essay on the Topology of Violence (2018) (Topologie der Gewalt, 2011) as a theoretical basis. Within this topology, Han locates the performance subject, victim of a modern form of violence less visible and spectacular than the premodern one, and which, instead of afflicting the subject from the outside, resides in the individual him-/herself and makes him/her exploit him-/herself to the point of being scorched, leaving him/her with a disposition for psychic illnesses. Taking that the protagonists of the novel, Alfredo and Griselda, represent two gendered types of the performance subject, and historically relating their being so to Menemism, this study investigates the ‘dialectic of violence’ staged by Giardinelli, vacillating between the centripetal, i.e., self-destructive violence, and the centrifugal, a notion that refers to an explosive form of violence. This dialectic is analyzed with regard to its location within a Dantesque topography of hell, an imagery which forms a counterpoint to the real-historical references the novel offers.

En el presente artículo se analiza la novela Décimo infierno (1997) del escritor argentino y teórico de novelas negras Mempo Giardinelli en tanto que ‘posdetective’, un subgénero de la novela negra hispanoamericana que surge a fines de los años noventa del siglo pasado, que protagonizan los delincuentes en vez del detective o investigador privado. Se propone examinar los topoi del infierno y del calor desde un ángulo nuevo, o sea en base a la Topología de la violencia (2018) desarrollada por del filósofo alemán Byung-Chul Han. Dentro de esa topología, Han localiza el ‘sujeto de rendimiento’, víctima de una nueva forma de violencia menos visible y espectacular que la premoderna. Tal violencia, en vez de afligir al sujeto desde fuera, reside en su interior y le hace explotarse a sí mismo hasta quedar abrasado, dejándole con una predisposición para enfermedades psíquicas. Partiendo de la idea de que los dos protagonistas de la novela, Alfredo y Griselda representan dos tipos distintos del sujeto de rendimiento diferenciables por su sexo, e históricamente relacionando este hecho con la sociedad menemista, el estudio investiga la ‘dialéctica de la violencia’ escenificada por Giardinelli, dinámica en la que la violencia oscila entre lo centrípeto, es decir, de una violencia autodestructiva, y lo centrífugo, noción que se refiere a una violencia explosiva. Esta dialéctica se analiza con respecto a su ubicación dentro de una topografía dantesca del infierno, un imaginario que constituye un contrapunto a las referencias histórico-reales de esa novela posdetective.

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