Neoliberal Noir: Bearing Witness to Systemic and Subjective Violence in Mexico

Abstract

This study is focused on the novela negra in twenty-first century Mexico and the ways in which authors have used the genre to engage with the realities of violence, fear, and insecurity in their nation. The three novels explored in this study were written and published in the first decade of the twenty-first century by Mexican authors—La voluntad y la fortuna (2008) by Carlos Fuentes, Hotel DF (2010) by Guillermo Fadanelli, and La muerte me da (2007) by Cristina Rivera-Garza. Analysis shows how they have adapted the novela negra to attempt to make sense of the symbolic and subjective violence in recent decades in Mexico. By centering their narratives around the novela negra’s void, what Slavoj Zizek calls the “blank of the unexplained,” each of these authors count on the genre’s tendency toward dark and disenchanted narration of the present and a pessimistic vision of the future, to examine the crimes of contemporary life in Mexico. These are crimes that reverberate throughout the entire national community and have done so for centuries, affecting everyone to differing degrees but affecting everyone nonetheless. As such, each of these novels is concerned with examining the nation through narrative, but in such a way that it stands in opposition to the totalizing narratives of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than attempting to establish a unifying ideal to subsume a radically heterogeneous nation under one coherent narrative, these novels explore the ways that distance and interconnection are negotiated within the national community, offering alternative accounts of the nation and questioning its viability as a construct, but ultimately being unable to abandon the nation as a concept. Moreover, functioning in opposition to the traditional detective narrative, which celebrates knowledge, mastery, and certainty, these narratives have turned the novela negra genre on its head to reinforce the need to recognize what we do not know and what we cannot explain in a context of generalized violence.