Novela de suspense (Thrillers)
Novela picaresca (Picaresque romance)
contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In their purest form, these two stories have no point in common . . . . The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens to the second? Not much. The characters of the second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them: a rule of the genre postulates the detective's immunity. We cannot imagine Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance threatened by some danger, attacked, wounded, even killed. The hundred and fifty pages which separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the killer are devoted to a slow apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after lead. The whodunit thus tends toward a purely geometric architecture.This second story, the story of the investigation, . . . is often told by a friend of the detective, who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book; the second story consists, in fact, in explaining how this very book came to be written . . . . The first [story] -- the story of the crime -- tells 'what really happened,' whereas the second -- the story of the investigation -- explains 'how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it."
Each story has a status which is the converse of the other.
"The first, that of the crime, is in fact the story of an absence: its [salient] characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book. In other words, the narrator cannot transmit directly the conversations of the characters who are implicated, nor describe their actions: to do so, he must necessarily employ the intermediary of another (or the same) character who will report, in the second story, the words heard or the actions observed. The status of the second story . . . [consists in being] a story which has no importance in itself, which serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of the crime . . . . We are concerned then in the whodunit with two stories of which one is absent but real, the other present but insignificant."
In Presentation criminelle de quelques concepts majeurs de la philosophie (Criminal Presentation of a Few Major Philisophical Concepts [1998]) by Guy Lardreau this scholar argues that the detective novel is in fact a genre of philosophical writing, characterized by the "fictional presentation of concepts." He shows that detective investigation is comparable in its method to the empiricism of certain philosophers. The elucidation of this methodological affinity gives way to various possible paths of development: that of intellectual empiricism (in the manner of Locke), of critical empiricism (in the manner of Hume and Hobbes), of radical empiricism (in the manner of Occam, Berkeley or Wittgenstein), or of vulgar (sensual) empiricism. Lardreau argues that the detective novel would have been the subject of much philosophical contemplation had their similarities in concept not been masked by the disparity of their presentation.
First detective novel:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlett (1887).
another genre within detective fiction, . . . created in the United States just before and particularly after World War II . . . . [T]his kind of detective fiction fuses the two stories or [more precisely] suppresses the first and vitalizes the second. We are no longer told about a crime anterior to the moment of the narrative; the narrative coincides with the action. No thriller is presented in the form of memoirs: there is no point reached where the narrator comprehends all past events, we do not even know if he will reach the end of the story alive. Prospection takes the place of retrospection.The thriller seeks to depict a particular milieu, and it organizes itselfThere is no story to be guessed; and there is no mystery, in the sense that it was present in the whodunit. But the reader's interest is not thereby diminished; we realize here that two entirely different forms of interest exist. The first can be called curiosity; it proceeds from effect to cause: starting from a certain effect (a corpse and certain clues) we must find its cause (the culprit and his motive). The second form is suspense, and here the movement is from cause to effect: we are first shown the causes, the initial donn«ees (gangsters preparing a heist), and out interest is sustained by the expectation of what will happen, that is, certain effects (corpses, crimes, fights). This type of interest was inconceivable in the whodunit, for its chief characters (the detective and his friend the narrator) were, by definition, immunized: nothing could happen to them. The situation is reversed in the thriller: everything is possible, and the detective risks his health, if not his life."
"around specific characters and behavior. This is how it was described in 1945, by Marcel Duhamel, its promoter in France: in it we find 'violence--in all its forms, and especially in its most shameful-- beatings, killings . . . . Immortality is as much at home here as noble feelings . . . . There is also love-- preferably vile--violent passion, implacable hatred.' Indeed it is around these few constants that the thriller is constituted: violence, generally sordid crime, the amorality of the characters."[Prepared by Professor M.A. Bossy for Comparative Literature 51A, Brown University]
The pícaros, upon whom the picaresque novel is based, were usually errand boys, porters, or factotums (persons employed to do a wide variety of tasks) and were pictured as crafty, sly, tattered, hungry, unscrupulous, petty thieves. They stole to escape starvation and were likable despite their defects.The picaresque novel, a reaction against the absurd unrealities and idealism of the pastoral, sentimental, and chivalric novels, represents the beginnings of modern Realism. It juxtaposed the basic drives of hunger cruelty, and mistrust and the honorable, glorious, idyllic life of knights and shepherds. Hunger replaced love as a theme, and poverty replaced wealth.
Early picaresque novels were both idealistic and realistic, tragic and comic, and the authors attacked political, religious, and military matters. Some authors were sincere reformers, while others conveniently set off their sermons so they might be easily avoided. They reflected the poverty and and unsound economic conditions of late sixteenth century Spain. Spaniards were living in a dream world after the glories of the conquest of the New World. They flocked to the cities, the upper classes refusing to work with their hands, cultivate the land or engage in business or commerce, all of which were viewed as degrading. Poor knights starved with the beggars. Thus, comic elements are omnipresent, the sentiment is tragic -the tragedy of a Spain that was outwardly the most powerful nation in the world but inwardly on the path to decline and ruin. The picaresque genre faithfully portrays these tragic conditions.
The picaresque novel is autobiographical and episodic in nature, as the pícaro recounts his adventures in the service of one master after another. These novels rarely came to a conclusive end, and were sometimes continued in later volumes. They inherited a long history of satire and bourgeois humor (. . .). Spanish writers gave the picaresque genre an intensity and urgency, however, that was previously lacking and made their picaresque tales one of the landmarks of European realism.
Usually the pícaro is of the lower classes. Forced into a life of servitude by the severity of the times, he drifts into a life of petty crime and deceitfulness in his struggle for survival. The tone of the novel is hard, cynical, skeptical, often bitter, and it often portrays the corrupt and ugly. Humor abounds, but it is only a step removed from tears, and what appears to be funny is tragic in a different light.
The pícaros ordinarily write in their old age about their experiences as idealistic youths. Yet they do not present the whole picture. In its emphasis on the seamier side of life, the picaresque novel twists and deforms reality. The pícaro lives by his wits and steals and lies just to stay alive. His many employers give the narrator the opportunity to satirize various social classes and to paint a portrait of a period full of living, brawling human beings.
[Extracted from: Chandler, Richard E & Kessel Schwartz, A New History of Spanish Literature, (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991), pp. 118-20.]
First picaresque novel:
La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (1554).
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