Contextos, pretextos e intertextos en la irresistible novela criminal de José Luis Ramos Escobar

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of José Luis Ramos Escobar’s third novel, El irresistible mundo de Benedicto, as crime fiction. It envisions the text by the Puerto Rican writer as an exposé of the institutional crimes involved in the establishment of sugar cane plantations in the island. These crimes are pervasive in the nineteenth century and create unending repercussions in the ecological disasters of the petrochemical industry in the twentieth century. The novel’s vision of society coincides with that of the hard core or noir novel, but crime is so pervasive that the only possible detective or hermeneutic activity in the text is left to the reader. In light of Brecht’s (and Piglia’s) question around the capitalist crime of founding banks, the novel poses the question, isn’t it a crime to found a plantation?