Plata quemada: ensayo sobre capitalismo y violencia en la tradición de la novela negra latinoamericana

Abstract

This essay invites us to read the Latin American noir novel from the last decades as a radical transculturation of the North American hard-boiled tradition. Firstly, it offers a brief critical discussion of the ways in which the noir genre has been appropriated by several authors such as, Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Franz Galich, Dante Liano and Élmer Mendoza, among others, underscoring the existing link between transformations of the genre, local narrative traditions and their respective sociopolitical contexts. Lastly, it provides a detailed analysis of the poetic of violence articulated in Ricardo Piglia’s Plata quemada (1996; Money to Burn), as a paradigmatic case of a noir aesthetics radicalization within the Latin American context. This reading shows how both the aesthetization and the hyperbolic representation of violence express a critique of capitalism while also offering a critique of systemic violence that takes place in the novel by referencing Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money and Siegfried Kracauer’s theorization of the detective novel’s role in modernity.