Crime in Fiction and the Secret of the World

Several themes struck me as I read this weeks essays on infrapolitics (or “lo impolítico” for Espósito), such as the idea of literature being anti-moral as it to disavow itself from any opportunism - a narrative that self-exposes without an ulterior motive – explored in what Moreiras calls “a non-moralist betrayal of war” contained within Comrac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But perhaps most enlightening was this idea that within the genre of crime fiction in Mexico lies not only the unveiling of the secret behind a murder but a secret within that secret: “the secret of the world,” an unfathomable secret that surpasses national boundaries. Moreiras’ exploration of the murders in Ciudad Juárez both as novelized by Roberto Bolaños and in reality expresses the paradoxical interaction between the necessity for a political reaction to the suspension of the ethical and the “ethical need to interrupt the suspension of the political” (173) – the infrapolitical quality of Mexican thrillers. I was also intrigued by the connection Moreiras makes between literary nationalism and subalternity and sacrifice and how this particular genre abandons that idea and steps out of the national and into the secret of the world concealed within narratives of murder. That this universal extrapolation contained within the genre of investigation literature, of that anti-moralist complex interplay of ethics and politics, might also hold the key to literature’s not-quite-ethical inpolitical role, a “need for antimoralist revelation,” points to an indefinable but essential function of fiction not only in Latin America but beyond.