Violence and Crime in Garcia-Roza: psychoanalytical detective story

Abstract

In this article, I expect to point out how Garcia-Roza, in his contemporarily approach to the detective-story genre, shows how cultural malaises can affect the fictional subject’s psyche, switching them into real criminal subjectivities as a metaphorical representation to the contemporary individual. In his narratives set from 1990’s onwards, by intermingling literature with psychoanalysis, the author claims that, in a culturally ‘schizophrenic’ society, themes like crime, death and other forms of violence predominate in the 21^st-century Latin America, featuring as a prolific subject-matter in (and for) contemporary detective stories. By critically observing Garcia Roza’s disordered and chaotic atmospheres, in this text, I highlight his novels O silêncio da chuva (1996) and Espinosa sem saída (2006) in which his protagonist detective Espinosa is carefully built as a culturally lost literary persona who allows the author to de-construct the investigator’s total infallibility typically found in classic enigma narratives, providing that the character’s never-ending perusals are constantly left unanswered. After all, as the novelist clarifies, the essence of every crime consists of something unveiled, impenetrable, inscrutable.