Abstract
This chapter analyses Colombian author Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s hypermedia novel Coup de Grace, demonstrating how he brings together two main literary precedents within this work. Firstly, a surrealist heritage is evoked through allusions to the cadavre exquis indicating a long tradition of experimental, ludic practice that informs this work in terms of its structure and procedure. Secondly, the whodunnit genre is invoked in terms of plot and characterisation. The chapter reveals how, through the productive bringing together of these two intertexts, Rodríguez employs digital technologies to transgress narrative levels, engages in narrative metalepsis, and questions some of the standard features (such as stability of character or cause-effect relationship) that are so central to the whodunnit genre he mobilises.
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Notes
- 1.
The titles of these works in the original Spanish are Album de cuentos, Ficción y olvido Debido proceso, and El infierno de Amaury.
- 2.
The title in the original Spanish is Gabriella infinita.
- 3.
- 4.
There are many modernist or high-brow authors whose works have been identified as drawing features from detective fiction , such as Borges, Cortázar, Robbe-Grillet, Nabakov, Eco, and others. Yet their works are mostly classified by scholars as overturning the genre , or undoing some of its premises; see, for example, Tani, who calls such works the ‘anti-detective novel’ or the ‘metafictional anti-detective novel’, and charts how they use the form of detective fiction as a ‘platform for more ambitious, more “literary” fiction’ (Tani 1984, p. xii); or Merivale and Sweeney, who classify such works under the term ‘metaphysical detective story’, and highlight how they raise profound questions about ‘the narrative interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge’ (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, p. 1).
- 5.
Numerous scholars of the genre have commented on its formulaic nature; see, for instance, Norman, who notes that writers of this genre are ‘overwhelmingly committed to narrative order and the resolution of plotlines so as to ensure the repeatable experience of popular texts ’ (Norman 2016, p. 87); Hühn, who describes the arrangement of narrative elements as ‘fundamentally the same in the majority of classical detective novels’, and states that ‘in fact, the genre has been remarkable for the rigidity of its conventional structures—especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when the conventions were frequently canonized as explicit “rules”’ (Hühn 1987, p. 453); and of course Todorov, who set down the norms of the genre and stated that ‘the whodunnit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre , but the one which conforms to them’ (Todorov 1997, p. 43).
- 6.
See Ascari’s (2007) volume which provides a detailed analysis of the sensationalist features of crime fiction, notwithstanding the attempts of writers to deny these sensationalist elements by foregrounding scientific methods of detection.
- 7.
See Klein, who argues that, as a popular fiction genre, detective fiction provides a form of catharsis since it is ‘designed to raise emotions of both fear and pity only to assuage them through the agency of the sleuth who solves the mystery, captures the criminal, and restores order’ (Klein 1995, p. 4).
- 8.
See Catherine Ross Nickerson’s felicitous phrase ‘the satisfactions of murder’ (Ross Nickerson 2010, p. 1) to describe the ways in which such texts structure the reading experience in such a way as to satisfy reader curiosity.
- 9.
In the original Spanish these read: ‘Cadáver exquisito’, ‘Línea mortal’, and ‘Muerte digital’.
- 10.
Although I am here concentrating on the three narrative worlds of Golpe de gracia, it is worth noting that there are also additional features to the novel which sit outside of these narrative worlds proper. In addition to these worlds, there are also four ‘rooms’ that we can visit: these are conceived of by Rodríguez not as integral parts of the narrative itself, but as ‘salas de profundización’ (Rodríguez 2007, p. 109), which offer us additional material and resources. These consist of the Sala de lectura, which provides us with a wealth of reading materials related to Golpe de gracia; Sala de juegos, which gives us access to the games that we already access in the worlds; Sala de estudio, which is set out as office, and links to three blogs about each of the three worlds; and Sala de construcción, which gives us access to two wikis to which users can contribute.
- 11.
In this way, I differentiate my reading of this hypertext novel from that of Romero, who has classified these three worlds of Golpe de gracia as corresponding to three different types of ‘reading ’, these being ‘a quasi theatrical performance, a game of skill, and a game of deduction’ (Romero López 2012, p. 312). Although I do not dispute the differences between each of the three worlds, I argue that Rodríguez’s strategies are much more complex, and that the very categories noted by Romero—such as that of ‘deduction’—are in fact called into question.
- 12.
In the original French this reads: ‘moyen infaillible de mettre l’esprit critique en vacance et de pleinement libérer l’activité métaphorique de l’esprit’ (Breton 2008, p. 701).
- 13.
As a recent edited volume on the cadavre exquis has shown (Kochhar-Lindgren et al. 2010), these notions developed by the surrealists in the first half of the twentieth century have given rise to a wealth of artistic and literary interventions that draw on the key notions of chance operations and collaborative authorship . Indeed, Paul D. Miller has argued that the cadavre exquis anticipated many contemporary digital forms of remixing material, such as database aesthetics , machinima remixing of video game characters, and many other contemporary digital forms of practice based on selection and juxtaposition (Miller 2010, p. xiii).
- 14.
In the original Spanish these read: ‘jefe’, ‘sacerdote’, ‘maestro’, ‘padre’.
- 15.
It is worth highlighting that, as well as a textual word game, the cadavre exquis also exists in visual format comprised of a collective drawing game, in which figures are drawn collectively, in sections, resulting in a disjointed, distorted body.
- 16.
In interpreting the ‘padre’ here as representing patriarchal structures I do not mean to ignore the religious connotations of the term ‘padre’, and which are present within the story. Rather, I am arguing that Rodríguez’s deliberate use of this term immediately brings to mind patriarchal structures more broadly.
- 17.
I am here making reference to the fact that scholars have argued that the computer game as cultural artefact is ambiguously positioned in relation to late capital. Some have argued that logic of the global computer games industry tends to reinforce capitalist values. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter have suggested that computer gaming could be seen to be the ‘ideal commodity’ of post-Fordist, postmodern promotional capitalism (Kline et al. 2003, p. 62), since it ‘powerfully demonstrates the increasingly intensive advertising, promotional, and surveillance strategies practiced by post-Fordist marketers in an era of niche markets’ and ‘displays the global logic of an increasingly transnational capitalism whose production capacities and market strategies are now incessantly calculated and recalculated on a planetary basis’ (Kline et al. 2003, p. 5). That said, others have championed the rise of alternative gaming projects which aim to subvert or thwart the global capital that subtends the commercial computer game industry.
- 18.
In the original Spanish this reads: ‘estás a punto de entrar en el segundo mundo’.
- 19.
In the original Spanish this reads: ‘ayudarle a recoger los pasos a Amaury y te pondrá en contacto con leyendas y historias gallegas, pero también con el camino de la purificación preparado por los dioses aztecas y finalmente con el escalofriante mundo del más allá, desde donde, libre de debilidades y pecados, Amaury volverá dispuesto a reparar’.
- 20.
Perla Sassón-Henry has analysed the depiction of the locales within this section of Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia, focusing on the variety of cultures represented in the novel and emphasising how it submerges the reader in ‘un mundo virtual que lo lleva a explorar una gran variedad de perspectivas culturales que van desde los tiempos precolombinos de los aztecas en México a la actualidad’ (Sassón-Henry 2012, p. 316).Whilst not disputing her identification of the various cultural referents, I argue in my reading that, rather than having a didactic aim of being ‘una fuente rica en referencias culturales que no sólo informan al lector sobre la cultura de los aztecas, Galicia, Colombia y Argentina, sino que también despiertan la curiosidad del lector para continuar la investigación de los aspectos culturales presentados’ (Sassón-Henry 2012, p. 320), Golpe de gracia works to trouble didactic readings due to its overturning of narrative norms and levels.
- 21.
The original Spanish reads: ‘tus sueños tienen que ver con sobrevuelos por regiones desconocidas que sin embargo te resultan familiares’ and that ‘tal vez en alguna vida anterior viviste en estos lugares: la costa de la muerte’.
- 22.
The original Spanish reads: ‘Recoge tus pasos, Amaury’.
- 23.
Indeed, it is worth noting that Rodríguez’s compatriot, Juan B. Gutiérrez, uses the jigsaw format as the interface for his first hypertext novel, The First Flight of the Wright Brothers [El primer vuelo de los hermanos Wright], which was first published in 1997, and in which the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle contained the lexia.
- 24.
This is not to say that all scholars are in agreement with Ryan’s use of the jigsaw puzzle analogy to describe hypertext narrative; see, for instance, David Ciccoricco who argues that the applicability of the jigsaw puzzle metaphor is limited, since, ‘while the analogy amounts more or less to a description of a network narrative, it does not account for arborescent narratives with a finite number of possible outcomes’ Ciccoricco (2007, p. 109).
- 25.
In the original Spanish this reads: ‘En él se resuelven los enigmas: ¿Quién atentó contra Amaury? ¿Por qué lo hizo? Averígualo, estás dotado ahora del poder de la indagación policíaca’.
- 26.
In the original Spanish this reads: ‘Ahora eres un periodista que investiga el crimen del sacerdote Amaury Gutiérrez. […] el modus operandi que has decidido desarrollar es clásico: delatar a los posibles sospechosos, identificar al culpable, y develar el plan criminal’.
- 27.
In the original Spanish this reads: ‘descubrir el objectivo del periodista’.
- 28.
In the original Spanish these read: ‘Descarte, Elocuencia, Psicología and Identificación’ and ‘Casa cura/ casa barrio/ iglesia/ salón’.
- 29.
It is worth noting that da Vinci’s The Last Supper is one of the most parodied images in popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From high-art films such as Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961) which undertook a ‘perverse appropriation’ (Gutiérrez-Albilla 2005) of the Last Supper by recreating it with beggars, or Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La última cena (1976) which restaged The Last Supper with a slave plantation owner surrounded by his slaves in order to make ‘a profound statement about the role of Christianity in the history of slavery’ (Sundt 2009, p. 8), through to multiple citations in Hollywood movies and television series, The Last Supper has become one of the most immediately recognisable visual images, remobilised in a variety of contexts.
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Taylor, C. (2019). Reanimating the Whodunnit: Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (2006) (Colombia). In: Electronic Literature in Latin America. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_4
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