Abstract
Chapter 4 examines “snuff literature” (Paul Virilio) or novels that fantasize killing women and recording their deaths photographically or on video. It contrasts Roberto Bolaño’s monumental 2666 (2004) with novels that exploit the topics of femicide and snuff for cruel pleasure: Federico Andahazi’s El libro de los placeres prohibidos (2012), Andreu Martín’s Por amor al arte (1982), Rolo Diez’s Mato y voy (1992), Javier Valdés’s Asesino en serio (2000) and Juan Hernández Luna’s Cadáver de ciudad (2006). A coda addresses the treatment of snuff in novels inspired by the same Ciudad Juárez femicides cataloged in 2666. These include feminist texts by Maude Tabachnik and Alicia Gaspar de Alba, as well as sensational, misogynistic and necropornographic ones by Gonzalo Martré, Gregorio León and Ricardo Clark.
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Notes
- 1.
Bolaño’s narrator does not count the cadavers introduced in “The Part About the Crimes,” but a number of critics have attempted to do so with varying results. Counts range from 106 (Olivier 33) to 108 (Corral 29, Rodríguez de Arce 198, Valdez n.p.), 109 (Candia Cáceres 53, Eguía Armenteros 135, Muniz 35), 110 (Manzoni 128, Tornero 33, Walker 100), 112 (Fourez 36), 119 (Afanador n.p.) and 183 (Tavares-dos-Santos et al. 145). Paz Balmaceda García-Huidobro is surely mistaken in estimating “around three hundred female cadavers ” (332), perhaps confusing the novel’s account with the number of women actually reported murdered in Ciudad Juárez during the same years. In an appendix to Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction, Bolaño’s translator Chris Andrews provides the most detailed accounting I have found of the murders in the novel and their correspondence to real crimes in Juárez. Andrews counts 109 murders in 2666 plus one suicide mentioned as having been provoked by despair over the murders, corresponding exactly to the count of real victims provided by Sergio González Rodríguez in Huesos en el desierto.
- 2.
In interpreting the apparently inconclusive ending of “The Part About the Crimes,” I should note that Carmen Pérez de Vega, Bolaño’s companion in the last years of his life, attests that in his final months he lacked the strength to finish the section, which he found particularly grueling due to the content, but that he intended to resume work on it after an anticipated liver transplant, which he never received. “The unfinished part of 2666 is the part with the crimes,” Pérez de Vega states. “He wrote the Archimboldi section first. The last words written for the novel were written in February 2003. The rest of the time he spent living and doing other things. The crimes, one after another, were too much for him. It was very hard work. He said that he couldn’t cope with any more crimes. He wanted to save his energy to recover from the transplant. That was when he started to put together The Insufferable Gaucho. […] He put together that book because he said that it would be his economic support for the postoperative period. He said: ‘This will give me the freedom to finish 2666 and edit it’” (quoted in Maristain 212).
- 3.
The sources for these adjectives describing Bolaño’s tone are as follows: anesthetized (Muniz 39), affectless (Andrew McCann 138, Walker 101), cool (Herlinghaus 164, Valdes n.p.), cold (Muniz 46), frigid (Zalewski n.p.), detached (Levinson 177), disenchanted (Herlinghaus 210), distant (Manzoni 133, Masiello 10, Walker 107), impassive (Elmore 269), impersonal (Elmore 269, Masiello 10, Peláez 41, Walker 109, Zavala 183), indifferent (García Ramos 118), insensitive (Muniz 43), mechanical (Rivera de la Cuadra 183, Walker 101, Zavala 183), neutral (Andrew McCann 138, Walker 101), noncommittal (Muniz 39) and rigorously formal (Cuevas Guerrero n.p.)
- 4.
I provide my own translations here, since semantic complexities are lost in Wimmer’s looser translations of these three phrases as, respectively, “they […] stabbed him” (297), “was literally riddled with knife wounds” (509) and “to pump him full of lead” (518).
- 5.
My thanks to Adriana Fonseca Vargas for calling my attention to this passage. The misogynist logic of the Argentinean torturers was recently echoed by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte when he publicly ordered his soldiers to shoot female communist rebels in the vagina (Rauhala n.p.).
- 6.
Ladenson first presented this essay in English at a conference at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in 2011, and with her kind permission, I cite from that version here. A Spanish translation of the essay has been published as “La violencia en la literatura: desde Homero hasta Bolaño.” in Salvador Cruz Sierra, ed. Vida, muerte y resistencia en Ciudad Juárez: una aproximación desde la violencia, el género y la cultura. Ciudad Juárez: El Colef, 2014. A French translation has been published as “Violence dans la littérature d’Homère à Bolaño” in Superflux 6 (2013).
- 7.
In interviews Bolaño places Borges above all other modern writers in Spanish. “I have read all Borges’s work, at least twice, and almost all the books that have been written about him […]. In sum, probably the best writer in the Spanish language since Quevedo” (quoted in Swinburn 77). In another interview he adds, “Borges [is] the modern author I reread the most. And the one that has taught me the most” (quoted in Braithwaite 99).
- 8.
Natasha Wimmer translates Bolaño’s “teatro” as “drama” (521).
- 9.
Wimmer translates Bolaño’s “una puta agonizante” (405) as “a whore […] facing death” (321).
- 10.
The first of Bolaño’s two segments on snuff begins on page 669 of the Spanish Anagrama edition, which is to say 227 pages (65%) into the 349-page section. The second segment of snuff follows closely after, beginning on page 675, 66.7% through “La parte de los crímenes.”
- 11.
Sources cite different dates for the Argentina shoot. Kerekes and Slater date it to 1971 (11) while Jackson says 1970 (8).
- 12.
Public outcry over what credulous citizens concluded was a genuine snuff film led to the month-long investigation of Snuff by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, resulting in the official finding of what was obvious to any careful viewer: that the apparent murder at the end of the film was a hoax relying on “conventional trick photography” (quoted in Kerekes and Slater 23). Kerekes and Slater report that similar scandals arose over the projection of Snuff in other cities in the United States and Canada, and that its exhibition was banned by some local governments (23). In Indianapolis and Las Vegas, local authorities required that advertisements for the film carry a disclaimer admitting that no one was actually killed during its production (Petley 206).
- 13.
Scholars agree that pornographic snuff as imagined in US popular culture since the 1970s has never been proven to exist as a commercial commodity (Jackson 9). Nevertheless, the myth has been strong enough to generate a long series of fictional feature films and television episodes dramatizing the production of snuff pornography. Rumors of the existence of underground snuff films, supposedly imported from Mexico or Argentina, were also strong enough to prompt denunciations by the anti-pornography activists of Citizens for Decency through Law in 1974, then commentary in mainstream newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom and reported investigations by agencies such as the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York City Police Department and the US FBI (Lynch 70, 86, 118). In late 1975, wire service reports from the Associated Press and United Press International and various newspapers quoted a detective from New York’s Organized Crime Control Bureau who cited organized crime sources in affirming the existence of a series of eight 8 mm snuff reels, possibly produced in Argentina, that were being shown in expensive private screenings (“Doubt Actual Kill” 1, 70; Lynch 70). In October 1975, the film industry trade newspaper Variety explains the supposed content of the film, in which a group of men engage in “assorted oral and sado-masochistic sex acts” with a woman, before stabbing her to death and dismembering her (“Doubt Actual Kill” 70). The same article also quotes porn industry sources as rejecting the existence of such a film but agreeing “that such a film would be the ultimate in pornography” (70). Citing comments by an FBI agent in a 2006 documentary, Neil Jackson states that “sexualized murder was built into the definition of snuff by the US federal authorities investigating the phenomenon in its early stages” (8).
- 14.
Following his legal conviction on charges resulting from a performance in 1968, Muehl was no longer able to perform his “material actions” in Austria, but he found venues and continued to generate scandals in Germany with performances that “featured naked protagonists who were mimicking acts of sexual violence, sadism , masochism and the devouring of animals such as pigs and hens” (Ursprung n.p.). A film recording of Manopsychotic Ballet, performed at Kölnischer Kunstverein in 1970, documents his last major public art action before retiring to commune life. It included four naked performers as well as two naked cameramen, two naked sound recordists and a naked cellist. Philip Ursprung summarizes the action recorded on the film as follows: “The action begins with a ritual dance of the performers, who caress each other’s genitals and mimic sexual intercourse. Muehl then extracts a tampon from the vagina of one of the female performers, presents it to the audience and carries it triumphantly between his teeth. Later, he inserts a rolling pin into her vagina. He whips her with a belt before being whipped himself by her and the others. There is a scene where a cameraman pretends to rape a female performer by inserting the lens of a camera into the vagina. In another scene the two male performers urinate on the body of one of the females. Towards the end, a live chicken is introduced into the proceedings. It remains unclear if it is actually slaughtered on stage, but the performers tear the dead bird to pieces and act as if they are devouring it. In the closing scene, Muehl defecates towards the lens of the camera” (n.p.).
- 15.
To quote Joan Ramon Resina once more, the message of detective fiction “is not so much ‘crime doesn’t pay’ as the inevitability of knowledge […]. The genre postulates an absolute transparency […], presupposed in the detective’s privileged perspective, [which] subtly reproduces Bentham’s panopticon, whose central perspective the reader shares as he or she identifies with the detective” (39).
- 16.
In the only journal article I have been able to locate on Cadáver de ciudad, Rodrigo E. Ordóñez defends the novel enthusiastically as an example of “gore literature,” which he says resembles gore cinema: “the writers in this genre work with literary motifs of sadism , cannibalism, murder, torture, morbidity and necrophilia . The principal objective of these creators is to confront people with a universal and undeniable truth: the fragility of our existence, employing the human body as a medium to expose undisguised mortality” (42). Ordóñez does not say what other contemporary texts he might classify as “gore literature,” but he does say that it dispenses with all sentimentalism and tears (45) and imposes no ethical order in its hyperviolent narrative worlds where atrocities go unpunished by the forces of law (43–4).
- 17.
In Martré’s 2011 article “Los críticos me dan risa” (Critics Make Me Laugh), he recalls that in 2000 alone he published four narco-novels under his own imprint, La Tinta Indeleble. According to Martré, his publishing enterprise “was strictly marginal, I never registered it [for tax purposes] with the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, I never obtained a single ISBN, and I sold the 1000-copy print runs almost at cost. I invented a sales system using my friends” (129). He adds that the novels were not sold in bookstores, but rather directly by him and by (or to) his friends (142). My thanks to Marco Kunz for referring me to this article.
- 18.
In this respect, I find the testimony of Candice Skrapec very enlightening. Skrapec is a psychologist and criminologist who has spent decades researching serial killers and who served as a consultant to police and prosecutors in Ciudad Juárez. After reviewing all existing files on women killed in Juárez between 1992 and 2003, Skrapec reported that she found nothing unusual in the nature of the sexual murders , since similar killings, manifesting a similar intensity of misogynist rage, are seen everywhere (248). She recognized two distinctions in Juárez: the unusually high rate of femicide and the apparent overlapping operation not only of individual serial killers but of groups of men engaged in similar activity, which is unusual because collaboration among perpetrators increases risk of discovery (246). Skrapec says that while she cannot disprove what Kunz calls the more mythic hypotheses, more basic explanations would suffice, especially since a practice such as organ harvesting and trafficking “requires a degree of sophistication” and a surgical precision for which there is no evidence (247–8). The single most obvious factor for explaining the rash of femicides is, in Skrapec’s view, the extreme lack of equipment, training and resources that has prevented the Juárez police and forensic authorities from processing evidence systematically and efficiently and from producing scientific conclusions strong enough to support arrests and convictions (245). In the resulting climate of impunity, Juárez’s abundant preexisting criminal organizations (“drug-related gangs,” 251) can freely engage in the abuse and even murder of women because the behavior “is condoned and accepted by other members of their group—and by the greater society—because we are not prosecuting them” (251). In this climate, and in accordance with González Rodríguez’s previously mentioned theory about the femicides, “the men who are committing these killings together have a camaraderie of sorts that reinforces the acceptability of this behavior” (251).
- 19.
Deborah Jermyn discusses a similar scene in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a film that has been considered groundbreaking for its introduction of a female investigator protagonist in a hard-boiled serial killer narrative. In an autopsy scene, FBI agent Clarice Starling interrupts a crowd of boisterous male policemen congregated around the body of a female murder victim and asks them to leave so that she can “take care of her,” remarking sarcastically that “her folks would thank you if they could for your kindness and sensitivity” (quoted in Jermyn “You Can’t Keep a Dead Woman Down” 165).
- 20.
I am indebted again to Marco Kunz of the Université de Lausanne for having called my attention to Clark’s novel, which is unavailable in libraries in the United States.
- 21.
Here it appears that Clark’s formidable sadistic imagination fails him, as he resorts to rehashing a similar brain-eating scene from the movie Hannibal (dir. Ridley Scott 2001), based on a 1999 novel by Thomas Harris.
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Close, G.S. (2018). Femicide and Snuff. In: Female Corpses in Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99013-2_4
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