Read Online Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - Free Book Online

the place and the precise identity of the object under discussion. The process was then repeated according to post-Vatican Council rites. Two round-table participants, having appointed themselves senior members, proceeded to play a private game of intellectual ping-pong over whether or not Dostoyevsky had written
romans noirs
. Then they moved on to Henry James, via an obligatory allusion to Poe, and finally announced their discovery that the
roman noir
was invented by a French book-jacket designer who used the colour black for Gallimard’s series of detective novels. Someone else on the platform tried to break into the monopolistic duologue being conducted by the bearded contributor and the short-sighted Latin American. But he was invisibly, metaphysically elbowed aside by the senior members.
    ‘The point is …’
    ‘In my opinion …’
    ‘If you will allow me to …’
    They didn’t allow anything. For a few moments, he tried to squeeze in the sentence: ‘The
roman noir
was born with the Great Depression …’ But his voice only reached the first row and part of the second, where Pepe Carvalho was seated. The particular way in which the two soloists moved their Adam’s apples suggested that they were about to pronounce a final conclusion or enunciate some synthesizing formula.
    ‘We could say …’
    Silence. Expectant faces.
    ‘I don’t know if my dear Juan Carlos will agree …’
    ‘How could I not agree with you, Carlos?’
    Carvalho deduced that their ascendancy was due to a degree of onomastic complicity.
    ‘The
roman noir
is a sub-genre, to which only a few great novelists were committed. Chandler, Hammett, McDonald …’
    ‘What about Chester Himes?’
    The voice which tried to make itself heard had a high-pitched tone—the result, perhaps, of having been bottled up for so long. But this initial defect proved to be an advantage, because it impinged on the duologue, and they turned to trace the origin of that thin sound.
    ‘You were saying?’ said the short-sighted man, with a tired affability.
    ‘I was saying that those three names should be supplemented by Chester Himes, with his great descriptions of life in Harlem. Himes’s work was on a par with that of Balzac.’ The two leading actors seemed temporarily tired from their exertions, and left the intruder to explain himself. Now everything was wheeled into play, from Chrétien de Troyes’
La Matière de Bretagne
to the death of the novel following on the epistemological excesses of Proust and Joyce; not to mention McCarthyism, the crisis of capitalist society, and the social marginalization inevitably induced by capitalism, which provides the suitable cultural milieu for the
roman noir
. The audience was impatient to intervene. As soon as he had the opportunity, one of them got up to denounce Ross McDonald as a fascist. Someone else added that the
roman noir
writers always tended to be on the brink of adopting fascist positions. Hammett was excused on the grounds that he had been a member of the American Communist Party at a time when the communists were above suspicion and had not yet been decaffeinated. Every
roman noir
has a single hero, and that in itself is dangerous. It’s simply neo-Romanticism, retorted another contributor, intent on rescuing the
roman noir
from the inferno of history.
    ‘I’d prefer to say that there exists a certain neo-Romanticism which is the driving force of the
roman noir
, and which makes it necessary in the times we live in.’
    Moral ambiguity. Moral ambiguity. That’s the key to the
roman noir
. Marlowe, Archer, the Continental Op—they’re all awash in this moral ambiguity.
    The two stars were not pleased to have lost their leading role. They now tried to reassert themselves within the rising flood of words: closed universe … lack of motivation … linguistic conventions … the new rhetoric … it’s the opposite of the
Tel Quel
school in that it affirms the personal specificity of the