Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Beatus Ille and Beltenebros:

Conventions of Reading in the Postmodern Anti-Detective Novel

Lawrence Rich

University of Maryland

Many twentieth-century authors of self-reflexive fiction have adapted or parodied the genre of the classical detective novel.^[1] Commenting on this use of a popular genre, Michael Holquist wrote in 1971 that postmodernists such as Robbe-Grillet and Borges “depend on the audience’s familiarity with the conventions of the detective story to provide the subtext they may then play with by defeating expectations” (155; emphasis added). More than a decade later, Stefano Tani in a classic study of the post-modern detective genre again claimed that “the anti-detective novel . . . stimulates and tantalizes its readers by disappointing common detective-novel expectations” (xv; emphasis added). In view of these and other commentaries it seems evident that for any discussion of postmodern narrative—and particularly of those texts which draw on popular genres like the detective novel—the role of the reader is fundamental. In this essay I intend to analyze how conventional reader expectations are utilized in two novels by the Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956): Beatus ille (1986) and Beltenebros (1989).

There is general agreement that the anti-detective novel is a characteristic literary expression of postmodernism.^[2] However, the latter is a problematical concept because theorists are often obliged to use paradoxical and contradictory terms to define it. For example, Linda Hutcheon describes the discursive strategies of postmodernism as the “uses and abuses” of conventions (Poetics xiii) which are both “installed and undercut” (Poetics 10). In fact, many postmodern texts attempt to balance the fulfillment and subversion of reader expectations, and I suspect that those texts which fail to do so are simply not widely read.^[3] The two novels to be discussed here exemplify this equilibrium, for both depend on reading conventions rooted in popular genres, but as postmodern texts neither do they leave these conventions unmodified.

Beatus ille is an account of a young university student, Minaya, who returns in 1969 to his home town of Mágina in order to investigate the life and writings of Jacinto Solana, a poet of the Spanish civil war who supposedly died there in 1947. During his stay in Mágina Minaya discovers that his uncle’s wife Mariana was murdered in 1937, although the assassin’s identity was never revealed. Minaya succeeds in unmasking the murderer, a discovery accompanied by a self-reflexive allusion to the traditional detective novel:

[Minaya] llevaba en un bolsillo la carta . . . como esos detectives de los libros que reúnen en el salón a los habitantes de una casa cerrada donde se cometió un crimen para revelarles el nombre del asesino. . . . (241)

However, this self-reflexivity is an inherent characteristic of the traditional detective story,^[4] and there is nothing postmodern about the account of Minaya’s investigations and his discovery of the clues, including the bullet which killed Mariana and a letter which incriminates the murderer Utrera. The novelty of Beatus ille is the surprise revelation which occurs after the unmasking of Utrera, the result of an ingenious metafictional strategy: Solana never died and has from the beginning been the first-person narrator of the text.

What distinguishes Beatus ille structurally from the traditional detective novel is that instead of one there are two mysteries. The first concerns the level of story—Who killed Mariana?—while the other concerns the level of discourse—Who is the anonymous first-person narrator?^[5] The reader is first presented with the enigma of enunciation as the novel begins with an unidentified first-person voice. This use of an unreliable narrator could very well have been inspired by Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but there is an important difference. In Christie’s novel the narrator is a “real” character in the diegetic world of the story. Solana on the other hand occupies an ontologically precarious position between the world of the story and the abstract space of discourse, alternately concealing himself behind a first- and third-person narrator. Although Solana is like Dr. Sheppard an unreliable narrator, he is also a postmodern contradiction who exists simultaneously as an omniscient author-narrator at the level of the narration and a homodiegetic narrator at the level of the story.^[6]

Confronted with two enigmas, the reader is seduced into focusing on the diegetic world of the story and the mystery of Mariana’s death through the author’s strategy of having the first-person “I” continually disappear behind an omniscient third-person narrator. Since the presence of the latter is a traditional guarantee of verisimilitude and the narrator’s authority, the reader is lead to accept Solana’s death, just as José Manuel Luque and Minaya do (18; 20). Individual reading experiences of Beatus ille will no doubt differ, but it seems highly probable that an implicit law of mental economy would impede most readers from wanting to puzzle over two enigmas simultaneously, particularly when through the seduction of fiction attention is drawn to the story of Mariana. After all, if Solana is assumed to be dead there is little reason for the reader to question the narrator’s identity.

The affinity between the activity of the detective and that of the reader was underscored by Todorov who proposed that “author : reader = criminal : detective” (49). This homology is made to show that the author (as criminal) must constantly try to throw the reader (as detective) off the hermeneutic path. Muñoz Molina does this by focusing on the story of Mariana and convincing the reader of Solana’s death, but does not forget the detective author’s traditional obligation to provide the reader with sufficient clues to deduce the criminal’s identity—in this case the identities of both Utrera and the narrator. However, unlike the traditional detective plot in which physical traces provide the bulk of the evidence—the case of Mariana—the clues to Solana’s identity are also discursive phenomena. “Puedo, si quiero, imaginarlo todo para mí solo, es decir, para nadie” says the anonymous narrator in Chapter 1 (7; emphasis added). Four chapters later Minaya discovers an inscription of Solana which reads: “Quién hubiera tenido el coraje de ser el capitán Nemo. Mi nombre es nadie, dice Ulises . . .” (52; emphasis added).^[7] Solana’s diary carries one of the most explicit clues, a description of the narrative technique of Beatus ille:

A veces Solana escribía en primera persona, y otras veces usaba la tercera como si quisiera ocultar la voz que lo contaba y lo adivinaba todo, para dar así a la narración el tono de una crónica impasible. (89)

Given the wealth of clues that point to Solana as the narrator, and assuming that most readers are genuinely unprepared for the surprise ending, the inability to presage the narrator’s identity most probably results from conventional expectations of the genre: in a classical detective novel there is a murder, and the culprit must be exposed. The reader is simply more interested in learning who killed Mariana and why. In this particular instance, rather than refer only to subverted expectations we would do better to speak of their being displaced and diverted before they are finally and unexpectedly fulfilled.

Beatus ille does nevertheless subvert reader expectations in one important way. Besides its obvious debt to the detective novel, Beatus ille is also a work of historiographic metafiction which challenges the authority of “official” history through its foregrounding of the impossibility of reconstructing the past through memory,^[8] for Solana’s “crónica impasible” of history is the product of a subjective and ontologically ambivalent narrator. When Solana tells Minaya “acaso la historia que usted ha encontrado sólo es una entre varias posibles” (277), he also denies one of the foundations of the classical detective novel: narrative closure.^[9] The postmodern aspect of Beatus ille is precisely in this “undialectical” ending.^[10] Thus, reader expectations have been fulfilled through a series of traditional strategies such as mysteries and clues, but also subverted by incomplete solutions and the lack of an unequivocal ending.

Unlike the protagonist of the classical detective novel who shares the unambiguous moral standards of society, the hard-boiled protagonist lives a socially marginal existence and refuses to participate in what he considers flawed or imperfect moral codes:

Like the lonely man of the forests, he works outside of the established social code, preferring his own instinctive justice to the often tarnished justice of civilization. (Grella, “Hard-Boiled” 106)

The setting of this genre is no longer an idyllic English country home but an urban jungle where the law of the fittest often replaces conventional moral codes. As Anthony Hilfer observes, “the central and defining feature of the [hard-boiled] crime novel is that in it self and world, guilt and innocence are problematic” (2; author’s emphasis). Besides inhabiting a morally ambivalent universe, the hard-boiled protagonist can no longer depend on reason alone:

The detective is no longer a logical mind in a positivistic world as he was in Poe’s tales. His attempts to unravel the mystery often clash . . . against a “reality” which is no longer explained. . . . (Tani 23)

Given that the world of the hard-boiled thriller is overshadowed by moral or metaphysical uncertainty, it is an ideal genre to articulate the postmodern consciousness of a decentered, unstable universe. However, relativity in the conventional hard-boiled crime novel is still characteristic of the modernist project, and its postmodern adaptation necessarily employs different strategies.^[11]

If Beatus ille is Muñoz Molina’s rewriting of the classical detective novel, Beltenebros is his postmodern adaption of the hard-boiled spy novel. Its protagonist Darman is an agent who has worked for years for the Spanish anti-Franco resistance both inside and outside of Spain.^[12] For what will most probably be his last mission, he agrees to “eliminate” Andrade, a fellow member of the resistance who has been identified as an informant and traitor to the Republican cause. While pursuing Andrade, Darman recalls a similar mission some twenty years earlier when he was ordered to kill Walter, another resistance member accused of treason. Darman realizes after Andrade is killed that the latter was an innocent victim of the real traitor Beltenebros. Walter’s guilt is left curiously ambiguous.

From the first sentence traditional reading codes of the hard-boiled thriller are activated: “Vine a Madrid para matar a un hombre a quien no había visto nunca” (7). The reader is prepared for a conventional thriller, and the novel does in effect fulfill traditional expectations of the genre in that it portrays a professional assassin who moves in a decaying urban setting, a panorama of shady characters, a femme fatale who drugs the protagonist and a spectacular chase scene. Nevertheless, Beltenebros is a postmodern text which like Beatus ille does not confine its focus to the diegetic world of the story but operates as a self-conscious or self-reflexive text.^[13]

Whereas the traditional thriller demands the reader’s unconditional acceptance of the diegetic world portrayed, the narrator of Beltenebros continually qualifies this reality. In airports “ni el tiempo ni el espacio son del todo reales” (13), a cathedral seen from a hotel window is “tan irreal y cercana como un espejismo” (28), the events of Darman’s past “tenían una irrealidad de pasado lejano” (143) and the streets of Madrid are “las calles de un Madrid irreal” (156). For Jorge Luis Borges “la irrealidad . . . es condición del arte” (“El milagro” 152), and in Beltenebros the Argentinian author’s influence is unmistakable. There are continual references to doubles and mirrors, destiny is treated as inexorable (“una invisible corriente más poderosa que mi voluntad” [57]), and time is circular (un “viaje circular” [130, 186]). Unlike the conventional crime novel which allows its protagonist a limited autonomy, all of the characters in Beltenebros are depicted as puppets in a universe controlled by ominous, uncontrollable, and unexplainable forces. There is also a characteristically Borgesian rejection of the unified Cartesian subject (“Yo mismo me multiplicaba invisiblemente en otros hombres” [41]). Through constant and explicit allusions to Borges^[14] and the status of his characters as fictions, Muñoz Molina creates a double-coded text which can be read both as a conventional thriller and as a self-conscious and self-reflexive metafiction in which Rebeca Osorio’s novels are a mise en abîme of the text itself. Rather than simply a subversion of reader expectations, one might speak here of an accretive strategy.

Like Beatus ille, Beltenebros offers a surprise case of someone thought to be dead who is really alive, this time in the person of the fascist police commissioner Valdivia-Ugarte-Beltenebros. There are obvious clues that he is really Valdivia: when Darman sees the commissioner for the first time the latter is smoking, and Darman recalls that Valdivia smoked constantly. The commissioner wears glasses while Valdivia’s eyes “no podían soportar la claridad” (119). There is also a clue that depends on the reader’s knowledge of intertextual references. In a poem by Pablo Neruda entitled “Valdivia (1544)” the villainous historical character is referred to as “Valdivia, el verdugo” (Canto 173), which suggests that Valdivia is really the fascist commissioner and executioner of resistance members. However, just as in the case of Solana in Beatus ille the reader has been lead to believe that Valdivia died years before.

Muñoz Molina has always been a devotee of the detective story and hard-boiled thriller.^[15] At the same time he has never ceased to speak of the importance of the reader as a co-creator of the text and “accomplice” of the author.^[16] Both Beatus ille and Beltenebros demonstrate this devotion to popular genres and a profound sensitivity to the reader. The former novel utilizes the hermeneutic convention of the classical detective novel, a convention which operates not only on the level of the story but also on the level of discourse. The reader’s traditional expectations have not been denied but rather displaced or diverted, while the text’s only subversive aspect is the absence of closure commented on previously. There is little subversion of expectations in Beltenebros, a text which though doubly-coded also allows for a conventional reading. This transformation of the hard-boiled thriller into a self-reflexive homage to Borges is more a case of accretion than a subversion of reader expectations. Thus, Beatus ille and Beltenebros are postmodern recreations of popular genres which incorporate, displace, and build on conventional reader expectations rather than only defeat, disappoint, or deny them.

Works cited

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “El milagro secreto.” Ficciones. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986. 149–57.

Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.

___. 62. Modelo para armar. 3rd ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Trad. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980.

Grella, George. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” Detective Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Woodstock: Countryman, 1988. 103–20.

___. “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel.” Dimensions of Detective Fiction. Ed. Larry N. Landrum et al. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1976. 37–57.

Herzberger, David K. “History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain.” PMLA 106.1 (1991): 34–45.

Hilfer, Anthony Channell. The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History 3.1 (1971): 135–56.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

___. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.

Muñoz Molina, Antonio. Beatus ille. 4th ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990.

___. Beltenebros. Mexico: Planeta Mexicana, 1990.

___. “Lectura y adicción.” ABC [Madrid, Spain] 20 Aug. 1988, “ABC literario”: XII.

Neruda, Pablo. Canto general. Ed. Enrico Mario Santí. Madrid: Cátedra, 1990.

Spanos, William V. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.” Boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 147–68.

Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 42–52.

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^[1]The classical or “formal” detective novel denotes the traditional genre popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in which pure ratiocination leads to the solution of a crime. Its counterpart is the “hard-boiled” crime thriller. For descriptions of both see Grella.

^[2]“The paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story” (Spanos 154).

^[3]Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela) and 62. A Model Kit (62. Modelo para armar) are exemplary. Both attempt to challenge the reader, but the former has attained the status of a best-seller while the latter has not due to the extreme demands it places on the reader.

^[4]“This literary form [the detective story] is itself a very self-conscious one” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 31).

^[5]“Story” refers to the text’s signified or narrative content and “discourse” to its signifiers or mode of presentation. See Genette 25–32.

^[6]A “homodiegetic” narrator is one “present as a character in the story he tells” (Genette 245).

^[7]At the level of the story being “nadie” allows Solana to hide physically from the other characters. At the level of discourse the pronoun also suggests a postmodern “absence” of narrative authority.

^[8]“Interpretation of the past is always ongoing, always contingent on memory. . . . Memory forgets, revises, and transforms” (Herzberger 42). For “historiographic metafiction” see Hutcheon, Poetics 105–23.

^[9]This is reflected by the stock phrase “the case is closed.”

^[10]“There is no dialectic in the postmodern” (Hutcheon, Poetics x). “The new metaphysical detective story finally obliterates the traces of the old. . . . It is non-teological, is not concerned to have a neat ending in which all the questions are answered . . .” (Holquist 153).

^[11]“[Hammett] is a professional detective novel writer who deeply innovates the rules . . . with that sense of uneasiness and relativism that all gifted modernist writers experienced in the same period” (Tani 24).

^[12]Although never explicitly named, the party in exile is obviously the Spanish Communist Party.

^[13]For Robert Alter, the self-conscious novel is “a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice” (x) in which “there is a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention” (xi). Linda Hutcheon proposes a distinction between “self-reflexive” (self-conscious) and “self-reflective” texts, the latter not necessarily self-conscious (Narcissistic 7).

^[14]Andrade as “el traidor [que] huye convertido en héroe” (49) refers to Borges’s short story “Tema del traidor y del héroe” in Ficciones (127–31).

^[15]See “Lectura y adicción.”

^[16]Solana says to Minaya “Yo he inventado el juego, pero usted ha sido mi cómplice” (Beatus 276), a direct allusion to the ideal reader proposed by Cortázar in Hopscotch (“hacer del lector un cómplice” [448]).