Narrativa criminal chilena: del espacio rural a la provincia

Abstract

This article proposes an overview of some crime fictions, rural crime narrative, or countryside noir narrative in Chile, produced in the mid-twentieth century. From this context, it probes into certain features that, on the one hand, are opposed to urban police narrative and, at the same time, raise their own features, based on the criminal-rural dyad, articulated from the transitions that their characters deploy. It is also proposed that these features would lay the current foundations of a criminal narrative that is established from the province, which is represented as another space derived from the rural, and as a decentered sense of the contemporary urban. In this context, the legendary bandit, rural or from the province, emerges and dilutes at the same time from his anti-mythological condition, exacerbating a paradoxical condition. In its development, pacts are drawn that underline the links between the rural story of the mid-20th century and the noir or provincial crime story of the 21st century, thereby emphasizing the social criticism and denunciation that crime fiction constructs, in a reading interwoven with the tensions and relationships between the criminal, the crime, and society.