Realismo y novela policial en "Las cuatro estaciones" de Leonardo Padura

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, Cuban crime fiction underwent a profound change and an evolution analogous to that achieved by the crime fiction genre in Ibero-America. These countries, since the 1970s, had managed to transform the genre, finally adapting it to the socio-historical conditions of each one of them, gradually creating what is nowadays known as neopolicial, which, through realism, turns the narrative text into a critical device where the police enigma is only an excuse to investigate deeper issues, revealing the darkest face of society and denouncing the vices of the State. This study argues that the spontaneous course that crime fiction would follow in Latin America and Cuba is frustrated on the island precisely during the 1970s when the detective novel takes a qualitative leap in these territories but coincides with the period in which the Cuban revolutionary government defines its cultural policy and assumes this genre for a strictly utilitarian purpose. During these years, and over the course of two decades, the socialist state promoted its proliferation as a political-literary device through one of its official organs, the Ministry of the Interior, creating the so-called revolutionary detective novel. The boom that this narrative achieved over the course of 15 years will begin to decline from the second half of the 1980s, diminishing completely in the early 1990s. The fall of the revolutionary detective novel takes place due to the social, political, and economic crisis that Cuba will go through during the disintegration of the socialist camp. The changes in the global political context and the economic crisis will force the Cuban State to a certain opening, which, on the artistic and cultural level, will be translated, among other things, in a process of reformulation of the literary canon and the search for new referents. At the forefront of these transformations that took place in the 1990s was Leonardo Padura with his first four detective novels, later known as Las cuatro estaciones, with which he reestablished a literary past denied by the socialist cultural policy while introducing postmodernity into the country’s literature through the poetics of the neopolicial. In order to argue the above, the thesis is organized into two theoretical frameworks, the one dealing with the so-called "new realisms" and the one devoted to describing the development of the detective novel and the characteristics of its newest Ibero-American aspect, the neopolicial. In the first case, we start from the premise that, in Ibero-American crime fiction and specifically in the detective novels of Leonardo Padura, there is a tendency to return to realistic modes of representation, but in a space of regression-evolution because realism has evolved to new forms; it has been transformed according to the imperatives of a new reality that needs to be represented, where the intimate, the self-referential, and the stylistic have been replaced by the collective, the social, and the crude exposure of corruption and marginality that the new Ibero-American cities of the late 20th-century harbor. The second theoretical framework allows us to analyze the process of the emergence of the neopolicial in Ibero-America and the reasons for its emergence in Cuba through the tetralogy Las cuatro estaciones, coinciding with the transformations that have taken place at the political and social levels in those countries and motivated by a new popular culture questioning the status quo. In order to provide a global approach to this situation, our work made a journey from the foundations of the detective novel and its development and transformation in Latin America to then investigate the emergence and evolution of this genre in Cuba until the triumph of the revolution in 1959, and from this date to study the changes that the new cultural policy brought to literature, especially to crime fiction in a period spanning three decades. We continue with what constitutes the core of our research, the analysis of the changes that took place in the Cuban narrative since the 1990s, culminating with the role that the writer Leonardo Padura played in this transformation as a reformer of crime fiction, which we corroborate through the study of Las cuatro estaciones, a tetralogy that promotes the new realism of the current Cuban novel in its neopolicial aspect. The sequence and organization of this study allowed us to conclude that the dimension of Leonardo Padura's work, as an author living and creating in a totalitarian state, lies in having assumed the change that Cuban literature was supposed to assimilate under the new political and economic circumstances, retaking the course and the realist tradition of Cuban literature and crime fiction, and introducing a postmodern discourse in his narrative, parallel to the new literary models of crime fiction in Latin America and the world in general.