Emmet Reads

Asked to discuss the violence in Road Runner cartoons, Mr. Jones quickly replied that ”there was nothing we ever did that wasn’t preceded by something in Chaplin or Keaton.”

”Everyone in America under the age of 45 grew up on our cartoons,” he said. ”Now, do you think they’ve been damaged by them?”

”And we had very strict rules about Road Runner,” he added, citing the list in his book, which includes the following: (1) The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ”beep beep.” (2) No outside force can harm the Coyote - only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products. (3) No dialogue ever, except ”beep beep.” (4) The Road Runner must stay on the road; otherwise, logically, he would not be called Road Runner. (5) All materials, tools, weapons or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation. (6) The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

from “Chuck Jones on Life and Daffy Duck”, New York Times, November 7, 1989

Hector Belascoarán Shayne had two exotic last names, a degree in engineering from the National University, and one eye less than most people. He was thirty-five years old, with an ex-wife, an ex-lover, one brother, one sister, a denim suit that made him look more like a social anthropologist than a detective, a .38 automatic in a drawer in his office in Mexico City, a slight limp from an old bullet wound in his right leg, and a private investigator’s licence he’d gotten through a correspondence course. He had a marked predilection for soft drinks, lemon-scented aftershave, crab salad, the bossa nova, and certain Hemingway novels (the first ones and the next to the next to the last). His heroes were Justin Playfair, Michel Strogoff, John Reed, Buenaventura Durruti, Capablanca, and Zorro (although he knew he was never going to get very far with a cemetery-full of heroes like that one.) He slept less than six hours a night, he liked the soft sound ideas made when they came together inside his head, and he’d spent the last five years bearing up under the strange weight of an inexplicable fatigue, awash in a sea of memories, reliving wasted passions, idiot love affairs, old routines that had once seemed exciting. He didn’t think too highly of himself in general, although he did have a good deal of respect for his capacity for bullheaded stubbornness.

Maybe all of this somehow explains-aside from the fact that explanations tend to be unnecessary-why Hector kept playing with the sand until he’d dug himself a regular-sized hole in which he buried the dead man, dead six months now, and the injured boy. Elisa waited until the sand was smooth again and then led Hector back toward the house, preparing herself for the story she had to tell, working hard to resist the drowsy, gentle murmur of the waves.

-from Some Clouds, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by William I. Neuman

In the Cuban detective novel, individuals do violence to the state by undermining its institutions. In the Mexican detective novel, it is the institutions— police, government, unions— who are the criminals. They attack individuals who threaten their hegemony, brutalizing whole sectors of society in their drive for money and power. As Paco Ignacio Taibo II puts it, the primary element of the neopoliciaco is “the characterization of the police as a force of chaos, of the barbarous system ready to suffocate its citizens in violence.” Since order is the instrument of tyranny and subjugation, the Mexican detective hero rejects ratiocination, legal process, and the scientific method as means to truth, offering his physical body as both a catalyst and a stage for the battle between good and evil. 

-from Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico by Persephone Braham