El crimen de la calle de San Vicente : Crime Writing and Bourgeois Liberalism in Restoration Spain

Although crime has been written about in literature of all ages, it is generally acknowledged that modern crime and detective fiction came into being in the nineteenth century. The categories of delinquency and justice that shape this fiction are born with the liberal bourgeois state. As legal scholar David Garland points out, during this period two important projects—the "governmental" and the "Lombrosian"¹ —converge to give rise to criminology, a discipline that produces its object (a particular conception of criminality) as it sets out to contain it. In a wider context, Michel Foucault has observed how the birth of criminology, together with the establishment of modern juridical and penal institutions, is part of "the emergence of a new form of 'law': a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution, the norm" (Discipline 304). This juridical order serves the interests of the new ruling classes by distinguishing, condemning, and concentrating attention on certain "illegalities" (257), while effacing and legitimizing others: those that support the prevailing economic structure, with all its inherent inequalities.

A social system that has largely replaced physical violence with symbolic violence is singularly dependent on language for its institution and survival. Pierre Bourdieu has analyzed how the juridical field is quite literally made of language. First, the law itself is a written code; it specifies through language those offences for which sanction can be sought, and recognizes only conflicts that can be argued. Second, the law's neutrality and authority are to a large extent an effect of grammar: for example, the impersonal voice that "establish[es] the speaker as a universal subject" or the use of "indicative mood [as opposed to the imperative] for expression of norms" (820). Third, the juridical system establishes its own specialized vocabulary, which often defamiliarizes everyday speech so that "words from ordinary usage . . . deviate from their usual meaning . . . and thus function for the layperson as 'false friends'" (829). This exclusionary lexicon requires that the parties in a dispute submit to the control of legal professionals, the only ones in possession of the language to represent them. Bourdieu's account also suggests a fourth linguistic foundation of the law:

The specific property of symbolic power is that it can be exercised only through the complicity of those who are dominated by it. This complicity is . . . unconscious on the part of those who undergo its effects—or perhaps we should say it is . . . subtly extorted from them. As the quintessential form of legitimized discourse, the law can exercise its specific power only to the extent that it attains recognition, that is, to the extent that the element of arbitrariness at the heart of its functioning . . . remains unrecognized.

(844)

According to the sociologist, the law's reproduction, transmission, and consequent naturalization depend on the fact that juridical discourse is written and thus available to be interpreted and commented on, again in writing, so that each "exemplary judgment" (845) assures the continuity between past and present.

Nevertheless, such official writing cannot be the primary instrument for eliciting the complicity of the dominated. This role falls to a corollary corpus of writing about crime, detection, and justice that Bourdieu does not explicitly consider, but which more effectively reaches a mass audience in a palatable form. It is Foucault who establishes the scope of this corpus:

The [journalistic] fait divers . . . recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory. The crime novel, which began to develop in the broadsheet and in mass-circulation literature . . . was to show that the delinquent belonged to an entirely different world. . . . The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of 'crime stories' in which delinquency appears as both very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives.

(Discipline 286)

If at the beginning the civil or criminal code is the written, reproducible, source for...