Indoor Spaces in Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls

Abstract

The three noir novels written by Marta Sanz —Black, black, black, Un buen detective no se casa jamás, and pequeñas mujeres rojas— feature a competition of voices that develops differently in each novel. Polyphony is a fundamental narrative strategy and central theme of the trilogy, transforming the noir dynamics even as it reveals the relationships between the powerful and the marginalized within society. Bakhtin’s theories of polyphony and heteroglossia permit analysis of the shifting interactions between expression, repression, and manipulation among different voices in the narrative. This essay focuses on the first and third novels due to their multiplicity of narrators and the presence of Paula Quiñones, the trilogy’s main defender of marginalized voices. Black, black, black reveals the power of polyphony to illuminate the relationships that underlie contemporary Spanish society, and perhaps to guide the processes of social control (such as police investigations) towards a more ethical purpose, given an investigator —Paula— who knows how to listen, interpret and bring together marginalized voices in society. In contrast, pequeñas mujeres rojas underlines the manipulative possibilities of heteroglossic competition, in which a malicious actor —Jesús Beato— can take advantage of the opportunity to obfuscate vocal diversity and channel public discourse in his favor. The conspicuous presence of polyphony connects the political themes of the trilogy with its transformation of genre, allowing the noir novel to function as a “stone in the reader’s shoe” and embody the efforts, successes, and failures of the marginalized as they strive for justice.