Paranoid Style: Juan Gabriel Vásquez and the Literature of Conspiracy

This essay explores the discursive and generic significance of various conspiracy theories in Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Shape of the Ruins (2015). In what ways does Vásquez's novel internalise and reproduce the ‘paranoid style’ we often attribute to such theories? How do these paranoid tendencies influence the narrative's production of meaning – its underlying semiotic structure and overall generic trajectory? And what, if anything, does such literary analysis tell us about the conspiratorial nature of twentieth-century Colombian politics? In the following essay, I argue that The Shape of the Ruins demonstrates two of the qualities that are most closely associated with the paranoid style: a tendency to see everything as significant (which might be described as indiscriminate semiosis) and a tendency to see everything as connected (which gives rise to an infinite semiosis). Together, these discursive ‘pathologies’ make it impossible for the narrative to achieve the kind of hermeneutic closure that detective fiction typically provides, and this in turn ensures that none of the crimes the novel investigates will ever be definitively solved.