María Inés Lagos is Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of H. A. Murena en sus ensayos y narraciones (1989), En tono mayor: Relatos de formación de la protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica, and essays on such writers as María Luisa Bombal, Rosario Ferré, Elena Poniatowska, and Diamela Eltit.

I use the term metropolis in the sense it is used in postcolonial theory, as a cultural and economic center of power.

For the analysis from a Latin American perspective, see Néstor García Canclini’s Culturashíbridas.

The Argentine writer Mempo Giardinelli collected his essays devoted to the genre -as seen from a Latin American perspective- in the two volumes of El género negro.

There are specific references in the novel to other twentieth-century texts that use unmotivated crimes as a point of departure for character exploration. Agustín says to Roberta: «I’ve also read Camus, and Gide, the gratuitous act, all that. But this ain’t literature, baby, this is sheer truth» (BN, 42).

Z. Nelly Martínez suggests that by taking refuge in Roberta’s apartment, Agustín finds comfort in an atmosphere that evokesthe uterus: «La vivienda de la joven... sugiere un ámbito interno que evoca la figura de la madre y que se revela como fuente de conocimiento» (190).

In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (189-93) Mary Louise Pratt emphasizes what is new about this 600 page compilation of letters Sarmiento wrote to his Friends while travelling in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, North Africa, and the United States (180-90). She states: «What is new is not the fact that Sarmiento went abroad, or even where he went. What is new is that he writes a book about it» (190).

See Sarmiento, Viajes, vol. 1, pp. 191-95.

For Cortázar’s own Reading of his European exile, see «América Latina: Exilio y literatura», Eco, 205 (1978), pp. 59-66.

Travel as a literary motif, such as we encounter in texts from the Odyssey to the twentieth century, is also present in the Latin American literary tradition. In Addition, as Roberto González Echevarría has shown in Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative, «Travel literature has been a mainstay of writing about the New World» (100; see 100-41). González Echevarría quotes a passage from Goethe’s Italian Journey that is particularly appropriate for my purposes because it underscores what I am suggesting with regard to Black Novel: namely, that journeys may be instrumental in the subject’s transformation. Goethe writes: «Above all, there is nothing that can compare to new life that a reflective individual experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have changed to the very marrow of my bones» (106).