Classic British detective fiction during the Victorian Age had huge impact on the development of American crime fiction in the beginning of 20th century, and the writers of American crime fiction during the 1920s were struggling to build a sense of style of their own while the influence of Sherlock Holmes had been evident in many caricatures of Sherlock Holmes stories in American crime fiction then until Dashiell Hammett released his first novel Red Harvest in 1929.
As Hammett revolutionized the outlook of American crime fiction in 1929 with his hard-boiled novel, the American detective started to have some qualities that are
idiosyncratically American, and the detective’s stories are all driven by the magnitude of his emotions rather than his reason, such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The noir universe17 conjured by the hard-boiled crime fiction appears to be darker and seedier without an exit. Here we will use Umberto Eco’s concepts of Mannerist Maze and
Rhizomatic Maze to illustrate the world of Sherlock Holmes and that of Philip Marlowe.
The Transitional Period of American Crime Fiction – the 1920s
Ever since the 1840s when Edgar Allen Poe created the first great detective C.
Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was introduced to the world to build the basis of this genre as this type of popular literature attained its Golden Age.
Nurtured in England, the classic puzzle stories have been well-loved by the common folks of America with their dime detective stories written by Mark Twain and William Faulkner.
Before Dashiell Hammett officially created the hard-boiled detective fiction with his Red Harvest in 1929, the United States of America went through a period when the crime novel writers struggled to find a style of their own, and the classic example for this shift
17 Here the noir universe refers to both the world of American crime fiction and American film noir inspired by the hard-boiled novels.
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
23
of time is Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan series – detective fiction written just to provide a puzzle for the reader (Dover 20).
Prior to Dashiell Hammett, Black Mask pulp magazine released many stories of Nick Carter the private eye during the 1920s, in which William Faulkner helped to create the character of Nick Carter’s son – Chick Carter. In this period, American crime fiction was all about “contamination and containment” as the writers then adopted the technique of
“double-barreled structure” from Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four as well as A Study in Scarlet, and these stories often center upon the protagonist’s “burgeoning manhood”
(Bildungsroman) and his transformation “from innocence to experience.” More or less, the detectives in these stories are “caricatures of Sherlock Holmes” as Americans are striving for their own sense of identity under the prevalent influence of classic British detective fiction (Bedore 153-76). However, Dashiell Hammett changed the outlook of American crime fiction with Red Harvest in 1929, and Hammett has created a new type of anti-hero who is purely American as the detective is no longer highbrow once he abandons those scientific methods inherited from Sherlock Holmes.
In Hammett’s detective fiction, the detective follows his own “private code of behavior” as his self-application becomes the only means of self-preservation in a corrupted world. In the world of highbrow detective, the world is put in order with objective intellectuality; the lowbrow detective cares nothing but his “business ethics” in American commerce. He does not speaks flawless English but is “a master of wisecrack – the language of thugs and drifters” (Dovers 65).
From the Mannerist Maze to the Rhizomatic Maze
In From the Tree to the Labyrinths, Umberto Eco mentions three forms of labyrinths to describe the different worlds of crime fiction. To start with, Mino’s Maze in Greek mythology is the archetype of labyrinth, and the world of Sherlock Holmes in Victorian
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
24
England is the Mannerist Maze while the society of hard-boiled detective fiction is Rhizomatic Maze (Abrams 72).
In the world created by Conan Doyle, Minotaur is the space for “the criminal in the labyrinth of crime” while “the threads of clouds” (the mystery of the crime) are pulling the great detective into this maze. Sherlock Holmes here will be the grave Theseus who solves the crime and restores the society in order. The idea of Mannerist Maze is inspired by art during the 16th century when the perception of art is “multistoried, distorted” and turned upside-down like a spiral staircase, and Eco compares the discourse of modernity as the Minotaur where “social fragmentation, moral skeptism and cultural pluralism”
reign. However, there is always an exit in the “pre-existential” universe of Mannerist Maze for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Abrams 70-72). In this Mannerist Maze, social aberration is only temporal while order and meaning are guaranteed by the Victorian sense of science – the deductive reasoning of the Nietzschean Overman, Sherlock Holmes.
On the other hand, Eco borrows the idea of Rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate the world of hard-boiled detective fiction as the Rhizomatic Maze where there is
“no center, no perimeter” and absolutely no way out as the protagonist cannot escape the Minotaur with reason (Abrams 72). The world of hard-boiled detective fiction is like the world of Ernest Hemingway, which is “dark, cold, moody, mean, existentially void and grossly atomistic” like “a house built to confuse men.” The noir universe is the “synthetic prison” made of the protagonists’ desire as they are “entirely self-contained, wrapped in their own fear and self-interest” (69). There is no exit in this malevolent world as you can only go further with no return. According to Eco, such Rhizomatic Maze “can be
structured but is never structured definitively” (74). Social aberration seems to be the only reality in this rhizome-like universe while our protagonist is just an everyman
(anti-Theseus) who dwells in a world of shattered values and his only redeeming grace is
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
25
his work-ethics.
Christopher Breu thinks that the identities in the 1920’s American crime fiction were
“radicalized and gendered” with the writers’ “ostensible rejection of middle-class white Victorian masculinity” represented by Sherlock Holmes; therefore, in hard-boiled crime fiction, there is a hyper-masculinity that places focus on the detective’s body – a mixture of “black rapist and white moralist,” in order to induce the “physical and ideological rupture” within the narratives of this genre (Bedore 20-23).
When it comes to the bodies of the detectives, Sherlock Holmes is “tall, lean, and languid” with the air of “the decadent aesthete” while the hard-boiled detective is “shorter, tougher and aggressive” (Abrams 77). Holmes’s contemplative method is his
violin-playing in his leisure time while the hard-boiled detective has no time to contemplate things because he has to move ahead fast all the time to escape his victimizers. Sherlock Holmes is well-travelled with a grand view of life while the hard-boiled detective is constrained in a claustrophobic urbanite space. In the world of Sherlock Holmes, the presence of the femme fatale is non-essential (not every Sherlock Holmes story involves one) while the existence of the femme fatale is essential in the world of Phillip Marlowe who is always having a tough time fighting off those deadly beautiful women. The boundary between the law and the outlaw is blurred in the noir universe where the private eye can only survive with the suppression of his own emotions.
Sherlock Holmes has his confidante Dr. Watson by his side while the hard-boiled private eye is always alone and emotionally detached.
The detective stories are usually told from the first-person perspective. Dr. Watson tells the adventures of Sherlock Holmes while Philip Marlowe says his own stories to us.
The pleasure of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories is “intellectually masochistic” as the reader admits his own inferiority to Holmes; the fun of reading hard-boiled fiction is
“intellectually sadistic” as the reader takes delight in the violence through Marlow’s
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
26
narration (Abrams 77). The approach adopted by Holmes in solving the crime is deduction (rule, case, result) while Marlowe prefers to conceive of the crime through abduction (rule, result, case). Marlowe is inclined to have his own idea of the crime before looking into the details of the crime scene. In brief, Sherlock Holmes is objective;
Philip Marlowe is subjective in his way of solving crime.
As hard-boiled detective is comparatively subjective, he is an Everyman who is motivated by his physical urges, cannot be governed effectively by his intellects. What differentiates the hard-boiled crime fiction from the classical detective fiction is the psychological developments as the world can no longer be narrowed down by Sherlock Holmes’ deductive reasoning as well as the supremacy of Victorian science. Chaos seems to be the only reality in the noir universe as the protagonist “self-consciously accepts his own isolated fate in the unlimited rhizomatic labyrinth of evil” as well as the maze of his own excessive desires.
2. Existential Ground of American Crime Fiction
Religious thoughts in the United States of America ever since the 19th century have planted a seed of spiritual divide in the minds of America, and such spiritual divide was intensified by the American paradox of nostalgia and progress during 1920s when America was in a transition from Gemeinsschaft community to the Gesellschaft society.
Such conflict was well-shown by the practice of prohibition, which was an attempt to reaffirm the old Puritan values to the immigrants until the 1929 Great Crash officially sent American people into a state of dread and despair. This was when the detectives in crime fiction were no longer highbrow intellectuals but struggling lowbrow common men with their insignificant existential crises. However, the two World Wars have brought horrid deaths as the American readers as well as film audience are introduced to a
nightmarish labyrinth where they lose their optimism as their material dream becomes the
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
27
stuff nightmare is made of.
From the 19th Century to the First World War
Jean-Paul Sartre says, “In general, evil is not an American concept . . . . There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization” while Simon de Beauvoir asserts that “Americans have no feeling for sin and for remorse.” In short, in the eyes of many European intellectuals, America is “bereft of anguish” due to the prevalence of optimism and materialism (Cotkin 2).
To depict existentialism, the basic elements are “dread, despair, death and
dauntlessness,” particularly from the perspective of Sartre, as “the shadow of totalitarian butcheries and potential atomic annihilation” have haunted the American public ever since the First World War. Existentialism is all about the recognition of one’s finitude (limitations of life) (Cotkin 3), the inevitable facing of death and the endless but futile attempts of resistance (like Camus’ Sisyphus).
Despite that there is a general tendency among the European elites that Americans are not sophisticated, the United States of America can be existentialistic with its historical burden of slavery and class struggle as the two World Wars have traumatized the American spirituality to a great extent. Moreover, the puritan impact on early
Anglo-American history provides the ground of existentialism in American culture during the 20th century. As Perry Miller asserts, Jonathan Edwards represents the Calvinism side of American culture where the individual is divided between “the tragic concerns of one’s own miserable condition” and the “tragic exultation about the universe at large.” Yet this spiritual divide within American Calvinism had been aggravated by the two World Wars as the “holy trinity of dread, despair and death” had taken hold of the minds of the Americans (Cotkin 15).
Before World War I, American society was full of “the banality of Victorian views”
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
28
for “progress, efficiency and culture.” However, after WWI, Americans had faced an existential crisis in their “religion, moral standards, and the ethical energy of American society.” That would be the world of the Lost Generation, represented by the cultural elites like F Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway, whose The Sun Also Rises (1926) illustrates “the metaphysical condition and despair and alienation” among the WWI veterans and the youth of America then (Cotkin 24). However, for the cultural non-elites, their voice of dread and despair would be spoken by the hard-boiled crime fiction during the Great Depression – the so-called lowbrow literature.
It is said that James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice had inspired Albert Camus to write The Stranger while Dashielll Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon can be the
“existential parable” of life (the falcon is “the stuff dreams are made of”) – an empty illusion for the meaningless life. In one minor episode of Falcon, the character Flitcraft decides to leave his wife and children in an unknown stir of void evoked by the clipping piece dropping over his head in a construction site18. However, Flitcraft remarries and starts a new family somewhere else. His life is not so dissimilar from his previous one.
Basically, the nature of this universe is chaotic, full of disorder and contingency, and the noir universe is a world of “defunct certitude and strained relationship” (Cotkin 30) where the winners are highly self-interested with strong willpower while the losers are those of naivety. The hardboiled detective is placed upon the margin where he endeavors to search for meaning for others as well as himself.
From the Roaring Twenties to the WWII
Lawrence W. Levine writes, Americans always have “an urge towards the inevitable future” while being self-conflicted with “a longing for the irretrievable past” (Levine 191).
18 In Hammett’s novel, Flitcraft “adjusted himself to beam falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling” (Hammett 72).
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
29
“Progress and nostalgia” are two essential qualities within the American temperament.
The 1920’s was the age of prohibition when the Anglo-Americans reasserted their religious concept of righteousness to the new immigrants as American society was about to shift from the Gemeinschaft mode (which values “permanence, intimacy and binding tradition”) to the Gesellschaft19 condition, which emphasizes economic boom and social progress with a reformist overtone (Levine 196-97). The meaning of prohibition is not merely institutional but symbolic as it reaffirmed “the recognition and legitimacy to the norms and values of rural, Protestant America” – a means to assimilate American ideals to the new immigrants during the 1920s (198). Simply put, prohibition was an attempt of nostalgia to restore a fading social ideal and its failure showed that the 1920’s society of America could no longer be contained by such old values.
After the Great Crash in 1929, John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath to express the “pervasive bewilderment” as well as an “impotent anger” among the lower middle class people during the Great Depression in a world where the individual cannot find a meaningful focus for his anger while his movement goes without any specific direction.
The frustration of prevalent unemployment and the rage of severe poverty were contradicted with the ubiquity of advertisements. In the facing of such conflicts, the individuals “internalized” their loss of jobs as personal responsibilities to the extent of shame. Material success became “a sign of virtue” while poverty was considered individual failure (Levine 212-15).
The roaring twenties was a time of “unprecedented and unending prosperity” as everything was in “order and reason;” however, the thirties was a period of “chaos and unreason of economic crisis” (Levine 219). In 1938, Superman was officially released by Action Comics. The author of Superman uses Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent to
19 German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies mentions the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in 1957 to render the different modes of social production. In simple England translation, Gemeinschaft refers to community (of traditional tribes) while Gesellschaft indicates the society (of bureaucratic captialism).
‧
30
caricaturize the majority of men during the Great Depression: “faceless, impotent and frustrated in an organized, depersonalized world.” The rise of such superhero comics during the thirties “symbolizes public distrust of institutions” as vigilantism becomes the main solution to social aberration (Levine 227-29). Later on, such public distrusts ripens into the hard-boiled private eye who demonstrates “freedom from institutionalized legal constraints” (Levine 247). The feeling of shame and the disorientation induced by the distrust in the government leads the masses of the Great Depression to the status of despair and dread till the occurrence of the Second World War harshen the public mentality with the prevailing deaths.
Film Noir and WWII
In his Pulitzer-winning poem The Age of Anxiety, W. H. Auden expresses his Kierkegaardain sense of dread in terms of the vicissitude of American life after WWII:
Violent winds Tear us apart, Terror scatters us To the four coins Faintly our sounds
Echo each other, unrelated Groans of grief
At great distance (Cotkin 55).
After living through the Great Depression, American spirituality reached another bleak state of being where the virtue of endurance no longer rewards. The world of film noir embodies Auden’s age of anxiety as “moral ambiguity, shifting identities and impending doom” are paralyzing the noir protagonist into the state of Kierkegaardian dread – a claustrophobic space of “despair, paranoia and nihilism” where the individuals are
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
31
purposelessly isolated while “estranged from compulsive confrontation of the past” –
“admixture of alienation, betrayal and depression” (Sanders 92). Psychological reality (reality of illusion) substitutes the real world with Bakhtinian chronotope (the
inseparability of time and space) where the demarcation between the past, present and future are obliterated; therefore, the sense of self-identity is made into the “contingent subject to disintegration.” Libidinal urges as well as obsessions and compulsions are disturbing the linearity of time into “a multiplicity of irreconciled spaces” (Sanders 118).
All the established values were questioned during the Great Depression then overthrown after the Second World War broke out. As Camus says, “‘Everything is
permitted’ does not mean nothing is forbidden.” In the war, people were killing each other in all kinds of brutal forms – Nazis, Concentration Camps, genocides, Nanking Massacres, rape of women and deaths caused by extreme ferocity. American Roman/film noir depicts a world where humans follow their desire at all costs, even at the price of one’s own annihilation. In this dark universe, there are always “continual desires without satisfaction, striving without fulfillment.” Humans made their nightmares a reality during the wars as life itself became defamiliarized and even absurd. It was also then Sartre proposes that existentialism is humanism – each individual is burdened with freedom of choice as
permitted’ does not mean nothing is forbidden.” In the war, people were killing each other in all kinds of brutal forms – Nazis, Concentration Camps, genocides, Nanking Massacres, rape of women and deaths caused by extreme ferocity. American Roman/film noir depicts a world where humans follow their desire at all costs, even at the price of one’s own annihilation. In this dark universe, there are always “continual desires without satisfaction, striving without fulfillment.” Humans made their nightmares a reality during the wars as life itself became defamiliarized and even absurd. It was also then Sartre proposes that existentialism is humanism – each individual is burdened with freedom of choice as