Sex, violence and anarchy have been the three dominant elements of American crime fiction, the unholy trinity of this genre, ever since the release of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest in 1929. In this dissertation, we will investigate these three elements as they are represented in the works of three classic “hard-boiled” crime writers: sex in James M.
Cain's Double Indemnity (1943), violence in Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake (1943), and anarchy in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929).
In the dissertation, acts of gender-transgression will be explored. Male transgression will be seen as following the logic of Theodore Reik’s so-called “reflexive
sadomasochism”: man creates an illusion of omnipotence through his self-destructive actions, for he is both the spectator (voyeur) and the spectacle of the crime scene (Savran 182-225). Female transgression, on the other hand, will be understood as uncontrollable sexuality that becomes “abjectified11” under the mask of domesticity: according to Kaja Silverman, female bodies are purposely represented (by the writers) as being either fragmented as “das Ding” or reified as “die Sache12.” The focus will be on how these
10 Jerry Palmer in Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction and Scott
McCracken in Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction both focus on the narrative patterns (which play a central role in the movies) and the issues of cultural hegemony and ideology in crime fiction.
11 Julia Kristeva notes in Powers of Horror that “the abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I. . . what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1-2)
12 Kaja Silverman barrows Lacan’s notion of das Ding, the Thing, which is like “a hole in the real, something that creates a will to jouissance, a constant pressing toward satisfaction” (Rabate 91) in her conceptualization of female self-identity: the female subject is divided into das Ding and die Sache, ideality and abjection, in the mirror stage. Das Ding is the Thing in immaterial form while die Sache is the Thing in material form. Thus the deified female is das Ding while the fetishized/objectified female is die Sache, and both of these are representations of the will to jouissance (Silverman 14-20).
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themes are presented by the authors (and filmmakers), and thus on the process by which readers are led—given their own desires, phobias and obsessions—to imagine and recreate the scenes of sex and violence (Silverman, The Threshold 10-32) .
Eric Hobsbawn says that the universal appeal of the American vigilante-detective is closely tied to the “in-built anarchism of American capitalism” (272-90). The body of the vigilante-anarchist is beyond the control of the system: this may have various
interpretations but I will emphasize the one according to which this vigilante-anarchist is most “free” when he becomes a reflexive sadomasochist inflicting pain on himself. Crime may be seen as a negative representation or manifestation of desire, and the bodies in American crime fiction can be seen as Deleuzian Bodies without Organs, decoded and deterritorialized by the flows of human desire. In the end, the victims, their victimizers, and the vigilante- detectives who try to bring the victimizers to justice all get dissolved into quasi-bodies by the desiring machine of America’s Great Depression and the build-up to the Second World War.
4. Dissertation Structure
Chapter One (The Introduction) of the dissertation will include the following sections: “Review of Literature,” “Original Contributions,” “Theoretical Framework” and
“Dissertation Structure.” In Chapter Two, “The Cultural History of American Crime Fiction, “The Cultural History of American Crime Fiction,” the author will explain how American crime fiction started to have a unique style of its own after the release of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest in 1929 and how the World Wars had affected the American spirituality as well as the cultural lieu during the Great Depression through some of the popular films during this period. This chapter will include: “From Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe,” “The Existential Ground of American Crime Fiction,” “The
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Mythic Heroism: the Biformity13 of/in American Culture,” and “From G-Men (1935) to Dillinger (1945) and Gun Crazy (1950).”
In Chapter Three, “Three Essential Elements in American Crime Fiction,” the author will introduce the logical plan of the dissertation by briefly explaining how the elements of sex, violence and anarchy are presented in the novels— published between the late 1920s and early 1940s—of James M. Cain (sex), Raymond Chandler (violence), and Dashiell Hammett (anarchy).
Chapter Four, “James M Cain: Sex,” will pursue an analysis of the role played by sex in two of Cain’s novels, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and in their movie adaptations. This chapter will contain three parts: “The Dramaturgical Body:
Femmes Fatales and Murderous Domesticity,” “Phyllis and Cora’s Socio-semiotic Bodies in Postmodern Hollywood,” and “From Optical to Haptical Sensuality: Malleable Female Flesh.”
In Chapter Four, “Raymond Chandler: Violence,” we will explore the role played by violence (also in relation to sex) in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, Vera Caspary’s Laura, and Jack Webb’s documentary account of the 1947 Black Dahlia Murder. The discussion will be divided into three sections: “Masculine Performativity:
Philip Marlowe – the Reflexive Sadomasochist,” “Das Ding and die Sache: The Femme Fatale’s Phenomenological Body,” and “Sacredness, Profanity and the Defiled Body: the Oneiric Dimension of the Black Dahlia Murder14.”
13 Michael Kammen mentions in his Pulitzer-winning book People of Paradox that American culture is characterized by “biformity” – that is, it is a sort of “national subject” defined by ”extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a lifetime or a generation” (101). Kammen takes two fundamental American icons to exemplify this biformity: Benjamin Franklin for American pragmatism and the philosophy of common sense, and Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson for American Puritanism and transcendentalism (111).
14 The Black Dahlia murder took place in Los Angeles in 1947. Elizabeth Short was a young girl of 22 who had drifted to Hollywood in pursuit of stardom, and she was mercilessly murdered on January 15, 1947 – her body was mutilated, her face was cut open so that it seemed to be showing a grisly smile, and she was cut in two at the waist. The victim was nicknamed “Black Dahlia” because she always wore a white dahlia in her dark hair. This crime, like the Jack the Ripper murders in London, remains unsolved today. However, the death of Elizabeth Short has become the inspiration for many writers, including James Ellroy’s The
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In Chapter Five, “Dashiell Hammett: Anarchy,” we will look at the phenomenon of American anarchism during the Great Depression—as this is presented in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar15—in three minor sections:
“Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the Vigilante Ethics,” “W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar and American Xenophobia,” and “(Sur)passing Masculinity in American Crime Fiction.”
In the final chapter of this dissertation – “Conclusion: the Deleuzian Body without Organs and the American Desiring Machine during the Great Depression”—we will come back to look at body politics in the works of Cain, Chandler and Hammett, and use
Deleuze’s idea of the “Body without Organs” to interpret the country’s cultural
temperament during this difficult period in American socio-economic-political history.
Black Dahlia in 1987.
15 Red Harvest and Little Caesar were published in the same year – 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression.
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Chapter Two
The Cultural History of American Crime Fiction
This chapter begins with the comparison between Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe to explain how American crime fiction started to develop a unique style in the late 1920s with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Moreover, the two World Wars have traumatized the minds of American people into a dark world where Americans lose their optimism as their dream of material abundance becomes the stuff nightmare is made of.
Many historians, such as Michael Kammen, think there is a biformity in the
temperament of American culture. We will explain the formation of American biformity through early historical figure like Benjamin Franklin in the19th century and the penchant of self-reliance within American culture. Americans’ idealization of self-reliance has contributed to the isolationist16 phenomenon that occurred during the Great Depression.
This isolationist ideal has been embodied in various forms of American popular culture, particularly in the portrayals of cowboys, private detectives and superheroes, who are vigilantes who make and follow their own rules in a lawless society. We will use the examples of popular films from the year 1930 to 1950 to illustrate the aura of American society from the 1920s to the 1940s, and this approach has been used by Lawrence W.
Levine in The Unpredictable Past.
We will talk about the cultural background of American crime fiction to provide a better understanding of American idiosyncrasy for the reader before we go into the body politics of American crime fiction and American film noir inspired by the hard-boiled literature.
16 According to the Office of the Historian in the U.S. Department of State, “Isolationists advocated non-involvement in European and Asian conflicts and non-entanglement in international politics” during the Great Depression (U.S. Department of State).
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1. From Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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