性、暴力與無政府：美國20年代到40年代犯罪小說中的身體政治 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系博士論文. 指導教授：史文生教授、羅狼仁教授 Advisors: Dr. Frank W. Stevenson Dr. Brian David Phillips. 政治大立性、暴力與無政府： ‧. ‧ 國. 學. 美國 20 年代到 40 年代犯罪小說中的身體政治 Sex, Violence and Anarchy: Body Politics of American Crime Fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. 研究生：郭佳雯撰 Name: Chia-wen Kuo 中國民國一 O 四年七月 July 2015. v.

(2) SEX, VIOLENCE AND VIOLENCE: BODY POLITICS OF AMERICAN CRIME FICTION FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1940S. A Dissertation Submitted to Department of English National Chengchi University. 學. Nat. n. al. er. io. sit. y. ‧. ‧ 國. 立. 政治大. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. by Chia-wen Kuo July 2015.

(3) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v.

(4) Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Professor Frank W. Stevenson and Professor Brian David Phillips for their kind help and feasible feedback to my dissertation. This has been a pleasure as well as honor to have them as my advisors. Second of all, I would like to thank Professor Eva Chen, Professor John Corrigan and Professor Chun-yen Chen for their comments in the oral defense. I have benefited greatly from their opinions. Third of all, I want to thank the Chair of the English Department, Professor Estelle Jiang who has been very supportive in my academic career. Moreover, I am very. 政治大. appreciative of the Ministry of Science and Technology and National Cheng-chi. 立. University for their generous funding for the international academic conferences I have. ‧ 國. 學. attended in these few years. I have learned a great deal from these events.. ‧. Most of all, I wish to thank my mother for all her supports in my academic career. I cannot have it without her. Thank you, Mom.. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i. i Un. v.

(5) TABLE OF CONTENTS. Chinese Abstract……………………………………..…………………………………..iv English Abstract……………………….………………………………………………...viii Chapter One Introduction ………………………………………………………………1 1. Original Contributions ……………………………….……………………..3 2. Review of the Literature…………………………………………………….10. 政治大. 3. Theoretical Framework …………………………………………………….17. 立. 4. Dissertation Structure………………………………………………….……18. ‧ 國. 學. Chapter Two The Cultural History of American Crime Fiction ……………………….21. ‧. 1. From Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe………………………………....22 2. The Existential Ground of American Crime Fiction………………………..26. y. Nat. er. io. sit. 3. The Mythic Heroism: the Biformity of/in American Culture……………..32 4. From G-Men (1935) to Dillinger (1945) and Gun Crazy (1950):. n. al. Ch. i Un. v. American Bureaucracy versus American Anarchy………….........………43. engchi. Chapter Three Three Essential Elements of American Crime Fiction ………………..53 1. Sex ………………………………………………………………................54 2. Violence ……………………………………………………………............58 3. Anarchy …………………………………………………………………….64 Chapter Four Sex: James M Cain ...................................................................................69 1. James M Cain’s Femmes Fatales and Abjectified Murderous Sociality…...69 2. The Socio-semiotic Bodies of Cain’s Femmes Fatales in Postmodern Hollywood ……………………………………………….…………..……94. ii.

(6) 3. From Optical to Haptical Sensuality: the Malleable Female Flesh in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) ..………………………………105 Chapter Five Violence: Raymond Chandler ………………………………………..113 1.. Masculine Performativity: Philip Marlowe – the Reflexive Sadomasochist in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake …………………………………………………………………113. 2. Das Ding and die Sache: Femme Fatale’s Phenomenological Body in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and Vera Caspary’s Laura …………………………………………………………………127. 政治大. 3. Sacredness, Profanity and the Defiled Body: the Oneiric Dimension in. 立. “The Black Dahlia Murder” (1947)………………………….………..145. ‧ 國. 學. Chapter Six Anarchy: Dashiell Hammett…………………………………………….161. ‧. 1. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the Vigilante Ethics……………..161 2. W R Burnett’s Little Caesar and American Xenophobia………………..166. y. Nat. er. io. sit. 3. (Sur)passing Masculinity in American Crime Fiction………………….. 170 Chapter Seven Conclusion: the Desiring Production during the Great Depression ….173. n. al. Ch. i Un. v. 1. Kafka’s Law Machine and Roosevelt’s New Deal …………………….. 173. engchi. 2. The Celibate Machine and the Image of Violence ……………………..179 3. Bodies with Organs: the Vigilantes, the Victimizers and the Victims in Any-Space-Whatevers …………………………………………...…….182 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….185. iii.

(7) 國立政治大學英國語文學系博士班博士論文提要論文名稱：性、暴力與無政府：美國20年代到40年代犯罪小說當中的身體政治指導教授：史文生教授、羅狼仁教授研究生：郭佳雯論文提要內容：. 政治大性、暴力與無政府是美國犯罪小說的三個主要構成元素。自從達許．漢密特於立. ‧ 國. 學. 西元1929年出版了他的《紅色收穫》，美國冷硬派偵探犯罪小說就此成形。此本論文針對三位經典冷硬派犯罪小說作者的主要作品，討論黑色電影文學的性、暴力與. ‧. 無政府：在詹姆斯．凱因的《雙重保險》裡，我們說到美國犯罪小說中的性元素；. y. Nat. io. sit. 在雷蒙．錢德勒的《湖中女子》裡，探討美國黑色文學中的暴力因子；而在達許.. er. 漢密特的《紅色收穫中》，我們講到美國冷硬派偵探小說裡的無政府現象。本論文. al. n. iv n C 的主軸在於作者如何呈現小說的故事，以及讀者是如何被作者引導進入犯罪小說的 hengchi U 世界裡，藉由文本的閱讀，讀者投射了本身的慾望、恐懼與迷戀情節 (desires,. phobias and obsessions) ，用幻想的方式，在腦海裡再生性與暴力的情節。法國哲學家尚路克．南希(Jean-Luc Nancy)提及影像的無扎根性(the groundlessness of images)，影像的過剩威力是一種自發的向度，不在場的人事物往往讓人感受到親臨現場的情緒張力：想像力生成的腦內影像，在缺置(absence)的狀態下，達到身置其中(presence) 的氾濫情感。藉此，犯罪小說激起讀者的強烈情緒、豐富的想像力，最後想像力生成的影像超脫了文本的桎梏，讀者體會了踰矩的快感。. iv.

(8) 詹姆斯．凱因偏向從犯罪者的角度描寫故事，不同於其他的冷硬派作者 (他們都從私家偵探的角度看待犯罪)，而凱因的主角往往都是利慾薰心的一般人。在《雙重保險》中，蛇蠍美女(femme fatale)的身體是美麗且怪誕的，凱因所描繪的女體性慾是無法掌控與馴服的，是法國女哲學家克里斯蒂娃(Julia Kristeva)所描繪的「黑暗、可憎且墮落的威力」。凱因的女主角菲力絲(Phyllis) 是一位愛戀喪禮美感的奇女子，也是死神的肉身賦形。菲力絲是克里斯蒂娃所說的「謀殺性社交的嘉年華魁儡」，她的愛人無法抵擋她奇異的女性魅力，參與了她的陰謀而犯下了謀殺的惡行。男人瘋狂地迷戀那腐敗的壞女人，臣服了自己心理的病徵 (拉岡Lacan與紀傑克Zizek. 政治大曾說：「女人是男人的病徵」)，成了女性犯罪的共謀者，一齊追求那遙不可及的執立. ‧ 國. 學. 爽快感 (jouissance)，以愛之名犯下了不可饒恕的罪惡。. ‧. 凱因的男主角往往是女性魅惑的犧牲者。有別於凱因，雷蒙．錢德勒小說中的. sit. y. Nat. 男主角成功地抗拒了女性的嫵媚。然而，男主角卻執意身涉險難，以證明自己的男. io. n. al. er. 子氣概。在《湖中女子》中，菲力普．馬洛涉入了一個危險的謊言境界：他必須釐. v. 清誰是謀殺湖中女子的真正兇手，以及溺死的湖中女子到底身為何人。沉入湖底的. Ch. engchi. i Un. 屍骸是被兇手強力切割分解的，它是一具毀了容的屍體，一件被殘忍掠奪性命的物品。另一位涉案的女性也慘遭痛毆，現場血跡斑駁。兇手與受害人的身份經常互調，難以辨識，連最後尋獲的屍體也由於兇手的猛烈侵犯，呈現突兀變形的恐怖狀態。大衛．沙勒文(David Savran)在《像個男子漢般地承受》一書講到強勢的男子漢總是把自己視為受害者，主動去承擔許肉體上的害難，以滿足男性建立自我價值的心理需求。男子漢堅持自我，冒險犯難且大難不死，為的是在事後享受到權威感與自我控制的滿足。心理學家芮克(Theodore Reik)曾解釋「反射型施虐受虐情節」 (reflexive sadomasochism)的運作機制：男人為了創造出全能的自我優越幻象，常常 v.

(9) 做出傷害自己的事情；在受難的過程當中，男人同時是觀看者，也是被自己觀看的對象。一方面說來，在男性相互角力的環境中，異性戀的性慾實現往往藉著肉體的剝削來達成：男人不是自虐地允許自己被女人傷害，就是自己成為施虐者，主動加害女性，來滿足一種扭曲的性快感。另一方面說來，在犯罪小說中，女體的再現是刻意被作者肢解的，用碎裂的方式呈現：私家偵探追蹤著女性受害者的屍塊，細部調查犯罪細節。讀者在追尋破碎女體的過程裡，也感到窺淫的樂趣，被作者帶入一個. 政治大. 以分屍女肉組成的殘忍世界。當故事的主角試圖蒐集碎裂的女體屍塊，來破解案情，. 立. 作者激起了讀者的想像力，用圖像的方式構思犯罪。卡雅．席佛曼(Kaja Silverman). ‧ 國. 學. 提及傳統電影當中的「陽具經濟」(phallic economy)：男人是主體(Je)，女人是客體. ‧. (moi)，男人必須在文化當中棄絕(repudiate)女性來鞏固自己在兩性中的主導地位。而. sit. y. Nat. 犯罪小說的作者也用這種方式，把女性邊緣化，帶領讀者進入一個想像力氾濫的邪. io. n. al. er. 惡世界，於無邊際的潛意識裡狂奔。就此案例說來，生氣勃勃、風韻十足的性感女. v. 性被賦形成抽象的「事」(德文das Ding)，而被謀殺分屍的女受者人則是具形的「物」. Ch. engchi. i Un. (德文die Sache)，這也符合德國哲學家黑格爾所說「主人/奴隸」(主體/客體)的辦證邏輯。這也說明了，犯罪小說的蛇蠍美女不是被過度吹捧且奉若女神(deified)，就是被貶謫且戀物癖化(fetishized)。漢密特的《紅色收穫》在西元1929年版，這本小說奠定了美國無政府社會正義英雄的典範。在惡名昭彰的中部小鎮「人民谷」(綽號「人毒谷」)中，私家偵探歐普陷入了官商勾結、黑道鬥爭的血戰，連自己的女朋友戴娜都被殺手用冰鑽刺死，而冰鑽的指紋卻指向他。逼不得已，被陷害的歐普必須以不報警的方式，靠一己之力來執行正義，飽受黑道追殺，歐普鋌而走險，在夾縫中生存，最後憤而一舉把壞 vi.

(10) 人殲滅。歐普是犯罪小說裡的無政府英雄，這種形象常常出現在眾多主流的好萊塢犯罪電影與超級英雄漫畫當中，體現出一種美國特有的無政府英雄崇拜。英國歷史學家艾瑞克．霍布斯邦(Eric Hobsbawn)說道，美國私家偵探的無政府英雄形象有著普世的魅力，也象徵著美國資本主義社會中根深蒂固的無政府主義。美國文化中的超個人主義(ultra-individualism)投射出一個理想的美式烏托邦：無政府的正義英雄是不受限於體制的，他也是個反射型的受虐施虐者，享受著痛楚的快感。法國哲學家德勒茲(Deleuze)提出「沒有器官的身體」這個概念來解釋資本主義的有機體，體制在慾望的流動中去邊界化(deterritorialization)，且再次邊界化. 政治大. (reterritorialization)。犯罪是人類慾望的反面再現，漢密特小說中的殺手是被解體. 立. 的，受害者的屍塊也跟著被分解。正義英雄、加害者與受害者的肉身在這個黑暗的. ‧ 國. 學. 犯罪世界中消融，成了美國經濟大蕭條時代裡慾望的半形肉身(quasi-bodies)。接下來美國進入了第二次世界大戰，也為血肉模糊的紅色收穫，鋪下了無政府的大道。. ‧ y. Nat. sit. 關鍵字：美國冷硬派犯罪小說，黑色電影，經濟大蕭條，身體政治，沒有器官的身. n. al. er. io. 體，陽具經濟，殺女. Ch. engchi. vii. i Un. v.

(11) ABSTRACT Sex, violence and anarchy have been the three dominant elements of American crime fiction, ever since the release of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest in 1929. This dissertation 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) as violence, and anarchy in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929). The focus will be on how these. 政治大. themes are presented by the authors, and thus on the process by which readers are. 立. led—given their own desires, phobias and obsessions—to imagine and recreate the scenes. ‧ 國. 學. of sex and violence. Jean-Luc Nancy mentions the groundlessness of image’s excessive. ‧. power, its "self-presenting" force that "draws the form of the present out of absence" so. sit. y. Nat. that the reader is, in a sense, "absent" from the scene of the crime. The intense emotions. io. n. al. er. that literary texts arouse in readers go far beyond the reach of the images that are implanted within his or her mind.. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. While other authors of crime fictions focus on tough-guy detectives, James M. Cain wrote about ordinary people who commit horrible crimes out of greed. In Double Indemnity, the femme fatale’s body is beautiful and grotesque, for uncontrolled female sexuality may become, in Julia Kristeva’s words, “a dark, abominable and degraded power.” Cain’s Phyllis Nirdlinger, enamor of the beauty of funerals, embodies Death incarnate. She is what Kristeva would call a “carnival puppet of murderous sociality,” for her lover cannot resist and thus also participates in her lust for murder; he succumbs to his symptom (Zizek), becoming her fellow-murderer in a reckless pursuit of pleasure viii.

(12) /jouissance under the name of romance (without love). Unlike Cain’s ordinary man who falls prey to a woman’s allure, the male characters in Raymond Chandler’s novels expose themselves to dangerous, life-threatening situations. In The Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe gets caught up in a complex and puzzling case that features the confusion of the killers’ and the victims’ identities. The body of the woman found at the bottom of the lake had been mutilated by her male murderer; it is just a deformed corpse, a thing. The body of the other woman was beaten. 政治大. and bloodied by her female killer. Thus in both cases the identity- body as well as. 立. victim-murder connection is emphasized, and the female victims’ identities, like their. ‧ 國. 學. bodies when they are found, have been transgressed and transformed.. ‧. David Savran in Taking it Like a Man claims that tough guys tend to view. Nat. sit. y. themselves as victims who need to recreate their self-value through voluntary corporeal. n. al. er. io. suffering. After surviving each dangerous situation, the tough guy feels a new and unique. i Un. v. sense of power and self-control. Theodore Reik speaks of the mechanism of “reflexive. Ch. engchi. sadomasochism”: a man creates an illusion of omnipotence through his self-destructive actions, for he is now both the spectator (voyeur) and the spectacle of the crime scene. On the one hand, within a world of male-male violence, heterosexual sex often becomes another means of physical (bodily) exploitation: the man either allows himself to be harmed by the woman or harms her, either way satisfying a twisted form of sexual desire. On the other hand, the representation of female bodies in this genre is purposely fragmented as the detective traces the remains of the dead women, and so the reader as ix.

(13) voyeur is introduced into a diabolic world of dismantled female flesh. As the protagonist maneuvers to reassemble the bits and pieces of the dead women and solve the crime, the author leads the reader to visualize the actual crime in his or her imagination. Kaja Silverman mentions the “phallic economy” of traditional cinema: man is the subject “Je” (I) and woman is the object “moi” (me), and man needs to “repudiate” (the) woman in order to have a completely “gendered” self. What I try to show here is that the novelist’s technique can bring forth an even more potent visceral response from the reader, whose. 政治大 darkness. In this case, the fully alive and sexually powerful woman becomes the 立. imagination of evil can guide him or her further and deeper into the domain of human. ‧ 國. 學. embodiment of das Ding while the crudely “disposed of” dead woman is die Sache, as in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. That is, the woman as femme fatale is either deified. ‧. or fetishized.. sit. y. Nat. io. n. al. er. Red Harvest became Dashiell Hammett’s first best-seller in 1929, and it introduces. i Un. v. the archetype of the vigilante in an anarchic society. Continental Op gets himself mixed. Ch. engchi. up in a web of city government, labor union and police corruption in the town of Personville, which Op calls Poisonville. Involved in an ongoing gang war, Op finds that his girlfriend Dinah Brand has been killed with an icepick that has his fingerprints on it. He is often held captive by criminals but finally breaks free and kills them all. In the end, Op decides that he must enforce the law himself, without official sanction, since none of the gang leaders will do it, and thus he becomes a sort of vigilante-anarchist of the sort we often find in Hollywood crime films, including those featuring comic book superheroes. British historian Eric Hobsbawn claims that the universal appeal of the American x.

(14) vigilante-detective is closely tied to the “in-built anarchism of American capitalism.” For here we have a utopic idealization of “ultra-individualism”: the body of the vigilanteanarchist is beyond the control of the system, even as he becomes a reflexive sadomasochist inflicting pain on himself. As Deleuze notes, the organism collapses into a Body without Organs after being decoded and deterritorialized by the flows of desire. Crime is a negative representation of desire, and the bodies of the killers in Hammett’s novel are themselves in some way disintegrated, just as is the flesh of their victims. Thus. 政治大 bring the victimizers to justice all get dissolved into quasi-bodies by the desiring machine 立 one might say that the victims, their victimizers, and the vigilante-detectives who try to. ‧ 國. 學. of America’s Great Depression and the build-up to the Second World War—a blood-soaked state of anarchy in Red Harvest.. ‧ sit. y. Nat. n. al. er. io. Key words: American hard-boiled crime fiction, film noir, the Great Depression, body. Ch. i Un. v. politics, Body without Organ, phallic economy, femicide. engchi. xi.

(15) Chapter One Introduction Sex, violence and anarchy are three essential elements that distinguish American crime fiction, particularly the so-called hard-boiled crime novels of the 1920s-1940s, from the classic detective fiction of the Victorian Age in England. As for sex, American crime fiction, particularly that of Dashiell Hammett, James M. 政治大. Cain and Raymond Chandler, positions the femmes fatales, who are basically. 立. non-essential in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as the center of attention.. ‧ 國. 學. In hard-boiled crime fiction, the presence of these femmes fatales is essential, as now the. ‧. potency of female sexuality is being rendered in the form of a hyper-femininity that had. sit. y. Nat. never been seen before the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920s. As Mary. io. n. al. er. Ann Doane puts it, the femme fatale in the American roman/film noir is “the figure of a. v. certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma . . . [her] hidden essence is. Ch. engchi. i Un. durable, malleable and resistant” (Hanson 1-2). This hyper-femininity has now transcended pre-existing norms, embodied as it is in the shapeless deaths of excessive lusts, for this femme fatale is not expendable.1 Hard-boiled crime fiction is a genre of American popular literature that has to do with the elimination of the fat, the impotent and the feminine. This noir universe2 is ultra-violent; it emerges from the protagonists’ libidinal urges as the authors aim to 1. Her transgressive sexuality may have been inspired by the 1928 Snyder-Gray case. Ruth Snyder was the first woman to be electrocuted for murdering her husband; she was aided by her lover Judd Gray. 2 The noir universe refers to both the American crime fiction and American film noir adapted from the novels. 1.

(16) describe the psychological development of the characters rather than the puzzle of the crime itself. Although violence has been an inevitable ingredient of detective fiction ever since the 19th century, these writers dedicated themselves to constructing a cult of hyper-masculinity, one not seen before Hammett and taken further by Raymond Chandler. The latter’s detective narratives represent a form of “reflexive sadomasochism” where the protagonist is simultaneously the spectator and part of the spectacle of the act of violence. When it comes to femicide (the killing of women), the English crime writers focus on. 政治大. killers (Jack the Ripper) while the Americans are obsessed with the victims (Elizabeth. 立. Short. the Black Dahlia), for we may see American crime fiction as transforming violence. ‧ 國. 學. against women as a surrogate form of transgressive lovemaking.. ‧. As far as social disorder is concerned, many sociologists and historians have called. Nat. sit. y. American society anarchic. British historian Eric Hobsbawn, for example, uses the. n. al. er. io. American cowboy stories of the Wild West to exemplify the utopic anarchy and cult-like. i Un. v. status of American ultra-individualism. Indeed, American vigilantism since the days of. Ch. engchi. the Wild West, with its tough self-reliance, has been presented in various hard-boiled novels and films as an idealized form of violence. The protagonists, whether victims, sheriffs, bounty hunters or detectives, regard the institutionalized order with distrust and even contempt. Thus one might even picture American outlaws, murderers, policemen, detectives and lawyers as operating on their own and trying to survive in a purposeless, chaotic, anarchic noir universe, one filled with their own obsessions with sex and violence.. 2.

(17) 1. Original Contributions The primary focus of this dissertation will be on the body itself as we get it in the crime fiction of these three authors. This inevitably means talking about sexuality and violence as well as anarchy, themselves already social practices, for here we will be concerned with the social and the individual body, with social as well as individual psychology. The secondary focus will be on American socio-economic and political-cultural history from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, as this is the setting,. 政治大. background and to a degree also the theme of these novels. Indeed, one of the issues to be. 立. addressed in the thesis and developed more in the Conclusion—which also brings Kafka,. ‧ 國. 學. Deleuze and Guattari into play—is that of the socially, politically and culturally. Nat. y. ‧. subversive impact of these “popular” American crime novels.. er. io. sit. Umberto Eco writes in From the Tree to the Labyrinths that the classic detective fiction of Sherlock Holmes is a Mannerist Maze while that of American hard-boiled. al. n. iv n C crime fiction is Rhizomatic Maze, ahterm Eco borrowsUfrom Deleuze and Guattari to engchi describe the noir universe of these authors. The Mannerist Maze implies a society that can be restored back to order by the massive intellect of Sherlock Holmes, while the Rhizomatic Maze of hard-boiled crime fiction implies one that cannot be redeemed by reason inasmuch as the protagonists are trapped in an excessive world of desires. 3 T. 3. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus contrast the horizontal, surface-spreading structure of rhizomes or root-like plants with the mainly above-surface, binary form of trees, whose branches branch off in a “Y” above the surface, and whose roots below the surface are still not so chaotic and entangled as those surface-growing plants known as rhizomes. The Deleuzian emphasis on plane surfaces is clear in many places, not least in his notion of a single “plane of immanence” rather than the traditional western (Platonic) distinction between transcendence (God, Heaven, Being) and immanence (becoming, time, immediate empirical reality). 3.

(18) This dissertation will explore the ways in which the protagonists in hard-boiled crime fiction use their bodies to pursue their desires in this rhizomic world where human lusts are spread out on the surface, that is, take a horizontal form. Furthermore, it will discuss some of the popular films adapted from hard-boiled crime fiction to better show the vicissitudes of the cultural history of America during the Great Depression4. As Anthony Synnott says in The Body Social, “the body is both an individual creation, physically and phenomenologically, and a cultural product; it is personal, and also a state. 政治大. property” (qtd. in Waskul and Vannin 1). The self, in a sense, is made through the use of. 立. the body, and the body is both a subject and a social object, “a vessel of meaning” which. ‧ 國. 學. concerns both “personhood and society.” That is, “the object-body is actually experienced,. ‧. produced, sustained, and/or transformed as a subject-body.” Here the body is given a self,. Nat. sit. y. as well as a meaning, in the symbolic interactions within the society, and there are five. n. al. er. io. types of bodily selves listed by Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannin in Body/ Embodiment:. i Un. v. the looking-glass body, dramaturgical body, phenomenological body, socio-semiotic. Ch. engchi. body and narrative body (1-4). In this dissertation, these five types of bodies will be used to map out the body politics of the American hard-boiled crime fiction of Hammett, Cain and Chandler. The looking-glass body refers to self-embodiment in the form of “reflexivity”— embodiment as individual forms or “images of self from his/her imaginary perspective of others.” In the act of seeing or being seen, the individual manages to have “the. 4. This approach is adopted by Lawrence W. Levine in the Part II of The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. 4.

(19) imagination of the body.” In this way, one’s self is “construed in the web of narrative discourse and imaginative representation” (Waskul and Vannin 2-4). In James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, the flesh of male protagonists becomes the looking-glass body incarnated by the will of women, and in turn their bodily actions become “reflexive” through the force of the female imagination. As Cora says to Frank in The Postman, “I love you. I would love you without even a shirt. I would love you especially without a shirt, so I could feel how nice and hard your. 政治大. shoulders are. . . . And you’re hard all over. Big and tall and hard. And your hair is light.. 立. You’re not a little soft greasy guy with black kinky hair that he puts bay rum on every. ‧ 國. 學. night. . . . Do you love me so much that not anything matters?” (14). Cora’s romantic. ‧. utterance—which expresses how she sees him—persuades Frank to help her plan and. sit. y. Nat. carry out her husband’s murder. Despite the fact that Frank is the narrator and the story is. n. al. er. io. told from his perspective, his sense of self is formed by how Cora views him. At the end. i Un. v. of Chapter Three, she asks him to kiss her and he says (narrates): “I kissed her. Her eyes. Ch. engchi. were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church” (15). Ironically, this “sacred” feeling is inspired in him by Cora’s grand scheme to kill Nick Papadakis. In Double Indemnity, Walter, also the narrator of the story, declares that he loves Phyllis like “a rabbit loves a rattlesnake” after a brief phone conversation with her, and then he does something he hasn’t done in years, he prays (174). On the other hand, the female flesh in Cain’s novels is the dramaturgical body that is rendered through women’s performativity. The concept of bodily performativity within. 5.

(20) the social discourse is first mentioned by Erving Goffman in Stigma5 (1963), where the author claims that “the potentiality” of body is “realized and actualized through a variety of socially related activities or practices” (qtd. in Waskul and Vannin 6). In this case, the body is always “performed, staged and preserved” for social and communal rituals (7). Cain’s women are intentionally sexualized in their “performances” of seduction: Cora in Postman commands Frank to bite her lips (10), while Phyllis in Double Indemnity dresses all in white, and acts like a frightened schoolgirl with freckles who is “innocently”. 政治大. serving tea in her Spanish-style art-deco mansion when she first insinuates her interest in. 立. husband-murdering to Walter (115-23).. ‧ 國. 學. In their own performances of hyper-femininity, Cora and Phyllis create rituals of. ‧. womanly seduction. Meanwhile, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled men, particularly. Nat. sit. y. Philip Marlowe, are also forming a cult of masculinity through the intensity and. n. al. er. io. magnitude of the pain they can endure in various dangerous situations. One example. i Un. v. would be Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, where Marlowe tries to revive himself in order. Ch. engchi. to escape from the trap set by a bunch of ruthless mobsters: “‘Okay, Marlowe,’ I said to myself. ‘You're a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You've been sapped down twice, had your throat choked beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine. Now let’s see you do 5. Goffman’s analysis of social “performativity” has inspired Judith Butler’s notion of the “masquerade” in. Gender Trouble. 6.

(21) something really tough, like putting your pants on’” (170-71). Throughout Marlowe’s first-person, subjective narration, the detective keeps telling himself to be tough and take it like a man: he’s virile enough to laugh at himself and ironically delight in his own misery as if it were just plain “nothing.” Similarly, in Hammett’s Red Harvest, Continental Op chooses not to leave Personville even though he has to risk his life to restore order in the town. The voluntary acceptance of pain and suffering has long been a ritual of hyper-masculinity, one exemplified in the male protagonists of Hammett’s and Chandler’s novels.. 立. 政治大. In hard-boiled American crime fiction women are often the victims of brutal male. ‧ 國. 學. violence, and the women in Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake are good examples, although. ‧. here both men and women can serve as victims or victimizers. The flesh of the victim in. Nat. sit. y. these novels and films is often the phenomenological body, defined by Merleau-Ponty as. n. al. er. io. a “somatic presence” as well as a “corporeal absence” (Waskul and Vinni 9). The corpses. i Un. v. of the victims in this novel are often deliberately concealed, misplaced and/or dismantled. Ch. engchi. by the killer, so that in a sense the deformed or vanished bodies are absent corporeally and yet still guide the detective, as well as the reader/viewer, into a new set of bloody “symbolic orders.” The dead body itself therefore comprises a province of meaning that is both “symbolic and representational.” Femicide is indeed a common theme in these novels/films that expose the inherent misogyny of a patriarchal society. The dead female body contains a “conceptual horizon for the perceived social significance” (Waskul and Vinni 10): that is, the literally-dead body allows for a variety of metaphorical 7.

(22) interpretations by the reader/viewer now that it has been given an oneiric, dream-like dimension. On the other hand, once again, both men and women can die, sometimes almost indiscriminately, in novels like Double Indemnity and The Lady in the Lake. In the latter, as suggested above, the performative and essentially borderless quality—here we might also think of Judith Butler’s gender performativity—of the men’s and women’s body-selves allow for a sort of chaotic inter-gender mixing or confusion. In The Lady in. 政治大. the Lake, the identities of the killer and the victim are also confused or misplaced at the. 立. beginning, when Marlowe wrongly identifies the victim (the dead lady in the lake) as. ‧ 國. 學. Muriel Chess. However, later on he discovers that the real identity of Muriel Chess is. ‧. Mildred Haviland, who has become entangled in the drug deals of a local clinic and has. Nat. sit. y. coaxed a police lieutenant to do her dirty work. It also turns out that Chrystal Kingsley,. n. al. er. io. the wife of the business tycoon who hires Marlowe in this private investigation, is the. i Un. v. dead lady in the lake, and she has been mercilessly drowned by Mildred Haviland. But in. Ch. engchi. the end Mildred is strangled to death by her deranged husband and also raped by him after death (literally a case of necrophilia). Thus the mixing, blending, confusing or “misplacing” of genders, of male and female “body-selves,” encompasses the possibility that women as well as men can be murderers (murderesses) as well as (as in Double Indemnity and The Lady in the Lake) victims. Mildred Haviland, in this case, is both the victim and victimizer, and she has shifted her identity (as defined by her body-self) three times throughout the novel. The gimmick of identity-shifting is even adopted by the detective Marlowe as he disguises 8.

(23) himself as a random passerby to escape the police manhunt. In Cain’s Double Indemnity, Walter pretends to be Phyllis’ crippled husband, who has already been murdered, in order to fabricate a phony alibi so that he and his lover may get away with murder. The stolen identity of the victim/victimizer is somatically present and corporeally absent, and in this way the phenomenological body is created through the process of the identity-thief’s semantic innovations. That is, the stolen body of the victim is corporeally absent as the victimizer uses the/its stolen identity to create a maze of mystery (sematic innovation). 政治大. and make others believe that the victim is still alive (somatic presence).. 立. Moreover, the various cinematic adaptations of the novels of these three authors. ‧ 國. 學. allow for “traces of culture” to be present in the socio-semiotic bodies or body-selves. ‧. represented by the Hollywood actors. Foucault notes that “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting,” and power/knowledge gives Hollywood actors’. y. Nat. io. sit. screen images “the political anatomy of the body”: thus they become “objects of. n. al. er. discourses” and carry a “symbolic value, use-value, sign-value, exchange value, and. Ch. i Un. v. sign-exchange value through the functioning of a discursive and material order” (Waskul and Vinni 10-11).. engchi. But already the film adaptations, the body in the original novels functions as an “object by means of appearance and performance.” In other words, the body is already taken as “sign-vehicle.” Moreover, in the cinematic adaptation of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, the screen images of Lana Turner as Cora and Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis helped to create or construct the archetype of the femme fatale in the school of film noir, and the dynamics of these actresses’ “body-images” are now traces of an American culture that have been and are being effectively recycled in many neo-noir films, including David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and (very recently) 9.

(24) Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill for (2014). It follows from the above discussions that this dissertation must also explore the issue of the (novelistic and cinematic) homme fatale, who functions more or less as the living admonition of nymphomania in this hard-boiled crime genre. In Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, Chris Lavery, the gigolo boyfriend of Chrystal Kingsley, is marginalized and diminished to become a mere prop that helps to get the story moving forward. The women in Chandler’s novel meet their doom for not being able to govern their desire for Lavery, yet his body-image as (that of a) homme fatal is never deified or. 政治大 body situated in a position which 立concerns “the coherence and continuity” of the storyline fetishized. Lavery is not to be possessed or dispossessed: his flesh is that of the narrative. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. in general (Waskul and Vinni 12).. 2. Review of the Literature. y. Nat. er. io. sit. To begin with, in this dissertation we would like to summarize the previous research done on the works of the three main authors of classic American hard-boiled crime fiction. al. n. iv n C novels: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain Chandler. In The American h eand n gRaymond chi U. Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain and Chandler, William Marling discusses the novels of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler in the context of narrative theories as well as that of cultural and historical changes in American society during the Great Depression. Marling speaks of the impact of technology on the style and technique of popular literature, emphasizing how the mass production of motor vehicles re-programmed Americans’ lifestyle by giving them much greater freedom of movement, and how the general public’s embrace of cinema—especially with the rise of sound-flicks. 10.

(25) like The Jazz Singer (1927)—led to the faster pace of literary narratives.6 Marling shows how this “metonymic aesthetics” was used by Dashiell Hammett as “a vehicle of allegorical impulse” in his novels (117, 143). Hammett, he says, has a tendency to use “cubist reduction” to depict his protagonists. For example, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is described as a “bear like” man with a “conical shape” due to the “steep rounded slope of his shoulder” (Hammett 1), while Continental Op in Red Harvest doesn’t have an actual name in the novel, as Op is a man whose self-definition is based on his. 政治大. perseverance, his tenacity (Marling 133, 122).. 立. In 1928, Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were sentenced to death for their murder. ‧ 國. 學. (made to look like an accident) of Snyder’s husband, Albert Snyder, after Ruth persuaded. ‧. Albert to sign a “double indemnity”7 insurance policy.” This was a sensational event. Nat. sit. y. because Ruth Snyder was one of the first women to be electrocuted in the history of the. n. al. er. io. United States. James M. Cain, a professional journalist, was deeply inspired by the. i Un. v. Snyder-Gray case, and based two of his best novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ch. engchi. and Double Indemnity) largely on it. Both novels are about the murder of a husband by his wife and her lover, and in the end the criminals-lovers are sentenced to death. The image of the flapper—a woman who bobbed her hair, smoked, danced, wore leg-baring short skirts and flirted with men—has been an ambiguous one as far as the traditional concept of the woman’s role and image is concerned. Ernest Hemingway, long. 6. Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers (1927) was written in the form of a film-script as he was experimenting with this new cinematic writing technique, one which fascinated and repulsed him at the same time. In the 1940s, The Killers was adapted into a movie of the same title, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. 7 This means that if the policy holder dies in an accident, the policy will pay double. 11.

(26) before Cain, tackles this question of whether a flapper can be an adequate wife and mother in his critically acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which Brett Ashley is the catalyst for the disintegration of the traditional world of men around her due to her unbridled sexuality. Ruth Snyder, who was also a flapper in her youth, became a notorious model of female transgression, an icon, after her execution during the Great Depression; this reputation was enhanced by the fact that her lover Judd Gray had exclaimed in court that she was a “Tiger Woman” who had manipulated him into helping her murder her husband.8. 立. 政治大. When it comes to the works of James M. Cain, Marling uses a Freudian motif – the. ‧ 國. 學. triangle of “the Father, the Prodigal and the Elder” (from Christ’s parable of “the prodigal. ‧. son”)—to interpret the narrative technique of James M Cain’s novels (Marling 22-23).. sit. y. Nat. Cain’s protagonist, he says, is often “a prodigal stranger who disrupts a weakened nuclear. n. al. er. io. family”—one that is struggling with “economic hardship” and “sexual temptation”. i Un. v. (Marling 160). If Cain embeds the cultural anxiety about female transgression. Ch. engchi. (represented by the Snyder-Gray case) in his novels, he also tends to focus on xenophobia. For example, we have the attitude toward the ethnic other in The Postman Always Rings Twice, where Cora wishes to get rid of her Greek husband because she doesn’t wish to produce “a greasy Greek child” (Cain 37), and in Double Indemnity, where Walter hires a male Filipino housekeeper whose careless glamour emulates that of Clark Gable (105). Both novels are narrated from a first-person perspective in the form of a confession. In 8. In Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ruth becomes Cora, who is married to a Greek restaurateur, and Judd is Frank. In Postman, Cora is reluctant to produce an heir for “the greasy Greek” and so she seduces Frank, and then convinces him to help her murder him. In Double Indemnity Ruth is Phyllis; she is married to a much older man, and persuades Walter the insurance man (now Judd) to help her murder her husband so that she can get the insurance money. 12.

(27) their cinematic adaptations, filmmakers chose the technique of voice-over narration as well as that of flashbacks to introduce the story to the audience as a sort of immanent space within human consciousness. There are narrative gaps within the stories as the protagonist’s “self” is problematized through his/her excessive desire for sex, money and violence. If Cain employs “metonymic reduction” in his depiction of Southern California (Marling 245), Raymond Chandler is a geopolitical observer in his cognitive mapping of. 政治大. Los Angeles and Hollywood. Chandler applies the technique of “physical relations of. 立. matter” to the profiles of his characters. This technique is also called “laymen’s physics”. ‧ 國. 學. as the hierarchy of values between and among things and people is ironically flattened. ‧. (Marling 215). For instance, in Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe says “the women. Nat. sit. y. had good legs and displayed their inside curves more than Will Hays would have liked.. n. al. er. io. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper's office coat.” (25). If Deleuze and. i Un. v. Guattari speak of the “celibate machine,” and claim that “the eroticism of the machine. Ch. engchi. liberated other limited forces as a mechanization of experienced embodiment of pure intensities, repulsion and attraction,” Marling assumes that this “celibate machine” fabricates the dynamics of hard-boiled men (Deleuze and Guttari 19-26). To be hardboiled is “to eliminate the soft, the old, the fat, the feminine and the emotional,” a praxis necessary for survival in the rough period of the Great Depression when individuals were perennially conflicted by their desire for “sexual freedom and social status” (Marling 231). Since the hard-boiled individual is driven by the Deleuzian “celibate machine,” the 13.

(28) hard-boiled crime writers use “alienating effects” to create a world of “claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism” (Marling 266). The American roman noir contributed to the American film noir, and the filmmakers evoke an “absent, mechanized economy” that could be “immanentized and represented by technique” with a stylish “figuration” of the demons within the human psyche (245). The cinematic focus takes us from “synecdoche to metonymy” with its “diegetic powers and mimetic skills” (258). Several scholars talk about masculine anxiety and the making of the “male self” in. 政治大. hard-boiled American crime fiction. Paula Geyth notes in “Enlightenment Noir:. 立. Hammett’s Detectives and the Genealogy of the Modern (Private) ‘I’” that “the subject’s. ‧ 國. 學. definition of the self (in Hammett’s fiction)” is achieved “through self-control and. ‧. self-denial,” and here Geyth uses the metaphor of Odysseus to describe the relationship. sit. y. Nat. between Hammett’s “man” and the femmes fatales. The latter are a bit like Circe, whose. n. al. er. io. main purpose is “to tempt the hero to forget – and thus lose – himself” (38). The classic. i Un. v. example would be Sam Spade’s decision to send Brigid O’Shaughnessy to jail for her. Ch. engchi. murder of his former business partner Archer, and his reason is simple: “this is bad for business.” Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick argue in “Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest” that the hard-boiled detective operates by means of “linguistic labor”—smoothly talking himself out of various perilous situations in his dealings with the gangsters in Personville, while the only female character, Dinah Brand, operates by means of physical labor through her involvements with other men. As would be implied by a traditional patriarchal-hierarchical model, male subjectivity is assigned to the domain of linguistics while the female is restricted to the field of bodies and sensations (12-31). 14.

(29) J.P. Telotte discusses the uses of voice-over narration and flashbacks in Voices in the Dark: the Narrative Patterns of Film Noir in director Billy Wilder’s film adaptation of Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944). The plot of the movie is told through Walter’s confession, which is being recorded on a Dictaphone after Phyllis shoots him. Walter records this message for his colleague Keys, who is the conscientious father figure in the movie. Raymond Chandler, hired by director Billy Wilder to co-write the script of Double Indemnity, chooses to enhance the part of Keys to strengthen the theme of homosocial. 政治大. bonding between the men who have mutual trust and respect for each other, while the. 立. heterosexual bonding between Walter and Phyllis is based on anything but mutual trust. ‧ 國. 學. and respect. The story is thus told through flashbacks, which are really the mental images. ‧. of the bleeding, dying Walter who remorsefully utters: “I killed him for money—and a. sit. y. Nat. woman—and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman” (40-57). The montage. io. n. al. er. assemblage of flashbacks, along with the subjective voice-over narration, is thought to be. v. classically exemplified in the case of Wilder’s Double Indemnity.. Ch. engchi. i Un. As for the homosocial bonding between Walter and Keys, Carl Freedman notes in “The End of Work: From Double Indemnity to Body Heat” that there is an unspoken “homoerotic feeling”9 between these two: “the solid reliability of masculine friendship is contrasted with the dangers and unpredictability of heterosexual dalliance.” In Freedman’s view, something “quasi- sexual” takes place between them when Walter ignites the cigar of the absent-minded Keys. In the end, it is Keys who lights a cigarette for Walter as the latter lies dying by the elevator, and Walter tells him “I love you, too”. 9. J. P. Telotte disagrees with Freedman’s view. 15.

(30) (62). It was in 1981 that director Lawrence Kasdan adapted Cain’s Double Indemnity into a movie called Body Heat, which Freedman regards as a postmodern interpretation of “America’s terrible economic malaise” now “aggravated by the political and moral humiliation of the Iranian Hostage crisis that began in 1979.” Kasdan changes the location of the original novel so that Body Heat takes place in Miami, Florida, and this location- change allows “the valorization of leisure” of late capitalism to be highlighted in the film’s frequent beach scenes. In Kasdan’s movie, the femme fatale doesn’t get. 政治大. punished; she continues to embrace her leisure time on the sun-drenched beach while “the. 立. shining all-American anti-hero at the dawn of the age of Reagan” is serving his. ‧ 國. 學. life-sentence in jail and dreaming of nailing the corrupted murderess (72-73).. ‧. Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, set in early-1940s Los Angeles, was also. Nat. sit. y. adapted into a movie of the same title by Robert Montgomery in 1947, and the film script. n. al. er. io. was loosely drafted by Chandler before being handed to Steven Fisher for revision.. i Un. v. Robert Montgomery casts himself as the detective, Philip Marlowe, and shoots the entire. Ch. engchi. movie from a subjective perspective, so that the audience is looking at the scenes from Marlowe’s perspective. This technique creates the effect of an “all-perceiving subject” and the viewer experiences a confusion of truth and self in the domain of “the real” (Telotte 103-20). In summary, the critics’ and theorists’ interpretations of hard-boiled crime fiction as well as film noir tend to mainly focus on the contexts of historical and social change in American life between the late-1920s and early-1920s as these are depicted in both the novels and the films. The socio-cultural background is set, in critical discussions and 16.

(31) interpretations, in relation to psychological and philosophical perspectives such as those of Freud, Lacan and Deleuze, and in relation to the role of both narrative and cinematic techniques10.. 3. Theoretical Framework 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. 政治大 represented in the works of three classic “hard-boiled” crime writers: sex in James M. 立. Harvest in 1929. In this dissertation, we will investigate these three elements as they are. ‧ 國. 學. 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. sit. y. Nat. will be seen as following the logic of Theodore Reik’s so-called “reflexive. io. al. er. 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. n. iv n C 182-225). Female transgression, onhthe other hand, will e n g c h i Ube understood as uncontrollable 11 sexuality that becomes “abjectified ” 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). 17.

(32) 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. 政治大 American crime fiction can be 立 seen as Deleuzian Bodies without Organs, decoded and may be seen as a negative representation or manifestation of desire, and the bodies in. ‧ 國. 學. 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. er. io. sit. y. Nat. build-up to the Second World War.. al. n. iv n C Chapter One (The Introduction)hofethe dissertation n g c h i Uwill include the following. 4. Dissertation Structure. 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. 18.

(33) 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. 政治大 their movie adaptations. This 立chapter will contain three parts: “The Dramaturgical Body: in two of Cain’s novels, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and in. ‧ 國. 學. Femmes Fatales and Murderous Domesticity,” “Phyllis and Cora’s Socio-semiotic Bodies in Postmodern Hollywood,” and “From Optical to Haptical Sensuality: Malleable Female. ‧. Flesh.”. sit. y. Nat. In Chapter Four, “Raymond Chandler: Violence,” we will explore the role played by. al. er. io. violence (also in relation to sex) in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, Vera. iv n C h einto Murder. The discussion will be divided i U “Masculine Performativity: n gthree c hsections: n. Caspary’s Laura, and Jack Webb’s documentary account of the 1947 Black Dahlia. 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 19.

(34) 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. 政治大 Deleuze’s idea of the “Body without 立 Organs” to interpret the country’s cultural. back to look at body politics in the works of Cain, Chandler and Hammett, and use. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. temperament during this difficult period in American socio-economic-political history.. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. Black Dahlia in 1987. 15 Red Harvest and Little Caesar were published in the same year – 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression. 20.

(35) 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. 政治大 through early historical figure 立like Benjamin Franklin in the19. temperament of American culture. We will explain the formation of American biformity th. century and the penchant. ‧ 國. 學. 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,. sit. y. Nat. particularly in the portrayals of cowboys, private detectives and superheroes, who are. al. er. io. vigilantes who make and follow their own rules in a lawless society. We will use the. iv n C society from the 1920s to the 1940s,hand e nthisg approach c h i Uhas been used by Lawrence W. n. examples of popular films from the year 1930 to 1950 to illustrate the aura of American. 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). 21.

(36) 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 20 th 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. 政治大 idiosyncratically American, and立 the detective’s stories are all driven by the magnitude of hard-boiled novel, the American detective started to have some qualities that are. ‧ 國. 學. 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. al. er. io. sit. y. Nat. Rhizomatic Maze to illustrate the world of Sherlock Holmes and that of Philip Marlowe.. iv n C Ever since the 1840s when Edgar h Allen the first great detective C. e nPoe hi U g ccreated n. The Transitional Period of American Crime Fiction – the 1920s. 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. 22.

(37) 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”. 政治大 the detectives in these stories 立are “caricatures of Sherlock Holmes” as Americans are. (Bildungsroman) and his transformation “from innocence to experience.” More or less,. ‧ 國. 學. 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. sit. y. Nat. of anti-hero who is purely American as the detective is no longer highbrow once he. er. io. abandons those scientific methods inherited from Sherlock Holmes.. al. iv n C U of self-preservation in a h e nthe behavior” as his self-application becomes h imeans g conly n. In Hammett’s detective fiction, the detective follows his own “private code of. 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 23.

(38) 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. 政治大 reign. However, there is always立 an exit in the “pre-existential” universe of Mannerist. as the Minotaur where “social fragmentation, moral skeptism and cultural pluralism”. ‧ 國. 學. 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,. sit. y. Nat. Sherlock Holmes.. er. io. On the other hand, Eco borrows the idea of Rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari to. al. iv n C h no “no center, no perimeter” and absolutely e nwaygout c hasi theUprotagonist cannot escape the n. illustrate the world of hard-boiled detective fiction as the Rhizomatic Maze where there is. 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 24.

(39) 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. 政治大 tougher and aggressive” (Abrams 立 77). Holmes’s contemplative method is his. languid” with the air of “the decadent aesthete” while the hard-boiled detective is “shorter,. ‧ 國. 學. 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. sit. y. Nat. hard-boiled detective is constrained in a claustrophobic urbanite space. In the world of. er. io. Sherlock Holmes, the presence of the femme fatale is non-essential (not every Sherlock. al. iv n C h e nhaving world of Phillip Marlowe who is always i U time fighting off those deadly g c ha tough n. Holmes story involves one) while the existence of the femme fatale is essential in the. 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 25.

性、暴力與無政府： 美國20年代到40年代犯罪小說中的身體政治 - 政大學術集成

性、暴力與無政府：美國20年代到40年代犯罪小說中的身體政治 - 政大學術集成