Re: RARA-AVIS: dickless realities?

MARK SULLIVAN (ANONYMEINC@webtv.net)
Thu, 11 Jun 1998 21:50:39 -0400 (EDT) I also found the claim of PC rather interesting. As you said, that
accusation often comes from the right to criticize societal changes
which clash with their nostalgia for a better, bygone era (although it
is also used by those on the left to criticize an overly doctrinare
approach which bears no criticism.). The best definition of nostalgia
I've seen is by Luc Sante in Low Life: "This word can be generally
defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of
the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy and safety,
and community--qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are
retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's
birth."

But to think that the sociological and literary can be easily divorced
in any culture strikes me as ludicrous. And to expect it in so overtly
ideological a form as the mystery in general, but especially in
harboiled, evidences severe myopia. The mystery is all about restoring
order to the world; however the author defines that order reveals an
ideological choice. Hardboiled was conceived as a class critique,
asserting the value of the everyday man as he exposes the corruption of
the more moneyed class (criminal and allegedly legit); Hammett went to
jail for his politics. Spillane's politics on the other side of the
spectrum are even more unavoidable.

All it means when someone claims a piece of culture is
ideologically-free, is that the ideology is the same as the reader's,
just as you can't see blue when looking through a blue lens. So when
someone has trouble with changes in a literary form, they are probably
not too happy with similar changes in society and now resent them even
more for invading their last remaining stronghold against the change.

Mark

#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.