Re: Re[2]: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking
Orpheus (orpheus@columbus.rr.com)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 00:58:56 -0400
James Doherty wrote:
> "What is a tough guy or hardboiled
novel?.....a
>few observations are appropriate here. The lower social
and economic levels
>provide the locale and characters of tough novels; it is
mainly the private
>detective novels that penetrate to the underworld, and
in those novels high
>society often completes the social picture - the poles
meet, clash, merge,
>often prove essentially identical.....[Madden makes the
point that the
>protagonist thrives in periods of social confusion and
disillusion, such as
>the depression].....The tough guy hero is not very often
a professional
>killer or criminal; such men are tough in any era.
Except in the private
>detective novels, the tough novels depict less crime and
violence than one
>might imagine......Reacting in kind to the indifferent,
violent,
>deceptiveworld that made him, the tough guy describes
and reponds
>objectively to a world that made him an
object."
>
> James
Would it then be safe to use Durkheim's term "anomie" to
describe the
social situation that the idealized hard-boiled protagonist
rises above to
create his own system of morals, to make his own rules? This
seems to be
yet another parallel between existentialism and the
hard-boiled universe.
Is not Camus's Meursault a hard-boiled character, if we
follow the above
definition?
Brian
"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" - Dorothy,
from "The
Wizard of Oz"
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