Juri writes, interestingly,
"There is some fascination in reading about people who seem
to have no hope. They are put against the wall and they try
to do something about it and don't always succeed. The
communication in these books is always about something else
than normal relationships, or rather: the normal
relationships have been replaced by those that prevent people
to have normal relationships. Greed. Lust. Anger. Hate. And
the communication has to happen with guns, fists, deception.
It's not the animal in us, it's the animal in the society.
And this is why I like hardboiled literature - it portrays
people more truthfully than the classical mystery tradition
in which a man is an animal, calculating but nevertheless an
animal. This might seem like a contradiction with the usual
attitude about HB, but I'm behind my words."
So a noir world, darker than the souls of those caught in it?
Reinhold Niebuhr's wrote a book in the 20s or 30s, Moral Man
and Immoral Society: thesis is something like individuals
have sin, but combinations of individuals
(corporations, unions, society) create more badness than the
sum of the individuals. I would agree, except for the
proletarian view of the rich as born and brought-up
bad--they're different from you and me, as Fitzgerald once
said, and I think many HB novelists would agree, though not
in the positive way Fitzgerald may have allowed. I'll qualify
that to say that Chandler, for instance, seems to distinguish
between the ones that made the money (the entrepreneurs) and
their children, who always had the money.
And it's a society that favors the rich and powerful--in the
US that translates into a country that hasn't lived up to its
promise, so a larger sense of social betrayal that perhaps
can't be transferred to other countries(?). Hence the special
satisfaction of social or class revenge when someone rich or
connected gets to suffer, in part because the PI or character
causing the suffering is outside the
social-judicial-governmental network.
Thoughts on an Inside Day; when it snows, the words come out
too. What do you think?
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 27 Jan 2000 EST