A. N. Smith writes:
<< "Isn't the work of Don DeLillo and other postmodern
writers
somewhat hardboiled because--" No, it isn't.
>>
The problem here is that qualifier, "somewhat." I might not
say DeLillo is hard-boiled, but I might say he is somewhat
hard-boiled. His prose is sometimes too stylized to qualify
for erstwhile avian James Doherty's insistence on colloquial
language. DeLillo's Running Dog, if not toying with classic
hard-boiled, is at least fooling with political thrillers. It
has that killer who is obsessed with guns (an obsession that
Jack Gladney of White Noise also takes on). The novel also
has the pornography macguffin, and forbidden porno has its
place in the hb canon.
Your post raises an intriguing problem about influence and
definition. Japanese (postmodern?) novelist Murakami was
interested in hard-boiled enough so that the word
"hard-boiled" appears in the title of one novel (at least as
it is translated in the U.S.). His "Wild Sheep Chase" has
Chandler all over it, but it mutates into something else and
never is too too hard-boiled even early on, even if it has a
ton of traditional hard-boiled elements. Perhaps some of the
list members from Japan could comment on Murakami and his
native reception and whether or not he is discussed in light
of crime fiction in his native country. What we need is a
tough colloquial PI novel with a hero pitted against
institutional forces and working for a suspicious client, but
that in the reading does not deliver a hard-boiled
experience. That would be something to investigate.
Arguments about taxonomy seem to me largely valuable for how
they illuminate a work. I'm not going to say Kafka is or is
not hard-boiled, but what happens if you think about him in
some of the terms of hb, or in terms of
"popular" fiction (and I don't know anything about
magazine/periodical fiction in central Europe in the early
part of this century). Here's the comparison: I don't think
Macbeth is a comedy or Romeo and Juliet a send-up, but I have
occasionally found some profit by thinking of them is such
terms.
Waxing foolishly literary--and
suddenly posting, Doug 3
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