Juri,
Re your comments below:
> I've also been thinking about police
procedural
> novel in the same context.
> It's politically more leftist, since there are
no
> heroical individuals, but
> the order is kept by the community and the men
and
> women who are elected and
> trained by the community itself. And the police
are
> very often shown to be
> part of the proletariat (not in the Leninist
sense
> of the word), as is the
> case in Collin Wilcox and other pp writers. They
are
> not the brave
> individuals, but only parts of the community
and
> society. Society itself
> restores the order, which is I think what
should
> happen - in the real world,
> fixers, heroes, that stuff belongs to
fiction.
I keep on getting drawn into this thread, but I can't let
this assertion go by witout unrebutted.
I happen to write police procedurals, Juri, and while they
may not be classic examples of the form, they are fairly
TYPICAL examples of the form, and one they are empatically,
absolutely, indubitably, without exception NOT is
leftist.
Jack Webb, who has a fair (though not absolute) claim to
being the creator of the police procedural sub-genre is also
emphatically NOT a leftist.
Joseph Wambaugh is NOT a leftist.
Gerald Petievitch is NOT a leftist.
John Creasey was NOT a leftist.
Maurice Procter was NOT a leftist.
Ed McBain may possibly be a leftist, though I doubt. He may,
possibly, identifes himself as moderatley liberal, but
judging from the evidence of his 87th Precinct books, he's,
by and large, a pretty non-leftist kind of guy.
Collin Wilcox, who I knew personally, was also not a leftist,
and, as for his character not being a brave individual, that
belied in virtually every single book in the Frank Hastings
series that I've read, most of which end with an action
climax in which Hastings must perform some courageous act of
physical heroism to bring about justice.
There are certainly examples of cop stories with a leftist
slant. The Martin Beck novels of Sjowall & Wahloo are
perhaps the most famous examples. But the obvious leftism of
the those novels, far from being typical for the police
procedural, makes them stand out from the rest of the
sub-genre. They are the exceptions that prove the general
"non-leftist" slant of the police story.
The fact of the matter is you're a lot more likely to find
novels about "lone wolf" private eyes with leftist agendas
than cop novels with such an agenda. Roger Simon, Sara
Paretsky, Michael Collins, and Gordon DeMarco are just a few
examples.
As to your assertion that police act as a unit, rather than
as an individual, that certainly true, but the members of
those units are not, either in real life or in fiction,
mindless cogs in a soulless machine of law enforcement. They
are individuals, with individual opinions, preferences,
aspirations, backgrounds, and personalities. They are
employees of the community, and to a degree, they are
representatives of the community, but they are NOT the
community in the sense that you seem to imply. They are
people the community has hired to do work, often unpleasant
and occasionally dangerous work, that communities need to
have done. And in taking on that job, they don't, either in
fiction or in real life, abrogate their individuality. And
quite a few of those individuals are splendidly heroic. I've
seen the proof first-hand. Teamwork is not, by definition, a
left-wing comment, nor is it a bar to individual
initiative.
Further, I don't grant that individual heroism is a form of
creeping fascism. Fascism is a governmental form that stifles
individualism. That fascist governments are often built
around a cult of a single charsmatic personality like Hitler,
Mussolini, or Stalin, is not an indication that fascism
fosters individual acts of heroism, but that it allows for a
small number of people, often one single individual absolute
power over the rest of the individuals in a given
jurisdiction.
JIM DOHERTY
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