The violent hero, wilderness heritage and urban reality: a study of the private eye in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald
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Abstract
The violent hero of the modern hard-boiled detective story
is Adam in the city, one of the sons of Leather-stocking faced
with the final conquest of the garden by the machine, an expression
of what David Noble has called "the central myth in
the American novel since 1830." With a value system rooted in
the nineteenth century frontier, he must confront the twentieth
century city, "a world," writes Raymond Chandler, "in which
gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities
fragrant world, but it is the world you live in."
I do not mean to suggest that nineteenth century urban
life was more fragrant. What I do urge is that in the nineteenth
century there were alternatives to the mean streets of
the city, and in the twentieth century there are not. For
Leather-stocking there was wilderness, both as fact and metaphor,
stretching west, a place of infinite moral possibility
to which the hero, threatened with a compromise to his integrity,
could escape. In the twentieth century there is no longer "territory" for which the hero can "light out." Instead the qualities of strength and courage which are the hero's heritage
as a son of Leather-stocking are used to support his private
values, to maintain his integrity in the face of decadence.
In speaking of the American Adam (whom he is in the process
of identifying with Deerslayer), R. W. B. Lewis asks,
"supposing there were such a figure--young, pure, innocent-what
would happen to him if he entered the world as it really
is?" For the private eye the world as it really is is the city.
As Leslie Fiedler points out. "the private eye is not the dandy
turned sleuth; he is the cowboy [whom Fiedler says Cooper invented]
adapted to life on the city streets, the embodiment of
innocence moving untouched through universal guilt." If by
"untouched" Fiedler means uncorrupted then surely he is right.
But in other terms this 0 embodiment of innocence" is hardly
"untouched." As Lewis says, "tragedy, in American fiction,
was generated by the impact of hostile forces upon the innocent
solitary, who had sprung from nowhere, and his impact upon
them."
If I may do so without committing myself to a position on
tragedy, I would insist that the private eye is just such a
solitary, and that his armed innocence suggests the paradox
that D. H. Lawrence observed when he called Leather-stocking
"a saint with a gun ... an isolate, almost selfless, stoic,
enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure
white. This is the very intrinsic-most American."
Like Leather-stocking, the private eye rejects the
official patterns of his society in defense of his integrity,
but he can no longer move west; he can only hold fast. If
there is redemption for him it is in this, in confronting the
world without accepting it, and in bearing its pressure with
grace.
Cooper's forest evolved into Chandler's city, and complicity
in evil became harder to avoid. The good man could
not flee it because evil had become part of the fabric of his
culture. And he could not accept it because acceptance would
violate his honor. Thus conflict, with its potential for violence,
became inevitable. The story of such conflict in the
twentieth century city is the story of the private eye. Ill
defined though his concept of the term may be, and subjective
though it surely is, the private eye opposes to a vast and
pervasive corruption his own private honor--and survives.
Perhaps it is only that the private eyes are, in most cases,
series characters that they survive. Or, perhaps, in their
creators, there is the conviction that honor will suffice if
maintained with sufficient toughness. Perhaps also in their
survival, and in the muted optimism which that survival represent~
lies some of the reason for their appeal.
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