Eddie Duggan sent this around before the archiving started, so I'm sending it out again in order that a copy will be stored for posterity. -- William Denton : buff@vex.net <-- Please note new address. Toronto, Canada <-- I'm not at io.org any more. http://www.vex.net/~buff/ Caveat lector. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 15:18:19 -0500 From: E J M Duggan <106156.565@compuserve.com> Reply-To: rara-avis@icomm.ca To: rara-avis LIST <rara-avis@icomm.ca> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Opening Lines The 'Welcome to the List' blurb said >> It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the >> sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the >> foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie >> and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue >> clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care >> who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to >> be. I was calling on four million dollars. - opening lines to _The Big Sleep_, by Raymond Chandler OK, so if we're trynig to define 'hard-boiled' --- and I can't think of a better way to kick-off this list---let's look at Chandler's opening passage (I know _TBS_ isn't generally deemed RC's 'best' as a novel, but despite all the shortcomings that derive from boilerplating three or four short stories into a novel, it does, at the risk of evoking bishops and actresses, have a *pretty snappy* opening passage). The time of day: Chandler's dick is not an early riser (it's OK, sit down Herr Freud, I know what I'm saying), no 9:00 - 5:00 world this, Marlowe was probably sleeping off a bottle that went inside or upside his head ;-) 'The sun not shining' undercuts itself with the unexpected 'not' of the description. This undercutting is repeated in the more developed description of the narrator, beginning with dress (BTW, just what shade is *powder blue*? Is it like, light, amphetamine blue, the colour of snooker chalk? Or doe Marlowe's powder come in a deeper shade, more akin to IBM?) and building toward 'neat, clean, shaved and sober', each descriptive term building upon the previous, conventionally, these are *not* the terms narrators describe themselves in: narrators are always 'neat' and 'clean', it goes without saying (can you imagine Virginia Woolf telling us this!?!) as should the 'shaved --- _pace_ VW ;-) --- and of course the 'sober': surely 'sober' is only worthy of inclusion because it is notable, as are the other adjectives. So we have a rather striking picture --- a self-image, for it is generated by the narratror himself --- building up of a narrator who is *not usually* 'neat, clean, shaved and sober': if he were he would hardly be telling us. Moreover, the as-yet-nameless first-person narrator, who also describes himself as a private detective is telling us something about himself with the tag 'and I didn't care who knew it': His general outlook, or state of mind, is neatly condensed into this single sentence. There is a cynism apparent in the metaphoric final sentence: 'I was calling on four million dollars.' Not a name, or a place, but a value, in terms of wealth, capital accumulation. The unshaven drunk, bit-of-a-bum PI is moving out of his social and economic league, and we can probably guess from this opening passage that class, or perhaps wealth, conflict will provide one of the key features of this narrative. We could probably generalise from here to say that this feature is characteristic of the hard-boiled style. One other noticable feature of this passage is the recurring 'I'; Private Eye or private 'I'? There may be a self-centred, self-obsessed trait apparent in the author/narrator/style/genre that is clearly evident in the subjective nature of the concentration of the narrative on the 'I. This narrator is perhaps over-emphasising the self in an attempt to fix what may be in doubt: his own sense of self, and the his identity, that is, self-as-subject, the unified, centred subject that is the fulcrum of the narrative, and who will, we may suggest, come increasingly under pressure --- in terms of unity, of for example, identity or of sexuality, as the narrative continues. OK, so here we have what may be a couple of the defining characteristics of 'hard boiled' writing. But is Chandler for real? He's writing what, a generation after Hammett, Daly and the other early proponents of the style which developed in the pages of _The Black Mask_ ? Hasn't Chandler *read* this stuff? So how much of what he writes, through the drunken, snobbish haze that is so apparent in his correspondence (see Chandler's letters, _Raymond Chandler Speaking_ Gardiner & Walker eds) to acquaintances and publishers, is 'real' and how much is a *parody* of the material Chandler effects to despise? We can't really answer such a question, but we can identify it as something to be borne in mind as the discussion develops. A couple of Hammett's opening lines might be worth brief consideration: 'It was a wandering daughter job.' ('Fly Paper', 1929) Samuel Spade said, "My name is Ronald Ames." ('They Can Only Hang You Once', 1932) The cynicism of hard-boiled is here, and of course there is humour (which is evident also in the Chandler passage) but the terseness of Hammett's phrasing has an effect that is entirely absent, I would suggest, from Chandler's overblown prose. A comaprison of first-person narrative in Chandler and Hammet would stand further exploration, but for my money, Hammett 'walked the walk' and 'talked the talk' of the 'hard boiled' dick, it was only *writing* that caused him problems from about the early-mid 1930s. Chandler on the other hand, had quite different set of baggage to declare, with a variety of unfulfilled aspirations: a wife old enough to be his mother, a drink problem that got him fired from a 'respectable' job, and literary aspirations that weren't satisfied or helped by the chip he kept on his shoulder. We might see that later, so called 'neo-boiled' writing, or hard-boiled writing which foregrounds a woman's or a feminist point of view develops further the parodic aspect that must surely come when one *writes after* a style has been set for so long that it is deifficult (as with Chandler) to see just where the genre ends and the parodies begin. Just my two cent's worth, Eddie Duggan