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RARA-AVIS: Red Wind: homoerotics & mastubatory closure



It seems my reading of 'Red Wind' is 'reading too much' for some
rara-avisers.
It might be cosy to hang on to a romantic, reassuring notion of "the
author's intentions",  but that would
suggest that "the author" is a single unified subject, capable of "knowing"
and "intention".

If, for example, a particular person --- a writer, say --- has particularly
strong fears or feelings about 
a particular issue --- homosexuality, say --- that writer might consciously
deny those fears/feelings 
and even try to keep them from surfacing in his everyday speech and writing
(particularly in a culture that is homphobic).  Unconsciously, he may even
try to purge them from his thinking.  
Such efforts might be less than successful however.

Freud has taught us that parapaxes (slips of the tongue: 'Freudian slips')
can reveal otherwise hidden things.  It is surely reasonable to be able to
suggest in this context then that, based on the plentiful examples of
homoerotic elements in Chandler's writing, *something* is working its way
to the surface to find manifestation in Chandler's elaborate prose.

Look, for example, at all the opportunities for heterosexual sex in the
novels that Marlowe declines; 
and his neurotic reaction to the prospect of  hetero-sex (he rips up his
bed after finding Carmen there in _TBS_ ; he can't get away quickly enough
from Anne Riordan in _F, M L_ ).   Marlowe seems not only to be drawn into
relationships with men (eg Lennox; Red; Moose) but describes those men in
homoerotically charged terms (all that 'I looked into his eyes' ; 'he was
worth looking at' and 'he had powerful thighs' stuff). 

Oh yes -- I know --- Marlowe is a man of honour.  His honour is such that
none of the available skirt is ever good enough, never what he wants. 
Whose he kidding?  Himself? Us? Chandler?
What is that hard, hot, sticky part of Red's anatomy that Marlowe holds in
_Farewell, My Lovely_? 
Of course, it's just a hand ;-)

Chandler may not have been consciously aware of the sexual gaminess of his
writing or of Marlowe, but one doesn''t need to read *too deeply* to find
it.  
Given all of the above, I'll stand by my reading of Dalmas symbolically
tossing himself off and ejaculating into the ocean while thinking about a
fantasy man at the end of 'Red Wind'. 

BTW, I teach a course in detective fiction, so I suppose that makes me a
kind of 'Eng. Lit. Professor' of the nineties --- So where did I get my
wacky ideas about reading that I pass on to students?  From those safe old
buffers, the Eng. Lit Professors of the 1960s.  


Eddie Duggan



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