I thought I might weigh in on the marxist debate.
It seems to me that it might be useful to dispense with the
heated term
"marxist," and instead say that there may be some value in
considering
individual novels and larger developments in the genre in
terms of
historical, economic, social, and class conditions. From
this
viewpoint, one might in fact be a marxist critic without
being a
marxist. (I guess it depends on whether one thinks one's
critical
thinking will bring about the greater democraticization of
the means of
production--but that's another story.)
What value? seems the next worthwhile question. As Dan Sontup
notes,
writers think about action and character, not broad
sociological
questions. This may be true of some writers. On the other
hand, all
writers are products of their time and social milieu and
they
willy-nilly articulate their positions in their culture,
whether or not
they think about it consciously. I think it's a bit limiting
to confine
ourselves to questions of authorial intention. Many writers
are famous
for talking very poorly about what it is they do. I do think
larger
social questions can illuminate the books themselves and
deepen one's
interest in them; thus, these questions seem worth
pursuing.
Finally, an example or two:
Charles Willeford was a child of the Great Depression. When
he was 15,
he jumped rail cars, went hungry, etc. He joined the army
when he was
16 or 17 and was a career enlisted man. While enduring
poverty and then
the army, he continued to imagine himself as a poet. After
WWII, he
wrote a collection of poetry called Proletariat
Laughter--certainly a
loaded title--which includes prose interludes about the war.
The war
pieces are incredibly stark and brutal and quite critical of
America
(e.g., American Democracy in Europe means the ability to
stand in line
outside a whorehouse to get the action you deserve).
Willeford's later writing is frequently critical of the
banality of
American bourgeois life. Indeed, criminal action, or at least
violent
impulses, seem to erupt from characters' responses to this
banality.
The best example is probably Richard Hudson in The Woman
Chaser (called
The Director by Willeford). Think too of the old man (what
was his
name?) in Sideswipe. The psychopath Troy's wild, spontaneous
criminal
life appeals to the old man after he thinks back on his
existence as a
trim painter on an assembly line in a Ford factory.
I don't know how much you've discussed Hammet's communism.
Somewhere he
talks about the horrors he saw perpetrated by the Pinkertons,
and that
gave him sympathy for the working man. I just started looking
over the
late story "Tulip" which seems to refer autobiographically to
Hammet's
time in the joint for refusing to testify to the House
Unamerican
Activities Commission.
Is this posting too long?
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