Re: Re[2]: RARA-AVIS: Broadly speaking

Orpheus (orpheus@columbus.rr.com)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 00:58:56 -0400 James Doherty wrote:
> "What is a tough guy or hardboiled novel?.....a
>few observations are appropriate here. The lower social and economic levels
>provide the locale and characters of tough novels; it is mainly the private
>detective novels that penetrate to the underworld, and in those novels high
>society often completes the social picture - the poles meet, clash, merge,
>often prove essentially identical.....[Madden makes the point that the
>protagonist thrives in periods of social confusion and disillusion, such as
>the depression].....The tough guy hero is not very often a professional
>killer or criminal; such men are tough in any era. Except in the private
>detective novels, the tough novels depict less crime and violence than one
>might imagine......Reacting in kind to the indifferent, violent,
>deceptiveworld that made him, the tough guy describes and reponds
>objectively to a world that made him an object."
>
> James

Would it then be safe to use Durkheim's term "anomie" to describe the
social situation that the idealized hard-boiled protagonist rises above to
create his own system of morals, to make his own rules? This seems to be
yet another parallel between existentialism and the hard-boiled universe.
Is not Camus's Meursault a hard-boiled character, if we follow the above
definition?

Brian

"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" - Dorothy, from "The
Wizard of Oz"
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