Jim:
> Marlowe, Spade, the Op, Archer, etc., do their
jobs,
> keep their promises, uphold their committments,
and,
> when this steely resolve puts them in harm's way,
they
> face danger bravely. That's what heroes
do.
Then ordinary people are heroes, since that what all people
should do.
I have been thinking about this fascism thing. It has come up
before somewhere and I think there is a point in there:
hardboiled mysteries are about the universe where the order
is dependent on an individual, even though the order isn't
always restored by that individual. I don't really know if
it's fascism, but it's close, if we only take it to its
conclusion.
(That's what Hitler did: restored the order.)
I've also been thinking about police procedural novel in the
same context. It's politically more leftist, since there are
no heroical individuals, but the order is kept by the
community and the men and women who are elected and trained
by the community itself. And the police are very often shown
to be part of the proletariat (not in the Leninist sense of
the word), as is the case in Collin Wilcox and other pp
writers. They are not the brave individuals, but only parts
of the community and society. Society itself restores the
order, which is I think what should happen - in the real
world, fixers, heroes, that stuff belongs to fiction.
Juri
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Jul 2003 EDT