At 09:08 PM 10/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>So let's appreciate them for what they are and not
burden them with more
>attitudes than they had in real life--and they had
more than a
>sufficiency. Let's
>judge them by what is on the page and not what was in
their background that
>may or may not have any significance.
How about I judge them for what's on the page and sift
through their backgrounds to try to understand influences on
what got put on the page?
Chandler's brief brush with Canada happened at a time and
place that is significant in this country's nation-building
mythology. Canadian troops first fought under British
command, whose upper-class officers used their own
lower-class and Commonwealth troops mostly as cannon fodder,
feeding them into killing fields for little gain, inspired by
notions of chivalry that should have been buried after the
example of the US Civil War. Canadians later won significant
victories fighting under their own commanders. So I am
curious about Chandler's fit into these events, and how they
might have influenced his romantic vision of the lone
detective as knight. Details Kevin or others may have about
that are welcome.
As for Hammett, I too thought his time as a Pink was
generally thought to have influenced his work more than his
war experiences. And that it was their activities as
strike-breakers and servants of capital, not their
crime-fighting, that influenced his outlook. Doesn't Hammett
tend to deal with class issues, mostly relations between the
lower and middle classes? I thought The Thin Man was an
Americanization of the British cosy, treating matters of
crime among the rich with superficial wit and whimsey. Maybe
I'm thinking more of the subsequent movies.
Or maybe I've got it all wrong, but given that both Hammett
and Chandler's works were part of a popularization of
literature and reading, dealing more with the people on the
streets than those in the parlours of privilege, I'm happy to
be corrected. So by all means, more background please.
Best Kerry
------------------------------------------------------
Literary events Calendar (South Ont.) http://www.lit-electric.com
The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
------------------------------------------------------
-- # 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 : 11 Dec 2003 EST