I thought once more about my comment on hardboiled horror. I
claimed that Lovecraft was a frontier writer and therefore he
is linked with the hardboiled. But wait a minute. Lovecraft
is an antithesis of the frontier ideology - in his texts the
nature is evil and hids all kinds of terrifying monsters and
secrets. This is totally different from Cooper and Thoreau,
for whom the nature is a healing, romantically perceived
experience. Lovecraft then is similar to, say, Joseph Conrad
who, at least in "Heart of Darkness", claims that if a man
contacts nature, he finds his own horrifying abysses and
becomes a raving animal
("Horror. Horror."). Here Lovecraft links with some authors
that are more inclined to hardboiled, for example Jack
London. (He's always said to be a nature loving writer, but I
find the hate of nature in his books.)
Does this have something to do with hardboiled? Browsing
through Jopi Nyman's short article in a Finnish anthology of
essays about Hammett I find that he says the same thing about
Hammett: "Red Harvest" is an anti-frontier book. In it all
the ideas of frontier ideology have vanished and there's only
corrupt city culture. It has poisoned Personville and it has
become Poisonville. The factories and mines have ruined the
countryside and the nature that were so important to the
frontier ideology. There is the aspect of the corrupt city in
almost every hardboiled/noir book/film, but there is also the
healing aspect of nature, e.g. in "The Asphalt Jungle". Maybe
Hammett was more radical than to renew old stereotypes.
But maybe this is what links Lovecraft and Hammett - the view
of the corrupt society that has also destroyed the nature so
that there are no more places to go. But this is a link that
functions only in the deepest layers of discourses or the
ideologies. As a writer, a craftsman, Lovecraft has nothing
to do with the hardboiled!
But I found that John G. Cawelti says that the plot of "The
Dain Curse" is straight from "The Mysteries of Udolpho"!
Comments, anyone?
Juri
jurnum@utu.fi
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