Miker, I was referring to irony in the style, though in The
Woman Chaser the content is also a send-up of all sorts of
things, including Freudianism, Kafka, etc. The author is very
much present, subtly pointing at things. That's my reading of
the novel, which obviously can also be read as straight dark
suspense.
In all of this, the reader is also a participant. A reader
today has a different perspective from an original reader. In
that sense, the reader makes the book as much as the author.
We laugh at Bellem, but maybe pulp readers just saw a series
of violent adventures.
A case in point from the movies: I remember reading that the
homosexual couple (the cricket fans, Basil and his buddy
whatshisname) in Hitchcock's thriller _The Lady Vanished_ was
not seen as such by viewers in the thirties. What seems
totally obvious to us was not seen then. Which is probably
why Hitchcock, who did know, got away with it.
I have even been told that readers in the fifties were not
very aware of Prather's sendup of the PI genre. They thought
they were reading PI novels. They were, of course, but we
don't call Prather a master because he wrote some thrilling
PI novels with enticing tomatoes. His genius is his
style.
Regards,
MrT
=====
"The difference between the right word and the almost right
word is the difference between lightning and the lightning
bug." Mark Twain
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