I recently read HIP: THE HISTORY, by John Leland (2004),
which is about hipness: hip as in Bird, Diz, Monk, Lou Reed,
etc. He goes to Wolof for the origin of the term, from "hepi"
(to see) or "hipi" (to open one's eyes). Hip is about knowing
and being aware (digging), he says: "an undercurrent of
enlightenment, organized around contradiction and anxieties."
Cool is the mask hipness wears to stay reserved and
understated. These are hard terms to define, but he does a
good job. Even if you don't like them, you know what they
words mean, anyway.
All this is of interest here because of chapter four: "Would
a Hipster Hit a Lady? Pulp Fiction, Film Noir, and Gangsta
Rap." Leland shows how hip Spade, Marlowe, the Op and others
were. I hadn't thought of them that way, but it makes sense.
They knew how everything worked (their cities, politics,
people, crime), they were involved yet apart, always on their
own terms; they cracked wise, they hung out with outsiders,
they didn't fit in with the squares.
"In the 1920s and 1930s, these two currents came together in
a new avatar of masculine hip, the hard-boiled detective or
pulp hero. As drawn by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain,
Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Latimer, David Goodis and other
disciples of the penny-a-word form, the hard-boiled hero was
a figure of masculinity unbound: big shoulders, strong chin,
smart lip, big pistol and taught gift of gab. As if in answer
to Jung, this hero--Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, the
Continental Op, Three Gun Terry, Race Williams and
others--introduced an all-American style of sex and violence,
bordered only by the writers' equally homegrown tools:
rhythym, humor, sensationalism, mass production and bold
opportunism. The private eye was his own invention, usually
an independent operator, unmarried, childless and motherless.
He cowed neither to women nor to work. He did not suffer an
employer; in many stories he gained the upper hand by walking
away from a check. Similarly, he cut a sexual swath but did
not have any attachments or obligations; on this front, he
gained advantage by walking away from hot nookie. Produced
and sold in bulk, he was an early model of mass hip. His
lineage, which offered brutality as style and product, has
continued in film noir and, since the late 1980s, in the
cinematic nihilism of gangsta rap."
He discusses the Flitcraft episode from THE MALTESE FALCON,
gives some history of BLACK MASK and its writers, quotes
Hammett and Chandler, and gets into Jim Thompson and James
Ellroy.
"Though they are called crime fiction, the stories were only
incidentally about crime. Often the crimes were the most
formulaic element. In THE MALTESE FALCON, for example, the
black bird is a red herring. The work was about work. No art
has ever dealt as exhaustingly in the mechanics of earning a
living: the solicitation of clients, the interview, the day
rate, the expenses, the office furnishings, the secretary.
This work, in turn, was not about money. For a Depression
readership, pulp treated money as a cheap metaphor or plot
point. Money served a literary function. For the bad guys,
money was power; in trying to get it, they were ultimately
beholden to it. Money locked both cops and criminals into a
pecking order of toadies and bosses, which many readers could
identify with their own workplaces.
"In contrast, for the detective money was freedom--arising,
paradoxically, from his freedom to reject it. He worked
strictly freelance.... Chandler was even more explicit about
the drag of the nine-to-five. After being slugged, drugged,
kidnapped and ambushed, Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe,
still feels 'not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried
job.'"
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org
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