Robert Elkin wrote:
Re "a wonderful affirmation of the strength of the
human spirit" & "a refreshing return to traditional
values"--are you planning on running for congress?
********** Haha! Good one, Rob. But the answer is no. My
country will have to be satisfied with my modest efforts in
engineering to preserve the free world. Heading down to
Florida tomorrow to do the deed.
In order to bring this back within the scope of rara-avis,
here's a leftover review I wrote for September:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the predominate
form of literary analysis was centered around two criteria
that influenced the text, an examination of the historical
background and biographical information on the author. As the
century progressed, both the Russian Formalists and New
Critics objected to this type of analysis, insisting that the
significance of the text be found within it, not through an
extrinsic process. In Pulp Culture, Woody Haut has returned
to a historical and biographical literary critique, focusing
on the hardboiled and noir genre in the early years of the
Cold War. Haut's theory is that the paranoia in hardboiled
literature of this period originates in Cold War fear, and
that the personal crimes portrayed are allegories for state
crimes. Drawing from the classic genre authors of the era
such as David Goodis, Chester Himes, and Jim Thompson, he
constructs his case. Although Haut struggles with his thesis,
he shows himself to be well read in the period and provides a
fascinating tour of the classic hardboiled and noir
literature of the early Cold War era.
Build My Gallows High is a story of about Bailey, a former
private detective who, working for some dangerous clients and
involved with an even more dangerous woman, traded that life
for a peaceful existence running a gas station in a small
town. The peace does not last long and he finds himself
blackmailed back into the business, only to be framed for a
murder. In the end he finds himself betrayed again by the
same woman. Haut parallels Bailey's situation with those who
were investigated as potential Communists during the red
scare. As Haut puts it, by allowing himself to be
blackmailed, Bailey
"aligns himself with those working against the social
order."
Gresham's classic Nightmare Alley is about a young man,
Stanton Carlisle, who joins a carnival doing odd jobs,
eventually working his way up the ladder to a mind-reading
act and then making it big as a spiritualist, conning big
money out of rich people who want to contact dead loved ones.
It is a spectacular moral parable about the dangers of greed
and selfishness, imbued with a strong Freudian undercurrent
involving memories of his parents. Haut sees Stanton as a
metaphor for "a McCarthyite witch hunter as he seeks to
exploit those wishing it escape the object of their fears."
The pattern of Haut's interpretations is clear.
So Haut interprets both these books as metaphors for the
communist investigations in the United States during the
early Cold War years. There is at least a minor problem with
this reading. The Cold War does not play an overt part in
either of the two books. Paranoia has been a popular theme in
literature for centuries, so what is the justification for
claiming that the paranoia in these books is fueled by the
Cold War? A temporal relationship does not establish cause
and effect, but even the temporal is tenuous. Both these
books were written well before the communist investigations
in the United States had made much progress. Nevertheless,
even without establishing a convincing causal relationship
between the two, Haut is still entitled to interpret the
books this way. In a similar vein, Jake Barnes's conflict
with himself and his friends in The Sun Also Rises can be
seen as a proletariat struggle to free itself from bourgeois
longings. John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress begins to look more
Marxist than Christian, and Dante's Inferno becomes an
allegory for the capitalist oppression of the masses. A man
with a hammer sees the whole world as a nail.
Rather than the arbitrary interpretation of Build My Gallows
High and Nightmare Alley, within several of Spillane's novels
Haut had the ideal opportunity to explore material that
featured overt Cold War themes with a clear link between
paranoia and the Cold War. Unfortunately Haut's politics gets
in the way, and rather than apply his thesis to the Hammer
novels, his efforts are spent denigrating them. First Haut
notes Raymond Chandler and Anthony Boucher's dislike of
Spillane's work. He describes Spillane's work as perverse,
and anybody who appreciates Spillane's work is open for the
accusation of being perverse, also. About Ayn Rand, a big fan
of Spillane, he states,
"Apparently only Ayn Rand, confusing objectivism with
objective realism, was perverse enough to remark that
'Spillane gives me the feeling of hearing a military band in
a public park'." Aside from the ad hominem attack on Rand,
Haut appears to not even grasp the concept of objective
realism. Objectivism being Rand's philosophy of the self,
Haut is suggesting that Spillane's writing is objective
realism. Objective realism has been effectively described as
a camera eye view. It relays what is happening with little or
no reporting on anything a camera could not pick up, such as
the thoughts of the characters. Implying that Spillane's
Hammer novels display objective realism is ludicrous. The
Hammer novels are filled with the unspoken personal thoughts,
judgements, and emotions of the protagonist.
Haut's discussion of Spillane continues its downward spiral
with two other unsupported declarations. He accuses Spillane
of misogyny with, "It doesn't take much insight to realize
that Hammer hates women almost as much as he hates 'commies'
and organized crime." Misogyny has been a common accusation
leveled at Spillane for many years, but convincing evidence
has never been produced. The usual reasoning parallels Haut's
unquestioning acceptance of it, choosing to pass it off as
intuitive without any significant support. Haut is consistent
with this kind of argument. He uses it again concerning
Hammer's penchant for violence, "Try as he may to convey the
notion that violence is a means to an end, it's obvious that
violence, for Hammer, is an end in itself." Saying "it's
obvious" is about as convincing as "it doesn't take much
insight to realize." Both these unsupported arguments involve
two logical fallacies. The first is ad populum, implying that
his conclusion, that Hammer hates women, is true because it
is common knowledge. The second logical fallacy is ad
hominem, a personal attack on those who disagree by implying
that they are stupid for not having adequate insight.
Logical fallacies aside, and regardless of whether he
personally approves or disapproves of regarding Spillane's
writing, Haut can't seem to come to any understanding of the
relevance of it. He notes correctly that Hammer employs
vigilante justice, but he fails to follow the thought to
completion. The reason that Hammer is a vigilante is because
in the dark world he inhabits, a corrupt system often does
not serve out justice, and even if the system were not
corrupt, what is legal is not always just. It is ironic and
significant that Haut chooses not to take this step. It is
ironic because Spillane is engaging a scepticism towards the
inadequacy of the state to provide justice, which is one of
Haut's favorite themes. It is significant because it reveals
a shortsightedness in Haut's ability to read a text that
doesn't fall safely within his world view. Haut is unable to
maintain an academic objectivity in the face of Spillane
calling his baby, communism, ugly. Haut's primary problem
with this is that he refuses to take into consideration one
of the most important sources of paranoia during the Cold
War, a fear of communist expansionism. Haut is only
interested in fear of the American government during the red
scare investigations.
Haut is nervously ambivalent towards Himes. He appears
hesitant to criticize him, yet there are several recurrent
themes in the Harlem novels that he cannot abide with. Coffin
Ed and Gravedigger Jones exhibit a strong inclination towards
a particularly violent form of vigilante justice. In the
Harlem series they beat a dwarf to death and slit a woman's
throat when she won't talk. In a disturbingly capitalistic
viewpoint, Ed and Gravedigger shrug their shoulders at the
plight of several prostitutes, concluding that the women have
to work for either one pimp or another. Haut eventually takes
Himes to task for what he calls "political weakness,"
criticizing him for privileging law and order over "radical
social change." Haut understands that the proletariat
revolution trumps law and order any day. A little blood may
flow, but the resulting workers' paradise will be worth it.
He resolves his disapproval of the extreme methods of Ed and
Gravedigger by declaring that the two cops are obvious
representatives of the state. He condemns their actions as
state crimes and concludes that Himes's work maintains "that
paranoia is the result of a specific state crime."
Haut occasionally slips beyond mere political posturing into
the dubious. His assertion that Iceberg Slim was politically
conscious is doubtful. When Iceberg Slim had the chance to
meet the Black Panthers, he was surprised and disappointed
that they did not welcome him into their arms as a noble
liberator of the black man. The thought that his lifelong
role as a pimp might be construed as oppressive towards black
women never crossed his mind.
And this of a man with self-proclaimed genius IQ. In
another section Haut states, "With the workforce becoming
increasingly de-skilled and inactive, it appeared that only
criminals possessed the skills around which a personal code
and ethical position might be constructed." Haut implies that
an honest ditch digger is the moral inferior to a skilled
thief.
This is absurd. When speaking about racism, Haut
suggests a racist interpretation of Chandler's statement
about the streets being "dark with something other than
night." Views on race expressed in the mid-twentieth century
hardboiled genre often do not meet the standards of the
contemporary politically correct, but this represents a
purposeful misreading of Chandler on Haut's behalf, leaning
beyond dubious and bordering on sleaze. He also got the quote
wrong.
In his ability to misquote and misrepresent meaning,
Haut perhaps has more in common with Joe McCarthy than he
would think.
At the conclusion of the book Haut declares that there
is little of value beyond his metaphorical interpretations of
the genre, stating "pulp culture crime narratives generate
interest in so far as they reflect state crime." It is worth
noting that when Haut talks of state crimes, he's not talking
about the seventeen million dead from Lenin's purges, or
thirty million death toll from Mao's cultural revolution.
State crime is broadly defined in his context, just as long
as the perceived offenses are actions of the United States
government, such as the heinous act of consumerism. One of
the great contributions literature has to offer is a chance
to expand one's normal range of thought to encompass other
experiences and ideas. Reading offers the proverbial chance
to walk a mile in another's shoes. It is unfortunate when a
reader chooses to restrict their reading to forcing a text to
meet their preexisting concepts, in effect pounding a square
peg into a round hole. Self-serving at best, dishonest at its
worst, Haut's book is always in danger of revealing itself to
be little more than a private political agenda thinly
disguised as literary criticism.
miker
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