Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

I. "I LIKED SOMEBODY BEING DEAD"

What is it in the hard-boiled novel that hooks me, binds me to it, arrests me in the tracks of an otherwise intractable desire? Where, to be precise, am I to locate the pleasure I take in that novel - a pleasure that is at least compulsive in that I am driven to repeat it, and that entails an interruptive thickening of a reading that might otherwise proceed too quickly, of a text we habitually characterize as thin? Taking seriously some of the commonplaces about the genre, we could open with a methodical elimination of the suspects that would please, at .any rate, the classical detective. Pleasure, then - my pleasure - can hardly inhere in the hard-boiled plot, since plot is here, in contrast to the classical tradition, subordinated to such elements as scene, dialogue, setting, and even to some extent to character. Where the classical detective story unfolds toward a moment of epiphanic illumination, the hard-boiled novel is said to be strangely indifferent to the economy of such a movement.(1) It sacrifices the drive toward a plenitude of meaning to less teleological representational exigencies. It plays down the joys of Holmesian closure by insisting that, as Raymond Chandler famously put it, it is a novel we would want to keep reading even if the last chapter had been torn out. And it performs this thwarting of narrative pleasure with plots of a delinquent character that Chandler is perhaps most expert at composing: plots that, through an irresolvable complexity or a resolute poverty of suture, forever expose their very plottedness and thereby cast suspicion on their capacity to produce the end-pleasure of a positive apocalypse. The temporal ontology of the hard-boiled novel is decidedly that which Kermode calls "waiting time": a time that kills time, that wastes it by refusing to redeem it, that "shall be no more" because it exhausts itself in its unfolding and so forgoes the climactic fulfillments of a time Kermode calls "season" - of a time, that is, "charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end" (47).

This may seem already a perverse characterization. After all, what is at issue is a detective novel,(2) and detective novels require crimes, which in their turn require solutions - resolutions - that shed light on all that has come before. We might then start to wonder how a genre so clearly geared toward closure can also be less than primarily concerned with the pleasures such closure entails. Here is at least a provisional hypothesis: in - for example - Hammett and Chandler, where crimes continue narratively to be solved and a certain resolution is no doubt achieved, such resolution is phenomenologically secondary because mystery and its apocalyptic temporality are in fact no more than "manifest" expressions of a more traumatized structure, a more dilatory temporality, a more perverse pleasure than those of the novels' official discourse. "The initial deception," writes Jameson of Chandler, "takes place on the level of the book as a whole, in that it passes itself off as a murder mystery" (143; my emphasis). And Gertrude Stein, in more elliptical fashion:

I never was interested in cross word puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detective stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to guess wrong but I liked somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more. (4)

"How it moves along," not "how it ends." For Stein as for Jameson, the penetration of the mystery is inessential to hard-boiled fiction, and this means again that the ending in such fiction is no longer the site of a primary delectation. "I liked somebody being dead," Stein says. Such a preference may help us already to flesh out our initial claim. It offers the disturbing but provocative suggestion that the hard-boiled corpse - the thing that provides the mystery and seems therefore most intimately bound to a temporality of narrative recuperation - is also and at the same time that which erodes that temporality, dysfunctionalizes pleasure, fixates us fascinatedly on a moment of brute and irrecoverable loss. To say that "I like somebody being dead" is to say that the end-pleasure of narrative meaning is replaced by a pleasure in the ravishing image of an irrepressibly murderous violence. And this violence is, as we'll soon see, always in these texts our own: we solicit it, call it into being, submit to it, not just as the condition but as the very convulsiveness of an utterly in(sub)ordinate enjoyment.

I want in fact to argue here that the pleasurable brutality compelling our reading is less a pleasure in violence done to "others" than it is joy taken in psi, chic self-destruction. When I claim, that is, to read these books because I like somebody being dead, I do not mean simply someone else being dead, but also and above all myself. I mean that the compulsive pleasure of such reading is a pleasure taken in the explosive assumption of an auto-annihilatory self-image. Hard-boiled reading is therefore best grasped through a speculative recourse to Freud, since psychoanalysis offers us terms with which to link pleasure and destructive repetition. But it is also the case that the hard-boiled novel knows things about the enjoyments of compulsion that Freud is at pains to deny, and my account will therefore entail some revisions to psychoanalytic theories regarding the relations among pleasure, mastery, masochism, and - ultimately - masculinity and femininity. It will entail, to begin with, that we wreak a kind of violence on the explicit arguments of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For that text seeks in its initial movement to sever compulsive repetition and pleasure in a way the hard-boiled text disallows, to connect pleasure with an act's repetition only to the extent that such repetition ceases to be compulsive. "The child cannot possibly have felt his mother's departure as something agreeable or even indifferent," writes Freud in the by-now infamous discussion of the fort-da game. "How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?" (9). The first answer begins as follows: