Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

A telephone-bell, ringing close to Ned Beaumont's head, awakened him. He opened his eyes, put his feet down on the floor, turned on his side, and looked around the room. When he saw the telephone he shut his eyes and relaxed.

The bell continued to ring. He groaned, opened his eyes again, and squirmed until he had freed his left arm from beneath his body. He put his left wrist close to his eyes and looked at his watch, squinting. The watch's crystal was gone and its hands had stopped at twelve minutes to twelve. (Glass Key 36)

The reality-effect of a passage like this results from the way it piles up nouns: what is real here is what can be nominally designated because it exists as substance. The style therefore "works" by juxtaposing only those "things" that can be substantially grasped by the senses. If and when it highlights "qualities," these tend to be purely exterior ones, since this is a style that approximates the real by refusing to register anything but surface. It is a style that moves from object to object with a certain restless but alert rapidity; seeking to reproduce the "natural" movement of everyday consciousness, it quickly exhausts the thing that it sees, takes it in at a glance, swallows it whole and with hardly a blink. We're asked to partake of a scopic ingestion that brings things into the field of vision long enough only to abolish by registering them.

It is almost, indeed, as if the closer the hard-boiled camera "looks," the less it truly "sees"; the greater its focus on the objects it collects, the more it is forced to attenuate that linguistic dimension - the significatory - which could alone establish the reasonable grounds for any such objectal collection. Thus, while Ned Beaumont would seem to stand in some "meaningful" relation to the ringing telephone, the stopped watch, and the parts of his own body, the novel declines to make the meaning of that relation explicit. Either the point of this moment resides in its significance for Ned, whose consciousness presumably organizes the scene; or the objects and encounters carry some symbolic or metaphorical meaning for readers, but one that Ned either does not or cannot know. Whichever the case, the text appears to be "saying something." It appears to bring together its objects in the name of a legibly thematic intention. If the only way to read such a scene is nonetheless to paraphrase it, while imputing affects and motives that the text nowhere explicitly states, this is because the hard-boiled style performs the feat of destroying the world in the act of describing it and banishing signification for the sake of its own material extremity. The modernist binary of language "or" the world here gives way to a materiality that spurns both the representational and the significatory dimensions of the linguistic sign. This is a language that isolates and contains, circling its objects and breaking them off from the world, then proceeding to clobber those objects, to flatten them into emaciated thinness, to pulverize and render them astonished and mute. It is a language so committed to the arbitrary and depthless juxtaposition of objects and subjects that their coincidence in one place comes to seem no more than a colossal accident of being: they just "are," in all their brute contingency, "there together." And it is thus a language that, far from primarily satisfying the desire to see and know that it produces, epistemologically starves us instead. "To speak, and above all to write, is to fast," write Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka (20).(5) When Ned Beaumont says that "all the dreams [he] ever had about food ended before [he] had a chance to do any actual eating" (179), he gives the hard-boiled version of that argument: to write is to produce a starving text, a text that starves (us); the hard-boiled novel, like the hard-boiled dream, compels a submission to the representational refusal of the realistic feast.