Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

Presently a path came under his feet. He turned into it, holding it partly by its sliminess under his feet, partly by the feel of the bushes whipping his face on either side, and not at all by sight. The path led him off to the left for a little distance, but then . . . brought him to the brink of a small gorge. . . . (Glass Key 123)

It would perhaps be redundant to list the preponderance of active verbs that here take Ned Beaumont for their object, or to point out the radically dehumanizing effect of the first sentence's equalizing inventory ("tree, bush, ground, man, car"). Multiplying the sites of sadistic agency, displacing. subjective activity onto a rain that "hammers," obstacles that "trip," and bushes that "whip," the passage so thoroughly disperses human being across its textual landscape that it also effectively abolishes that being. Ned and his world are confused and interfused; he becomes "worldly," his world becomes human, as the relentless personification of objects marks and enforces an equally implacable objectification of the subject. The humanized object resulting from this process is no more human than the objectified subject that results on the other side. For where "humanity" ceases to coincide with a human form, the category of the human uncannily vanishes by losing all possible meaning; it may seem at first glance to lurk almost everywhere, but this is because it in fact resides, simultaneously and surely, nowhere. Human qualities survive in such a case only on the side of the "object," and they're consequently rendered utterly inhuman by the force of their spatial displacement. The human form survives, conversely, in a manner so drained of those qualities we attribute to it as to become unmistakably dehumanized.

Let us be perfectly clear, however: this displacement of subjective agency and subjection of the human to natural forces is merely the bleeding into content of an essentially formal necessity. It is language itself, the hard-boiled style, that first and foremost pummels human being, grinding it to a pulp and rubbing it out. The only omission indispensable to this style is the omission of the category of the human itself. The only thing it cannot abide is an affective, active, and self-conscious subject who behaves in any way like a subject, and we must thus insist that the entire point of its omissions and opacities is to render the human as objectal as its objects: to flatten, silence, and blind it ("not at all by sight"); to rip it away from both reference and significance; to reduce humanity to a material register that blots out the difference between people and things by making each a pulpy occasion for the objectal eruption of an unmasterable real. Ned is objectified by a style that flattens him before the objects in his world beat him up. He is objectified in style so that the reader may be traumatized, as the fictive encounter with a human form becomes a disruptive and deadly confrontation with the "stuff" that predates the emergence of the subject and that the hard-boiled style works to "embody." Sadistic agency, subjective activity, the forms of objectal use and manipulation that properly "belong" to a human intention: these are all placed on the side of the object only as a kind of representational expression of the style's intention to wipe out human being, both within and "without" its pulverized field. For hard-boiled discourse is a sadistic discourse that, as Bataille says of Sade, "repudiates any relation between speaker and audience"; "its purpose is the denial of humanity" (180), and in this it is in its very essence an utterly impersonal third-person language that seeks to engulf even the consciousness at its origin.(7) The hard-boiled style can belong to no one because it is characterized by an unending hostility to even the "one" who would own and utter it. It seeks above all to squash human being into states of objectal indistinction, and it therefore obliterates the enunciative "I" while also repelling all readerly entry and insisting that it speaks "to" no one. The abduction of that style by such narrating dicks as Chandler's Marlowe and Hammett's Continental Op marks their attempt to arrogate a sadistic weaponry that enables a delusional linguistic mastery in compensation for the real psychic unmanning that, as we shall see, constitutes their masculine being. In first-person narratives, hard-boiled language becomes - that is - a fetish: an eroticized substitute for a phallic potency that the third-person narration scorns, an instrument that erects a sadistic armor against the internal worldly seductions of a more primary masochistic unbinding. The talking dick has merely read his Freud, and he plays the fort-da game strictly by the book.