Double Cain

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory

This, then, is the first thing Freud helps us to see: that if Cain provokes a violently disgusted self-assertion, it's because his texts seek, both representationally and performatively, to degrade and primitivize the civilized self by reamassing it with its primordially familiar "others." The game-thus launched-is undoubtedly a deadly one; it takes two to play it, and we shouldn't therefore be too surprised to find that Cain seeks also to escape the very mass he simultaneously drags us into, waging an eternal war with his doubles ("Hammett," "Hemingway," "Chandler")7 over the absolute sovereignty and independence of his "voice." But let's not concern ourselves with this war here; we need, for now, to linger a moment longer with the Freudian uncanny, in order to bring out the second point that it helps us to find in Chandler's response.

For Freud continues: "It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genitals. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning" (51). Unheimliche Heim, familiar strangeness ...: the female genitals are the primal portal to an originary and dissolutionary mass (of) being. They are, in short, the synechdochical representation of a place where the "ego" really was "in" its "object," and we can thus begin to speculate about why Chandler's revulsion takes such an explicitly olfactory form. For these genitals-aren't they also a site for the male psyche's fantasmatic and proverbial aromatic investment? Do they not, according to a disgusted misogyny, "smell fishy"? And isn't the danger of succumbing to Cain's tricks then precisely the threat of being brought back there, to the fantasmatically violent reek of a place that was once "me," to a smell that's become the imaginary medium of my original being-in-objects? The logic of the double is an olfactory logic in that the ultimate referent of the resemblance I now see is the odor I attribute to the "object" I once was. It is, accordingly, the reminder of that smell that enrages me, drives me to murder. If the double appears to be taking "my" place, this is because that "place" is itself a return of the site where "we" were once identified-madly, blindly, (self-)destructively-in the overpowering indistinction of its smell. Out of that indifference a male subject has been born; a masculine ego now quite confidently says "I." But it does so without being able to deliver itself from the odor of that place where it was not yet itself, without ever escaping the naive bellicosity of its own prehistory as a mass that let neither subject nor object "be" (itself). Smell is the relic and perpetual promise of an inescapable violence." And it's this smell, then, that-as Chandler rightly senses-makes Cain guilty of a "double" dirtiness: first, because the reek of his work is invariably the reek of the genitals, and we all know that to write about them, to write about sex, is to "write about dirty things"; but second because, by writing about those things "in a dirty way," he makes sex smell too much, confusing it in the end with waste and shit ("A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door") and bemiring us thereby in something completely offensive: not a sociable sexuality, not a lasting and relatively odorless libidinal opening onto others, but a precivil and violent sexual amassment, briefly enacted and frenzied-fundamentally non-socializable-and governed above all, as we shall see, by the animal convulsiveness of the sense of smell.9