A new deal for thirties literature

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000 by Entin, Joseph

In addition to drawing pathbreaking connections between the political vision and market position of hard-boiled writers, Gumshoe America offers a nuanced interpretation of pulp fiction's thorny racial dynamics. The text's opening chapter explores the proximity of hard-boiled crime fiction to the Ku Klux Klan, arguing that, although both the KKK and the pulps offered a populist moral critique of social corruption, writing by Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett in fact undermined the Klan's racism and ethos of communal authoritarianism by depicting a society dominated by self-interest and moral ambiguity. The book's final chapter locates Chester Himes in the transformation of postwar racial ideologies. McCann charts the rise of interest-group liberalism symbolized by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the writing of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, whose focus on racial "identity" set them apart from Himes, who saw the New Deal ideal of interracial solidarity as the only, though increasingly unrealizable, ethical alternative to a society characterized by corrosive self-interest and racist oppression.

McCann's text is built on a series of analogies, a procession of cultural echoes between narrative vision, conditions of the literary marketplace, and New Deal politics ("echo" is the metaphor McCann uses most frequently to explain the relationship of literature to politics). The strength of the study is the immensely tight and persuasive nature of the links McCann forges, connections that demonstrate the previously undiscovered cultural and political ambitions that drive this form of popular writing. If the study's rich allegorical approach gives less emphasis to any element of hard-boiled crime fiction, it is the formal aspects of style, point of view, and narrative structure. Gumshoe America offers less insight than might be expected into the hard-boiled language and formal qualities that characterize these texts. For example, the "decentralist imagination" that McCann uses to describe Chandler's political commitments might also be said to characterize the writer's aesthetic tendencies, his habit of emplotting episodic, disorienting narratives-a line of thinking the text doesn't fully pursue. Likewise, McCann provocatively labels hard-boiled writers as "pulp avant-gardists" (4), a term that raises the question of the genre's relationship to the wider field of American modernism, an issue that Gumshoe America leaves largely unexplored. For the most part, however, I expect that McCann's lack of emphasis on formal issues stems from deliberate design rather than unintentional omission-recent poststructuralist criticism of detective fiction, which McCann's study draws upon but largely departs from, has tended to focus on the aesthetic intricacies of the genre to the detriment of its political dimensions. The strength of McCann's study is that it provides a new, richly-- textured political and cultural framework within which to read pulp fiction's formal mechanisms.