feature of Chandler's prose, its obsession with the simile — a cigarette tastes 'like a plumber's handkerchief,' a handrail is 'as cold and wet as a toad's belly,' Marlowe feels 'like an amputated leg' — rhetorically marks the same dilemma. For synecdoche and metonymy are the figures 'proper' to the art of detection, which understands the whole from the part, the cause from the effects; instead, Marlowe's figure (Chandler kept a separate notebook of similes) registers an incessant, flickering likeness of parts that fit no whole, a world of mere effects.
The absence of totalizing knowledge extends more fully to the hard-boiled novel's account of the human body. Classical detective fiction, even such precursors as Oedipus Rex and Poe's The Man of the Crowd, attends to the idiosyncrasies of physique; like Poe's narrator, it regards 'with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance'; and it peoples the fictional world with cripples, invalids, grotesques. But this attention serves foremost to render the body legible, to incorporate physiognomical explication within the art of detection. In contrast, Red Harvest, resisting the sort of typology provided by Poe, creates a world of resemblances: the corrupt chief of police 'is gray, -375- flabby, damp, like fresh putty,' the Op's fellow agent is 'a big slob with sagging shoulders,' and the Op himself is described by Dinah Brand as 'fat' and 'middle-aged.' In this morass of likeness, the body disappears as a site for psychological or moral symptomatology. Similarly, physical gestures in The Maltese Falcon seem to resonate with significance and erotic overtones — he 'rearranged his hands on his lap so that, intentionally or not, a blunt forefinger pointed at Spade' — but they remain opaque. And this inability to regulate somatic semiosis has its correlative in the detective's apparent alienation from his own body: it is not 'Sam Spade,' but 'Spade's thick fingers' that make 'a cigarette with deliberate care,' as though the body operates on its own. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Philip Marlowe's self-representation reflects a comparable disjuncture: 'The hand jumped at the inside pocket of the overcoat.' We might expect moments of instinctual action to resolve this alienation of the self from itself, but the descriptive hyperspecificity permits no such resolution: 'Spade's elbow went on past the astonished dark face and straightened when Spade's hand struck down at the pistol.' Man remains a mere sum of body parts.
The resolution comes instead under the sign of 'woman.' It is in relation to the desired but deceitful femme fatale that the detective exerts a self-control that produces a coherent self, displayed most clearly in the closing pages of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade, though he has slept with Brigid O'Shaughnessy and though he admits to loving her, refuses to protect her from the police. While he reveals to her his knowledge of her crime — the murder of his partner — he is able to reveal himself to himself, to articulate a personal code of ethics, to enumerate seven reasons why, despite her pleas, he can neither escape with her nor let her escape on her own. The very process of numbering these reasons reflects the sudden triumph of reason in the midst of this irrational world. But just as the need of 'woman' to define the 'hero' tarnishes any ideal of self-reliance, so Spade expresses the most pedestrian anxieties: above all, he's afraid of being 'played the sap.'
More women appear in Chandler's novels, and their perpetual interest in the tall and handsome Philip Marlowe (Hold me close, you beast) more completely infiltrates the detection of crime with desire. His client in The Big Sleep (1939), General Sternwood, an old -376- man confined to a wheelchair, centralizes the figure of the body in the novel by describing the business of detection as the 'delicate operation' of 'removing morbid growths from people's backs.' While Marlowe finds one woman after another almost unbearably attractive, he is able to transcend their sensuality, though 'it's hard for women — even nice women — to realize their bodies are not irresistible.' And this ability to control himself stands in obvious contrast to the uncontrollable excesses of the novel's rich and liberated women, not just drinkers and smokers but exhibitionists and nymphomaniacs. It is the younger Sternwood daughter who has committed the initial murder that prompts the novel's escalating crime. In the midst of an epileptic fit, she shot the brother-in-law who would not sleep with her. Only the physical reenactment of the crime with Marlowe (her gun now loaded with blanks) provides the solution to the mystery, one where woman's body exposes itself as monstrous: 'Her mouth began to shake. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whinnying sound.' While Marlowe solves the mystery, he can hardly resolve the problem; he simply insists that the girl be taken 'where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her.' Unable to put a stop to the pornography and blackmail rings that have involved the Sternwood daughter, he can only perform the medicalized task of detection as her father initially defined it, removing a morbid growth, the girl's body, from social circulation.
In Farewell, My Lovely, the figure of the seductress, in contrast to this almost innocent girl, appears as a rich and ruthless woman. And in James M. Cain's hard-boiled mysteries, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), beautiful, predatory women seduce men into a world of crime. Even outside the hard-boiled version of the genre, desire now appears as a complication to be reckoned with. Rex Stout's obese detective, Nero Wolfe, remains aloof from the world and from women — 'I carry this fat to insulate my feelings,' he explains in Over My Dead Body (1939) — but his assistant, Archie, remains immersed in a world that includes beautiful women, the division of labor in Stout's novels reflecting the division between classical and hard-boiled detection. In turn, the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, indebted thematically to the Black Mask school, stylistically to German Expressionist cinema, portrays a -377- shadowy and claustrophobic world of the city, a world of perpetual night, in which the ruthless female predator embodies the modern world's threat to modern man. The long opening shot of Billy Wilder's version of Double Indemnity (1944) provides a memorable image of this man: an obscure figure in the fog…a coat and a hat…a man alone, hobbling along on crutches. But it is Mickey Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine (1950) that, for all its simplistic hypermasculinity, finally complicates the threat of 'woman.' Mike Hammer finds himself desperately attracted to Juno ('the best-looking thing I ever saw'), the powerful manager of an advertising agency, the heart of modern culture's manipulation of appearance and desire. Revealing her, too, as a murderer, he must shoot this woman he longs for, only to discover that — she is in fact a man. Not 'woman,' then, but a man and the very opposition between 'woman' and 'man,' along with the tough guy's own sexuality, now constitute the center of uncertainty.
In the trajectory of modern 'adventure' as I've drawn it (not chronologically but generically), the most visible transformation occurs — while the locus of adventure moves from Mars, to the West, to the modern city, back to Alger's urban scene — in the shift from 'woman' as a figure to be saved (from dark men) to 'woman' as the dark figure to be fought off. At the same time, the hero shifts from being wholly self-sufficient to someone struggling to construct a coherent self. Of course, this look at formula fiction has looked away from many popular novels — notably, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) — novels that bear a less recognizable relation to the narrative paradigms stabilized by modern shifts in the mode of literary production and distribution. And investigating this fiction as a site of negotiation between 'adventure' and 'modernization' has meant isolating only a dominant thematics — the relation of male heroism to social change. But that negotiation provides an exemplary instance of the 'transformational work' of the popular text, as Fredric Jameson understands it, the text's ability to express but neutralize social anxiety, providing symbolic satisfaction for genuine emotional needs. In this light, Tania Modleski, writing about such forms as the Harlequin Romance (invented in 1958, and quickly stabilizing a very different formula), has argued against simply denigrating the work as delusive, and for appreciating its ability to satisfy 'real needs -378- and desires.' For his part, Max Brand, that king of the pulps, simply reminds us that 'the sadness of life' does not 'appeal to the hornyhanded sons of toil,' but only to 'those who eat strawberries and cream.' The fiction that attained mass appeal still registers that sadness, helping to make the desires of that sadness explicit. It also constrains those desires by configuring heroism within a cultural code that relies foremost on race and gender to generate meaning, no matter where or when the adventure occurs. The adventure, even as it strives to project a hero unchanged by the world, protects that world from change.
Bill Brown
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