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The Mouse Will Play: The Parodic in Walter Mosley’s Fiction
- University Press of Mississippi
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121 The Mouse Will Play The Parodic in Walter Mosley’s Fiction —Laura Quinn In “Parody and Detective Fiction” (1997), Janice MacDonald claims, “There are reasons to believe that parody is at work within the genre of detective fiction.” Among the reasons are these: detective fiction “creates the context necessary for audience recognition of parody” since readership tends to be habitual, even addictive; additionally, the formulaic specificity of the genre, its repetitive conventionality, has inherent parodic potential (63). As an element of the formula itself, parody is “designed both to foster credibility and to generate new material within the highly mechanical formula” (68). According to MacDonald, it achieves both goals in the detective novel when “authors used it to situate their novels self-consciously above those of their predecessors and competitors ” (71). Here we have what Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), her important work on postmodern parody, refers to as “uses and abuses” of literary predecessors (95). The delineations of parody for these critics and for my purposes here go well beyond dictionary definitions of parody as imitation aimed to ridicule; what Hutcheon calls postmodernist parody that “works to foreground the politics of representation” and comprises a “value-problematizing, denaturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representation” (94) is the critical arena in which Mosley’s detective fiction can be productively confronted. That theories of postmodernist parody converge deftly with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s thick description of “Signifyin(g)” in The Signifying Monkey (1988) is crucial to an understanding of Mosley as parodist. Both Gates’s signifying and Hutcheon’s postmodernist parody are grounded in formal and rhetorical repetition with a critical or “signal” difference (Hutcheon, qtd in McDonald, 62; Gates xxiv). For Hutcheon, that difference consists of a self-conscious acknowledgment of and subversion of the authority of form and convention: “What postmodern Laura Quinn 122 parody does is to evoke what reception theorists call the horizon of expectation of the spectator, a horizon formed by recognizable conventions of genre, style, or form of representation. This is then destabilized and dismantled step by step” (114). The more specifically racialized purpose of Gates’s repetition with a signal/ critical difference is “to turn away from, to step outside the white hermeneutical circle and into the black” (258). In other words Gates’s difference is a racialized revision of discourses of blackness as these appear in both white and black-authored texts. I argue that Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series gets a lot of mileage out of parodic signifying on the premises of the (largely white and male) hard-boiled genre of detective fiction and that the “critical difference” in Mosley’s repetition of the conventions of that genre lies in the ways in which Mosley vexes the relationship between hard-boiled detection and the formal institutions of the law and the police. Inasmuch as these institutions underwrite a national social order and, given the racial history of that social order, Mosley’s vexings might well be seen as part of the project to secure a homeland for black Americans. There is a consensus in critical work on detective fiction that, however unofficial and maverick the fictional detective may be, he (and increasingly, she) works toward and brings about lawful and orderly ends. Detective novels are kissing cousins of the police procedural genre and true crime fiction, both of which are grounded in a fundamentally conservative law and order ideology. Mosley’s African American predecessors, writers like Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes, feature police detectives as their sleuthing protagonists and, nonetheless, often manage to level a critical attack on racist practices within law enforcement. Mosley critics, most notably Theodore O. Mason, Jr. and John Cullen Gruesser, have argued convincingly that he goes well beyond his predecessors in raising serious questions about the “order” protected by the “law” that polices the world of Easy Rawlins’s Los Angeles of the late forties through mid-sixties. That order is tenaciously racist; thus Easy Rawlins, as an unlicensed and unsanctioned detective , needs to work to subvert the racist injustices of “the law,” to protect his black community from predatory whites, from police abuse, and sometimes from itself. This will often amount to enabling “criminals” to elude the long arm of the law. Ironically, when Easy does become a licensed private investigator in Little Scarlet (2004) after the LAPD rewards him for solving a murder that threatened the tenuous post-Watts social order, the license...