Rescuing Chandler: Crime Fiction, Ideology and Criticism

Rescuing Chandler: Crime Fiction,IdeologyandCriticism David Geherin. Sons of Sam Spade: ThePrfrate Eye Novel of the 70s. New York:Frederick Ungar. 1.980. Stephen Knight. Form & Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1980. JohnS.Whitley.Detee tires and Friends: Hammeus 'The Glass Key "and Raymond Chandlers 'TheLong Goodbye:· Exeter: University of Exeter!American Documentation Centre). 1981. Stephen Snyder The grand project of structuralism, the de-mystification of the world, has been. to say the least, a peculiar goal in light of the present technocratic domination of society and the homogenization of the urban environment. Indeed. artists and humanistic philosophers have been proclaiming for two hundred years that the rationalist sensibility of science coupled with the zeal of big industry has done an extensive job of reducing our psychic climate to a condition of depersonalized monotony. The world of IBM in all itstrembling immanence seems to be a structuralist view of what the world should be: an impersonal (subjectivity is non-existent) coded system all of whosefunctions must be intelligible. There are no inner mysteries to things. nodark spots in man inaccessible to societal structure. no process of change beyond the ken of dialectical explanation. Psychic reality dwells within linguistic structures whose dynamics are based upon binary oppositions. 1 The structuralist program is, of course. a prescription for utopian progress. but in order for progress to ensue the dialectical vision of reality requires an opponent. This enemy most often turns out to be a version of "Romanticism." For the master structuralist. Levi-Strauss. the problem with Romanticism lies in its deification of the individual (the sense that man is a deep well). forthis apotheosis inevitably results in the promulgation of egoism and mutual exploitation. The human ego is never by itself: there is no ..ri which is not part of a "we." What an individual can become is contained within the Canadian Review of American Studies. Volume 14. Number 2. Summer 1983.185-94 186 Stephen Snyder linguistic structures of his society; he develops consciousness only by inserting himself into these. Individuality is both nugatory and delusive within the Levi-Strauss model. It ispossible, however, that the social structures Levi-Strauss recognizes may be creations from the mental structures of highly gifted individuals: we are alwaysfaced in structuralism with a chicken and egg problem-did men evolve structures in a Darwinian manner or did structures evolve men as Levi-Strauss suggests? Is language rooted in prior experience or is experience created by language'? If the latter, then what or who creates language? 2 These questions are seldom posed in structuralism and as a consequence there is a great confusion as to the nature of that ·'self' which structuralists reject. This inadequate ontology of "self" may explain the mistaken desire to encumber Romanticism with the delusions of the world.3 Structuralists seldom consider their own darling, "rationalism," as the father of the idea of "self" they despise and the alienation they wish to eliminate. After all, Descartes' dictum - cogito ergosum-posits reality in self-conscious reason, not feeling. That the "self" and, hence, individual consciousness, exist only as a matrix of social forces, while plausible as a description of much of our mental life, begs the question of the pre-existent capacity of the brain for experience and thus of the requirement for a self-contained and self-generative urge in con· sciousness by which it thrusts itself out of inorganic oblivion into light. It is possible that language, rather than defining a society, announces our separateness within society. If the self is neither a matrix nor a symbol, but a unique energy system or a Darwinian survivor, or a soul, or the basic sensation of being, 'T' may indeed have possible existence outside the ··we" or require for its unfolding a break with society. At any rate, structuralism lacks an adequate ontology of self which accounts for the inevitability of the fact that we experi· ence life as an ego and suffer individually and alone the results of our choices. As it validates group over individual reality, structuralism has natural affinities with Marxist thought; in fact most structuralist critics tend to feel that art is largely the result of...