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Public and Private Demons
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20469 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
5,098 Words |
| Author
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John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
The hard-boiled detective story is a distinctively American innovation. Its popularity attests to the formula's success in tapping deeply rooted American cultural values, and the social changes that have taken place in the United States since the 1960s are reflected in the more recently published detective fiction. The heightened politicization of American life has its counterpart in the heightened politicization of the detective story. The corruption lying beneath the surface of the giant metropolis in the work of the first generation of hard-boiled detective writers has become nationwide in scope.
Members of formerly excluded groups--such as blacks and women--have entered the ranks of the detective. Most important, a softening of the white, male private investigator has taken place. Not simply do newer-style private eyes come in all sizes and shapes, but they are humanly vulnerable, even guilt-ridden, rather than the "macho" superheroes of yesteryear.
Changing the Formula
Edmund Wilson has recalled how his publishing derogatory remarks about the detective story "brought me letters of protest in a volume and of a passionate earnestness which had hardly been elicited even by my occasional criticisms of the Soviet Union". Wilson may have been surprised by the vehemence of the detective story's admirers; but publishers, booksellers, and librarians can attest to their number. The detective story belongs to a category of writing that John G. Cawelti in his path-breaking Adventure, Mystery and Romance has termed "formulaic literature." Formula stories, according to Cawelti, depict "an imaginary world in which the audience can encounter a maximum of excitement without being confronted with an overpowering sense of the insecurity and danger that accompany such forms of excitement in reality."
Literary formulas consist of two different components. One is a plot type (adventure, romance mystery, melodrama, and alien beings and/or states) that has been popular in many cultures, perhaps even universally. The second is the details that make such an archetypal story pattern meaningful to a particular culture. Accordingly, formula stories supply important clues for "inferences about the collective fantasies shared by large groups of people." Because formula stories are cultural products, "the process through which formulas develop, change, and give way to other formulas is a kind of cultural evolution with survival through audience selection."
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