A Matter of Disguise: Locating the Self in Raymond Chandler's 'The Big Sleep' and 'The Long Goodbye.'
1997; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoIhab Hassan's 1961 book, Radical Innocence(1) attempts to describe the changing relations between the hero of American fiction and the world he inhabits.(2) Hassan interests himself, in the early part of his book, with an examination of the extent to which individuals, acting collectively or alone, have vested in them by the prevailing cultural system, a paradoxical ability, if not the desire, to resist the influences of that very system. Referring to the situation as he sees it in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, Hassan argues that it was at that time possible to locate man at a critical juncture of history(3) characterized, he implies, by a tendency, throughout the twentieth century, for human beings to be aware of their subordination to various systems of social control. Such an awareness challenges the myth that has prevailed in American culture from its inception, perpetuated by American capitalism, that the individual need only to strive to find freedom and success Contrasted with the moral validation of the American Way in fictional narratives in which the hero and villain represent respectively American Good and un-American Evil, the realization of the impossibility of true existential freedom poses a considerable threat not only to the stability of the individual consciousness but to the cultural system itself. Despite this apparently contradictory value system that, in Hassan's view, divides the modern self, he is curiously optimistic, denying the possibility of an actual abolition of selfhood. Instead, rather than arguing that the individual in Western culture at the end of the twentieth suffers a growing alienation from his `true' (Radical Innocence, p. 13), Hassan prefers the position that, in the face of new threats posed to it in the twentieth century, the self has undergone a process of that, far from presaging its eradication has in fact prevented its destruction. Hassan's view of the modern self in the mid- to late twentieth is perhaps best evaluated in relation to his view of the process of history, and the place of the self within its continuum. While the level of threat to individual consciousness, and the suffering that results, may not be any greater than at any other time, the peculiarity of the period, Hassan argues, lies in improved communications, which mean that, if the suffering itself may not have intensified, awareness of it most certainly has. Accounts of twentieth-century history are nearly always the same: spirit is exhausted, civilization is over-extended, the individual must move on surfaces or be crushed inward (Radical Innocence, pp. 11-12). As such, they fail to recognize the possibility that, far from being a linear process, history may instead be viewed as a cyclical movement of death and re-birth, as such being without final end. Rather than leading to a final cataclysm, the difficulties of the twentieth may in fact be precursory to a period of and reassessment and regeneration. The combined role of victim and rebel Hassan identifies for the contemporary self is explained in similar terms. His view of the self, victimized by the experience of modernity, and the grim events and strange developments of our century (Radical Innocence, p. 11), is optimistic and radical, rather than capitulatory. The modern self, he contends, withdraws from participation in the world not, as might be expected, to be forgotten or eradicated, but for the purposes of preservation and retrenchment with the possibility of future re-emergence. The process of recoil Hassan proposes for the self, therefore, is conceived as an attempt to preserve, through isolation, those elements of the self most necessary for rebellion and reaffirmation of identity. Such isolation, because it involves a disengagement from the world, establishes for the self a condition of innocence, which, in the context of Chandler's work, reveals itself as Marlowe's idealistic belief in his ability to confront and contend with the variety of physical and mental threats with which he is faced. …
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