UC Berkeley

Hardboiled Aesthetics: High Art and Modes of Excess in the American Detective Novel argues that 1940s American detective fiction fetishizes the work of art more perversely and self-consciously than high modernist texts. Since the early twentieth century, the modernist novel has defined its aesthetic project as a retreat from or resistance to mass culture, creating what Andreas Huyssen has called the “Great Divide.” Yet one of the central ambiguities of high modernism is its strange fascination with the low. The modernist novel displays an obsession with “the masses” even as it attempts to use this “vulgarity” to elevate its own aesthetic status. If modernism abandons the field of high art production to study “low life,” then it is surprising to find that the representation of high aestheticism surfaces with greatest frequency in one of the most “vulgar” forms of mass fiction: the American hardboiled novel. Beginning with the debates surrounding the Aesthetic Movement, between figures like Oscar Wilde and Henry James, Hardboiled Aesthetics examines how certain hardboiled writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Vera Caspary, attempt to distance themselves from commercial modes of production by drawing on fin de siècle European aestheticism in order to legitimize the artistic merit of the detective novel. I define the “hardboiled aesthetic” of the American detective novel as a constant fluctuation between moments of excess and attempts to contain that excessiveness.

Hardboiled Aesthetics traces how cultural constructions of high aestheticism are mobilized and reconstituted in the American detective novel to produce an aesthetics that is refined yet hardboiled and masculine, elevated yet still faithful to the demands of its mass readers. I study how the signature type of the Aesthetic Movement, the highbrow aesthete, is transported from the decadent milieu of 1890s Europe to the consumerist society of 1940s America. I begin first by comparing the excessive aestheticism of S. S. Van Dine’s “Philo Vance” novels to the sparse minimalism in Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled fiction. I argue that Van Dine consciously models his American detective as a European aesthete in order to showcase his own aesthetic knowledge. However, his excessive didacticism goes against his aesthetic goals, producing a narrative that becomes increasingly contrived and formulaic. Considered the innovator of the hardboiled style, Dashiell Hammett approaches the writing of detective fiction from what could be called an anti-aesthetic position. Through his construction of the detective as both anti-aesthete and anti-consumer, Hammett provides a new criterion for evaluating artistic value that replaces the “feminine” excesses of Van Dine’s decadent aestheticism with an emphasis on “manly” minimalism. In contrast to Hammett’s turn to minimalism as a reaction against commodification, Raymond Chandler attempts to project the novel as a source of aesthetic value through his portrayal of detective Philip Marlowe as a hybrid “hardboiled aesthete” figure who is both tough yet refined. My second chapter argues that Marlowe’s ornate descriptions of art objects and rooms stem from Chandler’s fascination with Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, which is itself a criticism of the “aesthetic craze” of collecting that Oscar Wilde initiated in America at the turn of the century. Although Chandler’s room descriptions often impede the plot, I argue that these excessive narrative digressions in fact allow Chandler to experiment with and expand the generic limits of the detective novel.

My third chapter examines how the hardboiled style, so powerfully cultivated in the commodified detective novel, comes to inform the modernist novel’s high style. For Ernest Hemingway, the pursuit of formal restraint represents a desire to re-masculinize novelistic aesthetics, a project which James M. Cain also adopts in his hardboiled writing. However, Cain’s representation of aestheticism and masculinity produces an opposite aesthetic style – that of velocity and excess – to express the tensions that Hemingway attempts to manage through minimalism. Addressing the fact that the detective novel is a predominantly masculine genre, my final chapter turns to Vera Caspary’s efforts in her novel Laura to reimagine the masculinist aesthetics of writers like Cain from a distinctly female perspective. Building on Walter Benjamin’s theories on public and private spaces, I argue that Laura’s individuality cannot be decoded from her personal possessions, thus allowing her to counteract the proprietary (male) desire to own and display her as an object of consumption. Laura affirms her female selfhood in terms of a negative capability, an excess that cannot be fully rendered by stylistic forms of representation.