Sat 28 Oct 2023
Being Towards Death & Hardboiled Lit, An Essay by Tony Baer.
Posted by Steve under General[4] Comments
An Essay by Tony Baer.
So, Heidegger has this concept called ‘being towards death’. It basically is just a fancy way of saying: constant awareness that you are going to die. (There are a lot of examples, of course — but one I fancy is kerouac’s poem:
Out there on the fence —
They’re all going to die.)
Speaking and acting conscious of your imminent mortality. ‘The only thing worth reading is what’s written in blood’, Nietzsche cautions. It is the reason that there is a hearsay exception for ‘dying declarations’. There is a presumption of authenticity for your very last words. ‘Rosebud’ is the key to the meaning of Kane’s life. In O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find the Misfit tells us:
So what is hardboiled lit? What is it that ties together slave narratives, prison memoirs, John Brown and Eugene Debs’s statements to the court, Gold Medal paperbacks, proletarian lit, Hammett with Hamlet, Whitfield with Whitman, Dennis Wilson with Charles Manson, Mozart’s Requiem with Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, the Diary of Anne Frank with The Inman Diary, the last words of Dutch Schultz with William S. Burroughs, the book of Revelations and the Tibetan Book of the Dead?
It’s this: when you’re at your rope’s end, your last cigarette has turned to ash, your dream at Owl’s Creek Bridge is nearly waked, and you are given your final words; you ain’t gonna waste your precious breath on bullshit words, on idle chatter, on echolalia that just don’t matter; your gonna say what you mean and say it quick, and say it with words that cut to the quick, while you sink in the sand that pulls you under, your book turns to flames, your words burned asunder.
And this is why I only read hardboiled lit. I hate small talk in life. Life is too short. Say what you mean, or forever hold your peace.
You are what you eat. Adorno says every time you read a newspaper you become less of a unique individual. There’s a homogenizing effect to consumption of mass culture.
But homogenization ain’t necessarily bad as long as we’re homogenizing an amazing product. Wanna make me great, go right ahead. But I fear the homogenization is towards mediocre mendacity, mendacious mediocrity. Hence my lack of alacrity.
When you watch and read and write and speak and act in less hardboiled ways, you establish habits of how you will be, the way you will think and live and love and act now and into the future. And in the end it is these very small choices added ad infinitum that comprise a life.
If you want to live authentically: speak from the heart, read what’s written in blood, listen to final words, listen only to those who are trying to tell you something. But listen with all of your heart. The time is nigh. Read hardboiled, write hardboiled, speak hardboiled. Or forever hold your peace.
October 28th, 2023 at 11:10 pm
Well written and stated. I’m not sure the genre has always lived up to that standard, but it has often enough to deserve the apologia (in the sense not of a defense but a celebration of).
Ironically the genre had its birth in many ways in the romantic movement and the penny dreadful, in the Newgate Calendar, Defoe’s sensationalism, Dickens and Collins, Dick Donovon, Vidoq’s memoirs Pinkerton’s casebooks, French feullitons like John Devil, the Black Coats, Rocambole, Hugo’s Valjean, Balzac’s Human Comedy, Poe’s Man of the Crowd, Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris with its strict adherence to street slang, and the cheap paper adventures of both Nick Carter and Buffalo Bill not to forget the sensational headlines of urban gang violence and the rise of the Mob.
Sensation and violence gave it life and art found truth in it. Out of Twain, London, and Crane by way of Hemingway and Fitzgerald it found its way in the popular imagination through Hammett, Chandler, Cain and dozens more and is today the recognizably American voice in literature.
It’s shaped American, British, French, Italian, and Scandinavian literature in the 20th Century and both film,art,jazz,and television.
October 29th, 2023 at 6:31 am
I dunno.
I mean, I’m a big fan of Hard-boiled, and no disrespect to Nietzsche, but I enjoy a little inconsequential chatter now &then.
October 29th, 2023 at 8:33 pm
Dan,
I agree. I’m perfectly happy with Wimsey or Campion nattering or Roderick Alleyn and his sergeant doing their Brer Fox and Brer Bear routine, and sometimes delight in the lighter side of John Dickson Carr, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, and Michael Innes and Appleby. Even the grim and gritty hardboiled genre has its screwball school.
But the hardboiled school and particularly the Chandler school has had a tremendous impact on the language of modern literature, its rhythms found today in literature from around the globe.
October 30th, 2023 at 2:41 am
And a tremendous impact on a high-school kid I used to know who wanted to be a writer.