Fatale Revisited: Reflections on the “Radical” in Radical Crime Fiction

Abstract

Fatale Revisited: Reflections on the “Radical” in Radical Crime Fiction Lucas Hollister (bio) Je me flatte de penser que mon travail (très imparfaitement mené à bien dans Fatale, d’ailleurs) contribue à la suppression du polar. —Jean-Patrick Manchette1 Anyone studying crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries eventually must confront a basic question of terminology and critical methodology: what allows us to qualify crime fiction as “radical”? This question, like many of its sort, has both simple and complex answers. The simplest answers rely on what Theodor W. Adorno (6) critiqued, helpfully if perhaps too categorically, when he wrote of aesthetic politics understood as “the insertion of objective elements.” The radical, in this sense, would name those moments where crime fiction comes into contact with and represents historical movements, ideas, or groups dubbed radical. From this perspective, Dashiell Hammett would be a radical crime writer because he was for a time a communist and because he transposed the “objective elements” of his experience working with the Pinkertons into the [End Page 888] adventures of his Continental Op (Knight 135–36). This conception of literary politics, characteristic of influential scholarship on French crime fiction (Gorrara, Lee, Platten) and of widely read contemporary crime writers (Didier Daeninckx, Dominique Manotti), has helped solidify the polar’s reputation as a politically engaged genre.2 As necessary as this work is in a cultural environment where representational content and authorial biography remain the most significant vectors for determining the political valence of a text, from the perspective of literary studies politicality must also be considered in relation to stickier questions of genre, form, and style. Adorno (6), again helpfully though again too categorically, wrote that the “relation of art to society” was defined not by political content (i.e. “objective elements”) but by “immanent problems of form” that reflect the “unresolved antagonisms of reality.” How might such a suggestion lead us to imagine a broader, less contextually narrow political history of crime fiction as a form or genre? What subversive strategies, meta-discursive tactics, thematic reorientations, and critical lenses would such a history highlight? Beyond disseminating and reinforcing politicized perspectives and worldviews, there are other important ways that popular genres regulate politicality. First, genres define who and what is recognizable in a positive or negative sense as a political subject. When marginalized subjects try to appropriate genres from which they have historically been excluded, they risk having their concerns dismissed as excessively political (“preachy,” “radical”) or, conversely, as insufficiently political (reformist, mere identity politics, “not truly radical”). Second, and relatedly, genres exclude some forms of radicality (Jean Genet, undeniably a crime writer and undeniably not a writer of crime fiction, is emblematic of the genre’s tacit exclusions) while celebrating others (straight white-male marginality and regenerative violence).3 Third, genres recuperate and tame the radical through commoditization. [End Page 889] Politicized market pressures channel cultural expressions toward different kinds of conformity, and the price of entry into a popular genre is that one’s work becomes symbolically industrialized and hence differently legible. We might add that the inscription of popular genres in transnational cultural economies means that these fictions, while certainly informed by contextual factors, work at scales that are often unacknowledged in histories of crime fiction focused on a single national or linguistic space and its imputed “politics.” As Theodore Martin (88) has suggested, contexts that are centuries and continents apart are in fact “bridged by something that measures historical time on a different scale—something like a style, a category, or a genre.” Such issues pertaining to genre remain underexamined by scholarship on French crime fiction. For this reason, much work remains to be done both to describe the formal innovations (or lack thereof) that have accompanied thematically radical crime fiction and to develop critical lenses that will allow us to read across from popular crime fiction to the politicized violent writing of authors who are generally considered above or to the side of the genre: Rachilde, François Mauriac, Genet, or Virginie Despentes to take but a few salient examples from French literature. The fact that the aforementioned writers might appear out of place in a discussion of...