Going Blood-Simple in Poisonville

Abstract

This article examines the representation and critique of what it terms hard-boiled masculinity as an exemplary form of modern masculinity in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. The novel presents hard-boiled masculinity as violent, rationalized, and largely purged of interiority and affect. Its representation of masculinity is organized around a form of split narration in which the affective detachment and seeming rationality of the firstperson narration produces a textual unconscious in which the affect purged fromthe surface of the narrative is projected on to and returns in the shape of various gendered, racialized, and nationalized others. After explicating this split narration, and suggesting its links to the advent of Taylorism and incipient Fordism in the 1920s, the article charts the political costs of this displacement of affect and the form of masculinity it constructs.