Playing Against Type: Statistical Personhood, Depth Narrative, and the Business of Genre in James M. Cain's Double Indemnity

Abstract

Playing Against Type:Statistical Personhood, Depth Narrative, and the Business of Genre in James M. Cain's Double Indemnity Frederick Whiting (bio) The characters, locale, and action of this story are fictitious; they do not represent and are not intended to represent, actual persons, places, or events. Disclaimer, 1992 Vintage edition of Double Indemnity The books didn't know anything to tell on me. Walter Huff, character1 Introduction An irony attends the inclusion of the disclaimer in Vintage Books' 1992 edition of James Cain's Double Indemnity.2 Absent from any of the editions of the novel that appeared during Cain's lifetime, the sentence invokes, in a form so familiar as to be by now nearly invisible, a long-standing distinction between two types of creature: literary characters and actual persons.3 The sentence attempts to foreclose the possibility of future legal action via what is ultimately a logic of genre: X in the book could not be the particular person Y in real life, not because X is not Y, but because X is a literary character and so could not be a historically particular person. Implicit in this logic is a distinction hearkening back to Aristotle [End Page 190] about historical particularity versus the broader typing of literary works, though with somewhat different truth claims in mind.4 Taken as an ontological pronouncement, the separation seems unobjectionable enough: there are literary characters and then there are real persons and neither requires further elaboration. As E.M. Forster put it in his Aspects of the Novel, unlike humans, literary characters needn't have glands.5 On the other hand, the disclaimer's very presence in the text bespeaks an anxiety, namely, that the distinction it draws is less than self-evident. Somatic referents aside, its appearance in the novel's front matter indicates that persons and characters are potentially confusable—a worry confirmed by a long history of libel litigation. Embodiment, then, is not the issue so much as is the correspondence or co-incidence of narrative descriptions between literary characters and actual persons. Of course, the irony doesn't reside in the fact that the character/person distinction is philosophically fraught—old news indeed.6 Rather it's that Double Indemnity itself focuses upon precisely the complications of this freighting. In both its thematic concerns and its formal elements, the novel, I will argue, is principally a rumination on personhood and narrative—on the relation between characters in stories and actual persons, and the role that types and typing play in our thinking about that relation.7 Since its publication, such critical response as the novel has received has tended to pass over the issue of the relation between persons and types. Where critics have taken up related concerns, such as, for example, agency or dehumanization, they've done so in a context that maintains the separation, concentrating on one side of the distinction or the other—either literary types or actual persons—without much bothering about the relation between them. Even cultural work interested in the ideological functions of genre has tended to focus exclusively on the dynamics of production and reception that characterize popular fiction rather than the formal conventions governing genre.8 Ultimately, this divided response adheres to the very distinction that the disclaimer wants to draw and that, I'll argue, the novel wishes to complicate. In what follows, I want to examine Double Indemnity's interest in the relation between persons and characters. More particularly, I want to analyze the relays between the novel's concern with type understood as an extra-literary concept that preoccupied a variety of real-world discussions (corporate, sociological/psychological, aesthetic) at the moment of its [End Page 191] publication, and with type understood as a staple feature of the formula genres (detective/crime fiction, gothic, confessional literature) that the novel uses to participate in these discussions. Ultimately, my claim is that in responding to anxieties about agency connected during this period to the discourses of actuarial science and depth psychology, Double Indemnity effectively assailed a longstanding opposition—one that continues to exert a powerful influence on present thinking—between types and persons. In...