Woolrich: Toward a Minor Literature

Abstract

In 1937 Harold Hersey pointed out in Pulp Editor that pulps had two components, tawdry tales of crime and horror (and westerns) and advertising for magical cures for human frailty and inadequacy – ‘parallel lines spoken by two sets of people with but a single thought’. Both played to anxiety, and it is that anxiety that concerns this essay. Speaking to a primarily working-class readership, this anxiety is distinct from that inspired by upward mobility in a middle class that survived the Depression and was saved from impoverishment by the war – an anxious imperative to have and to be more. Ads in the pulps targeted a working class positioned as both under-educated and de-skilled in the rapidly rationalizing economies of the Depression and World War II. Building on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature as a deflection from the majority position, this essay argues for reading the pulps – stories with lurid covers in both magazines and in books – as a distinct expression of a minority exception to the increased regulation of daily life, and to the normative requirements of upward mobility. Woolrich was, more often than not, the author of despair, of regret, and of futility – of pathology as objection.