Hardboiled Literary History: Labor and Style in Fictions of the Culture Industry

摘要

This article proposes the idea of a "hardboiled literary history" through readings three novels of the culture industry published in the 1940s: Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949), Fredrick Wakeman's The Hucksters (1946), an Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run (1941). These novels made visible the intellectual labor of producing the cultural commodities upon which the industry subsisted, while at the same time struggling to identify and preserve regions of culture as yet unsullied by the market. They achieved this double effect by materializing in their fictions the abstract components of creative intellectual labor, rendering them intelligible as part of a larger economy at midcentury. I argue that, by tracing historical shifts in the way cultural work and cultural commodities were conceived in the United States in this period, we might arrive at a new understanding of an old literary-historical term, hardboiled. Loosened from its constricting generic frame, with the associated conventions of mystery plot and economical vernacular language, hardboiled at midcentury can be understood more capaciously, and indeed productively, as naming a certain disposition towards the commodification of culture, and a particular style of undertaking cultural work.