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Double Cain

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory

Double Cain1 GREGORY FORTER

I. "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?"

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There's something fishy in the work of James Cain, something that doesn't quite smell right. I mean this, first of all, as a metaphor, though I propose to take that metaphor seriously. And I mean it to crystallize what the more discriminating among Cain's critics have in fact sensed for some time: that central to the experience of reading him-central, we might say, to the fascinated revulsion that so often greets his work-is a disagreeable and depressing suspicion of having been "had." Cain seems somehow always to be cheating, to be playing dirty; the goods he delivers evaporate behind their thin glitzy wrappers, leaving only an overpowering scent of sulfur and sleazy sex; his effects grip and seduce us, sometimes even to furious abandon, but they also invariably muss us up since they are, in the end, dirty little effects, cheap and sensational tricks, shams-by no means the real thing at all. "The list [of ingredients that made Cain's first novel a success] must always include a large item of trickery," writes W.M. Frohock in his book about violence in American fiction (14, emphasis added). Or again, from Joyce Carol Oates's essay on Cain: "The freedom of women and money and power, and the promise of adventure.... These are his tricks, his gimmicks" (110, emphasis added). Trickery, gimmicks, tricks, "legerdemain" (Frohock 15): it's almost impossible to talk about Cain without acknowledging this fakery, the ersatz dimension to his work. So that when I open by evoking something fishy, I mean in part simply to make that acknowledgment-to insist colloquially that Cain's "up to no good"-and to assert that ultimately, for me as for others, this "no good" can't but show: the writing may be able to "perform dazzling tricks but it cannot quite make us believe in them" (Oates 117).

The reason for this is that Cain's "no good" has, to begin with, aesthetic connotations. "Cain ... never manages to become an artist" because "there is always something sleazy, something eerily vulgar and disappointing in his work" (Oates 110). Cynical and exploitative (110), neither "'poet"' nor "'philosopher,' he is "in the end ... simply an 'entertainer"'; and an entertainer, of course-if he's to be a good one-must possess "an uncanny knowledge of the perversities of his audience, [and of] the great range of their vulgarity" (114). This is the subterfuge, the artifice of Cain's "art": "masterful and intelligent" in itself (114), it understands and exploits the vulgarity of "mass man" (124), who pants only after crude entertainment and finds it-only-in the rankest of places: in a sexual violence that animalizes humanity, in the shocks of action and the twists of plot, in the indelicate obviousness-the flash and excess-of mass art. To entertain on a mass scale is itself here to trick; it's to take artistic shortcuts that drag the reader through filth and mud, renouncing thereby all high subtlety in favor of the basely obvious, the excessive, the grossly sensorial. "[T]he vulgar degrade all notable qualities," Oates continues, "especially that of subtlety. What is not exaggerated will be passed by" (120). Cain is thus driven to excess-driven to cheat: it amounts to the same thing-by his desire to satisfy the insatiable brutishness of the vulgar herd. It goes without saying that the vulgar themselves, being on this reading always already degraded, know and demand nothing but trash, and they consequently remain blissfully unconscious of anything sweeter-smelling. For them, the trick precisely doesn't show, and the danger of befoulment thus threatens only "us": the non-vulgar who, gradually becoming hip to the trick, finish Cain's books with a shuddering sense of having had foul and polluting contact with something like lower life forms.2

It's important, then, to be clear about this contact, to familiarize ourselves with these forms. Oates's essay betrays so evident a slumming sensitivity to the pleasures of vulgarity that her disgust tends finally to become somewhat vague and vaporous. We still need to ask: what is it exactly that the crudities of Cain's art put "us" into contact with? And here the answer is startling in its simplicity, crude in its very obviousness: if Cain inspires an aesthetico-moral nausea, if his work induces in critics a vertiginous aversion that can only be adequately expressed in disgust, this is because his books address us as though we were ourselves vulgar, placing us squarely in the uncouth and animal minds of their narrators and asking us, incredibly, to feel at home there: to find in those minds our own vulgar selves, debased in and as mass man.3 Frohock both makes and misses this point, I think, when he says that The Postman Always Rings Twice "is thoroughly immoral ... not so much because of the unpraiseworthy behavior of the characters as because of the unpraiseworthy behavior of the reader" (21). For the danger his essay actually describes is of a devolutionary identification so complete as utterly to void such distinctions:

Double Cain

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory

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