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Double Cain
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory
I hope the day will come when I won't have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain.... Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain-faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlour and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God's sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at least Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on the garbage can. (22-23)
This is disgust at its most confident, its purest, its most imperious. No manifest ambivalence clouds the issues, no delicacies curb the expression of a passionate loathing, and the passage thus has at least the virtue of honesty in its display of revulsion. Chanting the familiar refrain, it tells us again that Cain plays tricks: he's a "faux naif," not a genuine innocent, a "Proust in greasy overalls" rather than the real article. But it also insists that those tricks stink, making thereby disturbingly legible the unconscious logic in Frohock and Oates and suggesting we take as literally as possible the olfactory metaphor with which I began. Cain's crafty "way" is crafty because "dirty," with "Nothing ... clean and ventilated" about it; if "Everything he touches smells like a billygoat," if he is, for Chandler, no Proust, this is because the stains on his overalls mark him already as a feculent creature who deals in "slops" while attempting to mask their aromatic filth with the smell of a cheap stylistic perfume. The essence of Cain's trickery resides in the doctored fetor he transmits to us through his writing as a potential for malodorous contamination. To read him is to risk both smelling "like a billygoat" and developing a wayward "taste" for that smell. The explicit reference to sex, moreover, in Chandler's disgusted denunciation, suggests that what's at stake in Cain is an aberrant and dirty "erotic" impulse that's inseparable from the identificatory dangers that Frohock and Oates have helped us to define.
Chandler himself tends more to enact than to reflect upon this conjunction. I want, therefore, to turn for a moment to Freud's late essay on "The 'Uncanny,"' which offers a remarkable theoretical account of the relations among sex, identification, violence, and smell. One of my claims will finally be that Cain knows things about these issues that even Freud is at pains to deny, and that this denial has everything to do with the theoretical ambitions by which Freud seeks to surmount a condition that he shows to be-precisely-insurmountable. Nevertheless, Freud's essay can help us provisionally to grasp the nature of the critics' fears and repulsions, and in particular, to bring quite clearly into view two points that Chandler's disgust intuits.
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