C.B: I guess Iíll begin by talking about the stories in the order that you gave them to me. I donít know if that was an order that was planned or if it was just random.
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R.N: It actually is the order they were written in, chronologically.
C.B: Were these written relatively close together?
R.N: They were all written over the summer, at some point.
C.B: With "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" there were a number of things that struck me, but I want to at first just open it up to you. What were you trying to do with this story?
R.N: Iím interested in different ways of narrating. Eliot OíRyan, who is not the protagonist of this story, or the focalizer, is the protagonist of my novel Blue Skies , where he is given the first-person voice. The first-person voice gives power to his world-view and makes it believable, which I think is one of the effects of a first-person narrative. This story is told in third-person, limited to the perspective of a woman he is supposed to find.
C.B: I wanted to pick up on that. That was one of the things that struck me. In two of the stories, the perspective is from a woman who, in another context, could be seen as a femme fatale, but from within her subjectivity is anything but, or becomes a certain negation of that role. We were talking earlier about the way in which the femme fatale is always sort of a fantasy figure. What I think youíve done here is to represent the shards of that fantasy around a fully-fleshed character. Particularly in "The Rig," but also in "Because I Could Not Stop For Death," where there is a sort of image of a damsel in distress, similar to the opening of The Big Sleep. But here, not only does she not want to be saved, but she doesnít need to be, and he is an idiot for trying to find her in the first place.
R.N: Heís led her husband right to her. Effectively, heís done exactly what he is supposed to do, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. Itís an infernally stupid thing for a detective to do. He should have researched the man who hired him before finding a womanan adultwho did not want to be found. What Eliot OíRyan is confused by are his own desires, his motivation to be a detective, which often clouds his reasoning.
C.B: Thereís an interesting moment I wonder if you could elaborate on, where her anger and hatred for her husband becomes almost indistinguishable from her anger at Eliot OíRyan.
R.N: Her anger is generalized even further than that. Thereís a part in the story where she talks about men and male violence as an all-encompassing structure that she has had to exist in.
C.B:
One of the things I think is effective in your writing is
a kind of empathy with the female character. This empathy is sometimes
present in older works, but is usually part of a kind of chivalry and code
of conduct. One of the things that you seem to be demonstrating is that
the code of chivalry is part of the larger misogynist culture it sees itself
as separate from.
R.N: In a conversation I had with Earl Jackson he pointed out how absurd the events of "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" are, and that is precisely my point. The entire story takes place because Eliot OíRyan is participating in a bizarre male ritual. He forces her into a position where she is totally reliant upon him. Of course, in a first-person narrative, thatís a perfectly safe thing to do, because of course if there is a first personand this is undermined in Jim Thompsonís writing, but not in traditional detective storiesyou know that they are going to survive. The assumption if the story is told in first person would be that it is fine for Eliot OíRyan to take her under his wing, because he is going to succeed. Heís the rusted post-Chandlerian knight, the "slumming angel" that is such an important trope of the detective story. Iíve always thought that that angelic male savior was a bunch of crap, to be blunt.
| The murderer is the disavowed fantasy space.
Christopher Breu |
C.B: It functions as sort of a disavowal of participation in misogyny, and there is always that homosocial and homophobic interplay between the "good" and the "evil" men in the storywhich seems to really be a sort of doubling. Itís precisely about a disavowal of the murderer within, and almost all Noir and detective stories are based around that triangle. The murderer is the disavowed fantasy space.
R.N: In many ways the murderer functions as the detectiveís doppelgängerthe shadow self that embodies all evil, and allows the detective to think of himself as completely good and righteous.
C.B: You can see the character of the husband in "Because I could Not Stop For Death" as just a doubling of Eliot OíRyan. Thereís an interesting reversal that youíve made in this story. By telling it from the womanís point of view, both Eliot and the husband can be clearly seen as occupying the same fantastic spacenot her fantasy, but theirs.
R.N: Although she has the narrative voice, she is barefoot and weapon-less, and is at the mercy of their interplay. Sheís nothing more than a token in their dark homosocial fantasy of male power.
C.B: there are a lot of stories which try to do that critique from the outside. What you get is a sort of auto-critique. Iíve talked about this in relation to Dashiell Hammet and *Red Harvest,* but there is always a trace of positive content when the story is focalized through the detective, precisely because of the formal properties of the first-person narrative.
R.N: If you give anybody a first-person voice, you give them power. The only time they can possibly lose power as a character who can demand investment from a reader is if you rob them of first-person. You even have to take away, I think, any access to their minds in order to take away their ability to control narrative.
C.B: James Ellroy does thattells his stories in third personbut it is almost always focalized through the police officers, almost seeming at times like an episode of "Cops"
R.N: He moves from violent male head-space to violent male head-space, and his characters are almost interchangeable in their debased male violence.
C.B: Right. It feels like the rudiments of a critique, but it never quite gets there. thereís still away in which heís almost clinging to that male power.