Introduction: Investigations in Postmodern Noir Fiction
Directly after its publication, Denis Johnson’s debut novel Angels from 1983 was called in Kirkus Reviews “one of the strongest example of fiction noir” to appear in recent years. The connection of Johnson’s work to the idea of noir remains unbroken until today, and thus is present also in his recent novel Already Dead, a novel about betrayal and fatality, to whose twisted tale Bill Knott’s “‘Poeme Noire’ provide[d] the plot”, as Johnson acknowledges in the “Author’s Note” (437). In this study, our interest in Johnson’s “fiction noir” will focus on his version of the private-eye tale Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Almost at the same time as Johnson’s novelistic debut, Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner from 1982 stands as the debut of another sort, as it was the first adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), to be followed by many others. The making of Blade Runner has been documented in the book Future Noir by Paul Sammon published in 1996. The apt title does not only sum up the essence of Blade Runner but neatly labels an entire filmic genre which was arguably spawned by Blade Runner and which has continued to thrive until today. The debt this genre owes to Philip K. Dick is not only apparent in Blade Runner, which became a classic itself, but also in the range of Philip K. Dick’s fiction of future noir that has been adapted to the screen from then on. This includes Stephen Spielberg’s recent Minority Report and Richard Linklater’s filmic project of A Scanner Darkly – the novel by Philip K. Dick to be examined in this study.
It seems then that the postmodern fiction of Denis Johnson, a portraitist of lost souls searching for redemption in an hellish American underworld, and Philip K. Dick, a science-fiction novelist permanently obsessed with asking whether we can ever know who we are and whether anything is real, find a point of convergence in this strangely reverberating but at the same time strangely vague idea of noir. In a comparative study of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, noir thus appears as our first key term. Since the concept will be used largely in relation to literature instead of film, it can be further specified as noir fiction.1 Thus, the first step of our discussion will be to seek a clarification of this term, briefly pointing out its genealogy, its usage in recent criticism and its origin as a popular kind of modernism, but also examining its postmodern features employed by both of our authors. These features of postmodern noir fiction will come into relief especially in the treatment of the protagonist’s personal identity.
In both novels, the personal identity of the protagonist stands in close relation to his status as investigator. The greatest challenge for an investigator in noir fiction is to keep his integrity. This is a sense of moral and psychological certainty and stability, which sets him off against a world of corruption and deceit. Integrity has to be read in a double sense, however, since it is the moral and psychological integrity which secures the integrity of his identity, that is the ability to perceive himself as a unified person. Although the noir investigator is never able to permanently restore any social order, his integrity at least allows him to maintain control and stability in a world whose corruption he has revealed. The integrity of the prototypical modernist noir investigator, like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, is frequently threatened, and as a consequence his identity is destabilized, but integrity and identity are restored at the end through a display of narrative control. This narrative control is a form of sovereignty mainly demonstrated by the correct interpretation of preceding events, which is made possible by the investigator’s detachment from the situation. In contrast, the postmodern noir investigators in Johnson and Dick lack such a personal integrity from the start and are bound to fail in their attempt to attain any position of control. Their failure as investigators affects their sense of personal identity but it is also a reflection of the instability of their identity which marks them from the beginning. The destabilization of identity, experienced by the typical modernist noir investigator as the result of a threatened integrity, is radicalized in postmodern noir fiction: The loss of integrity results in the disintegration of identity.
As postmodern noir fiction, contrasted to its modernist forerunner, comes into relief especially under the aspect of personal identity, the second section of the following chapter will discuss the importance of the concept of personal identity for postmodernism in general. Its emphasis on fragmentation and diversification challenges the concept of a unified personal identity. This challenge will find its response in the theory of narrative identity, as proposed by Paul Ricoeur, and put in the context of late modernity by Anthony Giddens. The link between narrative, identity and postmodernism will illuminate how the disintegration of identity is inseparably connected to the loss of narrative control of the postmodern noir investigator in a maze of false narratives. His attempt to maintain narrative control is bound to fail in a postmodern condition of indeterminacies and collapsing dichotomies.
In the ensuing discussion of Johnson’s and Dick’s novels, we will then determine the specific conditions under which the integrity of narrative identity dissolves. Each time caught in a position of instability and fragmentation, the identity of the protagonist disintegrates with his attempts to constitute an identity through the help of narrative. This, in turn, produces two results: In the case of Johnson, the postmodern noir investigator gets lost in a paranoid chaos of false narratives, and in the case of Dick, his integrity is split apart into incompatible narratives which lead to a fragmentation of identity and a total collapse of any idea of the self.
Section 2 A Theoretical Approach to Personal Identity in Postmodern Noir Fiction
2.1 Postmodern Features of Noir Fiction
The term noir was coined by French film critics for a number of films produced in the US in the 1940s and 50s for their cinematic dark style as well as for their morally black vision of contemporary society and human existence. It was later applied in the term roman noir to the hard-boiled thrillers of the 30s, which were seen as a literary source for subsequent films2. This connection was not left uncontested by some film scholars, who insisted on noir as being foremost a cinematic style and not a type of fiction. In many recent studies, however, the term noir has both been disengaged from its French context as well as been applied to a broader phenomenon in cinematic and literary works. Woody Haut names his study of Contemporary American Crime Fiction simply Neon Noir to mark the development of “a predominantly urban genre” in the context of “an electronic culture” (4). His liberal use of noir leads to collocations such as “neon noirists”, “noir narratives” and “noir fiction” (4,5). The title Neon Noir also hints at the more recent coinage Neo-Noir, referring to films from the 70s to the present day which are regarded as being indebted to the tradition of film noir. They both revise characteristic themes and motives as well as adapt them to a new cultural context which led to results as diverse as Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and the aforementioned Blade Runner3. In his study America Noir, David Cochran similarly stresses the connection between literary and cinematic noir and puts a strong emphasis on the social critique of noir. Noir, both in its form of B-movies and pulp fiction, is regarded as being part of an “underground culture” (2) in which postwar artists worked who kept the critical impetus of modernism alive. The value of their work remained unacknowledged at the time since it was produced in the mass culture industry, which was despised by the leading intellectual elite. Cochran argues, however, that it was the same elite who forged the “dominant cultural consensus” (15) of the Cold War, which noir artists in their work were busy undermining.
Most notably Lee Horsley, in her extremely thorough study The Noir Thriller, has been working towards a broader definition of the term noir that goes beyond specific time, national and conventional genre boundaries. She lifts the term noir to the status of an independent concept, which also finds expression in terms of grammar as it is now able to act both as adjective and noun (“noir characters“,“in contemporary noir” (11)). Thereby she lends noir a doubly defined freedom that is also well applicable to my study of postmodern noir fiction, as she introduces a well-defined but non-restrictive concept of the term. Her definition of noir rests on the concept of a “noir vision” (7) which captures a condition of “anxiety, […] alienation and entrapment” (8) in works of fiction that deal with crime and corruption and exhibit formal features such as “non-linear plots, subjective narration and multiple viewpoints” (3).
The noir genre, both in its cinematic and in its literary form, has often been discussed in connection with modernism. Horsley examines noir as a popular modernism sharing the thematic concerns, such as anxiety and alienation, with high modernism, but lacking the latter’s display of “formal complexity and […] aesthetic self-consciousness” (Horsley 3). Similarly, James Naremore, in More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, understands noir as a marriage between “Modernism and Blood Melodrama” (40). And in his analysis of pre- and post-war crime fiction from 1995, Pulp Culture, Woody Haut argues that the context of mass production and popular culture associated with literary and cinematic noir, “indicates a class-based separation” from high modernism including both the writers and the audience” (3). Situated between high modernism and popular culture, noir claims a specific position for itself. Lee Horsley maintains that in opposition to other manifestations of popular culture, noir lacks their affirmative view and “optimistic thrust” and instead pessimistically expresses the discontents and ambivalences of modernity (Horsley 3). The typical noir protagonist finds himself vulnerable and unstable in a society based on nothing but false appearances and in a universe governed by random brutality. An example of this precarious condition of modern existence is described in Dashiell Hammett’s famous Flitcraft-story (The Maltese Falcon, Ch. 7, 442-45) the “best-known parable of ordinary life disrupted” in noir fiction (Horsley 16).
The connection of noir fiction to modernism notwithstanding, noir fiction features several characteristics which link it closely to postmodernism. These postmodern characteristics are already clearly articulated in postwar works of authors such as Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson and feature as central elements in the novels by our authors Denis Johnson and Philip K. Dick. I am examining these features as follows: The cross-fertilization of genres including high and low cultures, the dissolving of stable boundaries and collapse of dichotomies, and finally, the implication of the protagonist’s identity in a violent and chaotic world to the point of fragmentation and disintegration.
Early in the discussion of postmodernism, Leslie Fiedler has argued that essential to postmodern literature is “a closing of the gap between elite and mass culture” (156). Similarly, Cochran claims in reference to Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith that “the underground culture pioneered in a new sensibility that would later come to be labeled ‘postmodernism’ [which as a cultural style] involves the breaking down of traditional distinctions between high and popular culture” (220). In a postmodern flexibility of genres including high and low cultures, it is no surprise that Lee Horsley notes that since the seventies there has been “considerable cross-fertilisation between the noir thriller and related genres” (194). This does not only mean the ‘fertilisation’ of noir through incorporation of elements of “future world and Gothic fantasies” (229) demonstrated, to some extent, by our authors Philip K. Dick and Denis Johnson. It also points to the fact that “mainstream writers have adapted noir characters, plots and motifs” (195), putting them thus into contexts considered more ‘high-culture’. A prominent example of this would be Paul Auster’s highly self-reflexive play with noir elements in his New York Trilogy.
The dissolving of boundaries, however, is not only a formal matter, but also a central thematic concern of noir fiction. The specific “noir vision” of crime, guilt and corruption continually depicts a morally destabilized word in which lawmen turn out to be guilty of the crimes for which others are convicted – as in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me – and in which investigators are strongly implied in the corruption that is supposed to be the object of their investigation – as in Geoffrey Homes’ Build my Gallows High. Lee Horsley closely examines the “destabilising of identities” (10) in regard to the disintegration of a stable moral position as a central characteristic in noir fiction:
Treacherous confusion of his role and the movement of the protagonist from one role to another constitute key structural elements in noir narrative. The victim might, for example, become the aggressor; the hunter might turn into the hunted or vice versa; the investigator might double as either the victim or the perpetrator. (10)
The denial of any stable position leads to a collapse of binary dichotomies. As a result, there is no single ‘guilty party’ any longer, “everyone is guilty […] and there can be no clear distinction between guilt and innocence” (10). For Horsley, the general result is a “breakdown of dichotomies, between user/used, active/passive, actor/acted upon, watcher/watched” (230). Oppositional concepts can imply each other so strongly that their dividing line is reduced to ambiguous “differences of shading” or that it disappears altogether (Cochran 38). Such a disappearance of stable boundaries questions not only the moral stability of society but also the very concept of the protagonist’s identity.
This leads us to the third feature of postmodern noir fiction, the fragmentation and disintegration of the protagonist’s identity in a violent and chaotic world. This “utter disintegration of the human” is the result of the protagonist’s unstable position in a “specific, time-bound struggle with doubtful meanings in a world of deliberate deceptions”, which is at the core of noir fiction (Horsley 13). The instability of the protagonist’s identity is highly important for the concept of noir fiction. This becomes already apparent in Horsley’s first two “main elements in [her] definition of noir […]: (i) the subjective point of view; (ii) the shifting roles of the protagonist” (8). This creates a narrative which is “frequently focused through the mind of a single character” (9), but can be subject to any kind of disturbance and unsettling effect when this character shifts from one role to another. Two examples of such typical noir protagonists would be Tom Ripley and Lou Ford. Tom Ripley, in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, makes a likeable impression and then reveals a previously hidden psychosis; Lou Ford, in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, deceives everybody around him and turns out to be suffering from the self-deception of a split personality. In noir fiction, the reliability of narrators has to be constantly questioned since “noir plots turn on falsehoods, contradictions and misinterpretations” (9). False narratives of corruption and deceit are dominant and inescapable in this genre. Furthermore, they extend to the narratives that constitute the protagonist’s identity. Once these narratives are revealed as mere self-deceptions and collapse into incoherent fragments, the protagonist’s identity disintegrates. In a struggle that seems doomed from the start, the protagonist’s confrontation with his own inner flaws and with “society’s injustices, failures, prejudices, pressures” (11) inevitably violates any sense of a stable personal identity. In postmodern noir fiction, the subsequent “self-division, [and] fragmentation and dissolution of a coherent self” (230-31) is the general result of the noir narrative, as we will see in the novels of Denis Johnson and Philip K. Dick.
Especially in the discussion of the last two features, collapse of dichotomies and disintegration of the protagonist, the postmodern features of noir fiction are brought into relief predominantly in their treatment of personal identity. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the concept of personal identity in postmodern thought for our discussion of postmodern noir. First of all, however, we need to classify the type of protagonist we are dealing with in the postmodern noir fiction of Johnson and Dick, that is the investigator.
From its origins in the pulp magazines to the present day, the investigator has been a prominent type of the protagonist in noir fiction. Traditionally, in a world of disintegrating moral stabilities the noir investigator is the one character who can lay claim to any sort of integrity. Postmodern noir fiction depicts the loss of such a stable position to the point of complete disintegration. Thus, the examination of the postmodern noir investigator brings into relief the features of postmodern noir fiction in contrast to noir’s modernist origin, especially in its treatment of personal identity. In order to highlight this contrast I am introducing a terminology that distinguishes three different types of investigators: the stable investigator, the lost investigator, and the split investigator. I am examining the stable investigator as the dominant modernist type in noir fiction, whereas the lost and the split investigators are variants of the postmodern noir investigator.
Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe present the two most prominent examples of the modernist investigator in noir fiction. They are both solitary and independent figures disconnected from the past; their professional integrity is their most important capital; and they always manage to secure their integrity and to stay in control of the narrative and the interpretation of events. However, throughout their narratives all of these qualities are threatened, and their status as heroes is weakened. Thus, as they struggle with a world of noir corruption and deceit from which they try to disconnect themselves, they appear as typically noir characters, flawed and ambiguous. Yet, at the end of the narrative they manage to successfully stabilize their position again and preserve their integrity. The outcome does not allow them to restore moral order in a society of “rotten power structures and […] brutal injustices”, but at least it reveals their lasting quality of “effective agency” and their ability “to strip away pretence and reveal the sources of corruption” (Horsley 23). As prototypical noir protagonists both Spade and Marlowe are engaged in a “struggle with doubtful meanings in a world of deliberate deceptions” (13), and hence in a constant state of tension. It is important to note how the different effects of this tension on Spade and Marlowe also reveal their different characteristics, their personal flaws and ambiguities.
The character of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is arguably Hammett’s best-known heritage, not least because John Huston’s filmic adaptation in 1941 marks for many the beginning of classic film noir. Sam Spade, like most of Hammett’s protagonists, is in danger of compromising himself by “revealing own anarchic tendencies and capacity for violence” and therefore becomes “more implicated in the world of corruption” than his status as investigator should allow (Horsley 20). In his investigations in the course of the novel, Spade perpetually conceals his true motives with narratives of his own that only at the end turn out to be narratives of lies and deceit. Thus, the reader is forced to reassess the judgment about Spade in a much more ambiguous light. The fact that this deception is the only manner by which he can survive and succeed “appears to typify the whole nature of discourse in the modern world [as duplicitous]” (32). In his case, it is no longer a “form of moral superiority” (20) in the search for truth but the control of a random universe of false narratives which marks the success of the investigator.
Philip Marlowe, in contrast, retains a “form of moral superiority,” but can only do so at the cost of a marginality expressed by “sexual anxiety [and] neurotic alienation” (39). His reserved and distanced manner is a form of deliberate isolation, and his integrity is part of living in a “self-enclosed world” (Haut, Pulp Culture 74). Thus, any social contact threatens to make him part of what he calls in The Big Sleep the “nastiness” of the world outside (Chandler 220). This integrity, which predominantly defines his identity, is also repeatedly endangered in the mazelike narratives in which Marlowe finds himself being drugged, kidnapped, shot at or slugged. Regularly, it is only at the end that Marlowe regains control when he presents the solution to a case in what is largely an “incomprehensible narrative” to everybody else, often including the reader (Haut, Pulp Culture 76). Although he has little control over the course of events, in the end he is the one in control of their correct interpretation. One of the few characters in noir fiction to appear in a series of novels, the growing acquaintance of the reader with his personality of wit and whimsy results in the reader’s trust in his judgments. This singles him out in noir fiction as an unusually reliable narrator, and makes him more sympathetic than, for example, Sam Spade. However, the reader also continually learns that he is left with little else than “an embittered marginalia, a belief that proof is relative, and an ambiguous relationship with his employers” (77). In addition, over the course of several novels, the reader gets to know Marlowe’s integrity not simply as a quality to be admired but as character trait whose sources can be traced back to “fears about loss of agency, about violations of self and fragmenting identity” (Horsley 39).
Both in the conflicts they endure and in their final maintenance of sovereignty, Spade and Marlowe emerge as typical examples of the stable investigator, dominant in modernist noir fiction. In contrast to the stable investigator, the lost investigator of postmodern noir fiction is unstable and lacks control and integrity from the start. He is lost both in the sense of lacking an inner position of stability to rely on, i.e. he is lost within himself, and in the sense of being disoriented in the world outside. Not the typical “man without a past” (Horsley 41), this type of investigator is troubled and even haunted by his past. In his attempt to disconnect himself from it and start anew, he suffers from “the standard delusion of noir protagonists” that one can escape the past with which one cannot cope (119). Due to this noir fatality, the investigator himself becomes strongly implied in the corruption he is investigating: Either his investigation uncovers a crime that is in close connection to his own past failings, or the investigation is itself revealed as a source of corruption and leads to the criminal activity of the investigator himself. Due to the strong implication of his own person in the investigation, the lost investigator is prone to misinterpret events, to lose control over the narrative, to have his integrity dissolved by corruption and self-deception. In the general condition of collapsing dichotomies in postmodern noir fiction, the unstable shifting of the investigator’s identity leads to a breakdown of the opposition usually established between the investigator and the object of investigation, whether it be the perpetrator of a crime or a missing person. For the lost investigator, this can mean a loss of identity by strong identification with a criminal or a missing person, or actually lead to the moment where the roles are shifted, and the investigator becomes a criminal or a missing person himself. Examples of this type of investigator can be found in Geoffrey Homes’ Build my Gallows High, in James Sallis’ Lew Griffin series, and in Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
The split investigator of postmodern noir is in some ways a radicalization of the lost investigator. Not only is he lacking full control and stable integrity from the start, but any concept he has of his own integrity is shown to be a delusion. More than being haunted by his past failings and corruptions, his entire present existence is one of corruption and deceit. The failure of his investigation involves him to such a degree that it shatters the very concept of his identity to the point that any sense of self disintegrates into nothing. The misleading misinterpretations and his subsequent loss of narrative control are not only based on misjudging what is happening around him, but are a result of misjudging the very quality of his existence. His delusions can be attributed to a personality split, a fragmentation of his own identity. He is not fully aware of this split, but he will eventually and inevitably be confronted by it. According to the general condition of collapsing oppositions in postmodern noir fiction, the split investigator is himself the object of his own investigation. Thus, two classical oppositional states come together in a single person. As a result, either one side wins out over the other or they finally cancel each other out. Such a split, in personality and status, can again be the unsuccessful disconnection from one’s past self, as for the damned Johnny Favorite/ Harry Angel in William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel. The perception of a fragmented identity can also be used to reveal the ubiquity of false narratives and the malevolent deliberation of self-deception in noir, as Christopher Nolan’s recent film Memento shows. Finally, the unsettling implications for the ideas of self-investigation and self-observation in the concept of the split investigator will be a central element in our examination of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.
A study that examines examples of the postmodern noir investigator covers ground that runs very close to what Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney label the “metaphysical detective story” (2). In order to avoid confusion in the ensuing discussion of our texts, I will briefly differentiate between these two categories. In the introduction to the volume Detecting Texts, Merivale and Sweeney describe the “metaphysical detectives story” as a genre that “subverts detective-story conventions” and confronts “the insoluble mysteries of his [i.e. the detective’s] own interpretation and his own identity” (2). In the rejection of classical detective conventions and the emphasis on questions of personal identity, one can discover a significant overlap between the problems encountered by the “metaphysical detective” and the postmodern noir investigator. However, one should note an important emphasis in difference in describing the “metaphysical detective story” and postmodern noir fiction. In the former, the inability of the detective to solve a case in order to establish a clearly guilty party is described as a confrontation with “the nature of reality” that always defies rational explanation (Merivale and Sweeney 1). In the latter, on the other hand, such an experience of the “dispersal of guilt” leads to the perception that guilt is an all-pervasive condition which “never disappears” and extends to a sociopolitical and even cosmic realm (Horsley 11). As “the historical dimension of noir fatality is strong” (11), the failures of the postmodern noir investigators always have to be seen in their specific social contexts, which are invested with a noir atmosphere of ambivalence, randomness and threat. Such a concept of fatality is essential to the noir vision, which perceives irrationality not merely as a given state but as the result of the ruling political and social conditions. Noir’s irrationality poses a constant threat for the protagonist who can at any time become a victim of random brutality of other people, state forces, or an undefined power of fate. Since this specific worldview of the noir vision will clearly influence our discussion of Johnson and Dick, the terminology of ‘noir investigator’ is to be chosen over the one of the ‘metaphysical detective’.
2.2 Personal Identity in Postmodernism and the Narrative Identity Response
The question of personal identity in postmodernism has to be seen in close relation to the discussion of the self and the subject. In order to avoid unnecessary confusion, I will suggest the following differentiation between the closely related but not synonymous terms self, subject and identity4. Self is the quality of being that exists in opposition to the other. The self’s awareness of an other automatically leads to defining the self as a singular core of being, whose existence makes one’s being possible at all and is thus regarded to be more important than the existence of the other. The self is continuously engaged in becoming a thinking and acting individual subject. The subject is defined in opposition to the object, which can be the aim of the subject’s thoughts and actions and which the subject generally regards from its own subjective point of view, that creates a relationship of the subject to the object and a relationship of the self to the self. Whereas the relationship between subject and object – just as between self and other – is always one of difference, the relationship of the self to the self is one of personal identity. Personal identity guarantees the perception of a person as a continuous and unified singular being over the course of time and in differentiation from anybody else. In postmodern thought, the concept of personal identity is mainly attacked in denying the existence of any stable self and subject.
The traditional concept of the subject, which in Fredric Jameson’s words can be described as a “monadlike container” (15), unifies diverse experiences and assumes a central position from which it can express its experiences. Such a notion of the subject is, in various degrees, attacked and denounced in postmodern thought. The “new depthlessness” (6) of postmodernism, Jameson argues, renders any notion of centrality in regard to the subject obsolete. This results in “the decentering of that formerly centered subject or psyche” (15). In the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist paradigm in art and literature, the phenomenon of ‘decentering’ signals that “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation” (14). Ihab Hassan argues similarly in regard to the individual self when he states that in postmodernism “the identity of the individual is diffracted” (Postmodern Turn 66) and that “Postmodernism vacates the traditional self” to the point of becoming “a fake flatness, without inside/outside” (169). Put in different words, both positions claim that postmodernism breaks down the very dichotomies which modernism used as its dominant sources of conflict: subject/object, inside/outside, self/other, and in an extremist position, even self/world. The shift from alienation, experienced as marginality and exclusion in modernism, to decentration and fragmentation in postmodernism is both a reaction against and a radicalization of the former dominant. It is a reaction against modernism, in that there is no longer a center from which one can be marginalized, and, as Jameson argues, that there is no longer a subject-position available from which to express the felt “anomie” and even that “there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (15). This shift is, however, also a radicalization of modernism, in that the thematic concern of modernism with “the disappearance of a subjectivity” due to forces of an alienating and uncontrollable society is fully realized in the postmodern “loss of subjectivity” (Hoffmann 20) in a world characterized by its “radical indeterminacy” (Bertens 47).
To Ihab Hassan, the term “indeterminacy” is essential to the postmodern condition and he uses it to summarize “terms of unmaking” such as “disintegration, […] discontinuity, disjunction, […] delegitimation” (“Desire and Dissent” 9). In the process of indeterminacies the self is also unmade. It reveals its emptiness in its indifferent and indeterminate stance toward all oppositional modes of being, “simulating self-effacement [or] self-multiplication” (Postmodern Turn 169). In this indifference toward a depthless void of self or an accumulation of unconnected self-layers, the self loses its sense of defined unity. Thus, personal identity as the result of continually defining oneself as one and the same subject becomes impossible. In postmodern thought, the inseparable concepts of self, subject and personal identity can only continue to exist as their negations – or as fictions.
The idea that the subject is nothing but an imaginary construct or, as Jameson puts it in reference to the poststructuralist position, “an ideological mirage” (15), can be traced back to Nietzsche who stated: “The ‘subject’ is only a fiction” (quoted in Hassan, Postmodern Turn 49). The fictitiousness of the individual subject turns any concept of self-definition into a matter of the creative imagination which stands in no connection to reality. As Norman Holland states in his essay “Postmodern Psychoanalysis”: “You are ficted, and I am ficted, like characters in a Postmodern novel” (304). However, this is not to mean that imaginative creation as a means of self-definition can escape the postmodern condition of indeterminacy. For exactly the precarious status of a fictitious character in a postmodern novel, whose sense of personal identity is characterized by his or her very fictitiousness, is revealed as a problematic concept by writers of postmodern fiction. In his study The Story of Identity, Manfred Pütz examines this problem. He compares, among others, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov and their attempts to answer “the joint problems of self and identity” (41) characterized by “loss of orientation, self-alienation, and finally loss of identity” (35). The answer repeatedly consists in a self-consciously fictitious “self-creation” of the protagonist. He escapes the “lamenting over […] the loss of a unified self” by “build[ing] an imagined universe of his own” (48) in which he acts out his new story of identity. However, such a “fable of identity” (194), seen as an escape from postmodern reality, cannot free itself from the complications of reality. In a state of indeterminacy, not even a fantasy can be clearly determined, so that either the characters, or even the authors themselves experience “a sense of distrust in the very same fantasies that occupy them” (49). The further fact that such attempts continuously “end in disaster”, goes to show that the self-creation through imagined fictions is finally denied any “positive evaluation” by the authors in their novels (50). The idea that the unified self, revealed as a fictional construct, can only keep its sense of identity through constructing a fiction of itself, is countered by pointing out the dangers inherent in such an endeavor. The paradox of such a situation comes to a head in the statement of Hassan that under the paradigms of “Self-less-ness [and] Depth-less-ness” the self remains an actor but only in that it “impersonates its absence” (Postmodern Turn 169).
However, it is exactly in reference to the necessity of self-enactment and self-constitution of the individual that criticism has recently been leveled against the postmodernist notion of “the disappearance of the individual subject” into merely fictional constructs (Jameson 16). Also the title of Pütz’s study The Story of Identity should be kept in mind: For it is exactly in the emphasis on the temporal and interpretative aspects in the constitution of personal identity that the process of self-definition is no longer regarded as a fiction but as a narrative.
One of the most prominent proponents of this concept of narrative identity is French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In his essays “Life in Quest of Narrative” and “Narrative Identity”, he presents very concisely concepts of narrative and identity that result from his ideas in Time and Narrative and are elaborated in Oneself as Another. In order to clarify what is at stake in the matter of personal identity, Paul Ricoeur proposes a definition of personal identity which has hence proven both as highly influential and helpful in the ongoing discussion5. Ricoeur’s definition introduces the distinction between “identity as sameness (Latin: idem, English: same; German: gleich) and identity as selfhood (Latin: ipse; English: self; German: selbst)” (On Paul Ricoeur 189). Identity as sameness refers to the process of “reidentification” under objective criteria (189). It is to be understood “in the numerical sense”, as “resemblance”, as “continuity” and as “permanence” (189, 190). Idem-identity can be applied to any object or item in the world. Not yet seen in reference to a person it answers to the “question what” (191). In order to answer the “question who” (191), one has to refer to the concept of “identity as selfhood”. Ipse-identity is defined as the only “mode of being”(191), in opposition to the existence of all things, which can be called “mine, and generally self” (191-192). At the point of connection between idem-identity and ipse-identity, which is “permanence in time”, the main problem of personal identity arises: the mediation between “change [and] constancy” (192). The mistake of confusing the two distinct senses of identity, idem and ipse, due to this overlap, leads to the mistake of only allowing two concepts of identity that exclude each other: “sheer change and absolute identity” (33). The latter is found in the notion of an “immutabable substratum” (190), the former in the ceaseless process of differentiation and fragmentation found in the postmodern concept of identity. Ricoeur agrees with postmodern thought that “the subject is never given at the start” and that there exists no “unity which is […] substantial” (33). However, that does not mean that fragmentation is considered as the defining moment of personal identity. Instead, the experience of insubstantiality leads to a constant process of self-constitution that means to find a unified personal identity in its experience of fragmentation and diversity. This is Ricoeur’s starting point for his concept of narrative identity. He presents it as a constant process of self-figuration and self-interpretation whose dynamics very consciously function in correspondence to “the literary forms […] of fictional narrative” (195). To quote Ricoeur:
According to my thesis, narrative constructs the durable properties of a character, what one could call his narrative identity, by constructing the kind of dynamic identity found in the plot which creates the character’s identity. So it is first of all in the plot that one looks for the mediation between permanence and change, before it can be carried over to the character. The advantage of this detour through the plot is that this provides the model of discordant concordance on which it is possible to construct the narrative identity of the character. The narrative identity of the character could only correspond to the discordant concordance of the story itself. (195)
The “narrative identity of the character” is mediated through the plot and can only be understood as an interpretation of this symbolic mediation, as for example in the “mediation between permanence and change”. Referring to the problem of “permanence in time”, narrative proves helpful because its nature is essentially temporal: It is both seen as an “act” that creates “a mediation between time as passage and time as duration” and in itself constitutes a “temporal totality” (22). This interpretation of storytelling as “drawing a configuration out of a succession” in which the one however always remains in “competition” (22) with the other, constitutes one element in “the synthesis of heterogeneous elements” which results in a “discordant concordance or concordant discordance” (21) of narrative. The concept of narrative proves especially helpful to the problem of personal identity in its regard to our experience of temporality and the importance of (self-)interpretation.
Especially in our experience of time, life can be seen in the same tension “between concordance and discordance” that characterizes narrative. Referring to Augustine, Ricoeur observes that “the misery of the human condition” results from the experience of time as discordance, as being in a process of “continual dissociation” (31). We counter the “instability of time” by attempting to discover a “totalizing intention” (31) in it. Similar to narrative, life is a process of “drawing a configuration out of a succession”, by which we constitute the continuity of our personal identity as a “synthesis of heterogeneous elements”. This temporal self-constitution takes place in a constant process of interpretation – of events, actions, decisions – and points to the fact that there can be no immediate, no un-mediated, knowledge of the self. Self-knowledge is always a matter of self-interpretation: Ricoeur states that “the self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly at the detour of the cultural signs” (198) and that “we never cease to reinterpret the narrative identity that constitutes us, in the light of the narratives proposed to us by our culture” (32). One of these forms of re-interpreting our identities on the foil of our culture’s narratives is “the appropriation of the identity of the fictional character by the reader” (198). Narrative interpretation reveals, then, not only “the figural nature of the character” but also that “the self […] turns out to be a figured self – which imagines itself (se figure) in this or that way” (199). Thus, the life of a person can be viewed as a story “in which history and fiction are intertwined” (188). It is this point which distinguishes Ricoeur greatly from the approaches previously sketched: The defined self does not have to be declared a fiction, an illusion, nor does it have to escape its lack of self-definition by creating a fictitious universe. Instead fiction comes into its own right by being one of the cultural foils on which the self interprets and imagines itself. Thereby it creates its narrative of concordant discordance in a constant process of figuring and reconfiguring which gives it “a unity which is not substantial but narrative” (33).
The constitution of narrative identity is mainly a means of “selfhood-identity” (195) to establish and imagine itself. In order to identify itself with itself in the process of constituting a unified personal identity, it has to rely on the criterions of “sameness-identity” (195): unity, continuity, permanence. It is when selfhood-identity fails to refer itself to any sort of sameness-identity that the person loses connection to her- or himself and enters an identity crisis. Ricoeur examines cases of narrative fiction in which the self loses its relation to sameness in order to prove that the question of identity persists, even more so when it is faced with “loss of subjectivity” and ultimate “indeterminacies”. Even ‘nothing’ “is still a reply to the question who, simply reduced to the starkness of the question itself. […] Who is ‘I’ when the subject says that (s)he/it is nothing? Precisely a self deprived of assistance from sameness – (idem) identity” (196, 198).
Ricoeur reintroduces the ultimate need for self-constitution to perceive oneself as a person to the discussion of personal identity. The acceptance of oneself as a mere fiction of fragments would make the whole idea of ‘being-in-the-world’ impossible, as it denies the very idea of self-relation and social interaction. He highlights what is at stake in the question of personal identity and thus emphasizes the severity of the condition experienced in the deepest state of identity crisis – a state which seems strangely taken for granted in postmodern treatments of identity. For it is in “the dark nights of personal identity”, as Ricoeur calls them, that one person loses sight of her- or himself as a being of permanence throughout time and of unity in time, that one sees no means to continue the narrative struggle of concordance against discordance. Narrative fiction, as Ricoeur points out at the example of Robert Musil, offers a “purgative virtue” (199) in that it examines problematic cases of (dis-)connection between idem- and ipse-identity. It is also crucial since it shows how strongly the ability of storytelling and the existence of a stable identity rely on each other: “the disintegration of narrative form [is] parallel to the loss of identity” (196). Correspondingly, the connection between disintegration of identity and loss of narrative control will be a matter we will observe in the interpretation of the novels by Johnson and Dick.
Ricoeur highlights the importance of a social environment when he says that “interaction is constitutive of the narrative situation” (197) which in turn constitutes identity. Yet he does not explicitly link the concept of narrative identity to the social phenomena one encounters in contemporary (post) modern society. However, the social dimension is crucial to the conflicts in which the postmodern noir investigator is engaged, since the “noir thriller is rooted in its own time and place” (Horsley 13). The crisis of identity experienced by the postmodern noir investigator has its roots both in psychological and social sources. The connection between these aspects, especially in relation to the constitution of narrative identity in contemporary society, is further examined by Anthony Giddens in his study Modernity and Self-Identity.
In accord with Ricoeur, Giddens distances himself from postmodernist thought focused only on fragmentation and decentration and outlines “the narrative of self-identity” in late modernity as a “reflexive project of the self” mainly “under internally referential systems” (185). It has to steer its course engaged in a constant process of movement between such poles as “unification [and] fragmentation” (189), “powerlessness [and] appropriation”, “commitment and uncertainty” (201). However, as such a project is undertaken under “the general climate of uncertainty [and] the crisis-prone nature of late modernity” (184), it is viewed as being “inherently fragile” (185). With “the loss of anchoring reference points” (185), the self has no authority on which to rely. The stripping away of “determinant authorities” even in “the domain of the self” (194) gives way to “the existence of diverse, mutually conflicting authorities” (196). Their existence produces a condition of “radical doubt” (181). When under pressure, the “dilemma of authority versus doubt” can result in seeking to confirm one’s narrative project of identity in one “dominant authority […], taken to be all-knowing” (196). This authority is to quiet one’s own uncertainty and provide a personal meaning that otherwise cannot be found in late modernity’s secularized “morally arid social environment” (201).
The reflexive project of narrative identity in Giddens’ late modernity is jeopardized by the very experience of indeterminacy that is essential to the postmodern condition. This can result in the search for an absolute authority whose existence, however, is denied from the start. Another outcome can be a state “in which individuals are virtually immobilised through a tendency towards universal doubt” (196). Just as Giddens’ project of narrative identity is based on self-reflection, Ricoeur’s is based on self-interpretation. Narrative identity has thus to be constituted with oneself being the ultimate point of reference. As authority is diversified and decentered, both for Giddens and for Ricoeur, it is impossible to determine any “determinant authorities”, even if a person, in a condition of “radical doubt”, is in need of such an authority. Such a lack of a “dominant authority”, however, leads for Ricoeur to the fact that one cannot perceive oneself as the author of one’s narrative identity. He stresses that “we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life” (32). The story of oneself is not written autonomously by oneself but only in an interacting process with others in a precise social environment. Although one’s narrative identity is one’s own self-reflexive process, the self is not the sole determining factor in it. In addition, in a condition of indeterminacy including the self, one can no longer rely on one’s own authority in order to constitute one’s narrative identity that is mainly based on interpretation. Thus, the concept of arriving at self-knowledge through self-interpretation is questioned in itself since it opens a constant possibility of misinterpreting one’s self-narrative. This is especially true of the “crisis-prone nature” of Giddens’ late modernity which manifests itself then in a crisis of narrative control.
In the context of our study, this close link between narrative and identity emphasizes that it is the inability of the postmodern noir investigator to maintain a narrative control which disintegrates his status as investigator and his personal identity. The integrity of stable modernist investigators like Marlowe and Spade rested on their ability to discover the narrative strands that point to a hidden plot in a web of deception, fragments and seemingly unrelated events. The postmodern noir investigator, in contrast, possesses no such integrity in a condition of radical indeterminacy. In his completely failing attempts to create such a “synthesis out of heterogeneous elements”, a “discordant concordance” of narrative, he finally disintegrates his own narrative identity through misinterpretation. Misled into false narratives by self-deceptive concepts of authority, plot and self-reflection, the postmodern noir investigator upsets the precarious balance between fact and fiction in narrative identity with much the same disastrous consequences as described in another context by Manfred Pütz. The ultimate need to escape the unbearable condition of postmodern indeterminacy is coupled with the specific sense of noir fatality, so that any escape attempt of this sort will be revealed as a misinterpretation leading to disaster and disintegration.
Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly present paradigmatic examples of this postmodern noir anxiety, as the investigative protagonists in both novels suffer under the postmodern collapse of dichotomies and the dominance of indeterminacies. Furthermore, this condition is not depicted as a liberation from the dictates of modernity, but as an existential crisis which inevitably leads to their loss of narrative control and final disintegration of identity. The final state of such a disintegration is the bleak vision of a postmodern hell in which either an indifferent self abandons all self-narratives, or the self has become a hollow shell that is no longer capable of telling a story of its own.
Section 3 Section 4
1It is preferable to fiction noir since it avoids the French inversion and is in agreement with most of the secondary literature discussed in the next chapter. Also roman noir does not satisfy as in the American context it refers more specifically to the hardboiled crime novels of the 30s and 40s (mostly written by Hammett, Cain, Chandler) which often were adapted to the screen (see Marling’s The American Roman Noir).
2 See Marling for an extensive discussion of the roman noir and its connection to film noir.
3 For an extensive discussion of the connection between film noir and Neo-Noir, see Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir by Foster Hirsch and Film noir und Neo Noir by Paul Werner.
4 The definitions presented here are indebted to Ricoeur’s concept discussed below.
5 Compare Peter V. Zima’s reference to Ricoeur’s concept at the beginning of his study Theorie des Subjekts (22-23), the importance of Ricoeur for Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self After Postmodernity (35-41) or Albert W. Muschenga’s assertion in the introduction of Personal and Moral Identity that “Self-psychologists as well as philosophers of identity […] turn to the same authors, to Ricoeur for example” (7).