crimeculture

‘Funny as hell.’ The Interplay of Laughter and Violence in
Chester Himes’ Rage in Harlem and Jim Thompson’s Hell of A Woman

Abbie Lea-O'Mahoney, Lancaster University

We had a wrecking yard on one side of us and a railroad spur on the other. But it was choice enough for us.’1 Laughter and violence are integral to the narratives of both Rage in Harlem and Hell of A Woman; the question remains to what extent they become interchangeable. The quote immediately presents the reader with one of two options; either the ‘wrecking yard,’ which is representative of violence in its suggestive name, and a ‘railroad spur’ as indicative of laughter with the notion of escape and release that is associative with the railroad. This suggests that laughter and violence inhabit separate spheres, as early in Himes’ Rage in Harlem, there is a clear distinction; ‘Pearly white teeth made for laughing, but Jackson wasn’t laughing. It was too serious for Jackson to be laughing.’2 Laughter and violence occupy separate fields, yet it becomes increasingly apparent that such clear-cut boundaries are inherently fated to dissolve. The interplay of laughter and violence is multiple and complex throughout the two texts and illustrates the similarities and juxtapositions that are elicited in the text. Laughter, like violence, can be a destabilising force as is evoked by elements of the Uncanny in the texts, which undermine the concept of separate spheres. Furthermore, by unsettling boundaries, laughter and violence undercut the identity of the protagonist and relation between internal and external. Strongly characterised by violence, Himes’ novel is arguably without a human protagonist as the multiple narratives of violence that flow through it serve to destabilise any sense of unitary subjectivity and, in some senses, occupy the space where a human subject should reside. Violence exists as both form and content as it ruptures the sense of linear time sequence; Himes’ Harlem is a reflection of the violent paranoia of Thompson’s protagonist when it becomes a panoptic arena for violence. Laughter, then, is a result of a performative model of identity as fear and violence are the motivating forces behind this laughter. Thompson manipulates Dillon’s paranoia to establish a continuum between hysteria and violence. Laughter and violence in conjunction create a bizarre melding of either comedic violence or the violence that laughter can perpetrate; whether linguistic or physical. Irony is never far from the two texts, in particular, in the authors’ treatment of the self-made man and the American Dream. By recurrent imagery of money and violence, the inevitable association is a harsh critique of this myth when confronted with the squalor of everyday life within the text. Furthermore, through the use of genre, violence is no longer marginalised as ‘other’ or alien to the self so that it becomes infused with the darkly comic and expressive of the potential of the everyman to commit such atrocities. The noir and hardboiled fiction elements are manipulated to undermine any sense of closure and order is not restored for the benefit of the reader.

Laughter is a liminal concept, it both acts as a celebratory release and disturbance of traditional distinctions. ‘Dolly’ Dillon frequently claims that events are ‘funny as hell’ (p. 28), which immediately presents the reader with a difficult paradox; it questions the duality of the word and its subsequent meaning. By implication, laughter can be in response to humour, but also pain, suffering and a hellish environment. Jackson in Rage in Harlem feels this hellishness to the extreme, ‘[he] had the feeling of sitting in the middle of a nightmare. He was sealed in panic and he couldn’t get out’ (p. 136). Infernal and nightmarish imagery is juxtaposed with humour and comedy, which reveals discordance at the root. ‘Funny,’ then shares a strong affinity with the Uncanny. Freud discusses the duality of the word heimlich; ‘on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.’3 The ambiguous nature of laughter unsettles the unitary meaning and distinctions within the text. Consequently, both laughter and violence become interchangeable forces of disruption and place internal and external reality in discordant relations with one another. This is illustrated linguistically in the discussion between Dillon and Staples in Hell of a Woman. Staples’ laughter punctuates and, to some extent, perforates the exchange undermining coherent unity; ‘No – ha, ha- I wouldn’t say that…And – oh, yes’ (p. 135/6). His laughter has interrupted and disintegrated his language, revealing it to be a disruptive force.

The symbol of the train in Rage in Harlem is indicative of the destabilizing energies, such as laughter, at work in Harlem; either in the form of hysteria or chemically induced. Donna M. Goldstein comments:

Humor is a vehicle for expressing sentiments that are difficult to communicate publicly or that point to areas of discontent in social life. The meanings behind laughter reveal both the cracks in the system and the masked or more subtle ways that power is challenged. Humor is one of the fugitive forms of insubordination.4

Himes constructs laughter as a releasing, yet disturbing power which is indicative of social protest;

Goldy burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. The C and M speedball had taken hold and the pupils of his eyes had turned as black as ebony and had gotten as big as grapes. He laughed convulsively, as though he were having a fit. Tears streamed down his face. Finally he got himself under control. (p. 30)

By combining the two elements of laughter and substance abuse, Himes portrays laughter as addictive, uncontrollable and, perhaps, detrimental. The lack of control in this situation is an unsettling notion, which is both celebratory of such insubordination, yet fear at its disorganisation. The excerpt suggests that this hysteria is a force without direct agency and, consequently, with a life of its own. Himes depicts the train as shaking the very boundaries of the city:

The Diesel locomotive of the train was rumbling overhead…The street shook, the building shook, the whole black night was quaking…Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls…The blood spurted from Goldy’s cut throat in a shower, spraying the black street…The flesh of the wide bloody wound turned back like bleeding lips. (p. 105)

The force of the train is immediately identified with Goldy’s murder and it penetrates every level of Harlem society from the physical squalor of the tenements to the presupposed moral depravity of single mothers. This shaking of boundaries subverts traditional dichotomies of internal and external; human and machine; laughter and violence. The train is a force that cannot be contained, it flows into and out of Harlem just as Goldy’s life is bestowed and violently taken away. The concept of uncontrolled energy is both invigorating and horrifically embodied in Goldy’s murder. The hideous imagery of the wound as lips evokes a bizarre and monstrous parody of laughter, where the blood that gushes forth gorily imitates that of uncontrollable laughter. Additionally, the boundaries between internal and external are transgressed as Goldy’s lifeblood literally spills out into his environment.

Violence and laughter are fluid and mobile energies in both Rage in Harlem and Hell of a Woman. In particular, the body becomes a site for the conduction and channelling of these energies as internal and external are put in strange communication with one another. Furthermore, the protagonist(s) become identified with their environment so that laughter and violence, though internal, are released like poltergeists into the surroundings; mimicking inner turmoil. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are perfect examples of the dissolution of boundaries; ‘The air was electric with his rage…She felt the danger emanating from him’ (p. 129/131). Their darkly comic names immediately connect laughter and death, yet comedy is an elusive element in relation to some of their behaviour, in particular, towards women; ‘He slapped her with such savage violence it spun her out of the chair to land in a grotesque splay-legged posture on her belly on the floor, the red dress hiked so high it showed the black nylon panties she wore’ (p. 120). Thompson equally portrays seriousness in the violence in the text when it is deemed to be deserved:

she had something coming to her, and I was just the boy to deliver it. And – and, hell. There didn’t have to be much risk…Because Pete Hendrickson had something coming to him, too; and if he wasn’t to be a fall guy I’d never seen one. (p. 49)

In both examples, absence of humour is accompanied with violence that is in line with the justice of the streets, suggesting that laughter is absent when the reader is manipulated psychologically to deal out punishment. There is, however, an undercurrent of the compromised narrator as Dillon cannot be trusted, due to the narrative devices that delay and manipulate information. Therefore, the reader both accepts his perception as well as judging the protagonist based on these insights. Additionally, aggression is grotesque in Himes’ writing, but not comedic as the savagery of the violence is uncontrollable. Jodie, for example, strikes the reader as a horrifyingly monstrous character due to his violence; ‘He was riding a lightning bolt of maniacal violence, and all he could see was a red ball of murder’ (p. 103). The personification of violence as a ride suggests ecstasy and also a surrender of responsibility to its agency. When the body is a site for violence, either in causing or receiving, the binary of internal/external is punctured and the disorganised violence bleeds forth onto the streets. Laughter is equally destructive as hysteria destroys the narrative coherency in the finale of Hell of A Woman; ‘she started laughing. Screaming at me. I threw myself out the window’ (p. 185). The juxtaposition of two separate narratives destabilizes the semantics of the scene; the protagonists’ identity; and blurs the distinctions between laughter and violence by paralleling Dillon’s suicide with the woman’s supposed laughter. Dillon’s entire narrative is then put into question as reality becomes a difficult concept to clarify. The reader no longer trusts his resistance to use violence that were once deemed as internal thoughts, it is suspected that these thoughts may have been acted upon; ‘The old hag, her aunt, was in the hallway, grinning and rubbing her hands together. I wanted to bat her in her rotten goddamned puss, but of course I didn’t’ (p. 14). The reader no longer has narrative certainty, and like the Uncanny, unitary subjectivity is compromised.

Further elements of the uncanny unsettle the protagonists of the two texts, particularly in their relation to violence and violent death. This fear of the violent dead is the fear of transference to the protagonist themselves as violent trauma shares an affinity with contagion. Dillon’s recurrent doubling with Pete Hendrickson both foreshadows the latter’s violent death and his unconscious fear of being discovered or meeting a violent ending. Dillon comments:

I sagged down in a chair across from his. It was the chair Pete had sat in, and he was in the place I had sat when I was talking to Pete. I was in Pete’s place and he was in mine.

Fear is borne out of the confusion of identity as Dillon sways between victim and aggressor. Reversal of roles undermines his identity and the shock of realising his position is indicative of the full impact of the uncanny that has been foreshadowed in the text. Freud discusses the Uncanny as:

concerned with the idea of the “double” in every shape and degree, with persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike; Hoffman accentuates this relation by transferring mental processes from the one person to the other – what we should call telepathy – so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own – in other words, by doubling, dividing, and interchanging the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations. (Freud: p. 425)

Despite their differences, Pete Hendrickson and ‘Dolly’ Dillon double each other to the extent that even Dillon becomes unsettled at the confounding sense of self that consequently follows on from this interchange. Dillon was formerly comforted by the similarities between the two; ‘we’d land in a lot of the same places. It seemed funny, though; strange, I mean. And when I could make myself forget – the other – it seemed kind of good’ (p. 84). There is an undercurrent of disturbance in his language, once again the recurrence of a different meaning of ‘funny’ is necessarily clarified as ‘strange’. The ‘constant recurrence of similar situations’ is further developed in the familiar, yet unfamiliar return home:

I looked around in there, and it was like I’d never seen the place before. No, nothing had been changed, nothing had been done to it, but something had happened to me…I was lost in a strange world, and there was nothing familiar to me. (p. 151)

Thompson appears to be manipulating the conceptions of Freud by mapping readily identifiable elements of the Uncanny onto his protagonist.

Freud describes the homecoming succinctly as ‘an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects…result[ing] in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny’ (p. 427). This helplessness is the result of Dillon’s own fears of being unable to fight that which is already vanquished. Through the doubling effect, Thompson reinforces the notion of the unsettling conscience through the fear of the violent death. Himes similarly recognised this fear of the return, ‘This was the instinctive fear of the violently dead. Fear of the dead themselves’ (p. 125). This fear is only existent in the notion that the violence lives on through the corpse in the form of trauma:

Trauma violently opens passageways between systems…making unforeseen connections that distress or confound. Trauma also appears to be worryingly transmissible: it leaks between mental and physical symptoms…via the mysterious processes of transference or suggestion, and between victims and their listeners.5

The blurred distinctions between victim and aggressor cause the fear of contagion in the form of violence. Therefore, the doubling effect is no longer ‘an assurance of immortality…[rather] he…[is] the ghastly harbinger of death’ (p. 426). Violence is expressed through psychological trauma as the repressed dead return; ‘something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light’ (p. 429). Violent nightmares flood Dillon’s mind as the reality of the blood on his hands can no longer be held at bay, ‘it was as though a guard had been taken away from a gate, or a door suddenly thrown open, letting in a hundred images that I hadn’t looked at…I screamed’ (p. 111). These recurrent images of death and violence reveal the damaging and fixated nature of violence as Dillon repeatedly attempts to start a new life, but is doggedly haunted by violent memory; ‘All dead. All jumping up in front of me wherever I looked, all laughing and crying and singing in my mind. All dead. And all for nothing’ (p. 171).

Recurrently intrusive images mimic the narrative sequence; the structure of the text becomes hybridized and ambiguous to parallel that of the confounded and divisive identity of Dillon. The chapters that act as pseudo-biography and confessional are devices that both withhold information in the narrative and question the reliability of the narrator. Frank Dillon’s alter ego of Knarf Nollid illustrate the effect of violence on the self and his perception of reality; ‘I got to wondering what was real and what wasn’t’ (p. 179). Violence and laughter are rewritten in his accounts to portray Dillon as the victim, rather than the perpetrator which further undermines his reliability. Laughter and violence become interchangeable in much of Dillon’s narrative as the violence is darkly comic, yet illustrates that it is directed towards outsiders or women, such as Joyce or Pete Hendrickson. His description of domestic abuse is almost proud:

I brought it up for the belt, the sweetest left hook you ever saw in your life. She spun around on her heels and flopped backwards, right into the tub full of dirty bathwater…I leaned against the door, laughing. (p. 26)

Cartoonish and slapstick in nature, these scenes serve to implicate the reader in terms of what is considered socially acceptable. Similary in Rage in Harlem, the absurdly comedic violence of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed demonstrate the insubordinate nature of the fusion of laughter and violence, whilst questioning why violence is acceptable if diluted with humour; ‘Grave Digger crumpled to the floor at the same instant that Coffin Ed was asking in the dark, “Where are you, Digger? Where are you, man?”’

Location and space are integral elements to the development of violence and laughter within the texts. The description of Harlem is horrific in its squalor:

Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts…It is truck-rutted street of violence and danger, known in the underworld as the Bucket-of-Blood. See a man lying in the gutter, leave him lay, he might be dead. (p. 93)

The conditions are depraved embodied in the cannibalistic and bestial imagery in addition to the areas that seem almost totally dedicated to violence and brutality. The space is claustrophobic and gives the impression of little or no escape with the added associations of a mechanical and diseased existence; ‘churning’ and ‘convulsed’. However, this use of space, though perhaps fermenting the ingredients of violence, is suggestive of Foucault’s theory of the plague-stricken town. The plague is violence and vice, yet Himes depicts Harlem as a place segregated in its violence. Foucault writes:

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the center and periphery, in which power is exercised without division according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead--all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.6

The claustrophobia of the Harlem portrayed in Rage in Harlem shares strong affinities with the enclosed and segmented space of the plague-stricken town in addition to the element of surveillance that is present within the text; ‘The spectators were laughing and shouting obscene encouragement’ (p. 45). The visibility of violence is emphasized in the hive-like quality of Harlem’s inhabitants, they are constantly watching others and being watched in turn:

Bums and prostitutes and working johns and loiterers and the night thieves and bindle stiffs and blind beggars and all the flotsam that floated on the edges of the station like dirty scum on bog water were jostling each other, drawn by the word of a cut-throat corpse, trying to get a look to see what they were missing. (p. 126)

Surveillance and visibility is multiple and complex, yet associated with the lowest forms of humanity. In Hell of a Woman, however, visibility is manifested in Dillon’s paranoia of being discovered. His paranoia constructs a panopticon that he plays upon himself further undermining his sense of reality in particular towards women; ‘It was like they were all the same person’ (p. 177). The panopticon functions as a sign of mental instability, rather than moral efficiency. Inevitably, the reality of Harlem functions as an inversion of the Panopticon, whilst maintaining the elements of violence as a spectacle or performance for entertainment; ‘It sounded like a battle royal taking place, and shootings and cuttings and folks dead and dying were a big show in Harlem’ (p. 79). Violence has literally taken centre stage in this dystopian city and is suggestive of the Panopticon fallen into wrong hands. Not only is violence a spectacle, it is habitual to the point of boredom as ‘Passersby glanced at them with brief curiosity, and passed on…Folks were dying at all hours in Harlem’ (p. 119). Even a policeman mutters an oath of ‘Jesus Christ’ in a bored tone as a riot scenario breaks out in the department (p. 51). Similarly, Thompson’s protagonist is immediately prone to violence; ‘I moved back another step, tightened my grip on the bottle. I was carrying it back behind my thigh. He hadn’t seen it yet’ (p. 20). This illustrates the undercurrent of hidden violence as well as Dillon’s immediate and instinctual response of violence.

Rather than the ‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’, Harlem governed by violence alone in a subversion of the panoptic arena.7 The inhabitants are constantly visible, but power is diffused across society only revealing itself in weapons of violence. Rather than ‘a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,’8 violence is the motivating force to the extent that is has become internalised and plays upon the individual; ‘Someone was either fighting, or had just stopped fighting, or was just starting to fight, or drinking ruckus-juice and talking about fighting’ (p. 36). Coffin Ed and Grave Digger in some ways depict the way that ‘the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary’9 as their power is derived not from their persons, but the fear of the violence of their weapons; ‘Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it’ (p. 49).

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault details how the Panopticon ‘will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world.’10 Furthermore, he comments that‘any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how…prisons function.’ Rage in Harlem demonstrates this model in decline and Himes is the inspector of this system. Therefore, the aims of the Panopticon ‘to strengthen the social forces – to increase production…raise the level of morality; to increase and multiply…[so that] it can be exercised in the very foundations of society,’ evoke horror in spreading violence and its disease throughout all levels of society.11 The exercise of violence, rather than power, is uncontrollable and as the inhabitant of the panoptic arena gradually internalises these mechanisms, what results is a bizarre subjection of the individual in favour of the mindless violence evoked in Thompson’s Hell of a Woman:

I didn’t say anything, do anything. I was like a mechanical man with the batteries run down. I wanted to boff the hell out of the old bitch, and I just couldn’t move…I left-hooked her, I right crossed her. I gave her just the two haymakers…Fast. Batting her one way, then the other…her head was swinging on it like a pumpkin on a vine. (p. 90)

Foucault states; ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility…assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself…he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’12 Rather than the automatic functioning of normal behaviour, the panoptic arena in these two texts has descended into one of performative violence; ‘Everything was a pantomime’ (p. 147). This performance of violence has developed its own mechanisms of order in a bizarre parody of Foucault’s theory as ‘it was the code of Harlem for one brother to help another lie to white cops’ (p. 82). The rules are governed by race and further illustrate the segregation of violence further destabilised by race between black and white; men and women; the ‘banana skin’ (p. 6) of Imabelle and the other black characters in the text.

Rather than living, the inhabitants of Himes’ Harlem function through violence so that even when laughter appears, it is performative, a consequence of their governing discourse; ‘No one thought it was funny but they all laughed’ (p. 57). Discourses according to Foucault are practices with a set of rules; they ‘define not the dumb existence of a reality…but the ordering of objects.’13 Discourses operate and construct knowledge on a subject in the way that excludes other elements of reasoning14, but are not governed by any single individual. Therefore, it is a community of violence that is constructed in this arena.

Laughter and violence are dominant themes throughout the text, especially in their creation from physical squalor and emotional exhaustion. The American dream is an elusive concept for the protagonists of Rage in Harlem and Hell of a Woman. Dillon states:

We lived in a little four-room dump on the edge of the business district. It wasn’t any choice neighbourhood, know what I mean? We had a wrecking yard on one side of us and a railroad spur on the other. But it was choice enough for us…If it wasn’t a dump to begin, it damned soon got to be…Nothing but dirt and disorder, wherever you looked. (p. 25)

Already reminiscent of the squalor of Himes’ Harlem, the impression is given of society on the wan. Woody Haut comments:

Born from a unique cultural mix – proletariat perceptions and muckraking instincts – such texts portray the city not as the site of the American dream, but as the epicentre of an all-consuming nightmare…City as malignant space, and the epitome of everything corrupt capitalism has achieved.15

Dillon is both a victim and agent in his perception of the American dream; he utilises his failures as an exscuse to Staples, as he admits to ‘feel[ing] like [his] best efforts gain…no more than [his worst], that existence itself has become pointless’(p. 58). However, he becomes a victim of its mythology as he attempts to become a self-made man, be it through crime; ‘I dipped down into the money again, squeezing and rubbing it between my fingers, hating to let go of it’ (p. 104). Money is inextricably tied to violence. Just as the hearse contains gold ore (later revealed to be fool’s gold) in Rage in Harlem establishing a continuum between death and wealth, the money acts as a curse in Hell of a Woman; ‘it had rattled me like a lightning rod on a tin roof…Suppose the cops or the FBI were on the lookout for certain serial numbers’ (p. 130). Similarly, Jackson believes that As soon as colored folks got on the side of the law, they lost all Christian charity,’ implying that to be a part of that society is to lose a sense of humanity or religion. (p. 10). Money constructs reality in the mind of Dillon; ‘I wanted it to be that way, so that’s the way it was’ (p. 62). He adapts reality to suit his desire to steal the money, whether it is true or not. The dystopian view within the texts is indicated by the American dream as achievable only temporarily through crime, yet even this ends badly. Similarly, religion can offer no solace, even the Reverend is named ‘Gaines’ and as he so aptly states, there is no escape in religion; ‘Jesus Christ, man, what do you take the Lord for?...The Lord won’t get you out of that kind of mess’ (p. 141).

America made a promise to its citizens in the form of the American dream, but it could not keep that promise. Violence and destabilising laughter reign the streets of Himes’ and Thompson’s fiction. These notions have replaced the human subject as recurrent and manifold imagery of dissolving boundaries has rendered the notion of unitary subjectivity somewhat naive. The reality of the squalor falls far short of the dream in these texts and brings violence ever closer to the forefront of our imagination. By situating those that have been or are traditionally marginalised, both Himes and Thompson, like Foucault, champion the subjugated or ‘marginal knowledges, especially those that have been disqualified, taken less than seriously or deemed inadequate by official histories’16 It also reiterates the question Foucault poses of ‘how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?’17 By using race and the psychopath, traditionally marginalised as other, they function to undermine the society that marginalises them; ‘The damaged self of the psychopath can act as a metaphor for society’s aberrations, or the perspective of the criminal outsider can serve to critique the socio-political world that he stands against.’ Violence and laughter embody an insubordination that seeks to critique the society portrayed in the texts. Lee Horsley identifies the continuum between genre and violence:

Himes...argues that American violence, which ‘is public life’, finds its literary correlative in the form of the detective story. What this implies is that the genre’s codes and conventions are an expression (rather than a containment) of all that is disruptive and explosive in American society. The genre as Himes conceives of it, then, is a hybrid form quite distant from the classic detective story, one that is not primarily about the process of detection, and that does not centre on the reassuring restitution of order. It is, rather, an unsettling embodiment of the competing forces in American public life – of the violent official imposition of the will of the dominant culture, to be sure, but also of the many other kinds of violence that seem to him to be the very fabric of American life.19

The expression of habitual violence is developed in both texts by utilising the form to reveal and depict the realities of such energies. The noir and hardboiled fiction elements of violence and laughter are manipulated to undermine any sense of closure and order is left hanging in the balance. What America hopes is resolved will always be unsettled by the threat of the return of the repressed.

Copyright © 2010 Abbie Lea-O'Mahoney

 

Notes

1  Jim Thompson, Hell of a Woman (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1990), p. 25. All other references to this text will be in parenthetic form.
2  Chester Himes, Rage in Harlem (London: Allison & Busby, 1985), p. 5. All other references to this text will be in parenthetic form.
3  Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 420.
4  Donna M Goldstein, Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, And Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 5.
5  Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 2005, p.3.
  Michel Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 552.
7  Michel Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2004, p. 553.
8  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p.201.
9  Michel Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2004, p. 555.
10  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1995, p.207.
11  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1995, p.208.
12  Michel Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2004, p. 555/556.
13  Michel Foucault, ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p.96.
14  Dr. Arthur Bradley, Foucault (22/01/08: Faraday Lecture Theatre).
15  Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p. 179.
16  Alec Mc’Houl and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), p.15.
17  Michel Foucault, ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2004, p.92.
18  Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 117.
19  Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

 

Bibliography

Bailey, Frankie Y., Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).

Bradley, Arthur, Foucault, (22/01/08: Faraday Lecture Theatre).

Foucault, Michel, ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ in Literary Theory: An
Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 90-96.

Foucault, Michel, ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 549-566.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 418-431.

Goldstein, Donna M., Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, And Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Haut, Woody, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999).

Himes, Chester, Rage in Harlem (London: Allison & Busby, 1985).

Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Horsley, Lee, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Luckhurst, Roger, The Trauma Question (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).

Mc’Houl, Alec and Grace, Wendy, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993)

Thompson, Jim, Hell of a Woman (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1990).