하드보일드 탐정소설의 장르적 특성 연구

Characteristics of Hard-boiled Detective Fiction: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

Having emerged as a distinct literary genre during the 1930s, hard-boiled crime fiction differs from classical detective stories such as the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie. Classical detective stories show how chaotic realities are scientifically explained by rational procedures so that temporarily disrupted social order may be restored in the end. On the other hand, in hard-boiled detective novels, though crimes are solved, the culprits of powerful businessmen, politicians, organized criminals go unpunished. This fictional chaos reflects the ethical uncertainty and cynicism of American society going through the corruption of the Prohibition era and the despair of the Great Depression. Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) exemplifies the above characteristics of hard-boiled fiction. Revealing the pessimism of the interwar-period America, his novel is not a simple "pulp fiction" but a serious modernist novel criticizing the widespread violence, corruption, and greed of the modern city. Despite the apparent darkness, Chandler creates a private-eye hero, Philip Marlowe, who voluntarily retreats from the sinful world to preserve his moral integrity. Embodying the ethos of American individualism, Marlowe is also a modern-day knight who is more loyal to his own conscience and ethical principles than to his client-his "lord." Exploring these issues, this essay examines the hard-boiled formulas used in The Big Sleep as well as the generic variants derived from classical detective stories and the medieval romance. In addition, it investigates Howard Hawks's adaptation of the novel in his film noir classic, The Big Sleep (1946). The comparison between these two works suggests the film's loss of the radical social criticism seen in the orignal novel. Deflected by the Hays Code and Hollywood commercialism, the film's sanitization is most obviously illustrated by the gender relations and hypermasculinity portrayed in the movie, anticipating the postwar political conservatism.