Mean Streets and Honorable Men

[BentonGrey]

Howdy gents, I've come across something I think many of y'all might find interesting.  This is an essay by one of the progenitors of the hard-boiled detective story, Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe.  It's ostensibly about detective stories, but it has some interesting applications to anything that we might call "popular" or "escapist" literature.  Comics strike me as a natural fit for many of his points.  In particular, his last paragraph is really fascinating.  I think it articulates something that I've always felt about literature at large, and while he has a specific genre in mind, his ideas about heroism serve as a pretty excellent description of what a hero should be.  I'll reproduce it here for you.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

And the whole article is here:
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html

[hoss20]

Thanks for sharing this, Benton. Chandler really nails the point that the definition of a "hero" is, in and of itself, both simple and complex. The last sentence is absolutely masterful and, quite frankly, probably needs to be quoted in every attempt to define a hero. Powerful stuff...