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The Contradictions of Racialized Masculinity in Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go
But it's a Freudian knot, not a Gordian knot, son.
-Chester Himes1
1.
The novels of Chester Himes resist easy categorization. Occupying a contradictory yet overlapping series of borderzones between high and popular culture, literature and hard-boiled fiction, the political and the psychological, modernism and postmodernism, social protest literature and expatriate modernism, African American and Anglo American literary traditions, Himes' novels seem designed to disturb received notions of both canonicity and literary propriety. Officially, his writings can be split between the detective fiction written for the famous French detective imprint, La Serie Noire, and his more properly literary endeavors. Yet, as soon as one begins to look closely at the novels themselves this generic distinction begins to collapse. Filled with the stuff of pulp and popular fiction--lurid crimes, illicit sexuality, populist anti-intellectualism, and the narrativization of popular fantasy--Himes' "literary" works transgress the boundaries of the literary itself. Similarly, Himes' detective fictions are often read as elaborate postmodern allegories or cosmic jokes of the type commonly associated with putatively high-cultural writers such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. The contradictions of Himes' fiction do not end at the level of its generic transgressions. Rather these disruptions, and the formal contradictions they enact, form part of a more general will to transgression that shapes the themes and content of Himes' fiction fully as much as its form. Himes' novels are designed to shock or disturb, producing narratives that not only resist categorization but also flaunt conventional morality and eschew easy recuperation by any single ethical or political position.
Interestingly, unlike many of his transgressive contemporaries (and here I am thinking of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith as much as William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon), Hirnes' novels have lost none of their ability to shock. They remain thoroughly disturbing reads.2 This ability of Himes' fiction to elude the limited shelf-life of most forms of literary transgression speaks to the continuing volatility of the subject that rests at the center of many of his most transgressive texts: black/white sexual relations, specifically that most taboo of heterosexual, miscegenous relationships, sex between a white woman and a black man. Yet the transgression does not end with...