Heavier than Broken Hearts: Dead Bodies and Narrative Objects in American Hardboiled Detective Fiction

Manuscript

In Heavier than Broken Hearts, I investigate the dead body as an object that both prompts and frustrates narrative compulsions in hardboiled detective fiction. I argue that the corpse is an object that defies exegesis and which “decomposes” even as characters and authors attempt to represent it as meaningful through narrative composition, authorial agency, and corporeal integrity. I make the case that the presence of the corpse induces a crisis of both knowledge and meaning—a hermeneutic decomposition—that engenders fear, confusion, and uncertainty in the genre. Using a blend of theoretical frames, including narratology, body-as-text theory, object relations theory/thing theory, reader-response theory, formalism, and genre theory, this project shadows the interactions among reader, author, and text by tracing how the dead body may be seen, in itself, as a deceptive text to be read or misread through a set of suspicious narrative contentions and motivations. The book’s underlying motive is to demonstrate that all narrative is inherently suspicious or suspiciously designed—in effect, framed—and to break down the hidden strategies of genre and narrative construction in which author, text, and reader are all complicit.