Wow, was this a good analysis of the series characters in this book. And, yeah, do I ever agree that this is the younger Archie, both within and outside of the canonical frame.
As a fan, I like to imagine some of Archie's character changes in the later books as caused not just by Archie growing up some more -- thankfully, in the case of Wolfe grimly sanding off some of Archie's racism-- but also by Archie gradually learning how to hide himself behind the facade of the sophisticated male. As the books go along, he takes more and more advantage of his position as the supposed author to present himself in what he sees as the best light. He just never gets quite as good at hiding himself as he hopes he is, probably due to his stated habit of abjuring self-reflection. He also increasingly hides Wolfe. Wolfe is more human in his petty flaws in the later books, but he also loses quite a few of the deeper fractures he initially is depicted as having (like the obviously depressive behavior).
In terms of the actual writing, I think the changes are a combination of Stout refining and improving his characterization and being unable to resist making characters he likes "better" heroes by his own standards of heroism.
Since his standards are an unreconciled mish-mash of the late Victorian, emotionally intense male hero that he grew up reading about, and the between-the-wars untouchable "tough guy" hero who finished coming into fashion right as he was writing the early books, the result is a unreconciled hybrid that is a lot more interesting (IMO) than it would have been if he had stuck to one period's or the others' favored archetype.
(To me, one of the minor changes exemplifying this authorial conflict was Stout's moving Archie's and Wolfe's bedrooms off of the same floor. The next door bedrooms would have conveyed a different message in something written in the teens than it did in the thirties, and Stout seems to have eventually realized that.)
I also think some of the changes during the early books were due to Stout toning down his literary style and gradually relaxing as he returned to writing books he initially considered one short step above pulp. Me, I don't find Archie and Wolfe any less interesting in the first books. They're just displaying themselves against a gaudy background painted by Stout's initial need to have every walk-on character loaded with Psychological Significance. (Holy cats, are his twenties literary novels ever loaded with Psychological Significance, especially the Psychological Significance of s*x, but that's a topic for another day. Probably the day we talk about LOFM)
As a side note, I do love the habit Stout picked up from Doyle and his successors of dropping throw-away comments about earlier events into his stories. Boy does it give the fan writer material with which to work!
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Date: 2010-04-06 02:43 am (UTC)As a fan, I like to imagine some of Archie's character changes in the later books as caused not just by Archie growing up some more -- thankfully, in the case of Wolfe grimly sanding off some of Archie's racism-- but also by Archie gradually learning how to hide himself behind the facade of the sophisticated male. As the books go along, he takes more and more advantage of his position as the supposed author to present himself in what he sees as the best light. He just never gets quite as good at hiding himself as he hopes he is, probably due to his stated habit of abjuring self-reflection. He also increasingly hides Wolfe. Wolfe is more human in his petty flaws in the later books, but he also loses quite a few of the deeper fractures he initially is depicted as having (like the obviously depressive behavior).
In terms of the actual writing, I think the changes are a combination of Stout refining and improving his characterization and being unable to resist making characters he likes "better" heroes by his own standards of heroism.
Since his standards are an unreconciled mish-mash of the late Victorian, emotionally intense male hero that he grew up reading about, and the between-the-wars untouchable "tough guy" hero who finished coming into fashion right as he was writing the early books, the result is a unreconciled hybrid that is a lot more interesting (IMO) than it would have been if he had stuck to one period's or the others' favored archetype.
(To me, one of the minor changes exemplifying this authorial conflict was Stout's moving Archie's and Wolfe's bedrooms off of the same floor. The next door bedrooms would have conveyed a different message in something written in the teens than it did in the thirties, and Stout seems to have eventually realized that.)
I also think some of the changes during the early books were due to Stout toning down his literary style and gradually relaxing as he returned to writing books he initially considered one short step above pulp. Me, I don't find Archie and Wolfe any less interesting in the first books. They're just displaying themselves against a gaudy background painted by Stout's initial need to have every walk-on character loaded with Psychological Significance. (Holy cats, are his twenties literary novels ever loaded with Psychological Significance, especially the Psychological Significance of s*x, but that's a topic for another day. Probably the day we talk about LOFM)
As a side note, I do love the habit Stout picked up from Doyle and his successors of dropping throw-away comments about earlier events into his stories. Boy does it give the fan writer material with which to work!