What does noir mean to you?
Centrifugal force generated by my recent discussion with Megan Abbott and some of the replies thereto spun off a few questions about noir.Is noir about attitude? Atmosphere? Doom? Destiny? The term is French; the first and most prominent practitioners have been American. Who else exemplifies noir?
I can define noir no more precisely than that American Supreme Court justice defined obscenity when he wrote:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."Without claiming to be an expert, and with little hope that my words will live as long as Potter Stewart's, I know noir when I feel it. It hits like a punch in the stomach when I see the protagonist going down, and down is the only direction in noir.
The protagonist may face his destiny (or hers) with resignation or with unnerving detachment. He may knowingly initiate his descent, and those stories may be the most chilling of all. The descent need not culminate in death. In fact, death may be too easy an end. The noir protagonist may not even recognize his own hopelessness (here my definition may part ways from those of most people), but the reader does.
OK, that's a bit of what noir means to me. What does noir mean to you?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Labels: miscellaneous, noir
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 1:37 AM
4 Comments:
I agree with your pornography analogy. The problem with too closely defining a sub-genre such as noir is that everyone has their own ideas of how broad the definition should be. Then some are taken to task for not being "true noir," or "not noir enough," or some other pejorative term because they didn't meet the critic's definition of an essentially undefined term. (And it must be essentially defined, or we wouldn't be constantly debating its definition.)
Considering the amount of heat sometimes generated by these discussions, I have stepped away, classifying them as debates about how many criminals/dirty cops/femme fatales can dance on the point of a switchblade.
"Why bother commenting?" you may ask. I'm just an argumentative SOB by nature. It's part of my darker nature that's drawn to noir fiction. How do I know what's noir?
I know it when I see it.
It's worth discussing as long as the discussion is more an inquiry than a marketing meeting, I'd say.
I've read references to neo-noir, but I'm not sure what it means. And I have read stories in noir anthologies that don't seem especially noirish, which does not bother me in the least.
Someone once wrote about the absurdity of trying to define a literary style with terms coined to designate cinematic style. That's a good argument to remember anytime anyone gets dogmatic about noir. I mentioned a panel at NoirCon that discussed how widely the term has spread. An interesting question for those of us with time on our hands is why it has spread so widely.
In a discussion about banned books over on Crimespace, someone mentioned that, sadly, crime/mystery novels have only very rarely been the target of bans. I suspect this is partly because mystery novels tend to be written by people with a great faith in good winning out over evil, the bad guy getting caught in the end and order getting restored. Nothing too subversive at all, really.
Even in books in which main characters are alcoholic, 'lone wolves,' up against the system, they don't go so far as to screw up their jobs enough to fail to catch the murderer.
This is where noir comes in ('cause I bet you were wondering where this was going).
To me, noir is a state of mind in which good doesn't always triumph over evil, where order doesn't always get restored and where bad guys don't always get caught.
True noir is rare though, probably because the huge leap of faith required to spend so much time on something so likely futile as writing a novel would work against the truly bleak world view of 'noir.'
Now that you mention it, I did wonder where you were going with that. I didn’t mind the diversion, though. That was an interesting take on crime fiction.
Two names occur to me in connection with your definition of noir: Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Claude Izzo. I suspect it is significant that both were French and perhaps bleakly coincidental that both lived rather short lives.
I don’t even think such a figure as Ken Bruen writes noir as I think of it, not even in his Jack Taylor novels. Bruen might disagree with me, but there’s hope in the novels, even if Bruen is only setting Jack Taylor up for disappointment. It’s no accident that he uses the Beckett line ”I can't go on. I'll go on” as an epigraph (if I remember correctly). That’s bleak, but there’s a kind of optimism to its persistence.
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