On 9/1/05, Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
> Just thinking out loud here, but...
>
> The former is a way of thinking, an attitude; the
latter more a
> condition or atmosphere. Even in literature,
hard-boiled generally
> refers to the attitudes of the narrator or author;
the other more to
> the prevailing mood or tone.
>
> But assuming one would want to "be" noir, what would
a noir philosophy
> consist of? We're all fucked and we're all gonna die
so the hell with
> everything? In practice, it would seem like
pretentious, glib, and
> morally hollow cynicism, a quick cutting remark for
everything and an
> answer for nothing.
I'll take a stab at this, Kevin, realizing of course that wht
is noir and what is hard-boiled has been debated many times
on this mailing list.
>From what little I know, noir, as it applies to
literature, is a
relatively recent conceit (more recent even than the norion
of noir as it applies to film). I always thought that the
impetus for noir lit came about as a result of the resurgence
in popularity of the lurid paperbacks from the fifties, and
then applied basically to those novels that has that
subjective quality of sordidness that went the nth degree
beyond what Chandler and Hammett. Later, the term noir was
used to encompass the work of earlier writers like Horace
McCoy and James M. Cain.
I think noir and hard-boiled share those issues of attitude
and atmosphere, they aren't specific to one camp or the
other, particularly since the notion of noir in lit certainly
springs out of the hard-boiled school.
Having said all that, there is a fine line between noir and
nihilism.
"We're all fucked and we're all gonna die so the hell with
everything" isn't necessarily a noir theme, and very few
successful noir novels go that route (Jim Thompson, of
course, being an example). But the fact of the matter is that
bad people who do bad things end up with bad results. The
recounting of a noir tale doesn't necessarily equate to an
all-encompassing noir world view.
That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.
Tribe
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