At 08:14 PM 30/08/2006 -0400, you wrote:
>You may be right about our running into semantic
differences. In fact,
>that's why I steered away from the use of the word
"moral," since even
>though I know Kerry was using it in the more general,
"norms and mores"
>sense of the word, I have trouble separating it from
ideas of religion,
>which is not what we're talking about.
I know what you mean, but my point would be that they can't
be separated. A culture's ideas of what's normal behaviour is
linked to it's idea of what is moral behaviour. What we now
term as "crazy" for instance, might have been termed
"possessed" just a couple of centuries ago, denoting a direct
moral valuation. Cultures evolve. In this case, crazy and
possessed both denote abnormal behaviour, but other cultures
found different ways to deal with this stuff, which in turn
suggests a different concept of moral bahaviour. In jazz
culture, "crazy" became good- something different from the
norm, a new direction for the music, is a positive. In other
circles, usually a politicized underground culture, crazy may
be deemed the only rational response in a world gone mad. All
these perceptions suggest a valuation which would come from a
moral outlook, and vice versa. Moral as in involving a
decision about what is good or bad, not moral as in making
the right decision.
To go back to the beginning of this line, these are different
"truths" to which readers would compare the fictions they
read or heard when making decisions about the story's reality
or relevancy. Different strokes.
Miker said:
"I'd say that what is implicit about good and evil in noir is
not one against the other (although I don't rule it out), but
good intertwined with evil."
Yeah. The way I like to put it is that good does not
transcend evil, at least not in noir. This is a change of
direction in cultural assumptions and western literature, I
think, which is why I always felt discussion about what is or
isn't implicit in noir fiction to be worthy of consideration.
Yes it should be entertaining, but there IS a subtext
too.
What does it mean that good does not transcend evil? What are
the implications for a society that organizes itself this
way? Why do we even look at things from the point of view of
good or evil?
To me, that's where the issue of reality lies in this genre,
and not necessarily because characters are street tough or
use words like "dese",
"dem" or "dose." Or whatever.
I think that's what Stansberry meant when he said the genre
had stalled, to some extent, in a kind of nostalgic reverence
(my words), which calls out for a new direction, citing the
existentialist European noir as an example of one such
direction. The world is full of competing realities,
competing views of life, and communications technologies
being what they are, we see new, and generally surprising
evidence of this almost weekly. Most recent might be the
evidence of home-grown, Islamic terrorists, or at least
people deemed to be this. Or it might be something like
somebody using society's almost reflexive response to child
abduction to earn attention and first-class airfare home from
Thailand. Well, what writers will write about is what
interests them. I'm just noting some of the fictions I'd like
to collaborate with by reading. Then again, when I read this
stuff in the news, I sometimes feel that I already am.
Where's my point? Oh yeah: Noir fiction is a strong
framework, point-of-view, or set of moral assumptions, well
suited to examining this, or these phenomena. Much as I like
Kevin, and I do, I don't want to restrict noir to his, or any
overly familiar assumptions about reality.
Something like that, Kerry
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The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
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