The trick for me, or problem rather, with tracing the roots
of noir, is roughly parallel to the arguments tracing the
origins of science fiction back to Cyrano de Bergerac--or
worse, to the Greeks. Yes, their tales contained fabulous
adventures in the spheres or whatever, and yes, Cyrano wrote
about a voyage to the Moon...but was it sci-fi? I'm sure you
can trace film noir back to the origin of film-anything, and
thr idea of tragedy is as old as the Greeks, but what sane
person would actually argue that noir existed before, say,
the Twenties? How could it? Victorian Noir? It is to laugh. I
will say this: One definition of "poetry" is "anything that
you are point at when you use the term, if you are being
serious," and for "poetry" substitute "noir." That leaves a
lot of loose ends, and won't satisfy a lot of people, because
it's more an intuitive definition than a taxonomic one, but,
as the great sci-fi writer Ted Sturgeon loved to point out,
"Taxonomy is no substitute for understanding."
Don
Bruce Lee said it best -- WALK ON!
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