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Re: RARA-AVIS: Michael Collins/Japanese hardboiled fiction
E J M. Duggan writes:
>Ah, but this is the 1990s, and 'noir' is a snappy term --- a loosely
>defined catchall with some cache.
>that you can already hear the poncey chat-show crowd with literary
>pretensions
>''Oh yeah, it's so Nu-wah in its am-be-yonce''
>[well, maybe Tony Parsons, anyway]
OK, perhaps. But, though I don't know Pronzini or his writing well, he
doesn't seem too big on literary pretension, and I don't think his free
use of the word "noir" in describing HB fiction is designed to impress
anyone. The intro to the collection is acutally very no-nonsense, very
helpful, and (as an English teacher I love this part) very clearly
written. Recommended.
====================== =========================================
Michael D. Sharp "My time-wasting abilities are legendary!
msharp@umich.edu If only I could harness them as a force
Department of English for good!" -- Shaun M. Strohmer
University of Michigan
On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, E J M. Duggan wrote:
> Michael David Sharp wrote:
> >
> >I don't think hardboiled and noir are interchangeable, but I think they
> > overlap. I would use noir to describe writing that concerns itself with
> > mental states/psychology, a sense of fear, alienation, anxiety, paranoia.
> > Harboiled refers (in my mind) to tone and attitude, to an idiomatic
> > writing that is relatively free of affect, clipped, terse, tough.
>
> I think this is a useful and meaningful distinction.
> It may be worth noting, as others have made similar points on this thread,
> that 'hardboiled' is or has been synonymous with 'tough' while noir clearly
> is not. Something certainly is 'borrowed' from the definition 'film noir'
> which, as MDS points up here, tends to be those interior mental states,
> characteristically alientation, paranoia and anxiety.
>
> >Lastly, I want to note that in Pronzini and Adrian's
> > *Hard-Boiled*, the editors frequently use "noir" to describe the HB
> world.
>
> Ah, but this is the 1990s, and 'noir' is a snappy term --- a loosely
> defined catchall with some cache.
> that you can already hear the poncey chat-show crowd with literary
> pretensions
> ''Oh yeah, it's so Nu-wah in its am-be-yonce''
> [well, maybe Tony Parsons, anyway]
>
> David Madden, however, writing before noir was a trendy term, uses
> 'hardboiled', 'tough' and 'toughguy' as synonyms or near synonyms in his
> introduction to *Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties*. I think it is also in
> Madden's introduction that he emphasises the proletarian aspect of this
> form. Perhaps the slippage toward 'noir' is also part of a general
> tendency towards the bourgoiseification of analytical discourse? (why use
> an anglosaxon term when there's a perfectly pretentious French one?)
>
> Also in *Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties* is a short essay by Benjamin
> Appel entitled 'Labels'. This, I'm sure, would be worth looking at in
> terms of the present thread --- my, um, *copy* of *TGWOTT* isn't so much a
> copy as a photocopy of a couple of the essays, so I don't have this to
> hand. From Madden's introduction, however, it would seem that Appel
> addresses a similar issue.
>
>
> Eddie Duggan
> -------------------------
> 'It would seem to me that Eric Ambler has fallen between
> two stools and that he has succumbed to a danger which
> afflicts all intellectuals who attempt to deal with thriller material.
> I know I have to fight it all the time.'
>
> Raymond Chandler to Bernice Baumgarten,
> 16th April 1951
> ----------------------------
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