<<Noir, as Mario observes, is more pessimistic. In my
view it carries
on the kind of fatalism that literary naturalism can
represent. One
can't rise above the environment: we get stories of straight
arrows who
are bent, and bent arrows who live quite well, unless or
until they are
caught. And if they are caught, it's because (to change
metaphors in
mid-paragraph) they didn't play the "game" well
enough.>>
The connection with naturalism is, I think, a valid one. If
you look at
the work of Zola and later writers like Pagnol and Giono, for
example,
you see stories that could well have been written by Thompson
or Goodis
(in a more direct style, perhaps, but in a similar spirit).
And even
Galdos's _Tristana_ has a noir air to it, which Bu=F1uel
exploited
brilliantly in his film. And let's face it, noir usually
involves
melodrama, just like a lot of naturalistic fiction. This is
far less
often the case in hardboiled fiction.
Regards,
Mario Taboada
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