A.N. Smith writes:
<< I'm glad you mentioned this, as I am taking a
graduate seminar on the Gothic
novel right now, and had the same thought about pulp
and noir being so
closely aligned. The professor said about my thought,
"To equate pulp with
gothic is to do violence to both terms." Which I think
is a pretty awful
thing to say. Gothic and noir share so many elements,
but because of the
"feminization" of gothic early on, they sort of laughed
my comments off, as
they were moreinterested in talking about gender issues
and historical
perspective in defining what gothic is. So, where I
thought I was going to
enjoy the class, it seems now I've been chastised for
bringing up the noir
aspect I so looked forward to exploring. >>
The lesson here is that graduate school cuts into one's time
for reading and profitable thought. All right, I'm ready to
uncloset my academic trappings and take on this professor guy
(or woman). A few things and then a loop back to harboiled:
As I recall, Gothic has a sharply defined genre history
(beginning in 1764 with Castle of Otranto); the genre as
genre was identifiable enough to be well parodied by Jane
Austen in Northanger Abbey. Noir on the other hand seems to
be a term of mood that has come into use in the 20th-century,
but might be applied to, say, Macbeth. I'm curious when
"pulp" was first used to describe the cheap magazines
themselves (that usage is not in the old OED); I misuse the
word, I believe (in a way that is becoming acceptable from
use), by calling paperback originals of the 1950s,
"pulp novels." Now back to the matter at hand, hardboiled.
One geneology would be to look at pulps, especially "Weird
Tales" type stuff, but also hardboiled, in another vein, as
coming through Poe (with forgotten intermediaries like George
Lippard, who incidentally wrote about corrupt society in a
way reminiscent of the hardboiled). Poe wrote Gothicky stuff,
surely, and also those detective stories (and the Gothic
always had those investigative questions--what's behind the
locked door, what was that body with the worms). Hardboiled
tales are not of course Sherlock Holmes/Dupin affairs, but we
do want to find out (at least a bit, sometimes) who did the
murder (or that question serves as a McGuffin to drive the
plot). Poe himself was inspired by and stole from many,
including Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote--you heard it
here first--the first American murder mystery in which an
amateur detective investigates the murder of his friend. This
novel, Edgar Huntly (1799) also quite, deliberately takes
from the Gothic tradition (Brown says so himself and uses the
word "Gothic"). Thus, Brown, Poe, Hard-boiled/Weird Tales
pulp; Gothic/Detection/Hard-boiled pulp. QED.
--The other Doug
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Feb 2000 EST