At 03:42 AM 10/04/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Parker doesn't amke moral choices because he
never
>considers the moral ramifications of any actions
he
>takes. His only concern is how any decision he
makes
>will benefit him.
Isn't that a moral decision? Perhaps not what we'd consider a
"good" moral decision, though I suspect that it is good in
the sense that it works for Parker.
>In any case, Bill said that what
distinguished
>hard-boiled from the other pulp genres was
that
>hard-boiled more concerned with morality. I
don't
>think that's inherently more true of hard-boiled
crime
>fiction that it is of, say, the western or
the
>swashbuckler or the military/war story. Or even,
for
>that matter, the cozy or traditional
mystery.
Yes, other genres deal with moral issues too, though
sometimes they do not. I doubt that romance or horror deal
with moral issues very much at all, though they can and do at
times.
But this is a defining characteristic for noir. Sometimes
noir stories may hypothesize good or bad moral choices,
popular or unpopular choices; they may suggest confusion in
the face of such choices or satirize the fact that people
feel compelled to make such choices, but given the accepted
(on this list at least- and who the hell else is crazy enough
to endlessly argue these points?) instigation for the genre
as the search for codes of behaviour in response to the
experience of war, how can we possibly define it
otherwise?
I mean come-on Jim, when you say "dark and sinister," are you
talking only about the weather?
Kerry
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