Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Noir is not for everybody

From: E.Borgers ( webeurop@yahoo.fr)
Date: 02 Oct 2005


I support most of the declaration Ed Gorman made here on noir. His directions are the good ones to try to put words together to describe "noir".

I always, and I suppose I'm not the only one, considered that a noir novel is noir first by the level of existential point of view it carries, found in the characters, in the setup or in the look the author has on the world as described in his novel.

On the other hand, I saw rather often in the Anglo-Saxon analyses and comments about noir literature a confusion between existential and
"existentialism"; the problem is that "existentialism" is also the name of a philosophical current of the 20th century, with many variations. By saying existential we stay one step above, as -evidently
-"existentialism" is only one way of treating the existential problems. To make it short: it does not have to be "existentialist" (in the modern philosophical sense) to be existential ( a broader sense). Therefore Camus, Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and other "existentialists"
(mainly in Europe) are not the necessary references for describing or giving a definition of Noir. Even if some of them expressed their admiration for the then emerging American "romans noirs" including some of the mystery/crime genre, even if some short stories by Sartre are real noir lit (see "Le mur"and other stories).

I think that existential is one of the key factor of roman noir. And of film noir. So, "existential hero" is a good start.

E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www;geocities.com/Athens/6384 Polar Noir http://www.geocities.com/polarnoir

ejgorman99@aol.com a 飲it:

>I always assumed that the phrase "existential hero" was an apt description of
>noir protagonists. But I recently read a piece about Sartre who, it turns
>out, felt that existentilism was often a philosphy of joy and liberation.
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>I think a lot of this present discussion about noir makes it sound as if noir
>is the only possible (or legitimate) way to look at the world. A piece in the
>London Sunday Times a few months ago made the point that too much
>contemporary crime writing makes a "fetish" out of grimness for its own sake. I agree.
>It's like the old John Candy-Eugene Levy SCT hillbilly movie critics who judged
>all films by how many explosions were in them. "Blowed it up real good!" if
>you recall. Darkness for its own sake strikes me as a form of arrested
>adolescance. Life is too complicated and too ambiguous to be reduced to "darkness."
>
>Ed Gorman
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