I finally read Stansberry's Noir Manifesto. I must say I was
impressed. And for pretty much the same reasons miker was
skeptical.
As for the supernatural in Poe, I think Stansberry was noting
that Poe's few works of ratiocination clearly take place in
the same world as the rest of his work, which is more
obviously concerned with the supernatural. And even a
detective's inductive reasoning contains leaps of faith and
intuition that go beyond the natural. For instance, I find it
very hard to think of a story where the murderer is an
escaped orangutan as a story of logic. No matter how logical
Dupin's thinking may have been in determining that, he had to
open his mind beyond the normal to even conceive of that
explanation.
However, I think focusing on Stansberry's use of the word
supernatural takes the focus off the essay's main
contribution, a need to replenish noir by rebuilding it from
the bottom up, which miker addresses:
"I was also skeptical about the idea of breaking away from
the shackles of the genre. That kind of talk always makes me
nervous. Literature has been stuck on one plot for thousands
of years, the struggle of man to prevail, and near as I can
tell, it's still a vital and viable story."
I certainly didn't get the impression that Stansberry was
claiming it wasn't "still a vital and viable story," just the
opposite. Instead, I took him as saying that too much of
current crime fiction puts more effort into meeting and
upholding strict genre conventions than with exploring the
struggle of the characters, is more interested in the plot
moving the characters along than in having the characters'
struggles move the plot.
And I think he chose good examples of books that break from
the straitjacket that genre conventions can become. For
instance, I doubt anyone would quibble with Denis Johnson's
Angels being called noir, under any of the definitions in our
recurring debate, but it seems to treat genre conventions as
a starting point, not an end point. The same could be said of
the other mentioned examples I have read, Auster's City of
Glass trilogy, Manchette's two books that have been
translated into English (damn, I wish someone would translate
more), and I'd add Marc Behm's Eye of the Beholder (is the
movie as bad as I've heard? I've steered clear of it), Derek
Raymond's Factory series, Jack O'Connell's Quinsigamond
series (does he have anything new on the horizon?), the best
of Ken Bruen, among others. These writers are not messing
with conventions for no reason, they just refuse to color
inside of the lines just because someone said they should.
And they're coming up with some very interesting pictures,
not just because they are using new angles, but because of
how those new angles offer a new perspective on and insight
into that old "vital and viable story."
Ironically, I don't think Stansberry's Confession, the only
thing I've read by him so far, succeeds in doing this. While
I certainly found it very readable, I did not find it
particularly deep, and certainly not transgressive. I thought
it rested on a fairly obvious gimmick that was better handled
in Dorothy Hughes's In a Lonely Place. Because of that, I was
very surprised by the controversy its award provoked. Why was
it thought unusual, even bad, to tell the story from that
perspective, especially since the character was never really
sympathetic?
Mark
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