Over the past couple years I've been delving back into older
literature looking for the origins and variations on the
themes I see in the hardboiled and noir genre. I started
chronologically by reading Gilgamesh and Beowulf, The Iliad
and Odyssey, several books of the Bible, and a buttload of
other great stuff.Some of it was just dazzling. Hell, most of
it was. After having White's Once and Future King as my major
source of the Arthurian legend, The Death Arthur was great.
They are almost all bastards and back stabbers, and the
blameless ones are the most screwed.
Then there were the two tales of Faust, each with their
own special twist on the story. I read a few Shakespeare
plays I hadn't got around to yet. As usual, the stories were
great but I could have done without some of the lofty
speeches. I finally worked my way up to American literature.
I have already posted here about Cooper's Last of the
Mohicans, with the first great American fictional hero. I
despised James's Turn of the Screw and I couldn't conjure up
a bit of respect for his instruction booklet on how to write
fiction. I loved Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables.
That's some dark-assed shit. I read Melville's magnificent
Moby Dick, Ahab for sure one of the most famous screwed
protagonists in American literature. I read some more of his
stuff but it didn't measure up to Moby Dick. I reread Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin and was a lot more impressed than the first
time. Uncle Tom is true to that old deordorant commercial. He
might die at the end, but you never see him sweat. Can't
really be noir, can it? Death without defeat. Twain's
Huckleberry Finn was a lot darker than I remembered, and
rereading it confirmed Hemingway's opinion that American
writing began with Twain. I finished The Virginian a few
weeks back. I commented heavily in the margins as I was
reading it and meant to get around to putting together some
thoughts on it but it hasn't happened. The main thing I
wanted to comment on was the variations I saw in the
Virginian as compared to Cooper's Natty Bumppo, and how that
related to the first hardboiled heroes of Daly and Hammett
and later Hemingway's code hero. I'll have to get around to
that one of these days.
I think a great topic worthy of discussion would be
literature that led up to the noir and hardboiled
genre.
miker
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