_After Dark, My Sweet_ is a very good counter-example. The note of personal redemption is very pronounced there. I could even make the case for _Maltese Falcon_ in light of Spade's insistence on personla integrity over all other concerns.
Lest I be misunderstood, when I use the word "redemption" I am not neccessarily referring to a religous connotation and certainly not to a "happy ending".
My concern is rather that the purposeful bleakness of some works.....I'll use the over-rated and rather ugly film _Memento_ as an example.....is just as false and cheap in it's own way as any number of contrived happy endings.
I can certainly think of writers who don't fall for this - Michael Connelly springs to mind- but there is drift in this direction. Ellroy, of course, can be one of the worst offenders as I think he was in the American Tabloid books.
Keri's quote from the Chandler essay was helpful and I can see that I, once again, need to revisit the whole piece.
James
----- Original Message -----
From: davezeltserman
To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 21:35
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Random Notes On Redemption
In Jim Thompson's "After Dark, My Sweet", Kid Collins achieves his own unique form of redemption, and I think most people would agree that that book fits solidly in the noir universe. I can think of also another noir book (at least a book that critics uniformly labeled as noir) all about the protagonist's quest for redemption, and his missteps along the way, as well as a number of small crimes...
--Dave
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Mark Sullivan <DJ-Anonyme@...> wrote:
>
>
> Just a question that popped into my head about redemption:
> Do characters have to be redeemed for a book to have a "quality of redemption"? Is it enough to have a book deal with characters who struggle with or strive for redemption? Even if a character openly rejects redemption or even its possibility, can't the book engage the idea? I guess what I'm asking is, can't a book in which characters fail to attain it still engage issues of redemption? Can't a book that shows a character making misstep after misstep away from "the light" act as a cautionary tale? Or can't there be a sense of "there but for the grace of God go I"? I haven't really thought this through, just tossing out some random thoughts, but it just occurs to me that redemption could be a structuring absence in noir.
> Mark
>
> > To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> > From: prosperena@...
> > Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 22:50:12 +0000
> > Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Random Notes On Redemtion
> >
> > James, your thoughts on this question are timely as they are related to the recent posts on the origin of Chandler's "mean streets."
> >
> > The sentences immediately preceding the "But down these mean streets a man must go..." passage in "The Simple Art of Murder" are: "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man."
> >
> > We can see Chandler wrestled with this issue in his fiction as he tried to balance hard-boiled elements with that certain "quality of redemption."
> >
> > This quality of redemption is important to me when I read hard-boiled and noir fiction but I wouldn't care to argue with other readers for whom it is not important. But I think Chandler's contention can be used to bolster arguments with those who say that hard-boiled/noir fiction is nothing but "genre junk."
> >
> > Kari E. Johnson
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------
> >
> > RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Sep 2009 EDT