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Re: RARA-AVIS: Michael Collins/Japanese hardboiled fiction
Michael David Sharp wrote:
>
>I don't think hardboiled and noir are interchangeable, but I think they
> overlap. I would use noir to describe writing that concerns itself with
> mental states/psychology, a sense of fear, alienation, anxiety, paranoia.
> Harboiled refers (in my mind) to tone and attitude, to an idiomatic
> writing that is relatively free of affect, clipped, terse, tough.
I think this is a useful and meaningful distinction.
It may be worth noting, as others have made similar points on this thread,
that 'hardboiled' is or has been synonymous with 'tough' while noir clearly
is not. Something certainly is 'borrowed' from the definition 'film noir'
which, as MDS points up here, tends to be those interior mental states,
characteristically alientation, paranoia and anxiety.
>Lastly, I want to note that in Pronzini and Adrian's
> *Hard-Boiled*, the editors frequently use "noir" to describe the HB
world.
Ah, but this is the 1990s, and 'noir' is a snappy term --- a loosely
defined catchall with some cache.
that you can already hear the poncey chat-show crowd with literary
pretensions
''Oh yeah, it's so Nu-wah in its am-be-yonce''
[well, maybe Tony Parsons, anyway]
David Madden, however, writing before noir was a trendy term, uses
'hardboiled', 'tough' and 'toughguy' as synonyms or near synonyms in his
introduction to *Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties*. I think it is also in
Madden's introduction that he emphasises the proletarian aspect of this
form. Perhaps the slippage toward 'noir' is also part of a general
tendency towards the bourgoiseification of analytical discourse? (why use
an anglosaxon term when there's a perfectly pretentious French one?)
Also in *Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties* is a short essay by Benjamin
Appel entitled 'Labels'. This, I'm sure, would be worth looking at in
terms of the present thread --- my, um, *copy* of *TGWOTT* isn't so much a
copy as a photocopy of a couple of the essays, so I don't have this to
hand. From Madden's introduction, however, it would seem that Appel
addresses a similar issue.
Eddie Duggan
-------------------------
'It would seem to me that Eric Ambler has fallen between
two stools and that he has succumbed to a danger which
afflicts all intellectuals who attempt to deal with thriller material.
I know I have to fight it all the time.'
Raymond Chandler to Bernice Baumgarten,
16th April 1951
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