miker wrote:
"A gut-level feeling would place Willeford's WILD WIVES, even
though it was 1956, in with Woodrell's GIVE US A KISS, but
would class Ellroy's BLACK DAHLIA among the older. Like I
said, this is just a gut-level feeling. I can't really
explain the difference, except that maybe that fate seems to
be playing a bigger joke on the protagonist in the neo-noir.
But that doesn't hold a lot of water. That sorta ironic humor
is in the old stuff, too."
That's an interesting question, miker. Is there more to the
label
"neo-noir" than simply marking a generational divide? I think
there is, but I haven't given great thought to defining it
from within.
Just off the top of my head, though, I would certainly place
Ellroy's work, especially his historical works like Black
Dahlia in the neo-noir category. In my reading, Ellroy is
writing as much about the genre of noir as he is writing a
noir story. I think that's how I would distinguish the neo
from the noir, an author's examination of the genre while
working within it.
This goes beyond a simple awareness of the genre in which one
is writing/reading. You can be aware of the genre and use
that awareness to perfectly satisfy it or you can examine it.
Charles Willeford, James Sallis, Jack O'Connell, James
Crumley and, to a lesser extent, George Pelecanos, along with
many others are actively engaging many of the bedrock notions
of hardboiled literature -- ideas of manhood, doing what's
got to be done, uses and costs of violence, the role of the
loner, etc. Even Loren Estleman can be neo-noir to the degree
that he notes Amos Walker's most traditional attributes are
now anachronisms, that Walker is a man out of his time. Of
course, Altman's adaptation of The Long Goodbye takes this
notion even further.
I must admit that this idea of auteurs' awareness making for
a break is close to Jim D's claim that awareness brought the
death of film noir, with which I argued at length. The
difference is that I don't believe that noir died, but that
it split off. One of those splits is neo-noir. It's noir's
sometimes ungrateful bastard child.
Mark
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 27 Mar 2003 EST