I support most of the declaration Ed Gorman made here on
noir. His directions are the good ones to try to put words
together to describe "noir".
I always, and I suppose I'm not the only one, considered that
a noir novel is noir first by the level of existential point
of view it carries, found in the characters, in the setup or
in the look the author has on the world as described in his
novel.
On the other hand, I saw rather often in the Anglo-Saxon
analyses and comments about noir literature a confusion
between existential and
"existentialism"; the problem is that "existentialism" is
also the name of a philosophical current of the 20th century,
with many variations. By saying existential we stay one step
above, as -evidently
-"existentialism" is only one way of treating the existential
problems. To make it short: it does not have to be
"existentialist" (in the modern philosophical sense) to be
existential ( a broader sense). Therefore Camus, Sartre,
Gabriel Marcel, and other "existentialists"
(mainly in Europe) are not the necessary references for
describing or giving a definition of Noir. Even if some of
them expressed their admiration for the then emerging
American "romans noirs" including some of the mystery/crime
genre, even if some short stories by Sartre are real noir lit
(see "Le mur"and other stories).
I think that existential is one of the key factor of roman
noir. And of film noir. So, "existential hero" is a good
start.
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www;geocities.com/Athens/6384
Polar Noir http://www.geocities.com/polarnoir
ejgorman99@aol.com a 飲it:
>I always assumed that the phrase "existential hero"
was an apt description of
>noir protagonists. But I recently read a piece about
Sartre who, it turns
>out, felt that existentilism was often a philosphy of
joy and liberation.
>
>I think a lot of this present discussion about noir
makes it sound as if noir
>is the only possible (or legitimate) way to look at
the world. A piece in the
>London Sunday Times a few months ago made the point
that too much
>contemporary crime writing makes a "fetish" out of
grimness for its own sake. I agree.
>It's like the old John Candy-Eugene Levy SCT
hillbilly movie critics who judged
>all films by how many explosions were in them.
"Blowed it up real good!" if
>you recall. Darkness for its own sake strikes me as a
form of arrested
>adolescance. Life is too complicated and too
ambiguous to be reduced to "darkness."
>
>Ed Gorman
>
>
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