But what about Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment? If it is
not the first noir novel, it is certainly a novel that
influenced ALL of the noir novelists as well as their
"serious" counterparts. Crime & Punishment is a herald of
the coming revolution. In it the middle class are depicted
has living 2 families to an apartment. Nothing can be more
pessimistic, nor have given Marxism in Russia a wider open
door.
--- Juri Nummelin <
juri.nummelin@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
> Jay:
>
> > I assume that novelists who can
> > be called noir, like Cain, McCoy,
Algren,
> Dahlberg, Fante, or
> > Benjamin Appel are not social reformers
or
> proletarian novelists
> inciting to
> > social change, and that social reformers
like
> James T Farrell,
> John Dos
> > Passos or Michael Gold, however much they
deal
> with evil, the
> criminal
> > underclass, and political corruption, cannot
be
> considered noir or
> > hardboiled. Does this distinction make
sense?
>
> I believe this is just what the Marxist
theorists
> meant when they
> said that this kind of gloomy,
pessimistic
> literature - or pessimism
> and nihilism themselves - cannot do good for
the
> mankind, but only
> makes the readers more passive toward the
society.
> It's essentially
> the same thing that Georg Lukacs said about
Franz
> Kafka.
>
> Hope I'm not opening Pandora's box again.
:)
>
> Juri
>
>
>
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