A friend with whom I had lunch today portrayed the situation
thus: the old noir novels grew in sync with existentialism,
whereas the neonoir crowd has grown out of a much deeper
alienation: the alienation of the consumer, the alienation of
the worker, the alienation of the voter, the alienation of
the family-bereft, the alienation of the lover... lots of
alienations wanting to be vented. He remarked that the
depictions of extreme violence signifies, to him, some sort
of sublimation of that mass of feelings, all of them
frustrating. The form this literature takes is quite
different from existentialist noir. It is closer to the
Mickey Spillane school of hardboiled.
I convey this as another point of view, not necessarily mine
(of late, I am not much into noir literature or hardboiled
literature, though I do think the three noir novels that
Catalan master novelist Manuel de Pedrolo produced should be
known in other languages. Joc brut (Dirty play), in
particular, should be known internationally.
And speaking of Pedrolo, in one his novels he spends about 30
pages on an operation being carried out on a woman, in which
scores of surgeons, nurses and onlookers proceed to take her
apart, or pieces of her, in fact torturing her until she
dies. It reminded me of what we have been discussing here. It
is horrifying, and the entire novel, a futuristic nightmare,
grows out of this. Pedrolo carries it off because of his
supreme mastery... a lesser writer would have lost the reader
already, I think.
Best,
MrT
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