So Who Has Time to Read? Mediterranean Blue-Collar Noir, Part 2

Abstract

N oir is, first of all, a style. In film it manifests itself in the dark shadows, odd visual angles, and extreme contrasts similar to those of German expressionist film. In fact, the argument has been made that American film noir was at least partially, if not largely, the result of the presence of expatriate directors, like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger. Alfred Hitchcock’s early training in film was in Germany. In fiction, noir was a style even before it was known as noir. Usually called “hardboiled ” to refer to the main character , the prose is blunt, ironic, and tough. It emulates the language of the streets. As early as 1886, Mark Twain referred to U. S. Grant’s “hardboiled grammar.”1 Students of Latin often see the hard-boiled in Caesar’s blunt history of the Gallic Wars. As Raymond Chandler explained it, his hero “talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”2 But noir is more than style. The style is inseparable from the worldview it brings with it. Life is tougher than any prose that attempts to emulate it. Human beings are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. If God exists, he isn’t paying attention . Destiny is replaced by inevitability , by the irony of individuals bringing about their own destruction because of their very nature. “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself,” Marlowe says in The Long Goodbye. Yet noir lacks the tragic nobility of mankind accepting all that the gods can dish out. Noir is about what life, in its randomness, can dish out, about how a person reacts to events. And how do they react? According to their natures. This relates the literary ancestry of noir to the determinism of naturalism . Frank Chambers of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Walter Huff of Double Indemnity (1936) are very much the descendants of Laurent in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). The brutal Moose Malloy of Farewell, My Lovely (1940) carries the DNA of Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899). It is an interesting nugget of cultural history that the naturalistic, grim view of life that noir presents should take hold in what is usually thought of as can-do America. Perhaps its spirit became more prevalent as the result of the helplessness brought on by the Depression and the experience of two world wars. This glimpse of universal darkness, however, eventually proves too much to live with as the hard-boiled softens in the 1950s and 1960s. The private eye becomes heroic in the ways So Who Has Time to Read? Mediterranean Blue-collar Noir, Part 2 photo: The Postman Always Rings Twice – Michael Kain Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis November–December 2013 • 9 Crime&Mystery international 10 worldliteraturetoday.org that Chandler defines him at the end of “The Simple Art of Murder” and then evolves into a redemptive urban version of the strong-jawed hero in westerns. In the rest of the world, noir has tended to cling to the darker view implicit in the interwar period. It says much about today’s sense of destiny and justice in society that noir dominates the cutting edge of crime fiction. In an interesting time in which crime is on the decline in the industrial world, the bestseller lists are bulging with crime writing. In a recent blog in the Guardian, Adrian McKinty argued that crime writing was playing a role akin to what punk did for rock and roll in the 1970s.3 Punk swept out the dry and conventional music. Crime writing, he says, is shaking up literature, putting it in the streets and out of the universities and drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie that controls what is anointed serious literature. Among the most influential crime writers supposedly initiating this revolution is French author Jean-Claude Izzo. He died in 2000, only fifty-five years old, but is credited with having begun the “Mediterranean noir” movement, a transnational and cross-language style that is said to include writers from Italy, like...