Roman Noir Research Articles

Adultère by Yves Ravey

Reviewed by: Adultère by Yves Ravey Edward Ousselin Yves Ravey Adultère Paris. Minuit. 2021. 140 pages. YVES RAVEY HAS been writing well-received novels and plays since 1989. His seventeenth novel demonstrates once again that he is one of the best living representatives of le roman noir, the literary counterpart to film noir. In the United States, his work could be likened to the genre of the hard-boiled detective novels written by Dashiell Hammett and others. In France, Ravey is often compared to the master of detective novels, Georges Simenon, although he has not produced a recurring character who would be comparable to Simenon’s Commissaire Maigret. Adultery is ostensibly the motive and the driving force that leads to a sordid murder in Ravey’s latest novel. In this short [End Page 78] narrative, the author once again describes in detail the actions of his characters, while providing little in the way of introspection or insight into their private thoughts. In a small nondescript town, Jean Seghers, the owner of a failing service station, is mainly concerned that his wife seems to be having an affair with a friend (and sometime business partner) of his. As it turns out, she is, but with another man. In Adultère, the traditional plot elements of a roman noir—the love triangle, the femme fatale, the vengeful husband, and the murder victim—are less important than the weight of the gloomy atmosphere that envelops the banal characters and their dreary urban environment. Seghers, the main character, remains strangely passive, indeed often submissive, as his marriage and his business slowly but steadily collapse around him. His unexpected outburst of violence is therefore all the more shocking, as is the sudden and tersely reported plot twist that closes the narrative. Despite having resorted to drastic measures, Seghers is not a changed man afterward. He continues to be the drab, withdrawn, unassertive character whom others can easily ignore or scorn. Ravey’s writing builds up the tension between the various characters by successive but slight degrees. The contrast between his minimalist style and the level of anguish endured (or callousness exhibited) by some of the characters provides a particularly vivid reading experience. The same can be said for the disparity between the carefully constructed banality of his novels’ settings and characters and the sophistication of his dramatic storytelling. Like the best of his predecessors in the noir genre, Ravey conveys complex, powerful emotions by means of an austere, pared-down literary technique. If he were a film director, he could be compared to Alfred Hitchcock. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Brazilian Literature as World Literature

Brazilian Literature as World Literature

Translation Jousts and Translation Genres

The Quais du polar book festival in Lyon is more than a site of commerce. Instead, the category of the polar, which brings together the mystery and roman noir, reveals the potential to destabilize literary hierarchies, foreground translation, and transform the role of place in a globalized genre. Using the insights of Lawrence Venuti, Benoît Tadié and Luc Boltanski, this essay examines how, within the polar category and in the context of the festival, foreignizing translations may upend linguistic and cultural hierarchies and transform genre categories. The communal and local experience of festivals events, its rewriting of southern American authors, and its reframing of the role of readers and translators all reveal the transformative potential of the polar and its cultural reception.

Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps by Michèle Vallenthini

Reviewed by: Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps by Michèle Vallenthini Olivier Delers Vallenthini, Michèle. Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps. Garnier, 2019. ISBN 978-2-406-06901-0. Pp. 512. Vallenthini offers an in-depth study of three historical novels written by the Marquis de Sade towards the end of his life while he was confined at the Charenton mental asylum. Sade started drafting La marquise de Gange in 1806 and published it in 1812, around the same time when he began work on Adélaïde de Brunswick and Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, two works that only became available in print in the twentieth century. These novels have generally received limited critical attention. Scholars have considered them tame in comparison to earlier works and have argued that Sade might have given in to the pressures of censorship in the Napoleonic era in an attempt to be recognized as a true homme de lettres. Perhaps because of that, Vallenthini takes great pain to situate Sade's historical novels within the context of his life, of his rich literary production, and of the historical transformations that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is a successful strategy: Sade dans l'histoire is also an engaging histoire de Sade, highly accessible to non-specialists, and structured in such a way that it is easy to focus on specific aspects of Sade's articulation of history and time. In her detailed analysis of his major works (Les 120 journées de Sodome, Aline et Valcour, and the Justine and Juliette series), Vallenthini argues that Sade has always been deeply interested in depicting the violence of history. Controlling and managing time are defining characteristics of the libertine's experience. This translates into both highly structured sexual scenes and characters who are able to adapt easily to shifting temporalities. Vallenthini offers a narratological reading of Sade's three historical novels that in turn focuses on plot, characters, time, space, and style. While the analysis can feel formulaic and repetitive at times, the rich close readings give a clear sense of the originality of each work and show what they have in common. The Sadean historical novel provides a disillusioned assessment of the Enlightenment at the same time as it introduces new intellectual concepts in a style that corresponds to the literary culture of the period. The aesthetic heterogeneity of the three works (with elements of the roman noir, roman sensible, roman troubadour, and roman picaresque) can be explained by the fact that fiction had to adapt to successive political regimes in a short period of time. Like Chateaubriand, Constant, and Staël, Sade uses first-person narration to depict his characters as prisoners of time. At the same time, his novels clearly betray "la peur obsessionnelle de l'aliénation" and "le malaise existentiel qui est celui de sa génération" (311). Sade's last three novels are asking universal questions but also expressing personal distress. They belong to a larger literary movement that seeks to digest the French Revolution and its aftermath and that precedes the new types of historical novels heralded by Walter Scott and the rise of history as an autonomous, scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. [End Page 216] Olivier Delers University of Richmond (VA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of the Holocaust1 Alan Morris As might be expected of a Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano stands out from the crowd. His œuvre is highly personal, and highly literary, thanks to its distinctive interplay of “fiction et diction” (Genette 2004). With each successive text, the same basic universe returns, albeit with slight variations. Typically, an autodiegetic narrator—the novelist’s ludically fictionalized, and sometimes autofictional, alter ego—embarks on a quest back into the past, because a now-distant event, or an abiding mystery, continues to impact upon the present. Revisiting once familiar sites (usually in Paris), this protagonist recalls (or occasionally imagines) old experiences, and seeks to preserve, through writing, the little that can still be saved from oblivion. Themes such as identity, difference, loss, remembrance, and forgetfulness predominate; characters and character types recur; a plethora of genres (biography, the historical novel, the roman noir, the love story, amongst others) intermingle; there is a constant va-et-vient between the real and the invented; and temporal levels collapse into a “présent éternel” (mirroring the workings of memory). Stylistically, a self-aware use of intertexts shows that literary creativity subtends the retrospection; the narrative combines with a meta-narrative, undermining any suspension of disbelief; and circularity proliferates, all of which reinforces the lack of final resolution, and ensures that each text is irrevocably non-totalizing. Incapable of being shoehorned into established categories, l’œuvre modianesque is, in a word, unique. Against this general backdrop, the present article will explore Modiano’s relationship to the Holocaust, in order to situate him vis-à-vis his peers, the members of “the second generation” or “those who come after” the Shoah,2 and to assess the extent to which he falls into, or remains detached from, this recognizable group of writers. More particularly, the analysis [End Page 13] which follows will have three broad centres of attention: firstly, Modiano’s family background; secondly, his writing; and finally, the question of how well or how poorly his writing reflects the Nazis’ attempted genocide. However, not all of his texts will be considered. He currently has a total of twenty-eight major works behind him, so the spotlight will be trained principally, but by no means entirely, on the two parts of his œuvre which seem to reveal the most about his treatment of the Holocaust, that is to say his first three novels and Dora Bruder. From this targeted, but nonexclusive, focus, it will emerge that, in his depiction of World War Two, Modiano’s aforementioned uniqueness is once again to the fore. He will be seen to be a second-generation, post-Shoah novelist who is haunted by the Occupation, but who, on the whole, and with the glaring exception of Dora Bruder, barely talks about the Holocaust at all. At first glance, Patrick Modiano appears to be a typical author “who comes after,” for he too is marked by the belatedness and the legacy of absence that commentators such as Marianne Hirsch and Eva Hoffman (on the second generation), and Susan Rubin Suleiman (on the 1.5 generation), see as characteristic of these writers. Born on 30 July 1945, of a Belgian, Flemish-speaking actress (Luisa Colpeyn) and a Paris-born Sephardic Jew (Albert Modiano), he did not live through the war years, so experiences them as a hole. Yet as he discloses in his most profoundly autobiographical text, Un pedigree, he believes these years, and especially the unwholesome period of the Occupation, to be fundamental to his inheritance: “le terreau—ou le fumier—d’où je suis issu” (20). Unlike many mothers and fathers of “those who come after,” Albert Modiano was not deported during the war, but this did not mean that, as he was growing up, Patrick had first-hand sources to inform him about the early 1940s. He was neglected by his parents, and regularly entrusted to a host of other people and to boarding schools all over France (from which he would often run away).3 This sense of solitude and upheaval was subsequently increased by an event that was to taint his life and his future writing—the...

Dwelling in La ciudad ausente: Piglia, Heidegger and Literary Experience

Dwelling in La ciudad ausente: Piglia, Heidegger and Literary Experience Erik Larson Noir detective fiction is a clear literary corollary to Heideggerian Being-in-the-world. Rather than privilege the abstract thought of the Cartesian tradition, Heidegger emphasizes our gut know-how as we navigate and interact with our environs, not unlike the detective of film noir who follows his instincts while maneuvering through an urban underworld. For Heidegger, thought coexists with phenomenological experience. It has less to do with rational interpretation and more to do with a “care” for our surroundings, or the “world” into which we are thrown. Heidegger emphasizes the very condition that allows one to exist with and through the object, to be with other entities and engage with them. This is similar to the anti-hero of film and roman noir, whose physical attraction to the femme fatale is the point of departure of any case, not to mention his affective and material liabilities to other gangsters. And, like Marlowe, whose union with Los Angeles is of an almost mystical nature, attuned as he is to the very heart beat of the city, Heidegger’s phenomenology is an experience of space as one is there, in the world, practicing with it. Ricardo Piglia, whose novel La ciudad ausente (1992) will be the focal point of this essay, presents a similar reading of the North American novela negra. Piglia claims that the detective is viscerally thrown into the action: “en la novela negra no parece haber otro criterio de verdad que la experiencia: el investigador se lanza, ciegamente, al encuentro de los hechos, se deja llevar por los acontecimientos y su investigación produce fatalmente nuevos crímenes; una cadena de acontecimientos cuyo efecto es el descubrimiento, el desciframiento” (Crítica y ficción 68). As we move to Piglia’s own literary noir novels, it would seem that this experiential, material component is utterly absent. According to Idelber Avelar, for example, “Literature for Piglia has little to do with experience, if one takes experience as the anecdotal content of a personal trajectory, the mass of lived moments in all their banality. In a word, literature’s material is not experience as Erlebnis, lo vivido, the raw collection of empirie” (100). However, if we place Piglia’s novels into the hardboiled world of deception and subterfuge, we can identify a kind of experience within the very slippage of language and interpretation. This said, experience and interaction with the surrounding world continue to underlie novels like La ciudad ausente, Nombre falso (1975) or Respiración artificial (1980), but they occur through textuality. Whether through the stolen identities, the double agents, or the cracked mirror reflections, the author teases out [End Page 2] the textual play that is ubiquitous in the noir tradition and brings it to the fore in his own work. Thus, he is able to posit a distinct form of Being-in-the-world, one that is made possible by inhabiting apocryphal, false and alternative narratives.1 While representation seems to take a back seat within Heidegger’s project, Piglia’s work shows us that representation and text can actually heighten our experience of the surrounding world. Inhabiting a strange text discloses other angles of praxis, conspiracies and complots, and thus reveals other corners of being that could otherwise go unnoticed. For example, in “Un pez en el hielo,” Renzi views Turin through the lens of Cesar Pavese’s diary. In La ciudad ausente, Junior, Elena, and Macedonio are colonized by relatos ajenos that cue them into an “absent city” within the city. If Being-in-the-World is for Heidegger a mode of dwelling that is attuned to those zones outside of traditional Cartesian thought, Piglia’s work signals such experience through the simulacra and foreign narratives that shift one’s perception and material engagement with their milieu. As we will see in this essay, the act of inhabiting alternate storylines and simulacra becomes a mode of “being” in La ciudad ausente. In his seminal work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger ambitiously sought to reposition the whole of western philosophy away from the central consideration of thought, onto what precedes mental activity: the fundamental...

Balzac, fictions génétiques. Par Pierre Laforgue

This subtle, sophisticated, often witty, and consistently fascinating study is an outstanding contribution to Balzac studies. Pierre Laforgue follows Nicole Mozet in challenging the hegemony of the ‘final’ version of the Comédie humaine but denies priority to any single state of the text, instead locating the significance of Balzac’s writing in its perpetual fluidity. Starting from the author’s discernible slips (including the Freudian, appositely considered diegetically in relation to Étude de femme), errors, anachronisms, incompatible ‘facts’, contradictions, demonstrable absurdities, and abrupt descents into fictional extravagance, these examples of ‘disfonctionnements’ (p. 14) are seen as indicative of a constantly shifting creation, a perpetual locus of tension, paradox, and aporia. There emerges from Laforgue’s fine attention to genetic detail an unprecedented sense of the way individual works incorporate both traces of discarded versions and awareness of new possibilities that, if fully implemented (an impossibility in view of the constraints of the already written), would constitute a considerable redefinition of focus. The text thus becomes an uneasy compromise between actualization and the virtual that is, nonetheless, impregnated with plurality of meaning. This is demonstrated with justifiable conviction in the case of the elliptical La Grenadière and the contorted genesis of La Femme de trente ans that leads to an unresolvable contradiction in the attempt to have six separate stories crystallize in the form of a novel. (The first part of Illusions perdues is shown as less intractable to such generic transformation.) Balzac’s writing is seen also to traverse the boundaries between individual texts, revealing ‘des points communs de nature génétique’ (p. 16). These are especially visible in works produced in close temporal proximity, which, at the non-enunciated level of their ‘deep structures’ (not Laforgue’s term), present unexpected continuity at the level of the writing itself. This allows Le Lys dans la vallée to be seen both as conte drolatique and as genetically related to La Fille aux yeux d’or. Particularly valuable is the demonstration of Balzac’s struggle to accommodate the exigencies of fictional form and, in the face of defeat, his recourse (as in Ferragus) to an ironical treatment of the clichés of the roman noir. Laforgue also delivers a mortal blow to characters viewed as examples of ‘une entité constituée en elle-même’ (p. 38). They are understood here not in terms of the surface narrative, but in relation to their function and textuality. Thus, the subject of Le Père Goriot is not the title character, but paternity, which licenses a view of the novel as ‘fathered’ by Lord Dudley. An interlude, nonetheless tightly linked to Laforgue’s perspective, offers an illuminating consideration of François Truffaut’s reference to Le Lys dans la vallée in Les Baisers volés (1969). The concluding discussion proposes a novel analysis of the eponymous wild ass’s skin as ‘text’. Laforgue wears his knowledge of the Comédie humaine lightly. (His own slips and omissions are mostly venial, although he has the Pauline of La Peau de chagrin become Raphaël’s wife, p. 78.) A companion volume pursuing the wider implications of these specific case studies would nonetheless be equally welcome.

Noir (Masculine Noun)

This article examines how the preeminent leftist crime writer of 1970s France, Jean-Patrick Manchette, engaged with the Delonian archetype of criminal masculinity. By drawing out hitherto overlooked ways Manchette’s last novel, The Prone Gunman (La position du tireur couche), was in dialogue with both Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime films (notably Le samourai [The Samurai]) and with a broader tradition of Anglophone crime film and fiction, the article argues for the importance of masculinity to understanding Manchette’s efforts to radicalize the roman noir (crime novel) and subvert from within the hypermasculine thriller. Indeed, the transnational filiations and appropriations that inform works like The Prone Gunman and Le samourai demonstrate the need to conceptualize both gender and genre in broader contexts than they have often been given in studies of French crime fiction. While this article is primarily a study of noir in the French context, it is concerned more broadly with the question how the reception of Manchette’s work might allow us to measure the progress that has (or has not) been made toward regendering or ungendering crime fiction.

Envoyée spéciale: Revisiting Return in Jean Echenoz

This article proposes a reevaluation of Jean Echenoz’s fiction, with a particular emphasis on the “return to the story” that Echenoz is often taken to exemplify. After carefully tracing the numerous allusions to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s romans noirs in Echenoz’s Envoyée spéciale (2016), I argue that Echenoz’s prototypically postmodernist metafictional strategies (or micropractices of “return”) suggest the need to revise our (literary) historical narratives about the “contemporary” period. Revisiting “return” today thus sheds new light on how Echenoz’s novels position themselves in relation to paraliterary genres (the roman noir, the espionage novel) and aesthetic categories (realism, modernism, postmodernism).

A Japanese-American Sam Spade: The Metaphysical Detective in Death in Little Tokyo, by Dale Furutani

AbstractThe aim of this essay is to discuss the legacy of the roman noir in contemporary detective fiction produced outside the hegemonic center of power, here represented by the novel Death in Little Tokyo (1996), written by Japanese-American author Dale Furutani. Starting from the concept of the metaphysical detective (Haycraft 76; Holquist 153-156), characterized by deep questioning about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality and the limits of knowledge, this article proposes a discussion about how these literary works, which at first sight represent a traditionally Anglo-American genre, constitute narratives that aim to rescue the memory, history and culture of marginalized communities. Typical of late modernity detective fiction, the metaphysical detective has none of the positivistic detective’s certainties, as he does not share in his Cartesian notion of totality, being presented instead as a successor of the hardboiled detective of the roman noir. In this article I intend to analyze the paths chosen by the author and discuss how his re-reading of the roman noir dialogues with the texts of hegemonic noire detective fiction, inscribing them in literary tradition and subverting them at the same time.

“Infra-noir” un et multiple: un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945-1947 éd. par Monique Yaari

cœur simple or the use of argot in Les misérables—it is in elaborating how the latter two modes gain prominence over time that Proses du monde presents intriguing possibilities for rethinking the dynamic linking history, society, and the literary imagination. Starting with George Sand’s halting quest for a stylistic framework that would accommodate both the popular language of her “democratic” characters and the narrative voice of an educated écrivaine-menuisier, Proses du monde traces the evolution of novelistic style from the privileging of a common national language in the experimental novels of Zola, to the écriture blanche associated with Camus and RobbeGrillet , to the elliptical sentences of Modiano’s amnesiac narrators, to Annie Ernaux’s signature écriture plate. The chapter“Migrations”examines how stylistic choices made by twentieth-century Jewish writers like Albert Cohen and Irène Némirovsky converted the limited social capital of immigrants into cultural assets that improved their standing within an increasingly democratic civil and literary society. In contrast, the final two chapters document the eclipse of the roman engagé and the postwar rise of a formalisme triomphant, which reflected a desire for greater artistic autonomy on the part of a generation of writers reluctant to engage with a recent history marked by the horrors of the Shoah (133–34). While it contains numerous previously-published articles that can stand alone,Wolf’s challenging study deserves to be read in its entirety. It rewards the patient reader while it lays the critical groundwork for a reassessment of the longue durée of French literary history. Davidson College (NC) Carole A. Kruger Yaari, Monique, éd. “Infra-noir,” un et multiple: un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945–1947. Berne: Peter Lang, 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1762-7. $74. The surrealist group of Bucharest has long remained in the shadows of the history of the avant-garde. As this illuminating volume demonstrates, this obscurity is due to the exigencies of history and an aesthetic commitment to secrecy and opacity. In her concise introduction,Yaari provides the historical context: cut off from their Parisian counterparts during the war, the group saw an intense moment of literary and artistic production between 1945 and 1947, only to disperse after the arrival of a repressive communist regime. This volume’s most valuable contribution is to bring to light that work from 1945–47, reproduced here in a substantial appendix. The reader encounters firsthand the group’s varied written and artistic oeuvre and their purposefully ambivalent relationship to language. For if the choice to write in French signaled a desire to communicate beyond Romania’s borders, these works also resist simple understanding, blurring boundaries between writer and subject, individual and group. The organization of the volume’s essays exemplifies the “un et multiple” principle. Three bookending contributions analyze the works the group signed collectively. Jonathan 248 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 249 Eburne’s opening consideration of the 1946 exhibition L’infra-noir brings into sharp focus the political dimension of the group: as he contends, their language of secrecy and conspiracy represented not just an aesthetic position but“une condition d’obscurité plus étendue”targeting power itself (34). Two closing essays on cinema and the visual arts establish important ties to André Breton’s surrealism. Régine-Mihal Friedman’s chapter on the group’s praise of the 1942 Italian film Malombra precisely links this text to surrealist fascination for cinema and the roman noir. Jacqueline ChénieuxGendron ’s analysis of “La salle nocturne,” the group’s contribution to the 1947 Exposition internationale du surréalisme, uses this experiential installation to suggest how their ultimate intent was to push the limits of surrealism’s poetic art. This desire to keep surrealism in “un état de changement et développement révolutionnaire continuel” (75) is underlined in three central essays on the group’s key members: Ghérasim Luca, Trost, and Paul Paun. Through extended (sometimes laborious) close readings and analyses of visual works, each contributor shows how the writers reinvigorated essential notions of 1930s surrealism (notably mad love, objective chance, and dreamwork). Krzysztof Fijalkowski demonstrates how, for Luca, desire becomes a motor for artistic production...

Roman noir et drapeau noir: Didier Daeninckx and the libertarian legacy

The crime novelist Didier Daeninckx originally established himself as an author of historical crime fiction. His 1984 novel, Meurtres pour mémoire, in particular challenged occluded and intertwined memories of the Occupation and the Algerian War of Independence. Since then, and through his subsequent writings and political activities, Daeninckx has been recognised as giving voice to a range of marginalised communities and memories. Much academic study has therefore concentrated on the recovery of the past in Daeninckx’s fiction, approaching his work from the perspective of cultural history and memory studies, considering it a form of memory activism. This article offers a new perspective on Daeninckx’s political engagement. It will examine Daeninckx’s three contributions to Éditions Baleine’s collaboratively authored detective series Le Poulpe: Nazis dans le métro (1996), Éthique en toc (2000) and La Route du Rom (2003). It will argue that they are informed by a memory of France’s broad libertarian tradition which constitutes a hidden referent essential to understanding the formulation of the ethico-political counter-communities to which many of his characters (and his ideal, implied reader) belong. More particularly, it will argue that these communities form the basis of a new model of political engagement beyond party, state and class, suggesting not only the persistence but also the adaptability of libertarian thinking in Daeninckx’s work and the French roman noir.

Writing Up Close and From a Distance: French and North-American Representations of Belleville (Paris) in Contemporary Roman Noir

The Parisian quartier of Belleville is considered the ideal setting for roman noir. Post-1968 French neo-polar writers proffer a critical view of contemporary French society with its social inequality, racism, corporate and political corruption, unemployment and its consequences. This paper presents a transatlantic view of contemporary Belleville seen through the eyes of French author and journalist Serge Quadruppani, Canadian artist and author Blaise Giuliani, and American crime fiction writer Cara Black. How do these representations of Belleville differ from one side of the Atlantic to the other? From where do these differences stem? What is the relationship between fact and fiction in each of these portrayals? Does the authors’ readership affect the way Belleville is depicted? In attempting to answer these questions, this article contributes to discussions about place and setting in the roman noir/neo-polar, contemporary Belleville, and its reputation in and outside of France.

The red and the black: Marie-Noëlle Thibault and the novels of Dominique Manotti

Dominique Manotti’s novels are informed by her experiences before she adopted this pen name and began writing fiction. As an instructor at Vincennes, a union leader and a militant with Les Cahiers de mai, Marie-Noëlle Thibault practised forms of political action aimed at empowering students and workers. She saw the possibilities for social change these promoted lost with the transformation of France during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Though Manotti continues to use methods she learned in Les Cahiers de mai and related projects, she adopted the roman noir to depict the self-reproducing nature of contemporary society which has displaced the world of participatory democracy to which she had devoted herself. Aware of France’s troubled recent past, she is less confident than Didier Daeninckx that revelation of it will weaken the powers that be.

La influencia de la literatura gótica en Francia: traducciones francesas y relatos de Ducray-Duminil y Arlincourt

Travail portant sur l'influence et la diffusion en France de ce que l'on a dé- nommé « Ghotic Fiction » ou « Gothic Novel », par le biais des traductions fran- çaises qui parurent presque en même temps que les textes originaux: c'est ainsi que l'œuvre The Castle of Otranto (1764) d'Horace Walpole fut traduite seulement trois ans après sa parution. Après avoir établi un répertoire complet des traductions faites jusqu'aux années trente, l'on analyse les deux auteurs qui ont le plus été influencés par le gothique: DucrayDuminil et Arlincourt, auteurs chez qui il existe un mélange de gothique et de ce que l'on pourrait appeler le « roman noir » proprement dit.

Belleville rouge, Belleville noir, Belleville rose: The Complex Identity of a Parisian quartier

The Parisian quartier of Belleville has long been the subject of scholarly literature and popular culture due to its colourful history and diverse population. Its symbolic boundaries extend beyond the geographical limits imposed by its administrative demarcation. Myths abound as to the extent of its rebellious past, its contemporary image as a melting pot and its prevalence as a décor for the noir genre. In this article a three-tiered categorisation of Belleville is adopted which corresponds to various representations of the suburb in literature, popular culture and from the perspective of its inhabitants. Belleville rouge reflects the quartier’s revolutionary past and the late 20th century struggle associated with its physical metamorphosis. Belleville noir focusses on the quartier’s criminal face, as it is depicted in Parisian film and roman noir and as it exists in reality. Belleville rose highlights the pleasures of the quartier: its cosmopolitan character whose representation verges at times on utopian. In his Malaussène series (1985-1995), writer and former resident Daniel Pennac portrays Belleville as a unique blend of rouge, noir and rose. This fusion of fairy tale, detective fiction, myth and reality establishes a complex Bellevillois identity distinct from other contemporary representations. The article concludes that it is impossible to associate a single identity with Belleville. The quartier’s contemporary face is inextricably linked to its past, the memory of which is preserved by its inhabitants and by social and literary commentators such as Pennac. In keeping with historian Pierre Nora’s concept of cultural memory, Pennac thus assumes the role of guardian of Belleville’s cultural memory in the face of the quartier’s perpetual evolution.

Razing Cain with Chandler and Wilder: The Prometheus-Pandora Myth inDouble Indemnity

During the eight lucrative but unhappy years Raymond Chandler worked as a Hollywood writer, he wrote or cowrote six screenplays which were made into movies. Surprisingly, he was approached to adapt only one of the Philip Marlowe novels which had made him famous. Chandler’s finest screenplay—coauthored with Billy Wilder—was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1936 “roman noir,” Double Indemnity (1944), for Paramount Pictur es. Chandler’s hiring was ironic; it was his first attempt at screenwriting, and he detested Cain’s fiction. In a letter to Alfred Knopf, Chandler—furious over being compared to Cain—launched into a vitriolic attack: But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that? (quoted in MacShane 101) Chandler’s violent distaste for Cain’s novels must have sparked something, however, for his work on Double Indemnity far surpassed anything he was to do thereafter as a scenarist. According to biographer Frank MacShane, Paramount next recruited Chandler to polish the dialogue on two plodding scripts for movies now virtually forgotten: a melodrama, And Now Tomorrow (1944), and an obscure mystery, The Unseen (1945). Both projects exasperated Chandler because their directors, Irving Pichel and Lewis Allen, respectively, omitted so much of the dialogue he had carefully crafted. Chandler based a third, more promising, film, The Blue

«Ridges on the floors of Hell»: traces ou palimpsestes dans le désert de The Dead Heart

The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy's first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the perspective of retranslation and the ostensible differences between the two translation Skopoi, and the use of paratextual branding to target specific reading publics. Focusing on the graphic novel allows us here to go beyond the problematics of translation and to broaden the scope of our study of textual adaptation. It also allows us to reassess the originality of the source text.

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

Literature After Ranciére: Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Gibson's Neuromancer

SummaryIn this article the implications of Jacques Ranciére's far-reaching notions of “the distribution of the sensible”, “dissensus” and the “three regimes of art” (particularly for literature) are explored. Kazuo Ishiguro's roman noir entitled When We Were Orphans and William Gibson's dark science fiction novel Neuromancer are examined to demonstrate the novelty of Ranciére's thought, in terms of which the cherished categories of literary orthodoxy are surpassed. Specifically, Ranciére challenges the usual distinction between premodern “representational literature” and modern self-referential literature, and introduces a radically historical manner of appropriating the art and literature of an era. His distinction between three regimes of art (the “ethical regime of images”, the “representative regime of the arts” and the “aesthetic regime of art”) are fundamental in understanding the capacity of art and literature to contribute discursively to the “(re)distribution of the sensible”, or the symbolic (re)configuration of social and political space, by disrupting the conventional space of the “sensible” through “dissensus”.