Title note: Reference to Alfred Noir (pronounced “Noyer”), protagonist of Alfred Bester’s Psychoshop.
After a conversation with Kevin, I’ve been thinking a bit about noir fiction1, and especially about how to define it or set about listing its distinctive characteristics.
However, having attempted this a couple of times now (efforts well-scrapped), I’m going to give up on a general account of the whole genre, and try to narrow my focus to Dashiell Hammett, on the grounds that I’ve read Hammett, whereas I have not read, say, Raymond Chandler, nor have I seen most noir films. Also, when dealing with big ontological questions, it’s often more useful to change the focus to a more specific and concrete question.
When I talk about Hammett, I’m talking primarily about three books: Red Harvest, The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. I think these are pretty representative, not just of Hammett, but also of three channels in the broader genre—dark, light, and somewhere in between.
The center of a Hammett novel is the hero, and the story that is told in a Hammett novel is the story of the hero’s relationship to the world. Hammett’s worlds are pretty ugly places, where corruption—not necessarily just crime—is the rule, the order, the norm.
Fanon—to make a slight detour—observes that if one wishes to inquire into the psychology of race, one must bear in mind that in a racist world, such as the one we in habit, it is the anti-racist that is “insane,” i.e., who is possessed of an abnormal psychology. Hammett’s view of human goodness is similar—it is not the norm. In The Thin Man, Nick Charles is an eccentric, a comic drunk who marries into wealth; he is characterized by whimsical patterns of speech and behavior, a sort of mad professor of detectives. In The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade is an outsider, poorly integrated into his society—getting along with no one or nearly non one, operating always on the margins of things, constantly and often disproportionately angry, etc. In Red Harvest, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the nameless, faceless operative who functions as the protagonist is, to be frank, a sociopath. He has the aspect less of a hero than of the avenging furies of greek tragedies—an unhuman and inhumane force2.
Of course, if the world is a bad place, that has some interesting consequences for hero-building. By default, a hero is normally assumed to be the upholder of the law—i.e., a sort of very large policeman. But laws are the laws of the world, enacted by people of the world. The policeman, lawyers, etc. of Hammett’s worlds are not above the muck, and the laws they uphold—and the way they uphold the law—are not compatible with a vision of heroism that stands in contrast to that corruption5.
Thus, while Hammett’s heroes (and many other noir or hardboiled heroes) are code-driven men with strong moral and ethical compasses (though they are not absolutely good, by any means), their code, their morals, their ethics are not based in the world3. Nor, however, are they mystical or ecclesiastical heroes with otherworldly warrants. They are not, like the Blues Brothers, “on a mission from god.” In fact, their codes are not made explicit anywhere, in any form—which isn’t particularly shocking, because they are, after all, just characters in novels, and who wants to read Sam Spade stop interrogating a witness just long enough to write his particular addendum to Hobbes or Kant?
But, reading between the lines, one finds moralities. I would propose that these are typically existentialist moralities, meaning that they have to do with the formation of identity as a process resulting from experiences and choices, as opposed to an essentialist morality which is held to exist outside of a historical context (but which is usually aligned to the published standards of a worldly institution, such as a church, or to the internalized mores of a given society).
Hammett’s heroes are men of action (meaning not just an inclination to act rather than reflect, but rather a tendency to think in terms of actions and consequences; i.e., they’re pragmatists) who have been shaped by experiences that include war and violent crime; their moral codes are also shaped by those experiences, and—as is particularly clear in the case of Spade—by the process of making choices which will be compatible with the identities that have been formed by all their other past choices and experiences. These have to do both with intangible concepts of honor and justice, and with purely practical realities.
The persistent question for them is, what is it to be good in a bad world, and its corollary, how good can one be in a bad world. Thus, the characteristic hardboiled virtues are the virtues that can be contained within oneself, rather than those that are imparted by or enactable only in the context of society: fair dealing, courage, and a determination to do what one says, for example, rather than charity, piety, or productivity.
Nor is it accidental that corruption, hypocrisy, and fraud are signature evils in noir fiction—murder is ubiquitous, but to kill is not, in itself, necessarily evil; it is the veiling of murderous motivations behind beauty or jollity, or behind respectability. This is why there are criminals, in noir, and then there are criminals—it is also why it is relatively easy to have a criminal—often a petty criminal, such as a thief, or, in some cases, a more serious one, such as the assassin of Block’s new series—as a noir hero, sometimes as an “anti-hero” but sometimes as an ortho-hero.
I should point out that Hammett’s three heroes demonstrate three different forms of the relationship between the hero and the world. Nick Charles, who is in essence a crook and who does not seek to do justice except when something sort of falls into his lap and his wife makes him, is the happiest and best-adjusted of the three, and the least heroic. He has compromised with the word. The Continental Op appears totally unable to compromise, or to show mercy, in his dealings with the world around him; he is essentially a destructive force upon it, bringing devastation wherever he goes. He is, while relatively unappealing, a very successful—perhaps too successful to be credible—noir hero. Sam Spade has not made his compromise with the world, really, but he has also not set out to break it down. He actively pursues justice (at least some of the time) within its framework, and as such is the most humane, the most appealing, and absolutely the least happy of the three.
There’s more to the genre than that, but a lot of it is in the way of tropes and gimmicks, rather than interesting content. Noir stories are typically also a subset of the “Whodunnit,” but, as Red Harvest makes clear, the crime isn’t really the point, no matter who dunnit. It is just one of many devices for illuminating the character of the noir hero. There’s also certainly a lot of icons of noir that are essentially nostalgic period-markers (hats, guns, and a lot of smoking, early-c20-style) often imposed retroactively—again, nonessential.
I may, or may not, come back to this topic with a look at the noir elements in some of the works Kevin and I discussed (Sin City and Cowboy Bebop come to mind.)
1 As Wikipedia points out, we should really speak of film noir, on one hand, and hardboiled detective literature on the other. I have trouble taking the word “hardboiled” seriously, however.
2 I suppose it’s tempting to immediately jump to the term anti-hero, which is probably accurate, to a point, but I don’t necessarily want to put too much weight on it, since that just basically opens up a whole new field of definitional problems (since anti-hero doesn’t really mean anything beyond “hero that makes us somewhat uncomfortable)[4].
3 It’s worth noting that there have been some Christian heresies that have gotten themselves into trouble by starting from the premise that the laws of men are not to be upheld.
4 Meta-note: The observant reader will note that I used both “hardboiled” and “anti-hero,” despite objecting to both terms and excusing a choice not to use them. Go me.
5 Slight tangent: We can bring this around, if we want to, to distinctions between modern and classical tragedy. Cornel West identifies modern tragedy as inclusive of portrayals of inadequate virtue—i.e., the best we can do isn’t always enough. The classical model, of course, tends to imply more twisty bits—the best we can do is what itself condemns us, or those who are the best are also destroyed by who they really are, or the good may come into conflict with the right, etc. But there’s an additional distinction, in noir, in that where the tragic hero of classical times was a community representative, often a leader, whereas the noir hero is essentially pitted against his.
6 At some point I really do need to see Yojimbo, which is based on Red Harvest. And Fistful of Dollars, which is based on Yojimbo. I’ve already seen Omega Doom.
