I was recently rereading the syllabus as I was checking the reading schedule and noticed something in the course description that has a new meaning to me after reading three novels in this class. It is said that we will look at “how the noir genre is altered when “noirs” are the subjects and the authors.” This helped me put into words the feeling that I was getting when reading If He Hollers Let Him Go in the context of our noir-focused class.
In reading this novel, I was unable to understand how it was that this might fit into noir as neatly as the previous two did. It was not simply the lack of a detective – which I realize does not define noir – that threw me off and challenged me to find links between this novel and the previous two. The aspects of noir that we talked about as the main characters would descend into darkness and operate on the margins of society did not seem to be operating in Himes’s novel.
Reading the description on the syllabus about the rationale for the inclusion of certain books, I have gained a new appreciation for how this book is noir. I think that Bob and Himes are both individually noir. First of all, Himes wrote this novel while in jail. As a convicted criminal, he clearly operated on the margin of society even if that’s not actually how he grew up. Likewise, Bob is a marginalized figure who, while he does not descend into darkness, lives in darkness nonetheless.
Since focusing on the noir within the characters themselves and the author who wrote the characters, I have been able to better understand how this book fits into the larger curriculum of the course. That is not to say that there is no more overarching feeling of noir from the book, but I think this new perspective has given be a different angle from which I can investigate noir as a whole.