Author: chloemiller

Looking back to my first post for this course, all I had were questions. I asked what the purpose of the novel was: whether it was supposed to reflect reality or if it should be an escape from it? I also asked if a novel is art, and if so, what would make it art? Building off of my history in the English major, I thought that the noir novels that we were reading were somehow sub-par to that of the canon of English literature. The “spirit of detachment” as Raymond Chandler wrote about noir,  which separated old detective fiction from the canon, came to me as a shock and I felt that noir was hard to take seriously. The Maltese Falcon, I wrote, existed in a space that I could not imagine because of its black and white morality. Now, having read all 8 of the books this semester and engaged with the supplementary materials, I have found a few answers. 

Nostalgia is the one idea in Noir that I have really grasped onto and has helped me find a definition for the genre. Nostalgia is a desire for a past that has never existed, and with each Black Noir novel, the black characters navigate a world that is inherently nostalgic in that the society they live in places assumptions upon them that are not true. For black characters, there is a disconnect between the reality of their personhood and an imagined idea of who they are and how they should be treated. Bob in “If He Hollers…” viewed himself as a man, yet his society viewed and treated him as sub-human. 

I believe that the sense of nostalgia that pervades each noir novel has given me an understanding of what fiction is for. Fiction allows us to examine aspects of our lives from an aesthetic distance. Without the consequences of realism.The unreality of fiction gives us space to apply the ideas to our reality. The novel “If He Hollers Let Him Go” was the first novel in this course that proved this to be true for me. Bob’s paranoia bordered on insanity in some instances, but I was able to conceptualize my own feelings of insecurity around my race through him. Just like Bob, I have feelings of anxiety towards how people see me. I get weird looks from girls in my residence hall, and my first thought is that it is about my race. If I walk by a group of white girls in my section and they suddenly go silent and watch me, I feel like a zoo animal and suddenly I feel outside of myself, watching them watch me. Bob’s story was a way for me to place these feelings into a context where I could examine them. It gave me a structure for the very real and confusing emotions I have. 

This was difficult work for me to do, but I am glad that this course has given me a new perspective on how fiction works to examine the inner self. Especially because I am doing a double major in Africana Studies and English, this course has helped me solidify my desire to examine the role of the novel in the development of our society’s conception of and reckoning with race. In the future, I will look back on this class as one that was difficult personally, as it made me think about my race and gender in a deeper way, forcing me to grow up, and it was monumental in my progress as a scholar in solidifying what I want to study at Notre Dame and in Graduate school. 

“Blanche on the Lam” has been a welcome break from the heavy reading of my other classes. As we discussed in class, it was refreshing to read a noir text that had innocence at its heart. I welcomed Blanche’s concern for her niece and nephew, and her interactions with Mumsfield as a new take on the dark, grim atmosphere of the novels we have read. Because of its innocence, “Blanche on the Lam” has felt different than our other noir novels. Nostalgia, however, is one part of noir that exists within this text, and is consistent with our definition of noir. Nostalgia is defined as, “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”  It is having a desire for a past that never existed.  Looking back to “Farewell, My Lovely” and “The Maltese Falcon” , each text engages with its past in a way that there comes a disconnect between reality and the imagined past. The first line of “Farewell, My Lovely” is  “That area of Central Avenue that wasn’t yet all negro.” Noir, as a genre, allows the reader to glimpse how a culture of a certain time viewed itself relative to its own history. 

When we place the Black body into the space of nostalgia, current realities of racism towards the black characters give way to an examination of the inception of American racism – slavery. “Blanche on the Lam” is set in a rural town in North Carolina, and examines the dynamic of African Americans performing domestic work in the same setting of their oppression post-emancipation. Neely uses humor to articulate the disconnect that her white characters have between the history of slavery and the reality of race relations in the early 1990s. These affluent white in the American south are living a life of nostalgia in assuming superiority over black people, holding onto a glorified past in the present. Blanche’s use of humor within the text adds another dimension to this nostalgia, as she critiques this false history her white bosses have created, while simultaneously removing the power this history has on her by attributing it to humor. In her article “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”, bell hooks writes that black women are looking back at history and reframing it in a way where they can see themselves within it.  She says at the end of the article, “looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.” So by making these quips at how white people view race relations throughout the text  in “Blanche on the Lam”  Barbara Neely is able to create a space where in slavery does not hold the weight that it does on black people, especially the black woman,  allowing Blanche to navigate her situation freely. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading  Never Die Alone this week. The narrative flowed and was easy to grasp onto. The plot was exciting and I enjoyed the colloquialisms and banter of King David with the other men in the novel. It was easy to get swept up in the quick pacing and wanting to uncover the mystery of who King David is in Never Die Alone. This being said, I have a hard time framing this novel within the umbrella of noir. 

My understanding of noir is that it is characterized by a dark theme and is a pessimistic story about a character entering a darkness, and emerging changed (for better or worse) because of it. “Never Die Alone” clearly has the atmosphere of noir because of how it lets the reader into the world of the urban underground. Each of the characters in this world are driven by lust and greed, which lead them into situations where they kill and get killed, ending up dead in a gutter, as was the case for most of Moon’s men, and almost for King David. However, this dark theme was undercut by the protagonist. 

Paul is a sympathetic character, as we discussed in class, he seems to be one of the only redeemable characters in all of the noir novels we have read. Paul has a proximity to the dark underworld that noir is supposed to let the reader into: he is poor, a drug addict, and lives in an apartment complex in a poor, mostly black area. His whiteness is tainted with a bit of darkness, as he is Jewish, which makes his racial identity slightly ambiguous. Framing this novel from the perspective of Paul creates a distance between the grittiness of noir and the reader. I did not feel the guilt of the voyeur because Paul has already borne the burden of interpreting King David’s story for the reader. . And further, by the end of the novel Paul redeems the reader of feeling the shame of David’s actions by giving his money to help drug addicts. It felt like an anti-drug book with this ending, tying up loose strings in a bow. This perspective of this novel takes away from the shock of an ambiguous ending like If He Hollers Let Him Go, where the wrongdoings that are done to Bob go unpunished. Maybe my definition of noir needs to be expanded, but I think the character of Paul makes Never Die Alone feel lacking in the moral ambiguity of noir. 

 The readings from “Street Players” this week were helpful in my understanding of how the publishing industry works, but have made me question how I view literature and wonder if I may be looking at it all wrong. The story Nishikawa tells about the Holloway House has provided me with an insight into how readership influences how we look at a story. What struck me was that Holloway House is a white publishing house, and used the black readership they gleaned from Pimp to profit, flooding the literary marketplace that were set in or starred protagonists from black ghettos. It brings into consideration the theoretical framework behind cultural appropriation. The pulp fiction genre lies in an interesting space where it allows a white readership to get a “taste of the exotic.. A bit of the other”, as Bell Hooks lays it out; but it also has a cultural significance to black readers as it validates their experiences and promotes their representation in this literary space. So, in examining the works of Iceberg Slim, it is important to acknowledge its initial readership. This insight made me problematize the pulp genre as possibly just a way for white readers to consume this underground aspect of black culture as black culture in its entirety – leading to prejudices and stereotypes. But this may be the same reason I have looked down on the genre. 

The last two summers, I worked as a summer receptionist at my old middle school. In the slow days I passed my time reading books like East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. One of the janitors that I chatted with regularly was named Tee. She is an older black woman and when we spent lunches together, getting to know each other. I learned that she had a kid and had to drop out of high school, and now that she is at retirement age, she has to work as a janitor to take care of her elderly father. I would look over my volume at the books she read, which she called her “Gangsta books”, small mass market paperbacks with scandalous covers with black characters. What she was reading was black noir, I just didn’t know it at the time. 

As an English major who is not well-read in black literature, but is trying to be, I realize now that I thought I was better than Miss Tee because I was reading classic literature. In our class conversations, I think we all have felt out of our element in reading from the noir genre, to the point where our conversations have left much to be desired. But to connect this to my personal experience, reading Trick Baby, I feel guilty that I have not exposed myself to this literature in the past. I think I have valued authors like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as what black literature I should be reading, instead of looking at books like Trick Baby as another aspect of black representation in literature. So, I guess I am a voyeur into this pulp space, and I have to accept that as a learning opportunity. 

“And its strange when we die, our folks like to rejoice, but when it comes to the living, that’s it”

This quote from the priest in Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song displays an interesting aspect of black noir: Religion. Christianity is an integral part of black culture. As a person who grew up in a black Baptist church with parents who were very active in the church, the Christian morality and idioms and phrases from the church are ingrained in my mind.  If we look back to `If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob invokes his religion when he feels secure in his relationship with Alice saying, “Peace Father, it is truly wonderful”.  In Sweetback, religion is present everywhere – from the opening scene with the hymn being sung, to the women chanting during Sweetback’s running scenes – religion is the heartbeat beneath the scenes of violence and fear. It can be interpreted as a way for black culture to fight against their mistreatment in society. Religion helps to give black people peace of mind, like the Priest said. He gives them an escape. There is the other idea of religion though, that it is a white morality that has been placed upon the black body. Which is why, I think, the priest vows to say a black Hail Mary. It would be interesting to investigate whether or not religion is an escape from a harsh reality, or if it is just another form of oppression. The film Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song holds both ideas at the same time. 

In the Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, our main love interest, Ellen, represents the antithesis of the femme fatale archetype. Instead of a ‘deadly woman’ who seduces the main character and leads them onto a path of darkness, Ellen is an untouchable beauty that Hugh is captivated by. It is through her aid and connections that Hugh is ultimately able to be freed from becoming the “expendable man”. Ellen is without a doubt a benevolent and key figure in this text. But, how does her identity as a privileged black woman complicate her place in this noir novel? When Hugh first sees Ellen, she is wearing a “honey-colored sheath… of some dull clinging material the exact color of her flesh… Instead of the inevitable mink stole, Ellen carried a matching scarf, fully twelve feet long, lined in lynx” (Hughes 48). This initial description of Ellen tells the reader two important things. First, Ellen is wealthy enough to wear the newest fashions and own a lynx-lined scarf. And secondly, the color of her dress is the color of her skin. In other texts we have read, the clothing women wore signaled something about the role they would play in the text. In Farewell, My Lovely, our femme fatale wears all white, contrasting the idea of purity and innocence that stems from our conception of the color white. Unlike in Farewell, Ellen’s appearance signals her beauty and desirability, but also her transparency around the reality of her race. Ellen is white passing based on Hugh’s descriptions, and with her wealth she is shielded from facing any real repercussions of that fact. Ellen says in a conversation with Hugh, she calls herself a “dark diplomat”, in recognition of her race, but she, “somehow I don’t mind invisibility. I’d rather no one saw me as I walk down the street, or pretended they couldn’t see me, than to have people nudging and pointing as if I were a freak. Even within its limitations, I like to live my life without comment” (153). Ellen’s perspective on invisibility as something that is good, contrasts our conception of the color black as darkness and evil. Ellen lives free within the confines of her blackness, and as an antithesis of a femme fatale in this genre, this space she exists in is radical.  

(post 6)

The uncertainty of race at the beginning of The Expendable Man places the issue of class at the forefront of the reader’s mind. This novel is more clearly noir than the previous novel we read, If He Hollers Let Him Go, because of its initial tone of ambiguity, especially in regards to race. It is not until page 24 when Hugh describes how he and Iris would look to people in town as “a strangely assorted couple” that their races are specifically mentioned.  Although I had suspected that the main character would be a black man, Hugh’s reasoned approach to the situations in front of him, paired with a sense of dread at the possible consequences of his actions, give off a sense of unease characteristic of the noir genre. In the first pages Hughes notes the dangers of picking up strangers from the sides of the road, mentions Hugh’s “automatic anxiety reaction that a person might step in front of the car” , “a chill of apprehension”, all phrases that invoke fear into the reader. (Hughes 4). Even after the gravitas of the situation is revealed, Hugh’s social connections allow him to face his investigation with courage.  In chapter 2 it is revealed that Hugh is from an upper middle class family with high standing in society. It is as if Hugh can forget his race, and has to remind himself that he is seen by his color before his class. For example when he is being interrogated by the police, he says that he pays his traffic tickets through the Auto club, “and realized at once that he’d done it again. Not for using the service but taking for granted the use…. Such conveniences were for white people; Negroes shuffled in line before a judge”(93). He is not outright afraid of racial violence, but the existence of his race creates a feeling of unease within the first events of the story. This class privilege gives Hugh a freedom from the stresses that Bob expressed in If He Hollers Let Him Go. Bob had an incessant desire to obtain and maintain his material wealth, and recognized others through their material signifiers. However, Hugh simply makes use of his resources without calling to attention the clothes he is wearing or the car he drives, unless it is based on how someone else sees him. Dorothy B. Hughes may be placing class at the forefront to say that when you have access to material wealth, the wealth that Bob was constantly striving for, race is more of a looming fear rather than a direct threat. This fear could at any moment, disrupt Hugh’s life, but with his access to resources, he can hide from its presence in a way that Bob could not.

(Post 5)

Bob, the protagonist of If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, embodies the aspect of interiority and introspection that is integral to the noir genre. Similar to the other protagonists in the books we have read, Bob exists within the shadows of society. Like an outsider looking in, he has a fatalistic outlook on society, moral ambiguity, and an alienation from society. Spade and Marlowe have an unquestioned personal autonomy and masculinity within their respective worlds as white men. Bob, however, has an identity that is not self-defined. His personhood is instead defined by its proximity to whiteness, taking away his autonomy at the very basic level. 

In our discussion in class, the question of paranoia came up in regards to Bob’s anxiety towards white people. Some may argue that he seems overly paranoid, however I would argue that this anxiety is founded in truth. As a black person who has existed in predominantly white spaces for most of my life, the sense of dread and hypersensitivity to your perception by others is something that is a constant in my life. I am always aware of color: I notice that I am the only black person in a room and brace myself for looks from people. I am constantly aware that I am “the other”. There is something that is uncanny about having this awareness about oneself. It is the idea of double consciousness: to be both your interior self, and to watch how other people see you from the outside. There is a certain sense of detachment from reality that this psychology brings. 

The liminal space that Bob and black people in general exist in can be stretched to discuss the inverse descent into darkness that Bob experienced in his decision to kill that white man. Coming from a place that is charged with anger and anxiety, there is a freedom in allowing oneself to descend in the darkness. I may pursue this idea in a later paper. 

This investigation into blackness is leading me to a broader thesis about blackness and noir. I think that being a black American, having no real roots to cling to because we can never know our true heritage, and having an identity that is exterior rather than interior, creates an existential feeling that is similar to the tenants of noir: oneiric, strange, ambivalent. 

It is easy to read novels passively. This past summer I indulged in reading novels in many different genres, and I did not write a single word of analysis. I just let the words wash over me and let myself be swept away into the plot and atmosphere that the writer creates. A novel like Stoner by John Williams let me live the life of a middle class man in the 1920s from rural Missouri who became a professor of no import; who was passed over for promotions and was left by his wife,  but who lived a full life by experiencing love in all its facets. This novel struck me and I found myself in it- it was inherently real and personal. It led me to question things about my life and prompted me to write about it. That is what I believe the point of good writing is. 

To be completely honest, reentering the academic scene this semester and discussing a novel like The Maltese Falcon, felt jarring. My past experiences with the Noir genre have only been in parody, for example, the Finding Mary McGuffin Phineas and Ferb episode (which is undeniably my favorite tv show); or in a passing glance at a row of dense mass market paperbacks found in a Walmart or Dollar Store. I saw the genre as cheap fiction.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Maltese Falcon, its plot was engaging, its main character charming and fun to follow, and created an atmosphere that feels unlike reality yet draws the reader in, a playground for cynicism and moral ambiguity. Some of the aspects of the novel are problematic compared to our modern sensibilities, and yet I was not quick to jump on these ideas because the genre does not feel serious to me. It feels like it is made for entertainment in the same way as a movie. 

I wanted to investigate this feeling, so I did some research and came across a work of literary criticism by Raymond Chandler entitled, “The Simple Art of Murder”. He writes that the detective novel, “is written in a certain spirit of detachment”, separating detective fiction from that of old fashioned novels which “have always intended to be realistic”.  I think the detachment from reality that characterizes Noir fiction is why I find it so hard to take it seriously. The murder mystery, Chandler writes, solves its own problems, leaving nothing left to discuss. It feels formulaic, predictable. Unlike a novel like Stoner, that left me wondering if the main character was truly happy, The Maltese Falcon left me satisfied but bored. It exists in a space that I could never imagine inhabiting. That may be because of my race and gender, but it is also because my world is not gritty and dark like that of noir. The bad guys are not always caught, justice is not always served. This white and black sense of morality makes the genre fall flat in my eyes. 

This leads me to a question that has plagued my study of English: What is the purpose of the novel? Is it supposed to be so close to reality that we see ourselves in it, or should it be a form of escape from reality? Is a novel art? If so, how do noir novels fit in? What makes something art? Do I, as a reader, need to feel a connection to a form of media for it to be art? And, how does the author’s position change how we view their art? Does the fact that Dashiell Hammett wrote to make a living change how I view his fiction? Should it matter who the author was when looking at their work? Should an author always have deliberate artistic aims in order for us to respect the work as art? All of these questions frustrate me and my study of the noir genre, and they may not be answered. But I assume that as I read more of the required texts in Black Noir that I’ll get closer to an answer.