Roman noir

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The novel noir is a sub-genre of the French crime novel .

Disambiguation

Roman noir is a term of French origin that means "black novel". It was created by analogy with film noir , an expression coined by the French film critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier in 1946 in connection with American crime films of the early 1940s, which, influenced by German Expressionism, were in complete contrast to conventional ones Hollywood movies were among others Murder, My Sweet (1944), after Raymond Chandler's Fahr zum Hölle, Liebling as well as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), after James M. Cain . Accordingly, the term (especially in the Anglo-American language area) also describes the American hardboiled detective novel with representatives such as Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.

The most common meaning of the term in the German-speaking area, however, denotes a sub-genre of the French crime novel that appeared in the early 1940s, was based on the American "hardboiled" crime story in terms of content and style, and was developed into an independent form from the late 1940s in received new impulses in the late 1970s and continues to exist in various variants today.

In a meaning mostly used today in French literary studies, the term is a synonym for the "roman gothique" or "roman terrifiant", a French genre of novels from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which is based on the German gothic novel and the English "gothic novel “Corresponds, with (French) representatives such as Ducray-Duminil, Madame de Genlis, Baculard d'Arnaud or Bellin de La Liborlière.

Origin and development of the Roman noir

In the 1940s a new variant of the detective novel emerged in France, which differs significantly from the “classic” detective novel. This new variant emerges under the influence of the American hardboiled detective novel , a sub-genre of the crime novel that was written in the USA during the economic crisis of the 1930s. In addition to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler , authors such as James M. Cain , Cornell Woolrich and WR Burnett are also considered to be important representatives . Critical aspects of society are in the foreground in their stories, whereby the main characters are often “outsiders” and the focus can be on the criminal or the detective. But also the crime novels by Georges Simenon as well as the American and French film noir of the 1930s and 1940s are decisive sources for the specific atmosphere and subject matter of Roman noir.

Initially, French noirs were written during the Second World War, whereby French authors published under American pseudonyms due to a publication ban: Léo Malet published at the time, for example, under the names of Frank Harding and Léo Latimer. After the end of the war, the roman noir developed into a more independent, French-influenced genre. The founding of the Série noire series by Marcel Duhamel in 1945 was decisive for the rapid development of Roman noir in France : this very successful series included translations of the great American hardboiled detective novels and, increasingly, French productions. Some important French authors of this phase are Léo Malet, Jean Amila , Albert Simonin and Francis Ryck .

This novel noir is characterized by a number of features: The detective is not an amateur or a police officer, but a private investigator who takes on an assignment for a fee. In his investigations, he does not rely solely on rational considerations, but also uses violence at times to get information. There is no radical separation between the milieu of the crime and that of the detective: the investigator himself often acts on the edge of legality, has a dubious past or lives in the same milieu as the criminals. He is also not protected from falling victim to violence himself or from doubting the legitimacy of his actions. The crime itself is not viewed as an ingenious game or act motivated by individual psychology, but as the result of political intrigues, social conditions or historical developments. This also means that the perpetrator may in some way be a victim of these circumstances or intrigues himself. In this respect, the socio-critical attitude of the Roman noir becomes clear in the basic structure of the plot. A dark mood and atmospheric descriptions of the locations are also characteristic of the Roman noir.

In summary, one could say that roman noir is characterized by the fact that it does not present silhouette-like separations between good and bad, but rather explores the gray area between good and bad, between guilt and innocence, between individual and collective responsibility. This is what Jean-Patrick Manchette, one of the most precise connoisseurs of the American and French Roman noir, points out when he describes it as “the great moral literature of our time”.

The novel noir since the late 1970s

Politicization of the genre: protest writing

From the late 1970s onwards, a variant of this Roman noir was created, which is occasionally referred to as neo-polar or nouveau polar . This variant is more political in that it makes historical injustices or political convictions the motives of crimes even more so than the original noir. At the same time, this type of Roman noir is often, but not necessarily, characterized by a rather offensive depiction of violence. The initiators of this literary initiative were a number of politically disappointed (mostly left-wing) French intellectuals and politically active people who wanted to use the Roman noir to go against the grain of (official) historiography. They see in the novel noir a possibility of reproducing contemporary historical events in a literary way, and use this form to deal with failed emancipatory movements.

By Didier Daeninckx , one of the main protagonists of this political and historical "dedicated" Roman noirs, comes the following programmatic statement:

The Roman noir provides ideal terrain for illuminating the social and political reality that French literature, which pleases itself in formalistic experiments, often ignores. It is about examining the wounds and breaking open the unsaid that doom a nation to sick and sickening repression.

Claire Gorrara calls this variant of Roman noir protest writing and defines it as an "alternative social history of France designed to contest the dominant narratives of those in power".

Consequently, the experience or processing of historical catastrophes plays a central role in the type and importance of the narration. The crime and its investigation do not only take place in the context of historical events such as the Spanish Civil War, the Vichy Régime or the Algerian War, or social and political events such as May 1968, but are closely linked to these events in terms of their motives and their cover-up. Language and style are also changing, becoming rougher and harder, but are also coming closer to everyday language. Important representatives of this variant of Roman noir include a. Jean-Patrick Manchette , Didier Daeninckx , Jean-François Vilar , Francis Ryck or Jean-Bernard Pouy .

At the limits of the genre: formal experiments

Another trend in French crime fiction since the 1980s is more experimentation with the narrative form. These novels are also occasionally referred to as Roman noir, but this also shows the vagueness of the term. Representatives of this tendency can u. a. Laurence Biberfeld , Jean-Bernard Pouy and Sébastien Japrisot do the math.

The novel noir today

The first line of the French Roman noir continues to this day: Pierre Magnan, for example, combines the historical perspective with the atmospheric embedding of the plot in the landscape and customs of Provence. Partly influenced by Magnan, Fred Vargas writes novel noirs. The novels by Patrick Pécherot can be understood as an homage to Léo Malet. In some of his novels, Tanguy Viel uses motifs from Roman noir in an ironic, deconstructive manner.

In the tradition of the politicized Roman noir stand among others Yasmina Khadra and Maurice Attia, in which the plot is against the background of the political events in Algeria (independence movement, Algerian war, civil war of the 1980s), or Dominique Manotti . Newer impulses for the politicized Roman noir of the 1970s also come from Maurice Georges Dantec , who expanded this type of novel to include a science fiction version.

The small town of Frontignan in the south of France has hosted the Festival International du Roman Noir (FIRN) every June since 1998 .

The Roman noir in an international context

The French novel noir is by no means alone in its development in an international context, on the contrary. Its US roots are clearly documented both historically and in terms of content. In Sweden, too, there is a sub-genre of the detective novel that works with similar principles, occasionally referred to as Swedish crime and more recently also as Nordic Noir and is represented by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö as well as Henning Mankell , among others . In German-speaking countries, for example, Horst Eckert , Wolfgang Schorlau , Jörg Fauser and Ulf Miehe should be mentioned. In the Spanish-speaking world, too, the generic name “novela negra” refers to both the US original and a Spanish-language production of crime novels that are comparable to the French novel noir and the US hardboiled crime novel, with representatives such as Juan Madrid or Rafael Menjívar Ochoa .

literature

To the French novel noir

  • Simone Bernard-Griffit & Jean Sgard, Mélodrames et romans noirs 1750-1890 , Presses Universitaires du Mirail, Toulouse, 2000, ISBN 2-85816-503-3 .
  • Michelle Emanuel, From Surrealism to Less-Exquisite Cadavers: Léo Malet and the Evolution of the French 'Roman Noir , Rodopi BV, Amsterdam, 2006, ISBN 90-420-2080-6 .
  • Claire Gorrara, The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions , Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture), Oxford, 2003, ISBN 0-19-924609-2 .
  • Simon Kemp, Defective Inspectors: Crime-fiction Pastiche in Late-Twentieth-Century French Literature , Maney Publishing, London, 2006, ISBN 1-904350-51-8 .
  • Alain Lacombe, Le Roman Noir Américain , o.O., Union Générale d'Editions, 1975.
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, Chroniques. Essays on the novel noir . Edited by Doug Headline and Francois Guérif. Translated from the French by Katarina Grän and Ronald Vouillié. Distel Literaturverlag, Heilbronn, 2005, ISBN 3-923208-78-2 .
  • Elfriede Müller & Alexander Ruoff, Histoire noire. Historiography in the French detective novel after 1968 , transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2007, ISBN 3-89942-695-9 .
  • Jean-Bernard Pouy, Une brève histoire du roman noir , Paris: L'oeil noir, 2009. ISBN 978-2-915543-25-4 .
  • Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser, Le roman noir français , Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (Que sais-je?), 1984, ISBN 2-13-038273-8 .
  • André Vanoncini, Le roman policier , Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (Que sais-je?), 2002, ISBN 2-13-052969-0 .
  • Fabienne Viala, Le roman noir à l'encre de l'histoire: Vasquez Montalban et Didier Daeninckx ou Le Polar en su tinta , Éditions L'Harmattan, Paris, 2007, ISBN 2-296-02300-2 .

To the American novel noir

  • Megan E. Abbott. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir , Palgrave MacMillan, 2002, ISBN 0-312-29481-6 .
  • Martin Böttcher, dealing with the genre of the “hard-boiled detective novel” at Crumley and Vachss , Tectum Verlag, Marburg, (Science Edition: Series AmericanistiK, Vol. 3), 1996, ISBN 3-89608-693-6 .
  • Gabriele Dietze, Hardboiled Women: Gender Warfare in the American Detective Novel , European Publishing House, Hamburg, 1997, ISBN 978-3-434-50411-5 .
  • Adrienne J. Gosselin, Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other” Side , Garland Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-8153-3153-3 .
  • Armin Jaemmrich, hard-boiled stories and films noirs: Amoral, cynical, pessimistic? An analysis of D. Hammett, R. Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, WR Burnett and other authors, as well as relevant films noirs , Frankfurt, 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-039216-0 .
  • Wolfgang Kemmer, Hammett - Chandler - Fauser. Productive reception of the American hard-boiled school in the German crime novel , Teiresias Verlag, Cologne, 2001, ISBN 3-934305-28-8 .
  • Markus Koch, The Roman noir and the popular underworld of modern literature: Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, Graham Greene , Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Main, 2004, ISBN 3-631-52514-1 .
  • William Marling, The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler , University of Georgia Press, Athens GA, 1995, ISBN 0-8203-1658-X .
  • Geoffrey O'Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir , Da Capo, 1997, ISBN 0-306-80773-4 .
  • LeRoy Lad Panek, New Hard-Boiled Writers: 1970s-1990s , University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, ISBN 0-87972-819-1 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ An alternative term to Roman noir in this last meaning, which is only used in the French-speaking area, is the “polar” derived from the term “roman policier”.
  2. ↑ See on the history of the série noire , Emmanuelle Papazian, Brève histoire de la Série Noire , in: La République des Lettres , July 30, 2010, online ( Memento of February 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ↑ Boileau-Narcejac: “Le roman policier noir”, in: Le Roman policier , Paris: PUF (Quadrige), 1994, pp. 75-87, here pp. 85-87.
  4. ↑ André Vanoncini, "Le roman noir", in: Le roman policier , Paris: PUF (Que sais-je), 2002, pp 62-91, here p 62nd
  5. ^ "Le polar [ie roman noir] est la grande littérature morale de notre époque": Jean-Patrick Manchette. "Les pères fondateurs". In: Charlie mensuel 108, January 1978, printed in: Jean-Patrick Manchette, Chroniques , Paris: Rivages, 1996, p. 31.
  6. ^ For example, Jean-Patrick Manchette in his literary criticism. See Chroniques , Paris: Rivages, 1996.
  7. ↑ Didier Daeninckx in: Le Monde des livres , July 7, 2006: Le roman noir constitue le terrain idéal pour éclairer une réalité sociale et politique que la littérature française, éprise de recherches formalistes, délaisse souvent. Il s'agit de fouiller les plaies et de rompre les non-dits qui condamnent une nation à un refoulement malsain.
  8. ↑ Claire Gorrara ( The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003).
  9. ↑ See in particular the monograph by Elfriede Müller & Alexander Ruoff, Histoire noire. Historiography in the French detective novel after 1968 , Bielefeld: transcript, 2007. The authors define their subject matter as "polar post-soixante-huitard" and investigate the extent to which this represents a form of (alternative) historiography.
  10. ^ Festival International du Roman Noir de Frontignan la Peyrade