crimeculture

Postmodern Noir: An Exploration of the Intersections and Hybridity between Genres

Liam Richardson, Lancaster University

The noir genre has been very loosely defined over the course of its history. However, this study shall examine how, ‘the label “noir” has been applied to texts and films that combine elements of the noir thriller with future world and Gothic fantasies’.[1] Theorists of genre contest that each generic form is constructed and formulated on a basis of rules and governing principals. John Frow believes genre to be a series of ‘conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning’.[2] One of his contemporaries in the field of genre, Heta Pyrhönen supports this viewpoint claiming: ‘genre directs the way in which we write, read and interpret texts’.[3] However, noir in its postmodern manifestation incorporates elements of other genres into its makeup which allow for an infusion of fantasy which offsets noir’s usual realistic pretensions. Slavoj Žižek argues that this is an attempt to ‘resuscitate the noir universe’ leading the genre to become a ‘vampire-like entity’ which is in need of ‘fresh blood’ to survive and prevent exhaustion.[4] Therefore, I shall examine in what ways and how noir adopts the themes and concerns of the gothic and science fiction modes, also considering points of overlap, where sensibilities are shared thus blurring the genre boundary divide ever further. I hope to argue that this incorporation of the fantastic allows ‘a number of related genres to emerge’[5] and indeed hybridise into a new postmodern form which defies categorisation under normative genre divisions. Brian McHale argues that we now belong to a culture which ‘tends to deny reality and promote unreality’ (p219) and I will pay due consideration to the methods in which authors extrapolate noir themes enthusing them with a fantastical twist.[6]

The short novel, Come Closer (2003), by Sara Gran is useful in introducing the concept of generic collusion between noir and Gothic modes. The character of Amanda is a noir protagonist in the same vein as Jim Thompson’s first-person narrated psychopaths, albeit a uniquely female transgressor. The ‘noir sensibility’ (Horsley, p12) is typically shaped by external and internal factors. External factors may constitute a sense of urban alienation, critiques of capitalism and, in American texts, explicit criticism of the American dream and idealism. Amanda is portrayed as being critical of Alex, her husband’s friend, who she claims to know nothing about, apart from ‘his career or the fruits of that career’.[7] These external factors directly impact on internal factors, the psychological element in the text, whereby Amanda’s descent into criminality is explored. She eventually resorts to murder, culminating in killing her husband which leaves blood ‘splattered on the walls’ and ‘smeared on the floor’ (p164), a crime she claims not to know having committed. The blurring of genres occurs in the motivation of these crimes. Instead of schizophrenia, greed or lust spurring the transgressor on, the fantastical element is injected into the text via Amanda’s possession by a demon named Naamah.

This surgically precise grafting together of two genres is surprisingly successful in producing a cohesive text, although Mary M. Talbot correctly asserts that ‘formulaic genres are permeated with the same discourse’, which possibly explains the success.[8] As we shall explore further in discussion of Hjortsberg and Ackroyd, the theme of identity is a concern of gothic and noir texts. Amanda’s possession by the demon motivates her criminal behaviour and correlates with a gradual loss of identity, which the character recognises in brief moments of clarity: ‘Occasionally I thought about how much I had changed over the past few months’ (p86). However, the demon reasserts itself claiming Amanda is ‘better’ now and the bleak ending, in which Amanda is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital after claiming insanity (p165) typifies the pessimism that proliferates noir fiction. Amanda’s demon, it transpires, had been an ‘imaginary friend’ (p19) from her childhood. Punter claims that the ‘supernatural itself becomes a symbol of our past rising against us’ (p47) and Amanda is certainly haunted by her past.[9] The demon is itself, as Freud summarises, ‘nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old- established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression’ (p429).[10] Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ illuminates the gothic concern of the past rising against us. However, this theme is also central to noir fiction, as the past is typically the site of criminal activity, which must be resolved in the present, by a process of investigation and exploration, something we shall discover in Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor.

William Hjortsberg’s novel Falling Angel (1977) is another hybrid text, although arguably more cunning in its fusion of two generic modes. It has been classified by Stefano Tani as an example of an ‘anti-detective novel’ whereby a ‘postmodern sensibility’ alters significantly the traditional structure of the genre.[11] The novel’s protagonist, Harry Angel, is employed to find a jazz singer named Jonny Favorite. However, the novel’s twist resolution is that Angel himself is Favorite, who used dark magic to inhabit another soul to escape from a pact with the devil himself, who is revealed to be Angel’s employer all along. In this rather convoluted plot, Angel, cunningly named, inhabits a nightmare city; a Gothicised landscape replete with voodoo rituals, Faustian pacts and incestuous relationships. The infiltration of the gothic is apparent from the novel’s first sentence: ‘It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse’.[12] Noir arguably already blurs the boundaries between good and evil. Raymond Chandler, a pioneer noir writer, states that classic detective fiction is ‘unreal and mechanical’ and ‘contrived, and too little aware what goes on in the world’.[13] Noir’s response is to feature morally ambiguous anti-hero detectives who are not so far removed from the villains they diligently pursue in a criminalised urban environment. This blurring of good and evil, self and other, is literalised by Hjortsberg. The devil takes on many disguises, whether it be Louis Cypher or el Çifr, and has a physical body described thus: ‘His hair was black and full, combed straight back on a high forehead, yet his square-cut goatee and pointed moustache were white as ermine. He was tanned and elegant; his eyes a distant, ethereal blue.’ (p5) The multiple identities of Louis Cypher are matched in his antagonist and employee: Harry Angel.

The ultimate irony of Falling Angel is that the detective is pursuing himself. The fantastic element incorporated into the novel is concerned with ‘revealing and exploring the interrelations of the “I” and the “not I”, of self and other’, according to Rosemary Jackson (p53). Angel’s quest through the city, his investigation is futile and his hunt for the mysterious and elusive Jonny Favorite pointless; as the answers are all available in his own splintered mind. Acceptance of his own identity comes too late: ‘Poor old Harry Angel, fed to the dogs like table scraps. I killed him and ate his heart, but it was me who died all the same’ (p287). The Devil, the ubiquitous Louis Cypher with his ‘dazzling smile’ (p172) is described by Harry/ Jonny as the ‘greatest Trickster of them all’ (p285) and it appears that Favorite’s black magic ritual was a folly.

The gothic is a pervasive mode that appears to consistently run parallel to the novel’s noir pretensions. The process of the investigation occupies Angel’s daytime activities but it is telling that it is in his dreams that a gothic ancestry emerges. Angel himself remarks that his ‘dreams were a succession of nightmares’ (p186) where he is menaced by the figure of Cyphre at every turn. These nightmares highlight the parallel narratives at work. However, as Lee Horsley remarks, ‘the noir amnesiac may all too effectively repress the memories that surface to give him nightmares’ (p233). These nightmares are indicative of a struggle between two contrasting but not mutually exclusive genres.

A fundamental aspect of postmodern noir is a propensity to destabilise the genre’s realistic grounding. Falling Angel may be viewed as an example of a deconstructive text which is characterised, according to Tani, by a ‘more ambiguous perception of reality’ (p77) which is given credence by the inclusion of a plot involving magic and the supernatural. Once Angel corners a suspect in the case, he is baffled by the unrealistic explanation offered by Krusemark: ‘I watched him conjure up Lucifuge Rofocale in my own living room. That’s a very complicated procedure’ (p269). The novel does present the reader with a resolution, albeit an irrational one that undermines typical conventions of the genre. As Tani observes, this resolution is dependent on the reader accepting the irrational and implausible notion that ‘the devil exists and operates among us’ (p99). The fusion of noir and the gothic reveals intrinsic similarities between the two modes which arguably hark back to the work of Poe, whom Tani suggests, in a manner akin to Hjortsberg, ‘struggles to exorcise through reason the ghost of eighteenth-century Gothicism’ (p7). However, on the part of Hjortsberg this is probably a self-conscious and deliberate manoeuvre, another example of his postmodern leanings. The author is able to parody and spoof the hard-boiled genre and at the same time undermine its textual structures allowing an infusion of unreality to permeate and dictate the manner in which the novel concludes.

This conclusion to Falling Angel ‘signifies a writing of excess’, which Botting considers to be a primary trait of the gothic mode.[14] This excess is exemplified by a black magic ritual which has grim consequences:

The priest gave the baby to an acolyte and was handed a knife in return. The bright blade caught the candlelight as they cut the infant’s throat. The tiny creature bucked for life, his cries a muffled gargle. “I sacrifice you to Divine Lucifer. May the peace of Satan always be with you.” The priest held the chalice under the spouting blood. I finished the roll as the baby died. (p262)

This shocking sacrifice marks the moment in which two parallel narratives collide and the gothic mode becomes dominant. Excess is marked further by the character of Krusemark ‘cornballing’ (p263) another man during the ceremony and Angel’s final realisation that Epiphany Proudfoot, a character he has been engaged in a sexual relationship with, is actually his daughter (p289). As Botting correctly asserts, ‘one narrative, the detective story, is gradually supplanted by a Faustian tale of diabolic repossession’ (p174). The narrative twist, a common feature in crime and noir fiction, is in evidence, although this twist destabilises the text and the genre itself. Harry Angel’s defiant objections, ‘Damn it, I knew who I was’ (p280) highlight the irony that the character’s struggle with his identity is mirrored (another gothic trope) in the text itself. Angel’s further comment, that he is ‘a corrupt hybrid creature trying to escape the past’ (p287) only heightens this sense of irony further. The quest for identity is subtly layered into the notion of the text’s generic status. The injection of fantasy creates a hybrid form according to Tani, a ‘fiction of potentialities’ (p148) that breathes new life into the exhausted noir form.

Like Falling Angel, Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor shares a similar preoccupation with the twin themes of identity and the past. However, whereas Falling Angel features an embedded twin narrative, Hawksmoor arguably differentiates between its multi-generic and separate narratives. The novel features a Satanist named Nicholas Dyer, an architect who conducts sacrifices whilst building churches. Dyer’s narrative takes place in 1711 with the character’s archaic speech patterns incorporated into the dialogue. A present day narrative features a detective named Nicholas Hawksmoor investigating deaths similar in nature to those enacted centuries earlier by Dyer. Ackroyd deliberately evokes from the outset what Horsley refers to as a ‘doppelganger relationship between investigator and murderer’ (p234) which is evidenced by their shared Christian names and Ackroyd’s own incorporation of historical fabulation, a typical trait of postmodernism. The character of Dyer is loosely based on the actual historical figure of Nicholas Hawksmoor, the name Ackroyd chooses for his fictional detective. This act of altering actual history and tailoring it to an author’s fictional needs is evidence of the postmodern trickiness that Ackroyd is guilty of.

Hawksmoor himself unwittingly alludes to this connectivity when he remarks it is the job of the detective ‘to hurry the murderer along the course which he had already laid for himself’ and therefore become ‘his assistant’.[15] In this instance, Hawksmoor assists and forges an uncanny connection between a murderer who believes ‘Sin is a Substance and not a Quality, and it is communicated from parents to children’ (p21). Dyer’s sins, made tangible by those he has murdered, continue into the future. John Scaggs contests the point that ‘the gothic novel is characterised by the disruptive return of the past into the present’ and Dyer certainly haunts the present day narrative.[16]

Hawksmoor is described by Julian Wolfreys and Jeremy Gibson as ‘the most obvious of English detectives’[17] and although it may be possible to view the character as fairly one-dimensional and under developed I believe this to be a deliberate ploy by Ackroyd who takes the opportunity to parody and pastiche the detective figure that inhabits the noir crime novel. Hawksmoor uses modern police methods and forensic detection to attempt to apprehend the murderer, although these techniques fail the rational detective: ‘“I don’t know about the time. Even if I allow for a rise of temperature of six degrees at death, and even if the rate of cooling was only two degrees an hour, his present body heat would mean that he was killed only six hours ago” ’ (p113). Solutions do not appear from traditional methods of detection. Hawksmoor is belligerent in his belief that ’we live in a rational society’ (p158) and does not accept that supernatural means may be the only possible explanation for the murders. Again, we have an undermining of the noir mode; where the text is haunted and controlled by a historic gothic element. Noir fiction is concerned with some form of resolution, a tying up of loose plot threads, yet Ackroyd, as Gibson and Wolfreys correctly point out, does not provide the reader with closure in ‘any conventional realist sense’ (P104) instead providing an ambiguous conclusion:

They were face to face, and yet they looked past one another at the pattern which they cast upon the stone; for when there was a shape there was a reflection, and when there was a light there was a shadow, and when there was a sound there was an echo, and who could say where one had ended and the other had begun? And when they spoke they spoke with one voice. (p217)

The acute relationship between murderer and detective is given its fullest expression here. Hawksmoor is haunted by the past, an intangible menace, possibly that of Dyer himself, who in his final passage, claims that his ‘shaddowe stretched over the world’ (p209). Evil is an abstract concept, and is represented as such by Ackroyd with shadows, voices and dust acquiring sinister connotations. A young boy who is murdered in the twentieth-century narrative asks the prescient question ‘where does dust come from?’ (p34) These ‘irresolvable mysteries’ (p233) are a fundamental aspect of a text that is concerned with raising questions without ever actually providing the reader with the answers that the genre itself, in its conventional form, typically demands.

Ackroyd himself is a playful and self-conscious author as is evidenced by the artificial structure of Hawksmoor. Chapters are linked together despite alternating between time zones. The ‘face above him’ (p42) that concludes one chapter is carried forward through time as well as in the text in the following chapter: ‘The face above me then became a Voice’ (p43). Events in the past narrative are echoed in the present day one. The characters share a concern with time. Hawksmoor himself frequently comments ‘time is not on our side’ (p112) which creates a level of irony inherent in the text as events in the past hinder the detective in the present. Nicholas Dyer is schooled in black magic by Mirabilis who claims: ‘This is our time, said he, and we must lay its Foundations with our own Hands; but when he used such Words I was seiz’d with this Reflection: and how do we conclude what Time is our own?’ (p55). The gothic mode, like the character of Dyer himself, is most apparent in the historical narrative; however it still permeates the present day discourse. A complex form of hybridity is again apparent with the text utilising and blending together motifs of both genres. Just as Hawksmoor is haunted by the past, it is also true that the debt owed by noir to the gothic, as an originating genre, is given due attention and status by Ackroyd in his text.

The central thrust of my argument, that postmodern noir fuses and hybridizes other literary genres is exemplified in its absorption of the Gothic mode. Fred Botting lucidly argues that a ‘diffusion of Gothic traces among a multiplicity of different genres’ (p13) is apparent in contemporary literature. The debt owed by literary noir to the Gothic mode is considerable. Edgar Allen Poe’s cycle of C. Auguste Dupin novels are widely accredited as representing the birth of the wider detective and crime genre; a viewpoint prescribed by Martin Priestman who nevertheless ascertains that the genre is ‘less easily pinned down to a single point of origin’.[18] However, the fiction of Poe, an author predominantly associated with the Gothic mode, and other sensation novels of the nineteenth-century are shown, according to Ascari, to feature a ‘simultaneous presence’ of the two opposing genres.[19] It could be argued therefore, that the hybridity occurring in the works of Gran, Ackroyd and Hjortsberg is merely a return to the past, or a process of recycling and reshaping anew old traditions. This analysis is supported by Steven Connor who argues that a central concern of postmodernism is the ‘imperative of the eternal return’ and how the process of re-telling is achieved by typical postmodern tropes of imitation, parody and pastiche, something clearly operating in the texts previously discussed.[20]

Noir’s interaction with other popular genres is not exclusive to the gothic. In fact, John Scaggs is of the opinion that ‘generic appropriation’ is something that noir is very ‘receptive’ too (p82). It is apparent in science-fiction that elements of noir are discernible, especially in its sub genre known as cyberpunk which I shall consider fully with a discussion of William Gibson’s Virtual Light. This receptiveness is perhaps most vividly explored in the 1982 Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner. The critic Gregory Benford believes the movie ‘was driven by a visual aesthetic and a postmodern need to revisit and recycle the tropes and mannerisms of earlier fictions’ (p224).[21] Blade Runner certainly amalgamates common tropes synonymous with noir and incorporates them into a futuristic setting. Harrison Ford’s character Rick Deckard is a stereotypical private detective and the film’s general atmosphere engenders a ‘sense of pervasive and impending doom’.[22] The films centres on Deckards pursuit and execution of a group of Replicants, a bioengineered species that possess enhanced strength and agility, but lack generally lack human emotion and empathy. The Replicants therefore become, as Woody Haut surmises, ‘an expendable product whose appeal extends no further then replication and critique’.[23] Identity as a theme is something I have already outlined as a common noir trope. However, a science-fiction infused noir narrative takes this idea onto its next logical and progressive step: dehumanisation. Botting claims that not only is the film sympathetic to the Replicants, ostensibly the villains of the piece, but that ‘the narrative gradually erodes the differences distinguishing one from the other’ (p164). The implication that the movie puts forward, albeit ambiguously, is that the central character may arguably be a Replicant himself. Brian Jarvis writes that ‘the blade runner, like the private investigator whose mantle he inherits, possesses the status of the ambivalent and compromised agent of authority’.[24] Once again, noir’s concerns regarding the nature of what constitutes a hero or an instrument of justice is extrapolated and incorporated into other generic forms.

Another primary concern in Blade Runner, which it shares with its noir predecessors, may be viewed in its depiction of the urban landscapes of the future. Paul Sammon considers this imagined future Los Angeles to be ‘dark’ and ‘decadent’, controlled by ‘omniscient (and corrupt) corporations’.[25] Blade Runner merely prophesises the noir author’s concerns with a capitalist culture and, indeed, as Scott Bukatman testifies, the task of the cyberpunk genre is to narrate ‘urban alienation and separation’ in this hybrid collusion of the noir and science fiction genres.[26] Themes concerning urban alienation and critiques of contemporary culture are endemic in science fiction, a genre that is particularly allegorical, but these concerns are intensified in the fiction of the author Phillip K. Dick, whose short story inspired Blade Runner.

Dick is commonly associated with science-fiction yet his ties with the genre could be perceived as ‘close but complicated’.[27] His novel A Scanner Darkly (1977) features the traditional trappings of science fiction, defined by Tom Shippey as the ‘building block’, or the presence of a ‘discrete piece of information recognisable as not-true’.[28] In this instance, we have a piece of technology known as a scramble suit. The story’s main character, Bob Arctor leads a double life as an undercover narcotics agent and a down and out disenfranchised drug addict. The scramble suit is essential for Arctor, known as Fred in his job, to remain anonymous to his superiors and those individuals involved in a drug culture that he is investigating. The scramble suit is explained as having been constructed by ‘experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue’ and renders the wearer a ‘vague blur’ that cannot be ‘identified by voice, or by even technological voiceprint, or by appearance’.[29] This science fiction element also allows for the development of an important plot point. As Fred/ Arctor himself comments, he ‘naturally reported on himself’ (p44) in his role as an investigator and when wearing the scramble suit. However, he can only make a ‘strangled, robotlike noise’ (p45) when his superior orders him to investigate himself. Thus, we have a scenario where criminal and investigator are in fact one and the same.

The critic John Scaggs believes that noir texts are about ‘making meaning’ with the investigator making connections between ‘appearance and reality, surface and depth, past and present, and truth or falsehood’ (p72). However, in noir texts that have a fantastical element, perceptions of reality are distorted with the novel’s title A Scanner Darkly implying that not only is reality distorted, but it is also arguably a product of hyper reality. Fred/Arctor watches himself via ‘holo-playbacks’ (p127) on the scanner, thus separating the character into two, an issue exacerbated by drug abuse, rendering the character’s perception of reality unreal. Baudrillard argues that ‘illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible’ resulting in the paranoid surveillance culture that Dick creates where reality is simulated by a technological process of scanning or viewing.[30] This relationship between self and society Baudrillard argues is an example of hyper reality, ‘models of a real without origin’ in which a new form of abstraction is apparent, replacing the ‘double’ (p364) which is common in gothic texts. This new mode of simulation is a central theme of postmodernism and is arguably most apparent in science fiction writing which Butler stresses runs ‘both parallel and overlapping’ with postmodern writing.[31] It therefore allows for a contraction of the noir sensibility in A Scanner Darkly, where meaning is left meaningless, and boundaries are blurred; the scramblesuit a visual reminder that the gulf between self and other, good and evil, criminal and investigator, is actually minimal.

Detachment from the self and the real situation leave Fred/Arctor a split person. He is told by a scientist ‘It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror’ (p169) which is a result of abusing the illegal drug Substance D, also known as slow Death. This altered perception of his situation means that Fred becomes disdainful and appears generally loathing towards Bob Arctor. This is evident when Fred claims that Arctor is ‘shucking us’, reasoning that ‘some people can tell when they’re being watched’ (p153). This division of himself and subsequent process of investigating his own activities lead to a sense of inverted paranoia. Palmer contests that Dick is interested in detailing the ‘plight of the modern worker in a postmodern world’ in which ‘no one, and especially no authority can be trusted’ (p396). Fred/Arctor’s erosion of his own identity result in him being unable to trust even himself. The opposing themes of trust and conspiracy are explored fully in the text. The noir hero typically must uncover a trail of secrets and lies whilst being hindered by treacherous and untrustworthy characters. His superior is aware that, ‘by a process of elimination’ (p181) the scramblesuit wearing Fred must be Bob Arctor, something Fred/Arctor amusingly finds ‘grotesque’ (p181). Characters all have there moment of revelation, where they impart knowledge the reader may have reasoned unlikely. The character of Donna, Arctor’s drug dealing girlfriend is revealed to also be an investigator. Perhaps, the ultimate revelation is that New Path, a sanctuary for those who have suffered psychologically due to Substance D abuse is actually cultivated and grown by the organisation: ‘I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth’ (p216). Dick is once again stressing the importance of understanding differences between appearance and reality. Corporate organisations, as in Blade Runner, are viewed as the primary agent of evil. The science fiction plotline merely heightens the sense of paranoia and possibility of deception that is a common motif of noir fiction.

Socio-political critique is a cornerstone of noir literature with ‘class prejudice and exploitation, commercial greed and the plundering of the environment, consumerism and the politics of self-interest’ governing factors inherent in the genre.[32] Science-fiction texts allow this critique to be projected and speculated upon in a futuristic environment. Botting argues that ‘consumption signals exhaustion; the wasting and wearing out of things and bodies’.[33] William Gibson’s Virtual Light (1993) invites the reader to witness an urban environment of the future in which a shadowy and murky corporation is planning to rebuild San Francisco ‘like they’re doing with Tokyo’ and are withholding the information from the population.[34] The plans for this redesign can be found in a pair of virtual reality sunglasses which contain the plans. These sunglasses perform the role of the Hitchcockian macguffin, an object that drives the narrative and carries forward the plot. However, rather than being a hollow prop, the sunglasses may also represent the obscurity and tinted, dark vision of the future the corporation is aiming to project. These corporate organisations appear to show disdain for the working classes who inhabit the Bridge, a structure which reminds the character Yamazaki of ‘the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier’ (p58). Gibson writes about the structure of the bridge, ‘its steel bones, its stranded tendons’ which are ‘lost within an accretion of dreams’ (p58). The worn out and dilapidates bridge may be viewed as a symbolic intersection which looks both forward and backward. The bridge could point to the technological near future which Gibson’s narrative is infused with and also hark back to a past which contained dreams and promises which amounted to nothing more than illusion and fabrication. Dani Carvalho argues that Gibson plays with ‘technological metaphors’[35] and this is certainly apparent with the bridge and the crucial pair of sunglasses which both appear to represent in differing ways in which a consumerist culture is creating an underclass, a nacent warning and extrapolation, perhaps of themes which loom large in a noir narrative, concerned with a version of criminality perpetuated by ruling classes which are then adopted by transgressor criminals. The noir hero, therefore, like Virtual Light’s Rydell inhabits, according to Cavallaro an ‘open and formless urban scene’ in which isolation and rootlessness (p8-9) occur due to a pursuit of criminality already inherent in a society’s social structure.

Both Blade Runner and Virtual Light can be cited as being part of the Cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Bruce Sterling, a proponent of Cyberpunk claims that the subgenre ‘prize[s] the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable’.[36] However, this rather prosaic analysis should be supplanted by Butler’s claim that the Cyberpunk was shaped by ‘a patchwork of influences’ (p142), something also contested by Roger Luckhurst who writes that ‘Gibson’s writing is not so much punk as pastiche’.[37] Virtual Light indeed retrofits noir tropes in a rather obvious manner. Berry Rydell is a security guard and ‘former police officer’ (p8) who was ‘suspended’ (p9) after ‘shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head’ (p10-11). Rydell is a typical tough-guy loner who inhabits the worlds of Chandler and Hammett. Like Harry Angel, Rydell appears to be a knowing pastiche and homage to their noir protagonists, Marlowe and Spade. This insertion of the ‘hard-boiled noir anti-hero in a science fiction scenario’ (Barlow, p48) again highlights what Gary Wolfe views as ‘generic slipperiness’.[38] Noir and science fiction intersect in postmodern genre texts. This intersection occurs because science fiction, most notably in its dystopian or Cyberpunk guises, incorporates typical facets of the noir narrative into its own textual structure. Concerns with urban alienation, consumerism and capitalism are sewn into a technological and futuristic tapestry, which therefore provides an enhanced or exaggerated speculative vision of how noir narratives primary concerns may develop.

Science fiction too clearly hybridises the noir form and indeed may be viewed as originating from the gothic mode also Adam Roberts accepts that a majority of critics ‘link the birth’ of science fiction with ‘gothic writing’ though he believes that ‘gothic fiction is irrational and magical’, a point that I readily accept.[39] However, the incorporation of technology and science into a genre that eventually became defined as science fiction is surely due to real developments in society. Lee Horsley argues that the ‘noir thriller is rooted in its own time and place’ (p13), yet surely this definition could be extended to all genre fiction. It is interesting to note that science fiction, particularly the works of Philip K Dick as we have discovered are infused with narratives of paranoia and distrust. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay JR states that ‘science was contained by Cold War ideology’ and this extends into science fiction of the period also.[40] Conspiracy culture and science fiction have gone hand in hand ever since, surely only exacerbated by events such as Watergate and the growing domination of Capitalist cultures on world societies. These cultural factors also therefore inhabit noir fiction and this undoubtedly leads to the extrapolation of noir ideology which we witness in science fiction texts.

In conclusion, the noir genre appears to be an extremely fluid entity which is at odds with Priestman’s assertion that the genre possesses ‘astonishing stability’ (p1). As we have witnessed, the infusion and hybridization of noir into other genres, explicitly the gothic and science-fiction modes, allow noir to progess and delineate from the path that it had previously been restrained too. Noir is plot driven with the denouement of a text surprising the reader and delighting them in equal measure. However, in its postmodern and fantastical incarnation, noir is able to surprise the reader by providing resolutions which undermine the previous stability and expectation of the genre. Peter Messent’s belief that detectives in noir ‘reveal corruption’ and ‘preserve the status quo’ appears to be an outdated belief if we consider the ways in which postmodern noir concludes with the triumph of chaos and disorder over our detectives/protagonists.[41] A bleak worldview, an inherent feature of noir, continues in its postmodern form long after the text has finished. Veronica Hollinger writes that postmodernism ‘functions as a kind of umbrella term incorporating within itself the features of a fragmented and hybridized way-of-being in a world that is itself understood to be random, chaotic and open to multiple and contradictory interpretations’.[42] This analysis encapsulates the postmodern agenda this arguably a feature not just of noir, but all genres. The postmodern sensibility is typically concerned with a quest for understanding and making sense of a chaotic world, a key trope of noir texts. However, postmodern authors appear only to pose questions but are either unable or unwilling to provide answers. They instead look to the past for inspiration, and other generic forms that are succeptible to reappropriation. We have already discovered the close parallels of genres and how, arguably, it is only due to developments in structuralism in the twentieth-century that boundaries and classifications for texts arose. By breaking free of these rigid confines, as Gary Wolfe succinctly puts it: ‘writers who contribute to the evaporation of genre… are those same writers who continually revitalise genre’ (p27). Postmodern noir represents a symbolic intersection, which allows the genre to stray along divergent paths and develop, travel and become refreshed and reinvigorated by each new vista it explores.

Copyright © 2009 Liam Richardson

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..........................

[1] Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp 228-229. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[2] John Frow, Genre (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p 13.

[3] Heta Pyrhönen, ‘Genre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007), p 109.

[4] Slavoj Žižek, ‘“The Thing that Thinks”: The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject’, in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), p 199.

[5] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981), p 7. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[6] Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p 219.

[7] Sara Gran, Come Closer (London: Atlantic, 2003), p 122. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[8] Mary M Talbot, Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p 38.

[9] David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edition (Harlow: Longman, 1996), p 47.

[10] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p 429.

[11] Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1984), p xv. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[12] William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel (Harpenden: No Exit, 1978), p 1. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[13] Raymond Chandler, 'The Simple Art of Murder' (London: Vintage, 1944), p 1.

[14] Fred Botting, Gothic (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), p 1. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[15] Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London: Abacus, 1985), p 116. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[16] John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p 15. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[17] Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Lucid and Labyrinthine Text (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p 95. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[18] Martin Priestman, Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), p 1. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[19] Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p 61.

[20] Steven Connor, ‘Rewriting Wrong: On the Ethics of Literary Reversion’, in Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Niall Lucy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p 123.

[21] George Benford, ‘Science Fiction, Rhetoric and Realities: Words to the Critic’, in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia, 1992), p 224.

[22] Aaron Barlow, ‘Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities: Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science-Fiction movie’, in The Blade Runner Experience: Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker (London: Wallflower, 2005), p 44.

[23] Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p 9.

[24] Brian Jarvis, ‘Watching the Detectives: Body Images, Sexual Politics and Ideology in Contemporary Crime Film’, in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia, 1992), p 233.

[25] Paul M Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (London: Orion, 1996), p 325.

[26] Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p 51.

[27] Christopher Palmer, ‘Philip K. Dick’, in A Companion to Science-Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p 389. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[28] Tom Shippey, ‘Hard Reading: The Challenges of Science-Fiction’, in A Companion to Science-Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp 13-14. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[29] Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly (London: Gollancz, 1977), p 15. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[30] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p 372. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[31] Andrew M Butler, ‘Postmodernism and Science Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003), p 144. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[32] Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005), p 159.

[33] Fred Botting, ‘“Monsters of the Imagination”: Gothic, Science, Fiction’, in A Companion to Science-Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p 121.

[34] William Gibson, Virtual Light (London: Penguin, 1993), p 269. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[35] Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (London: Athlone, 2000), p 11. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

[36] Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Arbor House, 1986), p xii.

[37] Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p 211.

[38] Gary Wolfe, ‘Genre Implosion: Strategies of Dissolution in the Postmodern Fantastic’, in Edging into the Future, eds. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (Pennsylvania: Penn State University, 2002), p 29.

[39] Adam Roberts, The History of Science-Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p 82-83.

[40] Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Science Fiction/Criticism’, in A Companion to Science-Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p 48.

[41] Peter Messent, Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (Oxford: Oxford University, 1997), p 9.

[42] Veronica Hollinger, ‘Science-Fiction and Postmodernism’, in A Companion to Science-Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p 234.