No Country- V- Literary genre: Noir fiction.

Ophelia

No Country- V- Literary genre: Noir novel.

Kenneth · Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 11:11 pm Post subject:

Categorizing art is a bitch. A perfect example is Widkipedia's muddled attempt at defining noir. If the protagonists in noir fiction are not usually detectives does that leave out Chandler and Hammett? But noir is hard-boiled and who is more hard-boiled than Chandler? What's a mystery? What's a police procedural? Can a procedural (like 'the Silence of the Lambs" be noir with no sexy ladies and no hardboiled hero?) Noir does imply mood, sex and a tough guy hero in books as well as film. By that measure this book isn't noir. I prefer the term "crime" because it is a very safe way to categorize books. I owned a small bookstore for a while and that massive "crime" umbrella served me well. I think of this book as "mainstream" fiction because that's what McCarthy does. But at some level it may have to be judged as a crime novel which is unfortunate because by the standards of, well, a county sheriff crime procedural I think it would be very weak. Readers of crime fiction would have to regard these County sheriffs as bumbling idiiots and I doubt if that was Mr. McCarthy's intention (although it may well have been).

I think this book needs to be viewed at the Cosmic level. Let's view it from the stratosphere where we can see all these little insect characters with their mountainous egos behaving as if they can make a difference in the world.

It's too easy to get bogged down in the requirements and boundaries of genre fiction (but I'm doing it as I write).

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:43 am Post subject:

Kenneth wrote:

Kenneth · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:07 pm Post subject:

Well, I think the author is willing to suspend plausibility in the day to day nuts and bolts part of the story in order to emphasize big themes. In the quote that you have highlighted I am alluding to the theme of Fate vs. Free Will which is everywhere in the book. Individuals tend to inflate the importance of decisions in their life-- not that they can't be important or even momentous, but in the grand scheme of things the choices we make take place within circumstances that are pre-determined. I think McCarthy sees human beings as tiny specks swept along in the tidal wave of events and history.

Example: Llewelyn Moss makes a momentous decision when he decides to keep the bag containing 2 million dollars. But how many hundreds, thousands, millions of events and circumstances had to take place over numerous lifetimes to put that money under his nose? He may have overslept and not been able to hunt that morning. His wife may have been feeling ill, his truck may have malfunctioned. The drug deal could have been resolved satisfactorily..... a thousand things, completely out of his control, could have kept him out of that Mexican hospital. If the wounded man who begged for water had been shot dead (a bullet one-quarter of an inch to the left or right), Moss would not have returned to the scene-- what then?

The Fate/Free Will theme is not just woven into the story. It is discussed openly between characters in a number of scenes. Maybe it's me, but the word "luck" seems to be all over the place.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:02 am Post subject:

Is there a link between No Country, noir novels and existentialism?

I have found a site that discusses Noir novels and existentialism.

WildCityWoman · Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2008 3:32 am Post subject:

I don't really get that 'noir fiction' thing - dark fiction . . . well, it's pretty bloody and violent.

From my understanding of what 'noir fiction' is, I gotta' say no - it's just a very violent crime story that's been made interesting even to non-crime readers by way of characterization, dialogue, etc.

I rarely lean toward violent stories, but I liked this.

I have a feeling I might not enjoy the movie though. We'll see.

I do know one thing - I am going to be reading more of Cormac McCarthy!


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