Interview with Dominique Manotti
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Interview with Dominique Manotti1
You are a well known author of the French roman noir. Have you been influenced by the American genre? Is it a model for you? If not, why not?
Yes, I have been greatly influenced by the American roman noir but not only by this genre. In the sixties, which was the period of my intellectual development, we were just coming out of the Algerian war and we were in a real rage against everything and so we adopted an entire group of cultural creations from the United States—cinema, jazz, and the American roman noir, to which I was introduced through American films. It represented a wave of new entertainment boiling with creativity and energy and bringing with it a critical look at American society, a look which was often despairing but always profound and inclusive. It taught us that men are the products of their history and not just human nature, which was what we wanted to hear. And being young, we concluded that man could change by changing society, which was what we wanted to do.
We found none of this in contemporary French literature, which buried itself in formalism and personal experience. As for French noir literature, the sixties with its preoccupation with collaboration with German occupiers during World War II, it was clearly stuck in a world of big time gangsters, totally fictitious honorable men—in other words, the works were visibly artificial. And so, to nourish ourselves, we looked, we read, we listened to everything American. But, was it a model? I hope not. American reality is totally different from that of French society. We must break the models and invent our own realism.
Are there differences between the American and French noir? If you prefer the American model, why?
Before answering the question, it's a great temptation to quote Manchette: "The problem for the French polar is that it's not American. Artistic norms have a period of time, and also space. The polar had a geographic center, the United States. Whatever is written recently is necessarily compared to American forms." Since the situations have [End Page 177] continually evolved and since I continue to read the American polars, I must say that I find it threatened by globalization, as well as a lot of formatting of a well-wrapped bestseller in an empty and boring series, and the book is abandoned on page 100 because s/he has already read the same thing a hundred times. The same is true of the televised police serials. Sometimes it occurs with authors who began as authors of works of stunning force and emotion such as Necropolis by Lieberrman, or The Sewers of Los Angeles by Connelly, or very recently, The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, or, of police seriés like NYPD Blues at its beginning. Why has none of this occurred in France? Is it because the French noir authors haven't gotten around much? Haven't lived much before writing in a society where social mobility is rare and that they don't have the guts to put it down on paper? Or is it because their writing is often too slow, too discursive and the emotion gets lost in the telling? Perhaps "noir language," because it was invented in the United States, is always better spoken there? However, it seems to me that as American noir literature becomes "best-sellerized" and more standardized in Europe, especially in Italy, France, Britain, a more autonomous noir literature, more specific and of better quality is beginning to appear. So much the better.
Who are your favorite authors?
The great classics come first, in the style of Hammett, McCoy, Burnett, Hines, Thompson. I reread them regularly just as I reread Dos Passos, whom I tend to regard in the same way. I believe I've been influenced recently by two authors, in two very different ways. First, Ed McBain and his 87th District. What I admire about him is his art of...
