The Roman noir in Post-War French Culture (review)

'Dark fictions', the subtitle of this book, says much about the roman noir. The locale is the city, the rhetorical colour is black, the dubious hero lives and drives by night. The author argues that the genre, rooted in counterculture, remains an enduring canon. In six chapters Gorrara outlines a history of the roman noir through close analysis of as many groups of works extending from the Occupation to the 1990s. It begins with Leo Malet's 120, Rue de la gare (1943), in which the hero's peripatetics chart the defeat of France and the 'negation of its glorious past' (p. 32). The growth of the post-war roman noir goes apace with that of film noir, especially in its French inflections in the cinema of Henri-Georges Clouzot from Le Corbeau (1943) to Les Diaboliques (1955), the latter feature turning Celle qui n'était plus, a novel of suspense, into a compelling study of rebellion and dissimulation. Post-war consumer culture is the target of Jean-Patrick Manchette's Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (1976), a counterpart to Georges Perec's Les Choses (1965), in which France is shown submitting to commodity fetishism. World War II returns much like the Freudian repressed in Didier Daeninckx's Meurtres pour mémoire (1984), a novel that asks its readers 'if and how France as a nation has come to terms with its past' (p. 82). Daniel Pennac's La Fée carabine (1987) reflects dilemmas of immigration encountered in the 1980s, a time of secularization concurrent with the emergence of racism and the pandemic of AIDS following expanded traffic in drugs and sex. Maud Tabachnik's Un été pourri (1994) shows that hard-boiled fiction does not belong exclusively to misogynist authors or misguided protagonists of film noir. Sexual violence is seen an 'an extension of fraught and unhappy relations between men and women in general' (p. 118) when Tabachnik calls into question issues of gender within the inherited conventions of the roman noir.

The history that Gorrara tells thus correlates the forms and shapes of black fiction with the aftermath of the Occupation with France in the glut of post-1945 consumerism, with decolonization and changing demographies inside the nation, along with the resurgence of the extreme right, and with sexual politics and violence much as they are also witnessed in recent French cinema. The book studies a genre of fiction whose sales and readership far outnumber works of literature and cultural theory. The author holds to an allegorical history by which dominant themes or topoi of six decades are read through the plots and styles of a rich variety of authors and texts. Notwithstanding the limits its allegorical method imposes, the book brings forward a wealth of works not familiar, it might be wagered, to most readers of of FS. The monograph, particularly in its treatment of the roman noir and film noir, invites extensive comparative treatment of cinema, fiction and dilemmas in the nation at large. Gorrara's short but telling work opens new paths in areas where literature, visual media and popular culture inform each other.