Noir as Affect

Like most forms of popular fiction, crime fiction is known to produce affective responses in its readers. One of the defining features of most genre fiction is that it produces effects in the body, whether it is the excitement of adventure, the fear produced by horror, the arousal of pornography, or the sense of longing and fulfilment produced by romance. Indeed, popular fiction is often denigrated precisely because it produces such “vulgar” bodily affects, in contrast to the complex and distanced contemplation instilled by capital “L” literature. The production of such forms of embodied affect may be lamentable for the guardians of high art, but for scholars interested in questions of affect, popular fiction can be seen as a privileged medium.

Popular fiction does not just instill affects in the reader, it also narrativizes them. Put simply, affect can be defined as that which affects a body in a given cultural, communicative or intersubjective context. They are bodily and intersubjective states that are both conscious and unconscious and are often experienced consciously as emotions or moods. Affects attach not only to characters and spaces but to the very workings of narrative itself. As psychoanalytic critics have demonstrated, central to the drive of detective fiction is the desire to know. In conventional detective fiction, this desire to know often manifests itself as a will to mastery. Thus, the classical detective narrative is premised on the movement from fear, suspense, and disorientation to mastery, clarity, and order. While the hardboiled detective story may forego much of the conventional resolution associated with the classical narrative, it too is predicated on a sense of mastery, even if this mastery is proven to be more about the toughness or endurance of the protagonist rather than any restoration of justice. Similarly, crime fiction that narrates the exploits of the master criminal, from the Memoirs of Vidocq forward, is predicated on the daring and mastery of the criminal.

Whereas detective and crime fiction are finally about mastering affects (as well as mastery as an affect), noir, as a reworking of these other genres, is about the opposite. Noir is predicated on the inability of the protagonist to master the affects dramatized by the narrative. Instead, the affects typically master the protagonist (who is unmastered by them) and define the coordinates of the fictional world. Noir thus has a privileged position in understanding affect in relationship to crime and detective fiction. It demonstrates the power of affect to both shape individual actions and the larger landscape in which such actions take place. Noir takes shape as a specific affective mood or atmosphere. Central to noir is the staging of negative affects. Negativity clings to the very bones of the noir crime story. Noir works via the staging of negative affects such as guilt, sadness, (often murderous) rage, cynicism, loss, resentment, fear, anxiety, destructive desire, often including an erotic attachment to death.

Initially, this definition of noir may seem counterintuitive. Noir is often associated in popular culture with a certain kind of nostalgic image of mid-twentieth-century life, featuring tough guys, femme fatales, shadows, crime, and a dangerous yet alluring urban demimonde. It is also usually associated with film, with such actors as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and others. Indeed, it has only been in the past thirty years or so that the category of the noir novel has gained critical currency in the work of Christopher Metress, James Naremore, William Marling, myself, and others. Yet, many film noirs were adaptations from crime novels that shared many of their thematic concerns and narrative structures.

Moreover, the novels often were resolutely darker and more disturbing than many of their filmic counterparts, since the latter had to negotiate the Hayes code. Thus, the term noir seems to fit the novels even more fully than the films, even if the naming was belated and the films were named first, if also retrospectively, as Marc Vernet has noted. If we focus just on the noir crime novel (leaving to one side the detective novel), we can construct a timeline that begins with the writings of James M...