Recessional times, such as are currently being endured in the United States ;
times of financial, cultural, and general societal instability; are inherently
dark. Dark times call for dark art; when it’s literature, dark writing.
Sometime mid-century XX, the appellation “noir” was affixed to all forms of
creativity heavily tinted with darkness, brooding self-consciousness, and
chiaroscuro perceptions of the world. What "noir" signifies, in
popular culture, is an aesthetic condition of extreme stylization. Look at the
elements which configure, say, the average Raymond Chandler novel, and which do
not change from book to book; stylized elements— a hard-bitten detective
(Marlowe) pursuing a treacherous villain, encountering a standard,
cemented-into-place cast of characters. There's the coy femme fatale, attached
somehow to a criminal underworld or with underworld connections, seductive
nonetheless; dirty and double-dealing cops (police officers), who may or may
not be trustworthy, and in on certain hits, games, “rackets”; and innocent
bystanders drawn into matrixes of crime and hustle against their will. What
stylization implies, as a kind of mold for artistic forms to fit into, is
homogeneity, and the solidity of homogeneity— we, as readers, need never wonder
what to expect from Raymond Chandler. To the extent that more serious artists
develop individual and individualized aesthetic concerns and formal-thematic,
consistent topoi, stylization in their work becomes inevitable— this is how we
know Picasso from Manet, Manet from David; or, in literature, Byron from
Browning, Amis from Updike; etc.
If I am interested in "noir," and in poaching
"noir" from American popular culture and granting it another context,
it is because the stylistic elements of my literary interests
share, in the kinds of moods, impressions, and ambience generated,
something with noir, and noir stylistic conventions. The entire edifice of twenty-first
century cultural Philadelphia
coheres around a set of imperatives, which lean towards the revelation of
shadows rather than light, dark tones and hues rather than bright ones, and
labyrinthine complexities rather than scintillating clarities. Levels of
cognitive awareness, represented in books and paintings which seek to boast
some philosophical import, particularly in regards to ontological awareness in
the midst of extreme (even pornographic) vulgarity, separate our Philly
drastically from the rote, pop culture consonant facility of Chandler's books.
Indeed, the chiasmus between noir and serious, sustained intellection is, as
far as I know, a novel mode of stylistic inquiry and exploration. One
equivalent of Chandler 's
shocking plot-twists and peripeteias are linguistic innovations which multiply
meanings and make key words and phrases serve dual, or triple, ends; so that
these words and phrases are set in place, figuratively, to split the heads of
their audience, towards recognitions of hidden semantic-thematic depth, and
against surface ("surface-y") orientations and sensibilities. That is
why I call this version of noir "deep noir"— Philly Free
School art is crafted, on
some semantic levels, from similar molds— towards chiaroscuro and the enchantment
of multiple meanings. It is also easy to notice that the work being referred to
is, in fact, haunted by coy femme fatales, dirty-dealers, and an interrogating,
interrogative protagonist ("I"), who attempts to sift his way through
mazes of psycho-cognitive, and psycho-affective, complications. The pieces
shudder towards satori-like head-split semantic inversions; and whether any
give satori ends its poem or not, the
ultimate stylistic effect is to startle, unsettle, and re-wire the minds of the
audience who reads them. Chandler ,
in a pop culture context sans intellectual heft, is far less unsettling.
Century XXI Philly creates mysteries and remains centered in them, in a
negatively capable fashion, while Chandler 's
level of stylization insures easy, unchallenging comprehension. Still, I like
"noir" as a stylistic formulation here nonetheless, because this
imagined landscape creates and maintains a shaded ambience, which is
recognizably itself from artwork to artwork. I have spoken of the "body
heat" passed from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in spite of
the new century's reservations— and, as one level of inheritance which takes
what I have envisioned to a secure hermeneutic locale, "noir" and
"deep noir" both work surprisingly well.
As to the issue of why, in 2019, a "noir" aesthetic,
inclusive of formal-thematic depth, would be of wide interest once placed into
circulation— the reason is fairly simple. On many levels and in many variegated
contexts, few sensibilities other than "noir" could be generally and
widely representative in America ,
against the facile breeziness of post-modernity. The Great Recession has
created a climate, both within and without aesthetics, of entrenched
circumstantial darkness and shadowy languor. Inspired or not by political
developments (which seem to evince not only corruption but flatulence, at
regular intervals), untold, unreported catastrophes may have wiped out entire
sectors of the population— yet the media chirps away as though nothing has
changed. American pop culture is in an advanced state of erosion and
deterioration— there are no new rock stars anymore, and new American cinema not
only isn't selling but is divested, for the populace, of the perceived glamour
which used to enable it to sell. The secret passageways which used to make America
interconnect have largely been severed; even as the Internet has created new
labyrinths and passageways which often amount to a subversive conspiracy
against the normative.
The truly noir facet of the Internet is that it allows the
American public to understand how and why it has been duped; and what is left
of a thinking American populace is cognizant of these things. What I call the
Philly Free School (P.F.S. Post is Philly Free School Post) was created to hold
down a cultural fort radically on the side of serious culture and thoughtful
inquiry, scribed by individuals from within the bounds of the United States and
elsewhere. For those watching closely, and who know how the American literary
landscape has largely been configured over long and short periods of time, this
congeries of circumstances is a rebellion and an innovation. That the Philly
Free School is not only indigenously American (if standing, aesthetically, on
the shoulders of historical Europe) but indigenously Philadelphian is another
innovation— the creation of literary Philadelphia, in the twenty-first century,
has to do with the noir elements already built into Philly as a mythological
construct.
Philadelphia, much more so than New York (which offers, to experienced eyes,
nothing labyrinthine beneath a bold, brusque surface) is perpetually ravaged by
contradictions and conflicting internal imperatives— the Main Line
surface/patina is all about the prestige of old money, while Conshohocken and
King of Prussia boast world-class architecture; South Philly prizes
blue-collar, ethnic simplicity, but falsely and disingenuously (against the
complex and baroque machinations of an active South Philly underworld);
underworlds also appear at least partly in other suburbs supposed to be
middle-class, and standardized to American suburban norms, which they are only
intermittently; and the architecture in Center City Philadelphia is also
world-class. The "noir" sense, at the end of things, is that Philadelphia is a shadow-plagued
city, and what you see is certainly not what you get here. The representatively
Philadelphian surface/depth tensions are what make the city fertile ground for
serious art, rooted in formidably intellectual narratives, slanted towards the
stylized chiaroscuro of noir symbolization and signification.
Make no mistake— Philadelphia makes
a more than reasonable microcosm of the United
States , because Philadelphia
has many things to hide. Every thoughtful Philadelphian has their own Philadelphia narrative.
That Philadelphia
is often misrepresented on the surface is one of its noir allure-features. Philadelphia , in fact, may be taken as the secret capitol
of America , and much of America 's internal
darkness is exteriorized and embodied with precision in our labyrinths here.
From a certain angle, for Philadelphia to produce representative American art
is no stretch at all— higher art requires higher faithfulness to complex human
truth. Because complexities are difficult, both to perceive and to assimilate,
they are, or can be, dark. If my version of noir borrows stylistically from the
likes of Raymond Chandler, the substance of the art is uniquely set within its
own thematic manner/mode of confused, perplexing darkness. Yet attempts to
unearth deep truth, when performed skillfully, are always cathartic, as pitiful
and terrible as the deep ("noir") truth can be, and in this, this newfangled
art finds its strength and metier.