Introduction 1 Fetishistic Noir: Charles Baudelaire and Léo Malet

Notes Introduction 1. David Bellos, for example, is loath to pin down Tati as a symptom of French- ness. David Bellos, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (London: The Harvill Press, 1999). 2. We might think of David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2003) or Patrice Higonnet’s Paris, capitale du monde: Des Lumières au surréalisme (Paris: Tallandier, 2006). 3. We should like to acknowledge our debt here to Ross Chambers, whose work on Loiterature has had such an impact on our conceptualization of modernity, and whose language (of ‘dogging’ and ‘haunting’) is so difficult to go past. 4. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998). 5. Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), and Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999). 6. Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981). 1 Fetishistic Noir: Charles Baudelaire and Léo Malet 1. We are deliberately using fetish terminology as expounded by Ellen Lee McCallum, whose work we return to in later chapters. 2. For the Surrealists, Objective Chance describes an event that appears to be random when considered objectively, that is from an outsider’s perspective. When considered subjectively, however, it is deemed to be driven by unconscious desires that are eventuating in the ‘real world’. 3. Le Chagrin et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary of the Occupation, was first released in Paris on 5 April 1971. 4. If one did not know better, one might be tempted to see in Deleuse’s use of the term vert-de-gris a Freudian slip, an unconscious acknowledgment that Malet’s novel has somehow been made relevant by the retrospective light of Duhamel’s translation of Cheyney. 5. Gorrara deals with the following: French fiction vs. American fiction, France vs. Germany, rich vs. poor, occupied vs. non-occupied and the everyday vs. the oneiric. 6. For the fetishist-heroes of post-war French noir fiction, the phallic woman will not turn out to be real; rather there is a real woman and a fetish, and to solve the mystery, the truth must be taken out of the abstract realm and brought into the existential world. Likewise in Baudelaire’s prose poems the statues remain mute before the townsfolk, the dream and reality interlocking but resisting communication. 200 Notes 201 7. The basic shift in perspective in Baudelaire’s poetry is from the objective narrative position of his verse, which is generally written by a poet who has observed his subject matter and has returned to his garret in order to ‘re-present’ what he saw at a later stage (as such, his objectivity relies not only on an elevated position but also on the passing of time), to a mitigated perspective in the prose poem form, which is that of the flâneur, who simultaneously presents and represents his subjects (that is to say, that he is both part of the crowd and separate from it, both pulled in and critically objective). The development of literary Modernism hinges on this mitigated position becoming that of the reader, who is both pulled into the text (by a compelling narrative) and repelled by it (forced to read critically by the text’s own reflexive gestures, its tendency to remind the reader of its status as literary text). As flâneurs we read more actively, we re-read. Ross Chambers is one of the most eloquent voices to lament the contemporary move away from such ‘loiterly’ reading as we submit increasingly to a culture of speed. 8. The Surrealists became famous for making art out of anything, and then (e.g. in Marcel Duchamp’s case) denying that it was art at all, preferring to justify the importance of their installations in terms of the objects them- selves. For his part, Baudelaire operated a poetics of neutrality; all objects were worthy of his glance. And as soon as a goddess is on the same level as a street, she or any other object can be the subject of the most intense scrutiny. 9. References here are to Louise Varène’s 1931 translation of the Petits Poèmes en prose as published by New Directions under the title Paris Spleen (New York, 1970), in this case ‘Evening Twilight’, p. 45. 10. There are perhaps in this image of the doctor, with blood still on his apron, overtones of Baudelaire’s interest in Edgar Allan Poe as well as a premonition of the infamous Whitechapel murders that would follow twenty years after the publication of the prose poems. 11. Charles Baudelaire, ‘To a Woman Passing By’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.189. 12. It will be shown how Boris Vian’s work draws on the fashions of the day as well as literature of the past; Nestor Burma too is an avid reader of such publications as Vogue, which strike a contrast with Baudelaire and Poe. 13. In cinematographic terms a MacGuffin is a device that drives the plot, but which is otherwise considered of little relevance to a film’s overall meaning. It was a term often used by Hitchcock and one that is generally associated with thrillers. Malet’s use of the term is potentially both coy and cleverly deceptive: the dwarf is a small and insignificant character; his insignificance, however, is precisely how he drives the main plotline. Here he is a pointer to the novel’s articulation with Baudelairean prose poetry and, as such, his cameo role is of crucial relevance to the production of meaning in the work. 14. This southbound flight and derailment, of course, recall the retreat of the French government at the beginning of the Occupation. 2 Liberation Noir: Boris Vian and the Série Noire (1) 1. In Chapter 1 it was seen how poetic objectivity is provided by the distancing quality of time (a poet’s verse is formulated belatedly, to use Ross Chambers’s 202 Notes term). Here, the objectivity necessary for successful allegory is provided both by physical and linguistic distance. To this more traditional idea of latitude is then added the extra remove of translation, which allows what is, effectively, a disingenuous appearance of objectivity (that is to say, that Marcel Duhamel writes his allegory of France via a body of text that he translates at times loosely, and which is there only to lend credence to his story). 2. We should be less tentative than Boris Vian in our praise; indeed, the importance of Marcel Duhamel’s translated version of La Môme vert-de-gris will be the subject of Chapter 3. 3. Raymond Chandler himself, though born American, was in fact naturalized British. 4. ‘One day Boris Vian will become Boris Vian,’ he enigmatically wrote in his famous foreword to the last of Vian’s novels, L’Arrache-cœur (Paris: Vrille, 1953). 5. Boris Vian’s work has been gaining an increasingly widespread popular following in recent years; this is due in no small part to the publication of many new (and retranslated) titles in English translation by TamTam Books in California. The title of Dan Halpern’s review article in The New Yorker (25 December 2006) gives a feel for the aura that still envelops Vian the author: ‘The Art of Extinction: How Boris Vian brought Cool to Paris.’ (www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/25/061225crbo_books1 [accessed 1 May 2008]). 6. This construction of noir’s development would typically show it being christened in France, and more specifically in Paris, travelling back to the United States where it grows up, flourishing under its French identity, before being translated back into French—in all its Americanness—and recapturing the Parisian imagination. 7. L’Écume des jours has been variously translated into English as Froth on the Daydream (by Stanley Chapman—London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967), Mood Indigo (by John Sturrock—New York: Grove Press, 1968) and, most recently, Foam of the Daze (by Brian Harper—California: TamTam Books, 2003). Given the difficulty of translating Vian’s work, the French title is used throughout (as is the case for most of the works discussed in this study) and all quotations are translated by the authors. 8. In the last decade of his life Vian’s production shifted away from novels (apart from his notorious noir parodies, his novels met with no real commercial success until after his death) towards poems, songs and jazz journalism. 9. For a more detailed reading of the fine line between free will and determin- ism in the novel, see Rolls (2000). 10. For a whodunit interpretation of L’Écume des jours, see Rolls (2004). 11. Clearly, the passer-by in Baudelaire’s poem, ‘À une passante’, to which Vian appeals in this depiction of leg fetishism, is not wearing nylons. Indeed, as was seen in Chapter 1, Baudelaire’s figure of the woman passing by is an iconic image and a necessary point of reference in all Parisian literary instances of this kind. Vian’s choice of material here marks an unmistakable modernization of the Baudelairean Ur-text, which is ironic given the importance of Baudelaire’s woman passing by in the development of modernity and the mourning of a lost Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Notes 203 12. Virtually no mention is made of the nylon stocking in the pages of such fashion publications as Elle in the years immediately following the Libera- tion.

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