The City without Gods: on Noir Fiction

Last week I had dinner at John’s Grill in San Francisco, with several friends from the APSA convention I was attending.  I ordered “Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops” from the menu, because I like lamb chops and noir fiction.  It was superb.  Six or seven lamb chops with a baked potato and sliced tomato.  In Dashiell Hammett’s most famous work‑The Maltese Falcon‑that is what Spade ate in that venue.  The restaurant had a small shrine to Hammett’s novel in the back, toward the latrine where everyone would pass it.  I didn't know it at the time, but I was constantly on streets mentioned in the novel: Stockten, Bush, Geary, and Kearny.  

Later, alone, I walked up Kearny to the Occidental Cigar Bar.  This is one of the last civilized places in California.  Apparently, it was “grandfathered in” when the same wise solons who are trying to promote the smoking of marijuana were trying to stamp out the smoking of tobacco. 

It is a narrow room with tables and chairs arranged in the space not occupied by the bar.  When I entered, there were two men dressed in pin stripped suits and hats smoking at the bar.  I had more or less walked my way into Hammett’s world. 

I sat at a table next to the big window, where I could watch people walk or drive by.  I lit a fine, square bodied cigar with a Maduro rapper and sipped on an excellent IPA.  The scotch was unaffordable.  I downloaded the first chapter of The Maltese Falcon and read, occasionally looking up at the passersby.  That is how I do San Francisco.

I have a theory about genres.  Each is centered on some essential idea, usually attached to certain special signs.  Westerns, for example, are essentially about the frontier: the grey land between civilization and the utter lawlessness of the uncivilized territories, coupled with the signs of horses, hats, and handguns.  The samurai movie genre is very similar, if you trade swords for guns and modify the architecture.  Horror is about the idea that evil can be a real force in the world, like gravity or electricity.  Science fiction rests on the idea of a constantly expanding scientific view of the Kosmos and the surprises that such a view might hold. 

So, what about noir fiction?  I submit that the genre is centered on the city without gods.  Almost all of the noir films I have seen or fiction I have read take place in modern cities.  Even those that take place outside it presuppose a larger civilization.  The city is a relatively recent innovation in human history, meaning that it appears only about 12,000 years ago.  For most of that time, cities were watched over by gods.  To be a citizen of ancient Athens was to be a member of the cult of Athena Nike, the goddess of wisdom and victory.  The gods reinforced the social contract on which each city depends and give the citizens‑those who must stand against the city’s enemies‑some reason for confidence and comfort. 

Noir fiction takes place in a realm that is utterly demythologized.  There are neither gods nor ghosts in world laid out by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.  The streets are dark and foggy, with nothing but black overhead.  Death is a constant presence, but there is not even a hint of anything beyond it.  Death is the big sleep. 

Evil, on the other hand, is very real.  Nearly everyone is morally comprised and knows it.  “I’ve been bad,” says Brigid O'Shaughnessy to Sam Spade.  What is true of Brigid is true of both the gaggle of lowlifes and the police.  There is no sense of any higher order, no confidence in patriotism, the rule of law, etc.  One wonders what meaning evil might have if there is nothing else in the human world. 

But of course, there is something else.  That is the hero.  Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Spade are heroes.  Neither is a saint or the ideal boy scout.  Yet each has a set of moral rules that he strictly follows and each is the best man in the story.  Both of these heroes risk their lives to defend those who deserve to be defended, or mostly deserve it. 

When I was, very briefly and a long time ago, a psychology major, I was taught that morality was socially constructed.  We only behaved according to moral rules because we were taught to do so by the other human beings amongst whom we lived.  If that were true, noir fiction would be impossible.  The bad would have no sense that they were bad and the good, no sense of what it means to be good. 

Human beings are moral animals.  We think in terms of right and wrong as naturally as we think in terms of pain and pleasure.  Even in a city without gods, we still act as though we are obligated to someone or something with authority over us.  Biosocial theory can explain how we came to be such creatures. 

It cannot tell us whether we can make morality work in the absence of gods or God.  In noir fiction, the hero is a small island in a sea of iniquity.  That is small comfort.  It is nonetheless comforting.  We love the story because the hero is beautiful.  That, perhaps, is what we have to concentrate on.