(Conference paper, Lancaster
University's 'The Twenty-First Century Novel:
Reading and Writing
Contemporary Fiction', 2-3 September 2005)
The
title of this paper is intended to convey something of the spirit,
the tone and the underlying agenda of 'tart noir' - its self-conscious
jokiness, its comic subversiveness and the tendency towards cross-generic
playfulness evident in its mixing of the conventions of crime fiction
with those of romance and the gothic. Its 'founding mothers',
Lauren Henderson and Sparkle Hayter, set about defining their new
subgenre in the mid-90s (their original label, 'Slut Noir', inspired
by a 'Barbie is a Slut' t-shirt, was changed to 'Tart Noir' after
they decided that "Americans wouldn't respond positively to the
word 'slut'"). Henderson, in collaboration with Stella Duffy,
edited the anthology discussed here - a group of twenty stories
called Tart Noir , published by Pan in 2002 - and the two of them
also run the 'Tart
City' website, which offers a news, 'advice on love and life',
paper dolls of 'your favorite Tart Noir characters' and other expressions
of "the Tart ethos - the naughtiness, the irreverence, and the
constant attempts to reinvent how women write, and what they're
supposed to be writing about." What I'm interested in looking
at in this paper is the form this reinvention takes in the Tart
Noir anthology: what strategies are deployed in this very deliberate
dismantling of some of the traditional binaries of crime fiction? how
are these writers playing on the expectations of their audience? and
what new directions can be found in 21st-century crime fiction,
given the numerous generic revisions that emerged in the last two
or three decades of the 20th century?
The proliferation and development of
popular fictional genres suggests that playing off and violating
norms are essential aspects of reader enjoyment. If we think in broad terms about transformations
of crime fiction, what we see are a succession of disruptions of
familiar forms of the genre, with each new departure building on
the changes that have already taken place. When feminism challenged
and rewrote the traditions of hard-boiled detection in the 1980s,
one of its central strategies - a hugely successful strategy - was,
of course, the regendering of the detective. By far the best-known
kind of protagonist in contemporary feminist crime fiction is the
hard-boiled female investigator, the gender-bending ‘chick dick',
case-hardened, gun-toting and invariably feisty. There were
feminist objections to this strategy ('chick dick', many argue, is
an oxymoronic phrase that suggests an inherently contradictory kind
of protagonist, Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer in drag, little more
than a parody of the male private eye); but one would imagine that
for many writers a greater source of difficulty lies in the fact
that, twenty-five years on, the female PI is often all too predictable
- as formulaic as the innumerable male PI clones of Chandler's or
Spillane's protagonists. The writers of tart noir do in fact
themselves create female detective figures (there is always a demand
for strong series characters, and for obvious reasons the detective
is more in demand as a series character than victims or murderers). In
the Tart Noir anthology, however, a clear advantage of the one-off
short story format is that writers were released from the need to
please their own publishers. The invitation to contribute to
the anthology offered the chance to "go for something very different
from your usual…something perhaps that you've always wanted to write
but know your editor would never let you get away with". The
result was a group of what are, on the whole, crime as opposed to
detective stories, bringing them within the dominant noir tradition
(which is non-investigative) and offering opportunities for much
more varied kinds of subversion, for mischievous manipulations of
a range of noir stereotypes - both those stereotypes created by the
earlier (male) hard-boiled tradition and those established in subsequent
feminist rewritings of the male tradition.
If
we think of 'tart noir' in contrast to 'chick dick' investigative
crime fiction, instead of protagonists who use their intellectual
and physical powers to restore order, what we have are protagonists
who, in the noir tradition, are driven in transgressive directions
by appetite and desire. The Tart Noir anthology does include
one or two variations on the 'tough chick' with a short haircut,
an attitude and a kick-ass physique, but the collection as a whole
is much more inventively and amusingly subversive of gender ideologies.
There is more opportunity to explore the fluidity of female identity. The
stories in the Tart Noir anthology don't give us positive female
role models but characters who are alienated from culturally permissible
(or at least culturally fashionable) forms of female identity and
desire. These are, as I say, stories that parody both male-authored
crime fiction and the feminist sub-genre. They break down the
binaries of transgressor-victim, sexual-domestic, consuming-nourishing,
aggressive-passive, and one of their key strategies for accomplishing
this is their amalgamation of the femme fatale and the nurturing
domestic woman. This linking of two traditionally antithetic character
types is often accomplished by the deployment of culinary motifs,
which are central to some of the best stories in this collection. What
I want to discuss here are four of the stories in which the noir
themes of law and transgression, power and vulnerability are most
vividly re-imagined in terms of exuberantly unrestrained female appetites
- not just the voracious sexuality and the hunger for survival that
characterize the femme fatale, but
also a prodigious appetite for food and an outrageous, often grotesque
corporeality.
Culinary activities are of course not
absent from detective-centred feminist crime fiction. Indeed,
they are often an important marker of the 'feminine' as opposed
to the 'male' protagonist, though on the whole they are peripheral
to the structure of investigative narratives. Patricia
Cornwell, for example, says that as she developed the character
of Kay Scarpetta, it was natural for her "to decide that she loves
to cook… After Scarpetta puts her hands on death all day, she needs
to come home to abundant beauty, wine, and delicious food with family
and friends….Be diligent about searching for cold-pressed extra-virgin
olive oil and whole milk Buffalo mozzarella." There's even
a cookbook to accompany the Scarpetta series. The symbolic
or highly allusive function of the food motif in crime narratives
will also be familiar to anyone who watches the classics of film
noir , in which, of course, the 'dark side' of the motif is more
prevalent, with characters routinely destroyed by their appetites,
and with dangerous erotic drives often imaged as a kind of mutual
consumption (think, for example, of The Postman Always Rings Twice,
in which the destructive hunger, desire and greed of Frank and Cora
are symbolically suggested by the diner setting).
The culinary metaphors in the four
tart noir stories we're looking at can be seen to function both
positively and negatively, evoking in some of the stories dark
associations with capitalistic consumption and in others linked
with life-enhancing, ritualistic, community-affirming qualities.
The more positive meanings tend to emerge (as we'll see in the
third and fourth stories) when the use of food motifs serves to
join the traditionally separate character types of the femme fatale
and the nurturing woman. The protagonists in all four stories
are, in one way or another, 'tough', but are created in deliberate
contrast to the feisty, independent but virtuous heroines of chick
dick fiction; each establishes her own kind of order, but this isn't,
in any of the stories, a restitution of order that would be approved
by the dominant society (were the dominant society to know the truth
of things). Except, perhaps, for the "Marooned!" diarist, all
of the protagonists are 'tarts' in the sense of being femme fatales
, but the relationships they enter into are sharply differentiated
from those in traditional noir: they may control the men in
their lives, but they also genuinely nourish them, fulfilling the
functions of the 'maternal' woman who is usually (in canonical noir
) the antithesis of the femme fatale. In the first two stories, we
have young, ruthlessly resiliant anti-heroines whose toughness is
so extreme that it couldn't conceivably be given even minimal official
approval, though their self-assertion in fact does ultimately act
to place them where they want to be within a male-controlled society;
in the second pair of stories, the protagonists are defined in ways
that immediately set them apart from the lithe, fit feminist detective,
and also (superficially) distinguish them from the curvaceous, alluring,
conventionally conceived sexuality of the noir spider woman, and
it is in these figures that (I think I would want to argue) generic
stereotypes are most effectively undermined.
The darker connotations of food and
eating are to be found in the first two stories I'm looking at,
Sparkle Hayter's 'survival of the fittest' tale, "The Diary of Sue Peaner, Marooned! Contestant" and
Karin Slaughter's "Necessary Women". Having thought up "The
Diary" while she was watching "Survivor!" (and eating Weird Deird's
special popcorn), Hayter constructs it as a murder story combined
with a comically extreme parodic mixture - "Survivor!" meets, say, "Cannibal
Island". By her own account, the question Hayter is interested in
asking is, "What would happen…if the contestants were really forced
to survive in that environment, without the cameras?" And the
answers she gives don't just lay bare the pretence of the sort of
TV programme she's sending up; they fold back into a critique of
the society that markets and rewards the winner of the elemental
fight for survival. The diarist herself emerges as the most
resourcefully rapacious of the characters, with the result that cannibalism
isn't just metaphoric of voracious consumerism but also has a somewhat
more positive role - as a taboo-breaking activity that signifies
an ability to free oneself of conventional restrictions. As in the
other stories we're glancing at, the effect this has on the crime
ingredients is a both the restructuring of a standard plot and a
revaluation of conventional characters. The kind of plot and
characters relevant here are to be found in the (fairly numerous)
mid-century male-authored crime novels in which the basic scenario
involved a group thrown together by some kind of disaster or accident,
or by their pursuit of a common obsession with some form of financial
gain. Take perhaps the most famous example, The Maltese Falcon
: you have the tough male protagonist (Bogart/Spade), the good
girl (Effie, Sam Spade's secretary), the femme fatale , the decadent,
corrupt Gutman, the effeminate Joel Cairo, and so on - all pursuing
the falcon, the signifier (empty signifier, it turns out) of riches
beyond imagining. The cast assembled on Hayter's island is
not at all dissimilar, but (pushing The Maltese Falcon analogy) it's
as though Sam Spade is a fraud and the only competent characters
are the secretary and the gay guy. Hayter's secretary, Sue,
the diarist, is at first "awed by the experience of these people",
including a doctor and a war vet with "backwoods survival training". But
as first impressions are put under stress, it emerges that the supposed
war vet is a "pompous bore" who's never been near a real war, the "doctor" is
just a university literature teacher - and, as things get really
bad, the only truly competent member of the "tribe" is the gay Filipino
chef who is Sue's only useful ally, surreptitiously bashing in the
head of the most annoying survivor, roasting the tender parts and
marinating the rest of him in brine to make beef jerky. Finally
it's just down to the two of them - at which point, having learned
from his example, Sue takes the initiative, killing and marinating
the chef and surviving on him until she is rescued and whisked off
to dine on steak and lobster in a swanky hotel and to receive the
grand prize of a million that they were all pursuing.
Like the Hayter story, the second story
I want to glance at, Karin Slaughter's macabre tale, "Necessary Women", gives us a young woman
taking on men at their own game, turning domestic skills into survivalist
tactics. Again, the preparation and consumption of food are
central to the protagonist's assertion of power, and cannibalism
acts as a metaphor both for the savagery of the society portrayed
and - from the protagonist's point of view - as a demonstration of
freedom analogous to the femme fatale 's brazen disregard of the
constraints of society. Like Hayter's protagonist, she is unwilling
to be kept down by the traditions governing her role as a woman -
even though her goal is in fact to secure for herself a place within
a fairly traditional male-dominated society. In her endnote, Karin
Slaughter defines her authorial stance in opposition to earlier male-authored
noir, a genre, she says, in which an upstanding man meets the Wrong
Woman - "Adam and Eve, only with more liquor and sex". The
women of noir "are defined by the men in their lives"; able to achieve
power only by the exercise of their sexuality, they are invariably
punished for it. Tart noir, Slaughter argues, is, on the other
hand, "all about rewarding women for taking power": in seizing this
power, they may make poor decisions, but they'll be their own decisions,
and the men involved will be only a means to an end - accessories,
nuisances, victims. Slaughter's own story takes a traditional
noir triangle - domestic woman, 'loose woman', man in the middle
- and sets about breaking down our underlying assumptions about the
roles each character plays: the story is told from the perspective
of a (school age) young woman, seemingly trapped in a white trash
family with a dead mother and abusive father, who we assume has had
a hand in her mother's death and who is now planning to take up with
'the other woman'. The twist readjusts our understanding of
the triangle, and it does this by turning the role of nourishing
domestic woman into a role emphatically unlike the male concept of
the 'little woman' defined by male needs: the 'necessary woman' makes
entirely her own choices; these are, by 'normal' standards, choices
of mythic dreadfulness (she not only sleeps with her father but,
in the interests of keeping things just as they are, has killed her
mother and served her for dinner - and plans the same fate for any
potential step-mother). Her choice is to stay home with daddy;
in pursuing this objective, she skillfully feeds the male appetite
in both a sexual and a culinary sense (the casserole she made out
of parts of her mother was delicious). She talks to her father in
terms of daughterly devotion and submission, but she who wields the
knife doesn't just make the casserole, and the last lines of the
story, offering verbal submission to her male accessory, are in reality
an assertion of her future control of both her father and any 'other
woman' he happens to invite over: "'That's fine, Daddy,' I said,
forcing some cheer into my voice. I looked up at him, giving
him my best smile. 'Why don't you invite her over next Sunday? We
can have her for dinner.'"
In terms of the manipulation of noir
character types, what we have in Karin Slaughter's story is a female
protagonist who combines the deadly femme fatale and the nurturing,
sustaining domestic goddess, a combination most obviously expressed
by the mingling of sex and food. This subversive undermining of one of noir's most well-established
binaries (the amalgamation rather than the opposition of the sexual
and the domestic woman) is carried even further in the other two
stories I want to look at: Jen Banbury's "Take, for Example,
Meatpie" and Stella Duffy's "Martha Grace". In both of these
stories, a strong sense of ritual and community is established through
preparing and/or sharing food. The act of eating doesn't lose
all of its darker potential meanings ("Martha Grace", for example,
involves murder by over-feeding), but the stress is on the connexions
between the nourishing richness of food and erotic experience, between
eating and satisfying one's sexual appetites. In contrast to
the first two stories we looked at, female ascendancy is achieved
through an essentially positive motherliness, through an older woman's
nourishing, maternal provision of both food and instruction, transforming
and improving the young men they take under their wings. Though
they have thoroughly noir endings - loss, departure, death - the
central events of the stories involve joyful, transcendant acts of
eating, acts that rescue, at least temporarily, both the male and
female characters from the liminality of the noir protagonist. Although
these are outcast figures, their eating/cooking signifies an incorporation
of the world; instead of an alienated protagonist separated from
and defeated by 'the world', you have female protagonists who assimilate
and incorporate the world and briefly create for the men they instruct
in their earth-motherly ways a rich, primal, almost edenic unity.
"Take, for Example, Meatpie" plays against a standard noir plot
in which a strong, determined woman takes in hand a weaker man, bends
him to her will and - having undermined his whole sense of self and
made him entirely her own - destroys him. Here, similarly,
one has the strong woman as educator and shaper, the older woman
taking the most unpromising, unprepossessing boy she can find into
her life and her bed. "Meatpie", whose derogatory nickname
is food, is seduced with cookies and mini-muffins, together with
sex and music and poetry. The protagonist teaches him creativity
- but also schools him in breaking out of the conventions of a society
that devalues him and persuades him to take pride in being 'Meatpie';
she consumes him sexually but also (in a counter-rhythm to traditional
noir) uses this consumption to give him his own identity, using the
strong femme fatale -weak male interaction not to undermine and traumatize
the male but to help him define his mature self. This educative
older woman doesn't take up a position in any traditional socio-economic
set-up but positions herself completely outside conventional society,
and one consequence of this is that she retains her transformative
potential beyond the scope of the story itself, driving off in the
end to 'feed the fancies' of a new weak male who will eventually,
like Meatpie, be initiated into confident adulthood. The culinary
metaphor that Stella Duffy uses in talking about "Martha Grace" is
relevant to Jen Banbury's story as well: speaking of the outcasts
of society, Duffy argues that they are "the juice that feeds the
fevered imagination of the conforming rest."
My
own vote for the most splendidly created woman in the Tart Noir collection
goes to Duffy's Martha Grace, a figure described in ways that remind
the reader of the ample, carnivalesque bodies of the women painted
by Jenny Saville. Like Saville, Duffy is interrogating assumptions
about beauty by depicting a body that isn't beautiful in any conventional
sense, but instead is distended, fleshy, disquietingly grotesque;
like Saville, she asks us to look at things that, in a normative
cultural climate, women are encouraged to conceal - "those parts
of their bodies considered fat, jiggly, out of control, and excessive". The
physique of Duffy's lovingly drawn protagonist is the antithesis
of the smooth, "tightly managed" body that epitomizes the contemporary
ideal of feminine beauty and attractiveness; she is a subversion
of male stereotypes of the desirable woman and a clear contrast to
what Duffy calls the "thin and lithe heroine" who is such a standard
part of post-80s feminist crime fiction. Martha Grace's body, with
its bulging excesses, is suggestive of unrestrained desires and hungers. "I
wanted," Duffy says in her anthology endnote, "a woman who was fat
and old - and immensely fuckable…Which makes Martha Grace ideal Tart
material - self-sufficient, secret-holding, and just looking for
a good shag and a little bit of love." In Duffy's story, she
takes over the weekends of a high school jock who is clever and handsome, "And
right. And ripe." The intertwining of sex and eating constitutes
the whole substance of the story. "Fresh and warm in a sluttish
[but immaculately clean] kitchen", Martha feeds him and devours him
sexually: having fed him, for example, freshly baked bread with thick
yellow butter and layers of creamy honey, she kisses him as he eats
("Tim Culver is delicious" and he loves her "ever-hungry mouth");
like the 'older woman' protagonist of "Meatpie", Martha educates
her young man in bed, through to the time he's a college boy.
The relationship lasts until she very
briefly enters his environment, paying him an unexpected visit
at the coffee shop near his college. Duffy
uses the coffee shop as the culinary and emotional antithesis of
everything that Martha's own house represents: Tim himself
is loud and brash there, and Martha Grace sits alone in a corner
with "a pale crumble of dried cappuccino froth at the corner of her
mouth"; ridiculed by his friends, her bulk and manner are awkward
and constrained in this commercial parody of real food provision. She
is physically hemmed in, stuck in her corner, and the scene ends
in a grotesque chaos of spilled food from the hamper she has brought
with her - wonderful foods, pies, strawberries, spilling out, bringing
humiliation. After this debacle, Martha sees that the relationship
has to end, and the final scene of the story is a tour de force of
food and sex, with Martha preparing all of the richest, most unimaginably
delicious foods, the things she knows Tim to desire the most, "real
chocolate, dark and shocking" in a "deep tart of black berries",
flavoured with warm, distilled essences left over from her grandmother's
days, served with wine and sex, a "special treat" that is too much
for him to survive. A murder story, then, with traditional noir ingredients
- a domestic woman, a deadly femme fatale , and a dead male who has
strayed into her lair - but again, with binaries deconstructed and
meanings altered: the femme fatale and the nurturing woman
are one, and the dead male has found both his identity and his ultimate
fulfillment with this mythic woman. When he dies of a heart attack,
Martha Grace carries him out and, unseen, leaves his body in the
dark street, smelling of "chocolate and food and sex". He has
been given the most satisfying experiences life has to offer and
has died happy, of an excess of pleasureprovided by a woman of (in
all respects) immense power - an ending that is both a fulfilment
and a reversal of the patterns of the noir tradition.
Copyright © 2005
by Lee Horsley
