September 15, 2013
20th September @ the FAC is Prose with Helen Hagemann : 10am-noon, Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing.
Continuing
on with World Wide Short Fiction, this workshop will focus on Caribbean work
and the class will read the short story Pot Luck by Lisa Allen-Agostini from the
short story collection Trinidad Noir.
Writing exercises and discussion on L’Homme
Fatale and the doomed male character.
Since discussing the "Femme Fatale" in literature (Gothic Literature) in a previous workshop, I actually expected these terms to have equal opposites as well as the same amount of abundance. We also looked at the "doomed female/woman" in the Gothic genre. The discovery, therefore, has been rather surprising. In my vast library of books, esp. short story collections, and other known works, I failed to find the equivalent L'Homme Fatale to that of the Femme Fatale,(contemporary Angela Carter eg), unless we go back to Hamlet or Oedipus.
As Irina Aleksander states in her article Beware L'Homme Fatale! in the New York Observer, this type of guy happens in real life and is only now resurfacing in films and TV series such as The Pickup Artist (Molly Ringwald & TV Series) and Gossip Girl (TV teen drama). Aleksander describes the L'Homme Fatale, "often the creative type, he projects a deceptive vulnerability, while maintaining an appealing confidence. He's usually not the best-looking guy in the room, but he is the smartest, he turns these traits to his advantage, playing up the contrast with the typical hot guy or womanizer (physical inferiority, emotional evolvement. His courtship begins with a rushed sense of intimacy and, yet, a disarming lack of forward physical advances; a first date might involve a game of Scrabble or perhaps a cup of tea, his target usually leave wondering if in fact it was a date a all. And yet the story always has the same ending - he grows distance, stops calling and eventually disappears with little explanation, if any."
Researching, however, I did find this little gem above Trinidad Noir. "These stories attempt radical revisions to the noir genre, to mixed degrees of success. We have some potentially entertaining variations on the femme fatale, such as an homme fatale in Reena Andrea Manickchand’s “Dougla”, in which the male protagonist’s boyfriend betrays him in a climatic courtroom scene. The concept of the femme fatale as the tangential woman character on the fringes of the narrative, serving as a sex object and plot device, is turned on its head in Elisha Efua Bartels’s “Woman Is Boss”, a tale of ratiocination featuring a female journalist who juggles lovers as effectively as the archetypal male private eye. Ramabai Espinet also reaches for an intriguing bi-sexual homme fatale twist in her “Nowarian Blues” (Caribbean Review of Books).
Lisa Allen-Agostini's short story called Pot Luck tackles the drug and weed-growing underworld in the Caribbean. There's a slight inclusion of the Femme Fatale in the character of Tasha, yet it is the main protagonist Trey we look to and discover as the bumbling Rastafarian guy caught up in the trade. It's black comedy with a slight twist at the end. L'Homme Fatale aspect arises with Garvin who has shacked up with Trey's ex-girlfriend. He is the victim, the doomed male!
One reviewer wrote, "Trinidad Noir is edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason. Here is an anthology set on a Caribbean island and you might be forgiven for thinking that despite the rum-and-Coca-Cola, white sandy beach atmosphere, that there would be noir aplenty. Criminals, prostitutes, corrupt officials would form a perfect setting. Each of these stories is new to print, and Allen-Agostini has said that she has worked with the authors to produce a noir story. And therein lies the rub. She admits she has assisted the writers because there is no noir tradition in Trinidad and she had to keep reminding the writers to "show me the body". It is hard to explain noir, if you haven't encountered it before. Growing out of the film noir genre, with its emphasis on moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, noir is said to be strange, erotic, ambivalent, cruel and dream-like. The protagonist is not a detective, rather a victim or a suspect. In the noir novel, the writing style is lean, direct and gritty. Not all these stories conform to those rules of thumb."
Researching, however, I did find this little gem above Trinidad Noir. "These stories attempt radical revisions to the noir genre, to mixed degrees of success. We have some potentially entertaining variations on the femme fatale, such as an homme fatale in Reena Andrea Manickchand’s “Dougla”, in which the male protagonist’s boyfriend betrays him in a climatic courtroom scene. The concept of the femme fatale as the tangential woman character on the fringes of the narrative, serving as a sex object and plot device, is turned on its head in Elisha Efua Bartels’s “Woman Is Boss”, a tale of ratiocination featuring a female journalist who juggles lovers as effectively as the archetypal male private eye. Ramabai Espinet also reaches for an intriguing bi-sexual homme fatale twist in her “Nowarian Blues” (Caribbean Review of Books).
Lisa Allen-Agostini's short story called Pot Luck tackles the drug and weed-growing underworld in the Caribbean. There's a slight inclusion of the Femme Fatale in the character of Tasha, yet it is the main protagonist Trey we look to and discover as the bumbling Rastafarian guy caught up in the trade. It's black comedy with a slight twist at the end. L'Homme Fatale aspect arises with Garvin who has shacked up with Trey's ex-girlfriend. He is the victim, the doomed male!
One reviewer wrote, "Trinidad Noir is edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason. Here is an anthology set on a Caribbean island and you might be forgiven for thinking that despite the rum-and-Coca-Cola, white sandy beach atmosphere, that there would be noir aplenty. Criminals, prostitutes, corrupt officials would form a perfect setting. Each of these stories is new to print, and Allen-Agostini has said that she has worked with the authors to produce a noir story. And therein lies the rub. She admits she has assisted the writers because there is no noir tradition in Trinidad and she had to keep reminding the writers to "show me the body". It is hard to explain noir, if you haven't encountered it before. Growing out of the film noir genre, with its emphasis on moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, noir is said to be strange, erotic, ambivalent, cruel and dream-like. The protagonist is not a detective, rather a victim or a suspect. In the noir novel, the writing style is lean, direct and gritty. Not all these stories conform to those rules of thumb."
0 comments:
Post a Comment