Reader, I Marinated Him: A Taste of Tart Noir
Lee Horsley, 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
