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ABSTRACT
This essay questions what relevance the genre of noir might play in the representation of today’s degraded environments. I argue that Nunn’s novels offer readers an important and startling alternative model of California to that suggested by the mythology of the Golden State—an idyllic paradise that provides its inhabitants with daily doses of sunshine, ocean breezes and avocado. In Nunn’s surf novels, California is a violent and unpleasant space, in which even the most isolated and exurban natural environments are fallen worlds marred by unlimited development. I argue that noir—a genre that has not yet played a large role in ecocritical analysis—is a useful lens with which to read Nunn’s storyworlds. I also read Nunn’s noir novels refractively, exploring the new directions they suggest that this classic genre may take in its representation of today’s “dark” nature.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Harkness, 904.
2 Nunn, Unassigned Territory; Pomona Queen; Chance.
3 Nunn, Tapping the Source; The Dogs of Winter; Tijuana Straits.
4 Heissenbüttel, 85.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 86.
7 Nunn, The Dogs of Winter, 143.
8 Chandler, 5.
9 Ibid., 37.
10 Bradford, 18.
11 Nunn, Tapping the Source, 10.
12 Ibid., 14.
13 Bradford, 73.
14 Jameson, 125.
15 Ibid., 127.
16 See the essays collected in Deverell and Hise (eds.).
17 Nunn, Tapping the Source, 17.
18 Ibid., 20.
19 Morton, 182.
20 Ibid., 201.
21 See Bradford; and the essays collected in Most and Stowe (eds.).
22 Jameson, 142.
23 Nunn, Tapping the Source, 77.
24 Ibid., 93.
25 Ibid., 159.
26 Nunn, Unassigned Territory, 36.
27 Bradford, 55.
28 Nunn, Tapping the Source, 186.
29 Ibid., 208.
30 Nunn, The Dogs of Winter, 44.
31 Ibid., 92.
32 Ibid., 182.
33 Ibid., 328.
34 Nunn, Tijuana Straits, 207.
35 Ibid., 3.
36 Ibid., 113.
37 Bakhtin, 84.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 85.
40 Ibid., 84.
41 Ibid., 250.
42 See Raab.
43 Nunn, Pomona Queen, 2.
44 Ibid., 18.
45 Ibid., 177.
46 See the essay on “declensionist” environmental narratives by Paul Sutter.
47 Foucault, as quoted in Miller, 99.