Chapter 2

Mapping Space

The tension in Chandler criticism will reproduce the henceforth inevitable one between semiotic analysis and interpretation as such, between the formal exploration of a space that returns again and again and can be apprehended only by way of its identity with itself and a theme or a meaning (“down these mean streets,” etc., Chandler’s own romantic ideology, the concept of honor, the very mise en abyme of the stained glass window that welcomes Marlowe to the Sternwood mansion).

But “space” must be read; unless conventional modes of reading are presupposed (conventions being themselves everywhere in crisis in this society), the reader may expect to pass through an initial period of programmation, through some inaugural entry chamber in which the appropriate decoding techniques are taught and learned. Even as far as the category of space itself is concerned, it cannot be assumed to preexist the text either, but must be projected by the latter as that “code” of space which the reader must learn to read. We might therefore have begun by noting receptacle space in The Big Sleep, halls and interiors too capacious for their furnishings (“large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t look as if anybody had ever sat in them” [BS, I, 3–4]): this is a kind of phenomenological training in which we learn to sense distance, separation, disjunction, between a container and its contents. It prepares us then for a sensitivity to furnishings as such, to “interior decoration” of a type that can fill up the vacant rooms or buildings of a certain Southern California; but it also problematizes the relationship between the latter and nature itself (“Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.”)

Yet this opening chapter of The Big Sleep contains other interesting clues. The stained glass window was rather obvious (although its hidden meaning lies, one would think, in the absence of the villain, something of the secret of the novelty of Chandler’s plots); the portrait may be a little less so:

At once, spatial and temporal coordinates are set in place which are altogether unusual in Chandler’s work and may thus be taken in some sense to be inaugural, to establish the frame within which all the rest will take place. These coordinates involve imperialism itself and spatially designate that Third-World other from whom Southern California has been wrested: it is striking to note that “Mexico” as an alternate space will not reappear until The Long Goodbye. Otherwise, its functional role is taken, significantly, by closer elements:

Marlowe laughs at the corrupt policeman’s suggestion because in fact Moose Malloy is in hiding much closer to Los Angeles, on one of the gambling boats standing out beyond the three-mile limit. Spatially, then, the designation of Mexico, the Mexican War, and the older political history of Southern California, serves as an initial mechanism for sensitizing the reader to what lies beyond the frame, to categories of an essentially spatial otherness of which Mexico proper is only the strongest form.

Temporally or historically the reference to the Mexican War sends us back to origins, first of all the origins of California itself in blood guilt and national aggression, in “manifest destiny” (not a theme that unduly preoccupies Chandler), but thereupon, by analogy, and far more significantly, to the origins of the Sternwood family (and the Sternwood fortune) itself. What is paradoxical is that the original General Sternwood is not the answer to the question his portrait raises: the family’s fortune comes, not from the spoils of the Mexican War or from the glory of a military career and tradition, but much more recently from oil (remember that Chandler was himself in the oil business during the brief boom of the twenties and before he began to write for the pulps): a somewhat different place of origins, which we will visit in the next to last chapter of the novel. This disjunction of money from the martial tradition (essentially: honor) is one of the ways in which Chandler systematically seeks to differentiate his plots and their motivations from those of the classical detective story (which normally presuppose either money or “evil” or both). Yet as we have already seen the place of great wealth is important for the construction of his novels (or better still, for the range of their paths and itineraries), so that it will be important to separate the fact of wealth from its acquisition (something achieved in Farewell, My Lovely by the age and weakness of the Grayle figure; something less adequately managed in The High Window, as we shall see later on).

All of which is in effect insisted on by the portrait itself, which stares at Marlowe and which demands that he look back at it:

The portrait, after all, was at most diegetically important in order to explain or at least enable the “motive” of General Sternwood— the fondness for the son-in-law (also marked by a history become past, in his case the IRA) and, by transfer, for Marlowe, or in other words the male-bonding syndrome, a space of “mateship” still relatively “feudal” (or “military”) in its connotations, and also anti-feminine in ways which will be significant for this particular plot (with its two daughters as twin sources of disorder).

Now, however, we meet one of the crucial characters in both story and narrative, and Chandler must work at setting up a psychopathological “reality” in which he and his readers no doubt still believe, but which for us is the sheerest archaic sexual mythology, namely the concept of “nymphomania.” This will be done by means of a battery of gestures and twitches, by some tell-tale signs (“she had little sharp predatory teeth”), but above all by the very “signifier” in which we have already begun to have a little training, namely the Look itself: “Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me.”

This primacy of the “Look” and of looking, of the eyes, as a place in which a signifying system is developed, flexed and underscored, is then confirmed by the final episode of the chapter:

The first chapter of The Big Sleep is therefore something more than a mere anthology of “looks” of various temperatures, colors and expressions: it is the place in which, by way of the Look as a permutation space, a whole system is slowly and cumulatively disengaged, in which we can already glimpse a cluster of important “semes” or traits: passion, fidelity and confidentiality, sexual fixation or pathological obsession (and depersonalization), and so forth.

Following Greimas, we will need at least four fundamental semes, or two fundamental oppositions, in order for this thematic constellation to emerge in the form of some genuine ideological system: the process of disengaging it is at least facilitated by the realization that in fact this opening chapter exhibits for our inspection not three pairs of eyes, not three characters (of very unequal diegetic importance), but rather four, since the whole encounter is seen through the eyes of Marlowe, a “peeper” and someone whose business is observation. We are not, of course, told what Marlowe’s gaze looks like (we know from other sources that his eyes are brown, which adds a rather different note to the spectrum of black / slate-gray / blue, and appropriately enough tends to define itself over against those three hues): the quality of his look is paradoxically conveyed by “voice,” by the wise-cracking voice-over which, however, leaves us in permanent doubt as to whether this gaze is cynical or compassionate.

Yet the liminality of the chapter suggests other coordinates as well: this is not merely the threshold of the novel, it is the initial visit to the Sternwood mansion, and thus the boundary between the public world and the private one behind the gates (with, as Chandler puts it elsewhere, “a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes” [FML, XVIII, 212]). Yet the military ancestor signifies the public realm and History par excellence. Meanwhile, his “hot black eyes” and Carmen’s expressionless ones paradoxically have at least something in common with each other that excludes Marlowe and the butler: namely something like personal commitment, forms of passion which vary in their external expression depending on the public or private nature of that passion, yet which both involve violence and the acknowledgement of the Self and its claims.

These indications are perhaps sufficient to authorize an initial characterization of this “system” as follows:

What is significant here is not merely the way in which this scheme pits Marlowe against Carmen at the very outset, and thus virtually gives the plot away; it is also the care with which Marlowe’s function is differentiated from that of the butler, himself also a witness to the shames (and glories) of the Sternwood family and a preserver of their secrecy, a guardian at the threshold of the private realm and of family space. In Greimas’ terminology, the butler’s is here merely a neutral or neuter function (just as the General’s “complex” or “Utopian,” function—that of implacable judgment, the judgment of the dead and of the heroic past—is the place of an impossible synthesis).¹

Meanwhile, it is clear that in a situation in which we have not even begun to meet the more important characters, the content of this still relatively simple and abstract scheme will become greatly modified and the scheme itself will be subject to enrichment and to modification; nor can we, without more closely examining the other novels, conclude that the contradiction articulated for us here between “passion” or “self” and the public realm is Chandler’s fundamental subject (it may only be the fundamental subject of this particular novel, which turns after all on blackmail).

What can be suggested is that this use of the Look as the vehicle through which the system initially emerges will have an unexpected side-effect, a kind of secondary function and prolongation which has little enough to do with this thematic system. After this initial chapter, indeed, “looks” in Chandler will once again assume more modest proportions in the narrative and in its descriptions (it could not be otherwise, without the text taking on the kind of mannered or high-literary stylization which Chandler’s genre must resist under pain of ranging him alongside a Sartre, a Sarraute or a Duras); but looking as an activity has been at least momentarily reinforced for us here and lent a symbolic importance that it would not normally have.

Yet at least one powerful tradition of interpretation of the detective story as a genre—that of a certain Freudianism—reads our involvement in such texts and their “passionate” interest for us as a scopic impulse and as the deep repressed attraction of the primal scene; something consistent with Freud at least to the degree that he himself characterized the scientific vocation—the passion to discover and to know, and to learn secrets—as a sublimation of the infantile voyeuristic impulse. The concept of a primal scene, indeed, whether it existed in this or that empirical biographical experience, can nonetheless stand as the quintessential expression of belief in and nostalgia for the absolute event, that at which you could be present, the event, indeed, that could be a genuine present in its own right, without losing its narrative definition in past or future. My own feeling is that naturalistic explanations of this kind, which appeal to some permanent drive in human nature, are dangerous and ideological indeed; yet in the case of The Big Sleep we do not at all need to appeal to some theory of an eternal (Freudian) human nature, we can attribute the reinforcement of the scopic impulse—and the consequent “reinvention” of the driving force in the genre,or at least this particular example of it—to the preliminary “work” on looking in the first chapter, and to its systematic exasperation of the relationship between the gaze and the public and the private, between seeing and knowing, secrets, sexuality and historical action itself.

But even more than that rides on the impulses generated by this opening chapter: for this particular detective novel turns around a “primal scene” a good deal more literal than the imputed generic one, and one whose structure, as well as its radical absence from the text itself, underscores the peculiar nature of this moment better than any straightforward version of the Freudian myth. The Big Sleep has as its diegetic center and pretext images: photographs which the verbal narrative cannot give us, and which show Carmen naked (a metonymic primal scene, since it supposedly documents her “nymphomania”) and also show her as guilty of or linked to Geiger’s murder (by displacement, murder itself becomes a heightened version of the sexual act). On the other hand, the “scene” that Marlowe actually surprises is one of looking and voyeurism: the camera itself positioned over against Carmen looking like “a totem pole. It had a profile like an eagle and its wide round eye was a camera lens. The lens was aimed at the naked girl in the chair. There was a blackened flash bulb clipped to the side of the totem pole” (BS, VII, 22–3). To which we should add that, as in Hitchcock’s films, the momentary lightning of the flashbulb is both a homicidal and a sexual assault, and also that in the sentences immediately following this one, Chandler quite gratuitously remarks on the dead Geiger’s “glass eye,” as though the bookseller’s own lens-and-flash-bulb had similarly flared, burning his life out along with it in the process. But all this suggests a perspective in which Chandler’s novel—the “debased” or sub-cultural practice of a genre which cheaply panders to voyeurism and the scopic impulse (to repeat some of the moralizing typical of the Frankfurt School’s analysis of mass culture)—turns upon itself and includes within itself a figurative meditation on its own nature, as voyeurism and the longing to see, even for a minute, the “real,” the “event,” in the form of the forbidden photograph.²

Still, one should not leave a psychoanalytic revision of the text without some indication as to how its social and historical dimension might then be reestablished. This can be done, one would think, essentially or at least initially through that thematics of private and public on which we have already touched and which constitute a historical rather than a merely topological opposition (that is, the emergence of privacy and of “private life,” of private “experience,” including sexuality, the sterilizing of a public life which is gradually felt to be set off against all that—this emergence and this opposition is a historical event and not, certainly, a permanent feature of social life observable in all societies).

The denotative aspects of the raw material of the detective story as a genre—relationship to the history of the city; emergence of a surveillance society and the role of surveillance in a market system in full transformation; relationship between public and private police, etc.—offer a rather different line of approach than that indicated above and mediated by psychoanalysis, or at least by the analytic theme of the “primal scene.” One is tempted to reintegrate this theme into a sociological perspective by way of Goffman’s front-back distinction (particularly as MacCannell has developed it in The Tourist):

What happens, however, is that the private, “unpresentable” areas behind the official reception rooms and “fronts” come to be considered little by little as more “real” than the areas designed for public appearance: it is in the backrooms then, and behind the scenes, that some more authentic activity takes place; and it is felt that only those who know such operations “from the inside,” that is to say, who know what goes on behind the counter and in the backroom, have any genuine knowledge (or know-how). MacCannell rewrites all this in order to describe tourism proper—the activity of seeing how other people “really” live—as a ritual whereby the quest for the authentic—most often a failure, and considered risible by more “authentic” and sophisticated travelers—serves to confirm the ideological opposition between authentic and inauthentic, serves therefore in a quasi-metaphysical way to reconfirm the idea of “reality” itself. His book has at any rate the two-fold merit of grasping hermeneutic activity (whether that of the textual interpreter or that of Marlowe and other detectives) 1) as a ritual, as an activity whose connotative meaning confirms and secures an ideology which greatly transcends its immediate denotative intent (the immediate solution to the enigma or problem); and 2) as a spatial form, that is, as an activity whose fundamental material organization is to be found in space (rather than in cognitive categories).

The “solution” of the mystery or mysteries—in any case notoriously incomprehensible in Chandler—is to be sharply distinguished from the closure of the narrative (from what lends it its completeness and its illusion of “totality”), since it takes place on another level altogether, that of the narrative raw materials (the story or fable). At best, this more “cognitive” clarification of the enigma will stand as a mere sign of closure, as the latter’s analogon within the narrative. Nor can the “imaginary” dimension of the story materials—e.g., doubles, attitudes towards women, the place of libidinal investment, of affect, the objects and products of a properly fantasy-producing activity—be isolated as the place of closure either.

The problem is that when we find ourselves driven out of these areas, in which or from which reader and writer can reflect in some synthesizing way (cognitive or affective) on the interrelationships between the events, we are confronted with a series of episodes linked only in the most tenuous ways. Genetically, of course, the early novels are something like collages, in which a series of separately published stories—sketches or finger exercises —were carefully sewn together into longer book sequences (but even those original stories were themselves structurally episodic; a fine early text like “Trouble is my Business” is virtually a Chandler novel in miniature—which means that the problem of the autonomy of the various episodes remains intact).

The issue becomes even more perplexing when we grow aware of the degree to which these various episodes are structurally homologous. The transfer of a color dominant from a given setting (e.g., white, in Vivian’s room, The Big Sleep, III) to the description and presentation of a character (gray, Eddie Mars, The Big Sleep, XIII) suggests a kind of symbiosis between character and place which will be maintained throughout the novels, but which demands explanation in its own right. I would suggest that it can be accounted for by the hypothesis that the primitive or rudimentary form of the episode in Chandler is the interview itself, whose ur-form as in pre-Aeschylean drama involves no more than two actors at any given time. Marlowe does not tend to catch people in the street, like a reporter, so that the visit and the interview situation tend to be at one with a whole architectural framework, approach to a building, room, interior and furnishings (of which, once again, the attention to clothing and fashion would seem to be something of a secondary derivative).

This is, however, rather different from naturalization in the Balzac tradition (where clothing and housing are seen as so many exoskeletons and camouflage secreted by a particular social “species”), since, as has been suggested above, there is in Chandler a fundamental distance between human space or habitation and the Nature of Southern California; the realm of the first, and Los Angeles in general, is here marked as artificial rather than as natural.

Yet this very distance allows for bravura passages, among the most interesting in Chandler, in which it is the gradual or tortuous approach to the interview situation (and less often the withdrawal from it) which becomes foregrounded. Whence the emblematic and well-nigh mythic value of the private entrance and the private road (Idle Valley, from The High Window, XVII), through a virtual citizens’ uprising (The Little Sister, XXVI), to the embourgeoisement of The Long Goodbye (XIII); but also the diegetic mysteries of Marlowe’s entry by night into Harry Jones’ office (The Big Sleep, XXVI) or by day into the silence of the Lavery house on Altair Street (The Lady in the Lake, XV). All of which may be reduced to the screen door which separates Jessie Florian’s bungalow (Farewell, My Lovely, V) from the “dried out brown lawn in front” and metonymically sums up her shabby existence: yet another approach to the “primal scene,” like those windows in Hitchcock (I Confess or Psycho) through which, fatefully, the camera discovers the body.

Yet Vivian Regan’s white interior (“like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead”) and Jessie Florian’s room full of junk (“a couple of frayed lamps with once gaudy shades that were now as gay as superannuated streetwalkers”) mark out the two permutations of Chandlerian ekphrasis: the astonishingly “sensitive” evocation of women’s fashions or interior furnishings, whose tone can range from the “neutral” one of a Barthesian fashion magazine, demonstrating sheer technical “know-how,” to the most typically American and populist sarcasm in the voice-over; and the enumeration of broken or worn items which have for the most part lost their brand-names, becoming the anonymous world of objects of the lower-class Chandler neighborhoods, the boarding or flophouses, Beacon Hill, the cheap hotel lobbies with their battered spittoons and deep leather chairs.

What must be stressed about this discursive polarization— which is also a sociological one—is that Chandler’s “poor,” far from being working class in any sense, are members of what would today be called the “underclasses”: Lumpens, non-workers, social “flotsam and jetsam,” people as broken as the furniture and buildings in which they live. But by the same token, it would be premature to assimilate “privilege” in Chandler, in the sense in which the term applies to fashionable descriptions which are often as class-conscious as any socialist-realist text, too immediately to class categories, either in the social sense of a bourgeoisie or in the political and economic sense of a “ruling” class, of a capitalist class, of the owners of the means of production or whatever. I have begun to suggest above, indeed, that one of Chandler’s originalities, one of the ways in which he felt himself consciously to be modifying the genre (and the genre even as he inherited it from Hammett), was the attempt to substitute some other kind of motivation for the standard financial or materialist one (and this substitution, at its most successful, will take the form of the threats posed to men by predatory women). For the displacement to be successful, however, the place or locus of wealth must be “managed” with some skill; and one would want to distinguish the way in which the source of their wealth has been somehow muffled or mediated in Grayle or in General Sternwood (not only by old age in these two cases), from the widowhood of Mrs. Murdock, the magical riches of Hollywood in The Little Sister (Chandler’s only approach to this particular setting), or—above all—the mysterious aloofness of Harlan Potter (in The Long Goodbye), in which last, however, power and money (as the object of murder, for instance) have been dissociated. What can be concluded in a provisional way is that, while Chandler needs the category of the “rich” in some form, the locus of wealth is in his work somehow unoccupied (a way of saying, perhaps, that there are no capitalists in Chandler’s novels either); “rich” characters come therefore to be defined by way of their houses and interiors, they are those who inhabit the spaces of “fashion” analyzed above.

But this would lead us on to other sociological distinctions in Chandler, or, more accurately, to other spaces or slots in the social typology with which his work seems to present us. It will come as no particular surprise to find that we remember such “types” on the basis of the houses and interiors with which they are associated, rather than for their own characterological merits; and also that the more strongly marked of such typologizing episodes are remembered in relative independence of their narrative context. We are not terribly sure in which novel this or that episode took place; each of the six novels has its own specific atmosphere, but the stronger episodes are also remembered distinctly, and in a different place in the mind, as though the effects in Chandler were somehow stereoptic, the molar effects (of the plot as a whole) radically dissociated from the molecular effects of these particular episodes.

The ensuing comparisons are at least instructive insofar as they sensitize us to the “obligatory” episodes, to a certain number of indispensable episode-types. The inaugural visit to the wealthy client, for instance—revealingly displaced in Farewell, My Lovely, but “rendered” once and for all in The Big Sleep—has something interesting to tell us about that most interesting and characteristic of all Chandler’s failures, The High Window, where clearly enough Mrs. Murdock’s isolation and her port-sipping was meant to be the feminine analogue (including appropriate structural inversions) of General Sternwood’s greenhouse. It did not manage to be that, evidently: for one thing, a Pasadena house is no substitute for the Sternwood estate, because—as will be emphasized below— it does not articulate relations with nature in the same way. Meanwhile, as has already been suggested, the widow’s inheritance of her husband’s fortune is, if anything, too clearly articulated, by contrast with the relative mystery of the Sternwood fortune and with General Sternwood’s “distance” from it. Finally, the Brasher Doubloon is a regressive substitute for the photographs in The Big Sleep, or The Little Sister, replacing the “image” with coinage (albeit of a more historical, aesthetic or archeological “stamp”); it is a throwback to the more romantic Hammett formula of The Maltese Falcon, and yet still manages to provoke the return of the repressed of a photographic image in its denouement. At any rate, The High Window poses an interesting problem which will serve us as a guiding thread for the rest of this discussion: why do we not feel its shape nearly as strongly and sharply as the other novels; why is it more of a failure, formally, than the unsuccessful Little Sister; above all, how can we make judgments like these when The High Window also contains some of the most remarkable and archetypal episodes in Chandler?

I am thinking, for example, of the office of Elisha Morningstar (the crooked numismatist) and of the murder on Beacon Hill (previewed in “The King in Yellow”)—a place which is the quintessential flop-house neighborhood for Chandler, who lived there briefly in a somewhat more prosperous era and took Angel’s Flight to work daily. The only strongly competitive alternate version here would seem to be Orrin Quest’s boarding house (in The Little Sister), but that is in Bay City and thus connoted rather differently (meanwhile, Jessie Florian’s is a detached private cottage and thus not comparable). The Beacon Hill rooming-house victim, however, has other equivalencies throughout Chandler, being Marlowe’s bad mirror image and the very type of the unsuccessful private detective (compare Harry Jones, in The Big Sleep; Goble in Playback; as well as a whole species of hotel detectives—perhaps a somewhat different typological slot?—at any rate involving a whole “system” in which Marlowe and the police equally figure). Harry Jones’ shabby office is the counterpart of G. A. Phillips’ shabby rooming house; but certainly the shabby office building, in general, is a fundamental component of the Chandler cityscape, here secured by Morningstar’s office. The latter, as a sociological type, would seem, taken narrowly, to represent the various kinds of experts on whom the rich have occasion to call from time to time (but I can only remember one other, the authenticator of documents Arbogast in the story “Trouble is my Business,” in some ways a trial run for this novel). In a more general or figurative sense, however, the “Morningstar” position would appear to be related to all those professionals who pander in one way or another to the needs of the rich, but most specifically with overtones of “vice” (Geiger’s bookstore), and most numerically represented in the novels by crooked physicians or quacks of various kinds—Amthor and Sonderborg in Farewell, My Lovely, Almore in The Lady in the Lake, Lagardie in The Little Sister, and Verringer in The Long Goodbye (Chandler seems to have been much less interested in attorneys). These generally have their offices in their homes, which is a step up the ladder of spatial status in Chandler’s work.

Below them, one is tempted to make room for a kind of character whose “home” is his “office,” if you know what I mean, namely the gigolo, whose manifestation in The High Window (Vannier) is perhaps not nearly so sharp as his avatars in Farewell, My Lovely (Lindsay Marriott) and in The Lady in the Lake (Lavery); the figure shows up briefly and unexpectedly as a kind of Hollywood producer in The Little Sister, and then even more unexpectedly becomes the romantic lead and the protagonist in The Long Goodbye. Chandler feels these people to be rather unmanly, hence the overtones of effeminacy and homosexuality which tie figures like Marriott back into the more obscure relationships of The Big Sleep.

The gigolos are, however, to be distinguished sharply from other figures who sometimes resemble them slightly, but whose positioning and evaluation by Chandler are among the most interesting problems in his work. These are, of course, the gangsters —Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep, Brunette in Farewell, My Lovely, Alex Morny in The High Window, and Steelgrave in The Little Sister; they often have sidekick figures who are more “evil” (Canino in The Big Sleep, Eddie Prue in The High Window, and surviving without a “boss” figure, the Menendez and Starr of The Long Goodbye); of them, we might venture to say that their “office” is their “home,” since the appropriate interviews (when they do not take place on somebody else’s turf entirely) are almost always staged in the gambling casino, or, most dramatically at all, on the gambling boat of Farewell, My Lovely. But the peculiarity of Chandler’s gangsters—his way of modifying this stock figure so that the stock plot resolution of “organized crime” is neutralized—is that they have hearts of gold, Marlowe likes them (as he sometimes even likes certain policemen), they often have trouble with their wives like anybody else, and they are almost always understanding.

This sequence of social types—the rich, the poor, crooked professionals, gigolos, gangsters, and the police—would seem fairly adequately to exhaust the typology of the male figures in Chandler’s novels (the women figures are certainly positioned socially, but would seem to find their dynamic in a rather different “libidinal” apparatus which turns around stereotypical “unconscious” archetypes like the “belle dame sans merci” or the woman “pal” and likeable but non-sexual co-detective). What has been implicit in the development of this typology, however, and what must now be more explicitly stressed, is its relationship to space, and the way in which spatial configurations articulate it as a system, and also provide the means for “rendering” this or that exemplification.

The thematics of private and public take on at least one dominant symbolic expression in Chandler, an expression which is in many ways canonical for the hard-boiled detective genre as a whole: namely the fact of the office, or better still, the twin possession by certain characters (most notably Marlowe himself) of both an office and a private dwelling (most often an apartment). A case might be made—but not in this context—for grasping one of the social and ritual functions of the detective story as a reinvention of the myth of the private, of private space and personal or private life (I will only note here the fantasmatic and excessive attention paid to the private dwellings and lives of the detectives themselves, most strikingly in the stereotypical popular fantasy— textually quite erroneous—that Marlowe sleeps in his office, keeps his phone in the icebox, etc., etc.).

At any rate, the coordination of home and office allows us to project a very summary permutation scheme, in which the logical possibilities turn out in fact to correspond to the sociological typology developed above:

1. There are, first of all, people who have homes without offices: these are, paradoxically, either the very rich or the very poor.

2. There are those who have both, and they are professionals in the service of the rich, mostly crooked but also occasionally the structural inversion of this last, namely honorable (e.g., Marlowe himself!)

3. There are characters for whom home and office become in one way or another identified and coterminous: a) the gigolos, whose home is their office; b) the gangsters, whose office (casino, etc.) is their home.

4. Finally, there is a logical possibility about which we have not yet spoken, namely those who possess offices without homes. I will suggest that this corresponds to the category of the police, who are always seen in their precinct buildings as though they had no equivalent of what, for civilians, would be private life and private living space.

We will examine the phenomenological meaning of such “offices” in the next chapter: for the moment, it suffices to test the structuralist “aesthetic” principle that our impressionistic sense of closure or the completeness of the narrative as a whole stands in direct proportion to the systematic exhaustion of the logical possibilities in the permutational scheme we have offered. The problem with this hypothesis is that its terms apply perfectly well to The High Window, in which all the logical possibilities are quite adequately represented, all the social types portrayed, and yet which palpably fails to yield the sense of global narrative closure produced by the other three major novels of the first cycle: it is a whole whose parts are very often superlative, but which does not add up, for reasons we have not yet been able to grasp or formulate.

I want to try to do this by staging a disjunction between the social typology we have just established—along with the urban space and buildings to which it corresponds—and something else, which it will be just as easy to call Nature. The coexistence of the urban and the natural landscapes is indeed one of the more striking features of Los Angeles, as compared to more classical cities, which replace the natural, or which are at best, as urban wholes, contiguous to some great natural site, the bays of San Francisco or Sydney, say. Houses in the Los Angeles canyons, however, are still city dwellings, and the then nascent literature of suburbia (with its special aesthetic dilemmas) is thus radically excluded from Chandler’s Southern California.

This is to say that, in this particular Los Angeles at least, both dimensions—of the urban and of the natural—are in play simultaneously at all times; neither is effaced by the other, as would be the case in a spatially different kind of literary practice. On the other hand, in Chandler the two dimensions—however they coincide or overlap—nonetheless remain distinct, whether we can go so far as to describe them as being in tension—let alone in contradiction—or not. We must thus read Chandler’s novels on two staves or two distinct scales all at once, and this from the very outset: in The Big Sleep we visit a quintessential selection of houses, rooms, and offices—a whole panoply of specifically urban spaces—and we also live in Nature, most dramatically by keeping an eye on the weather and observing the progress of rain clouds over the foothills. The chapter sequence of The Big Sleep is in this respect a virtual fever chart of weather: clouds, drizzle, bright sun, fog, heavy rain and automobile lights in the darkness; a sequence which has its own logic and about which it would be premature indeed to suppose that—following the old “expressive fallacy”— it entertained any meaningful symbolic relationship with the sequence of human events taking place simultaneously in urban space proper.

The realm of the weather—and Chandler’s attention to it— turns out in fact to be the unifying mechanism of these novels, in a far more concrete fashion than the complex plots themselves: it is the evolution of the weather, particularly in The Big Sleep—waiting for rain, the bright sunlight next morning—which holds together the otherwise random or even centrifugal tendency of the episodes to drift apart from one another, to become “timeless” unities in their own right. It would seem, therefore, that we are here on the track of a principle of closure rather different from anything available in the social or urban typology, but whose mechanism for the moment seems cyclical, or at least predominantly temporal, and thus lacking in that momentary equivalence of time and space upon which the sense of aesthetic closure necessarily depends.

Meanwhile, the criticism of art and architecture alike has accustomed us to notions of “metaphorization,” whereby a “cultural” space or element is read in terms of a “natural” one, and vice versa. In Chandler it seems at least minimally certain that our capacity to perceive his peculiar urban space—from Southern California mansions to shabby hotel lobbies, from downtown office buildings to canyons or private roads leading to exclusive residential compounds staffed by private police—is stimulated by and constitutively dependent on our sense of the natural ecology of the Los Angeles basin itself, from foothills to port or bay.

Yet it seems equally important not to grasp such perceptions in any static or fragmented way, as some mere inert act of “situating” an event—and the space of an event—geographically:

The proper reading of such a narrative moment involves the conviction that “geographical space,” in the sense of natural setting, the foothills and so forth, is not merely one more piece of descriptive information which can be optionally added on to other types of physical data about the room, but rather that the first kind of datum is of a radically different order from the second (which might have to do with interior furnishings), and that we must develop in ourselves, in order to read such a passage properly, the sense that two distinct languages are being drawn on here, that two radically distinct systems are herein juxtaposed. Meanwhile, the metaphysical temptation must also be resisted, namely the attempt to transform this juxtaposition into a statement and the expression of some eternal pathos: the room in which a violent death will happen, itself then transfigured by the eternity of the natural cycle that presides over it, as though the insignificance of human passions were suddenly dramatized by an opening to the infinity of the heavens. Rather, it seems to me that such notations should be read as the momentary intermeshing of two distinct yet complete systems, each of which has a kind of closure specific to it. We have already schematically mapped out the social typology at work in Chandler’s narratives, and it is a typology which has a logical completeness of its own as a system, even though from the standpoint of the analysis of social class it is significantly flawed and incomplete in such a way as to make its very illusion or projection of “completeness” or of “totality” an ideological act or even a kind of false consciousness. The natural or geographical code then has its own traditional closure, although of a very different type.

One is tempted, in trying to think the possible modes of interaction between these codes or systems, to rework Roman Jakobson’s well-known characterization of poetic language as the “projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”⁴ The formula usefully conveys the sense that each such axis has its own specific dynamic or logic or principle, so that the long shadow that one axis projects upon the other is more concretely to be read as the illicit transfer of the rhythms and lawfulness of one system into another normally governed by quite different principles.

With this in mind, I will suggest that closure in Chandler’s novels is achieved by something like the projection of the axis of geography or nature onto that of society; and that the intermeshing of these two codes or systems allows for the transfer of closure as such from the vaster totality of the natural landscape to the far more questionable and purely logical systematization of the social order. The landscape of Southern California in other words returns on Chandler’s own limited ideological (and even personal or private) view of the social realm to confer on this last a kind of completeness. It is a rather different operation than the kind of “naturalization” which Barthes and others saw as being essential to any ideological move: in Chandler, there can never be any question that the social order of Southern California is “natural,” its artificiality is on the contrary underscored at every moment. The naturalizing move here intervenes not on the level of individual social types or institutions, but rather in the aesthetic claim that Chandler has touched all the bases, that this itemization of the flora and fauna of Los Angeles county is an exhaustive one, that the “representation” of the various elements, poles, forces, actants, of this social order—however photographic or not—is somehow a complete thing in its own right.

But closure—the achievement of a sense of narrative totality—must not be confused with the merely formal ending or conclusion of a work, something Chandler’s last and least successful novel demonstrates. I have so often been unjust to The Long Goodbye that my most recent rereading suggests the moment of making amends. Indeed, a confrontation with the problem of film adaptation may be indulged on the occasion of his last completed novel, which also raises questions about the breakdown or exhaustion of the narrative apparatus so triumphantly rehearsed in the earlier books. For we have not yet raised the interesting matter of Altman’s film version, the most personal, idiosyncratic and outrageous of all the movie versions of Chandler’s novels (all have been filmed at least once), but which will have even more insistent claims on those for whom Altman is as important as Chandler in his own way and for whom this film is also one of his masterpieces. To be sure, Elliott Gould is very far indeed from the ideal Marlowe Chandler himself imagined for the silver screen (to have been played by Cary Grant!); while the change of ending is something like Altman’s decisive rebuke to the excessive sentimentality of the novel, and to its celebration, if not of the homoerotic impulse, then certainly of the male-bonding syndrome.

Yet it is precisely this change of ending which suggests a more adequate way of grasping the relationship of novel to film version than the customary “representational” one (in the sense in which we ask whether the film is “faithful” to the book; whether Bogart is a more satisfactory Marlowe than Dick Powell, etc.). From symbol to allegory, from identity to difference, from homology or replication to structural distance and differentiation: the changeover in these critical values also has its equivalent here, as in the feeling of the newer film criticism—addressing an analogous problem of the relationship between images or shots and words or voice-over within a given filmic text—that such relationships were more intense when there was a lag, a dissonance, a non-correspondence, between these two registers, than when they harmonized with each other to the point of constituting each other’s mere “illustration” or “example.”

Perhaps, in a similar way, the intensities of this peculiar new “object of study”—the filmed novel—are greatest when both novel and film are felt to have equal status, and to comment mutually upon each other. At any rate, Altman’s gesture—the palpable disgust with the Chandlerian sentimentality and with Marlowe’s inexplicable indulgence for the gigolo-protagonist—has the effect of reconfirming the objectivity of the plot itself, of making this last appear as a virtual object, as an objective fantasy, somewhere in between the two texts, each of which becomes a way of making an alternative evaluation and taking an opposing position on their shared object. Perhaps, indeed, only thus can a filmic adaptation keep faith with an original of great quality: not by seeking to reproduce it faithfully, but by letting it “be in its being,” as Heidegger would have said; respecting its uniqueness and difference by transforming it into something so radically distinct that both works appear on the retina separately. Walter Benjamin had a theory of translation that seems relevant here: the point of a good one, he argued, was not to fashion an equivalent of its original in a foreign tongue, but rather to demonstrate the impossibility of such translation and to hint at the strange resources and syntax of the other language, at its specific effects of which our own is incapable. Ultimately, perhaps, only thus do film and novel preserve their own autonomy—an autonomy which is strengthened precisely by their differences with the identity each shares with the other.

But if pairing the novel with Altman’s film gives us one object of study, matching it against The Big Sleep gives us yet another, and it is here that we will find the formal clues both to the possibility of the rather unexpected later work, and to its structural uniqueness. Another system or typology can obviously be disengaged here, which incorporates the basic types of the vamp-murderess, the woman pal, the professional woman, and the “mousy,” timid or provincial type (as she evolves from The High Window to The Little Sister). The overall logic of the Chandler plot will be useful in rotating these “types” so swiftly that they blur into one another, substitute for one another, or unmask each other as the hidden reality of the other’s appearance.

But there exist “masculine” versions of these plot dynamics, versions in which a variant of the same sexual ideology is expressed—now generally called “male-bonding syndrome,” male backlash and fear of independent women which takes the form of “mateship” and the drawing together of men in strong protective friendships—but which also seems to me to emit formal effects of a somewhat different type. I think, for instance, of Ernst Bloch’s doctrine of Hope, with its two archetypal mythic or narrative expressions: the tale of the Egyptian Helen, and Hebel’s little story, “Unexpected Reunion” (“Unverhofftes Wiedersehen,” taken up again by E.T.A. Hoffmann and others)—narratives in which a beloved—lost to hope, and seemingly forever—miraculously reappears. In the myth of the other Helen, she had never, to be sure, really been lost after all: it was for a mere simulacrum that the Trojans fought, the “real” Helen safe all the while in Egypt—and thereby, as it were, two kinds of wishes were fulfilled simultaneously, the wish consummated and abolished (in fulfillment, presence, satisfaction), and the wish to wish reaffirmed, perpetuated, enjoyed in the perpetual deferment of the Trojan War. In the Hebel story, a miner is killed on his wedding day; sixty years later, a fresh landslide reveals his youthful body—preserved without a trace of injury—to the aged widow on the point of entering her own grave.

This “most beautiful story in the world” (Bloch) with its bitter “happy ending” compresses the time of a life, of generations, of a whole historical cycle, into a reflexive anecdote about wishing proper, on the order of the reflexivity of the fairy tale. To stage an effect of this kind in the more leisurely, properly epic proportions of the novel itself would seem to involve the planned throwaway of the rich content of a lived time which is suddenly unmasked as appearance. One thinks of Vertigo, or, for a representation which hesitates perpetually on the verge of the reversal without choosing, which perpetuates the ambiguity itself, of Antonioni’s L’Avventura: but film obviously has a different relationship to the present of the image and is able to pay a less onerous price aesthetically for this “reversal” that can so easily look more like a mere trick (à la Nabokov).

The Big Sleep is, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, one of the rare narratives to have been willing to pay the price for such an effect, and to have committed the most substance to it. Chandler’s false quests trigger cycles of blood-letting and violence which seem virtually normal events in this world, until we discover their vanity and irrelevance to a search whose object—as in The Big Sleep—has been dead and buried long before the novel began or the trail of fresh bloodshed set in. The tease of a central character whose name is omnipresent in the interviews and their peripeties, but who has never been where we think he is (or who turns out to be dying the first chance we get to look him in the face, as in The Little Sister)—this seeming trick is perhaps the figure for a whole metaphysic.

What I wanted to note, however, is that in all respects The Long Goodbye is simply a structural reversal of this. The protagonist dies unexpectedly in an early chapter, and we, Marlowe, the novel, and its intrigue, must continue without him, new clients emerging in the peculiar desolation of this definitive absence. (Nor can I help thinking that Marlowe’s move, out of the typical Los Angeles apartments, of which he has had several, into the isolation of a “small hillside house on a deadend street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way”⁵ is not unrelated to the peculiarly terminal atmosphere of this novel.) The return then—the film replaying backwards, its figures rising back into place in the very light traces of their fall—is less a resurrection than the unmasking of a presence that was already there, like some sonorous overtone from which a momentary band of silence has been removed. In both these novels—first and last—something is being demonstrated about the very spectrum of reality itself, and about the distance between our perceptions or its appearance, and the permanency of its levels—blank or absent in The Big Sleep, unexpectedly present in The Long Goodbye, yet for much of the book imperceptible to our own more limited sense organs. The reappearance of Terry Lennox is, however, no more a happy ending than the definitive disappearance of Rusty in The Big Sleep is a tragic one. Perhaps it is rather the other classical storytelling formula—common to both novels—which should be retained for this final note: the farewell to the characters. “I never saw any of them again.”