Chapter 1

Shill Game

I

That the detective story represented something more to Raymond Chandler than a mere commercial product, furnished for popular entertainment purposes, can be judged from the fact that he came to it late in life, with a long and successful business career behind him. He published his first and best novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939, when he was fifty years old, and had studied the form for almost a decade. The short stories he had written over that period are for the most part sketches for the novels, episodes that he will later take over verbatim as chapters in the longer form: and he developed his technique by imitating and reworking models produced by other detective story writers: a deliberate, self-conscious apprenticeship at a time of life when most writers have already found themselves.

Two aspects of his earlier experience seem to account for the personal tone of his books. As an executive of the oil industry, he lived in Los Angeles for some fifteen years before the depression put him out of business, enough time to sense what was unique about the city’s atmosphere, and in a position to see what power was and what forms it took. And, though a born American, he spent his school years, from the age of eight, in England, and had an English public school education.

For Chandler thought of himself primarily as a stylist, and it was his distance from the American language that gave him the chance to use it as he did. In that respect his situation was not unlike that of Nabokov: the writer of an adopted language is already a kind of stylist by force of circumstance. Language can never again be unselfconscious for him; words can never again be unproblematical. The naive and unreflective attitude towards literary expression is henceforth proscribed, and he feels in his language a kind of material density and resistance: even those clichés and commonplaces which for the native speaker are not really words at all, but instant communication, take on outlandish resonance in his mouth, are used between quotation marks, as you would delicately expose some interesting specimen: his sentences are collages of heterogeneous materials, of odd linguistic scraps, figures of speech, colloquialisms, place names and local sayings, all laboriously pasted together in an illusion of continuous discourse. In this, the lived situation of the writer of a borrowed language is already emblematic of the situation of the modern writer in general, in that words have become objects for him. The detective story, as a form without ideological content, without any overt political or social or philosophical point, permits such pure stylistic experimentation.

But it offers other advantages as well, and it is no accident that the chief practitioners of art-for-art’s sake in the late modern novel, Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet, almost always organize their works around a murder: think of Le Voyeur and La Maison de Rendezvous; think of Lolita and Pale Fire. These writers and their artistic contemporaries represent a kind of second wave of the modernist and formalistic impulse which produced the great modernism of the first two decades of the twentieth century.² But in the earlier works, modernism was a reaction against narration, against plot: here the empty, decorative event of the murder serves as a way of organizing essentially plotless material into an illusion of movement, into the formally satisfying arabesques of a puzzle unfolding. Yet the real content of these books is an almost scenic one: the motels and college towns of the American landscape in Lolita, the island of Le Voyeur, the drab provincial cities of Les Gommes or of Dans le labyrinthe.

In much the same way, a case can be made for Chandler as a painter of American life: not as a builder of those large-scale models of the American experience which great literature offers, but rather in fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature.

Take for example some perfectly insignificant daily experience, such as the chance encounter of two people in the lobby of an apartment building. I find my neighbor unlocking his mailbox; I have never seen him before, we glance at each other briefly, his back is turned as he struggles with the larger magazines inside. Such an instant expresses in its fragmentary quality a profound truth about American life, in its perception of the stained carpets, the sand-filled spittoons, the poorly shutting glass doors, all testifying to the shabby anonymity of a meeting place between the luxurious private lives that stand side by side like closed monads behind the doors of the private apartments: a dreariness of waiting rooms and public bus stations, of the neglected places of collective life that fill up the interstices between the privileged compartments of middle-class living. Such a perception, it seems to me, is in its very structure dependent on chance and anonymity, on the vague glance in passing, as from the window of a bus, when the mind is intent on some more immediate preoccupation: its very essence is to be inessential. For this reason it eludes the registering apparatus of great literature: make of it some Joycean epiphany and the reader is obliged to take this moment as the center of his world, as something directly infused with symbolic meaning; and at once the most fragile and precious quality of the perception is irrevocably damaged, its slightness is lost, it can no longer be half-glimpsed, half-disregarded—the meaningless is arbitrarily given meaning.

Yet put such an experience in the framework of the detective story and everything changes. I learn that the man I saw does not even live in my building, that he was in reality opening the murdered woman’s mailbox, not his own; and suddenly my attention flows back onto the neglected perception and sees it in renewed, heightened form without damaging its structure. Indeed, it is as if there are certain moments in life which are accessible only at the price of a certain lack of intellectual focus: like objects at the edge of my field of vision which disappear when I turn to stare at them head-on. Proust felt this keenly, his whole aesthetic presupposing some absolute antagonism between spontaneity and self-consciousness. For Proust we can only be sure we have lived, we have perceived, after the fact of the experience itself; for him the deliberate, willful project to meet experience face to face in the present is always doomed to failure. In a minor way the unique temporal structure of the best detective story is also a pretext, a more organizational framework, for such isolated perception.

It is in this light that the well-known distinction between the atmosphere of English and American detective stories is to be understood. Gertrude Stein, in her Lectures in America, sees the essential feature of English literature to be the tireless description of “daily life,” of lived routine and continuity, in which possessions are daily counted up and evaluated, in which the basic structure is one of cycle and repetition. American life, American content, on the other hand, is a formless one, always to be re-invented, an uncharted wilderness in which the very notion of experience itself is perpetually called into question and revised, in which time is an indeterminate succession from which a few decisive, explosive, irrevocable instants stand out in relief. Hence the murder in the placid English village or in the fog-bound London club is read as the sign of a scandalous interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surface of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth and impermanent private lives. Yet in both, the moment of violence, apparently central, is nothing but a diversion: the real function of the murder in the quiet village is for order to be felt more strongly; while the principal effect of the violence in the American detective story is to allow it to be experienced backwards, in pure thought, without risks, as a contemplative spectacle which gives not so much the illusion of life as the illusion that life has already been lived, that we have already had contact with the archaic sources of that Experience of which Americans have always made a fetish.

II

European literature is metaphysical or formalistic because it takes the nature of the society, of the nation, for granted and works out beyond it. American literature never seems to get beyond the definition of its starting point: any picture of America is bound to be wrapped up in a question and a presupposition about the nature of American reality. European literature can choose its subject matter and the width of its lens; American literature feels obliged to put everything in, knowing that exclusion is also part of the process of definition, and that it can be called to account as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does.

The last great period of American literature, which ran more or less from one world war to the other, explored and defined America in a geographical mode, as a sum of separate localisms, as an additive unity, at its outside limit an ideal sum. But since World War II, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization, and the organic social unity of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead from one monad to another. Communication in this new society is upwards, through the abstract connecting link, and back down again. The isolated units are all haunted by the feeling that the center of things, of life, of control, is elsewhere, beyond immediate lived experiences. The principal images of interrelationship in this new society are mechanical juxtapositions: the identical prefabricated houses in the housing project, swarming over the hills; the four-lane highway full of cars bumper to bumper and observed from above, abstractly, by a traffic helicopter. If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life.

Chandler lies somewhere between these two literary situations. His whole background, his way of thinking and of seeing things, derives from the period between the wars. But by an accident of place, his social content anticipates the realities of the fifties and sixties. For Los Angeles is already a kind of microcosm and forecast of the country as a whole: a new centerless city, in which the various classes have lost touch with each other because each is isolated in its own geographical compartment. If the symbol of social coherence and comprehensibility was furnished by the nineteenth-century Parisian apartment house (dramatized in Zola’s Pot-Bouille) with its shop on the ground floor, its wealthy inhabitants on the second and third, petty bourgeoisie further up, and workers’ rooms on top along with the maids and servants, then Los Angeles is the opposite, a spreading out horizontally, a flowing apart of the elements of the social structure.

Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. The equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, linking “picturesque” but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole, but he does not really stand for any genuine experience of it. Of course the origin of the literary detective lies in the creation of the professional police, whose organization can be attributed not so much to a desire to prevent crime in general as to the will on the part of modern governments to know and thus to control the varying elements of their administrative areas. The great continental detectives (Lecoq, Maigret) are generally policemen, but in the Anglo-Saxon countries where governmental control sits far more lightly on the citizens, the private detective, from Holmes to Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, took the place of the government functionary, until the postwar return of the police procedural.

As an involuntary explorer of the society, Marlowe visits either those places you don’t look at or those you can’t: the anonymous or the wealthy and secretive. Both have something of the strangeness with which Chandler characterizes the police station: “A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pass in beyond the green lights of the precinct station you pass clear out of this world into a place beyond the law” (LL, XXIII, 418). On the one hand those parts of the American scene which are as impersonal and seedy as public waiting rooms: run-down office buildings, the elevator with the spittoon and the elevator man sitting on a stool beside it; dingy office interiors, Marlowe’s own in particular, seen at all hours of the clock, at those times when we have forgotten that offices exist, in the late evening, when the other offices are dark, in the early morning before the traffic begins; police stations; hotel rooms and lobbies, with the then characteristic potted palms and overstuffed armchairs; rooming houses with managers who work illegal lines of business on the side. All these places are characterized by belonging to the mass, collective side of our society: places occupied by faceless people, who leave no stamp of their personality behind them, in short, the dimension of the interchangeable, the inauthentic:

The presentation of this kind of social material is far more frequent in European art than in our own: as if somehow we were willing to know anything about ourselves, the worst kind of secret, just as long as it was not this nameless, faceless anonymity. But it suffices to compare the faces of actors and participants in almost any European movie with those in American ones to note the absence in ours of the whole-grain lens and the dissimilarity between the visual representation and the features of people around us in the street. What makes this somewhat more difficult to observe is that of course our view of life is conditioned by the art we know, which has trained us not to see what the texture of ordinary people’s faces is, but rather to invest them with photographic glamour.

The other side of American life with which Marlowe comes into contact is the reverse of the above: the great estate, with its retinue of servants, chauffeurs, and secretaries; and around it, the various institutions which cater to wealth and preserve its secrecy: the private clubs, set back on private roads in the mountains, patrolled by a private police which admits members only; the clinics in which drugs are available; the private religious cults; the luxury hotels with their security personnel; the private gambling ships, anchored out beyond the three-mile limit; and a little further away, the corrupt local police who rule a municipality in the name of a single man or family, and protect the various kinds of illegal activity which spring up to satisfy money and its wants.

But Chandler’s picture of America has an intellectual content as well: it is the converse, the darker concrete reality, of an abstract intellectual illusion about the United States. The federal system and the archaic federal Constitution developed in Americans a double image of their country’s political reality, a dual system of political thoughts which never intersect with each other. On the one hand, a glamorous national politics whose distant leading figures are invested with charisma, an unreal, distinguished quality adhering to their foreign policy activities, their economic programs given the appearance of substance by the appropriate ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. On the other hand, local politics, with its odium, its ever-present corruption, its deals and perpetual preoccupation with undramatic, materialistic questions such as sewage disposal, zoning regulations, property taxes, and so forth. Governors are halfway between the two worlds, but for a mayor, for example, to become a senator involves a thoroughgoing metamorphosis, a transformation from one species into another. Indeed, the qualities perceived in the political macrocosm are only illusory, the projection of the dialectical opposite of the real qualities of the microcosm: everyone is convinced of the dirtiness of politics and politicians on the local level, and when everything is seen in terms of interest, the absence of greed becomes the feature which dazzles. Like the father whose defects are invisible to his own children, the national politicians (with occasional stunning exceptions) seem to be beyond personal self-interest, and this lends an automatic prestige to their professional affairs, lifts them onto a different rhetorical level entirely.

On the level of abstract thought, the effect of the preordained permanency of the Constitution is to hinder the development of any speculative political theorizing and replace it with pragmatism within the system, the calculation of counter-influences and possibilities of compromise. A kind of reverence attaches to the abstract, a disabused cynicism to the concrete. As in certain types of mental obsession and dissociation, Americans are able to observe local injustice, racism, corruption, educational incompetence with a practiced eye, while they continue to entertain boundless optimism as to the greatness of the country, taken as a whole.

The action of Chandler’s books takes place inside the microcosm, in the darkness of a local world without the benefit of the federal Constitution, as in a world without God. The literary shock is dependent on the habit of the political double standard in the mind of the reader: it is only because we are used to thinking of the nation as a whole in terms of justice that we are struck by these images of people caught in the power of a local county authority as absolutely as though they were in a foreign country. The local power apparatus is beyond appeal, in this other face of federalism; the rule of naked force and money is complete and undisguised by any embellishments of theory. In an eerie optical illusion, the jungle reappears in the suburbs.

In this sense the honesty of the detective can be understood as an organ of perception, a membrane which, irritated, serves to indicate in its sensitivity the nature of the world around it. For if the detective is dishonest, his job boils down to the technical problem of how to succeed on a given paid assignment. If he is honest, he is able to feel the resistance of things, to permit an intellectual vision of what he goes through on the level of action. And Chandler’s sentimentalism, which attaches to occasional honest characters in the earlier books, but which is perhaps strongest in The Long Goodbye, is the reverse and complement of this vision, a momentary relief from it, a compensation for its hopeless bleakness.

The detective’s journey is episodic because of the fragmentary, atomistic nature of the society he moves through. In European countries, people no matter how solitary are still somehow engaged in the social substance; their very solitude is social; their identity is inextricably entangled with that of all the others by a clear system of classes, by a national language, in what Heidegger describes as the Mitsein, the being-together-with-others.

But the form of Chandler’s books reflects an initial American separation of people from each other, their need to be linked by some external force (in this case the detective) if they are ever to be fitted together as parts of the same picture puzzle. And this separation is projected out onto space itself: no matter how crowded the street in question, the various solitudes never really merge into a collective experience, there is always distance between them. Each dingy office is separated from the next; each room in the rooming house from the one next to it; each dwelling from the pavement beyond it. This is why the most characteristic leitmotif of Chandler’s books is the figure standing, looking out of one world, peering vaguely or attentively across into another:

In psychological or allegorical terms, this figure on the doorstep represents Suspicion, and suspicion is everywhere in this world, peering from behind a curtain, barring entry, refusing to answer, preserving the privacy of the monad against snoopers and trespassers. Its characteristic manifestations are the servant coming back out into the hallway, the man in the car lot hearing a noise, the custodian of a deserted farm looking outside, the manager of the rooming house taking another look upstairs, the bodyguard appearing in the doorway.

Hence the detective’s principal contact with the people he meets is a rather external one; they are seen briefly in their own doorways, for a purpose, and their personalities come out against the grain, hesitant, hostile, stubborn, as they react to the various questions and drag their feet on the answers. But seen another way the very superficiality of these meetings with the characters is artistically motivated: for the characters themselves are pretexts for their speech, and the specialized nature of this speech is that it is somehow external, indicative of types, formulaic remarks bounced across to strangers:

This kind of dialogue is also characteristic of the early Faulkner; it is quite different from that of Hemingway, which is much more personal and fluid, created from the inside, somehow re-enacted and personally re-experienced by the author. Here clichés and stereotyped speech patterns are heated into life by the presence behind them of a certain form of protective emotion you would feel in your dealings with strangers: a kind of outgoing belligerence, or hostility, or the amusement of the native, or bantering, helpful indifference: a communicativeness always nuanced or colored by an attitude. And whenever Chandler’s dialogue, which in the early books is very good, strays from this particular level to something more intimate and more expressive, it begins to falter; for his forte is the speech pattern of inauthenticity, of externality, and derives immediately from the inner organic logic of his material itself.

In the art of the twenties and thirties, however, such dialogue had the value of social schematism. A set of fixed social types and categories underlay it, and the dialogue was itself a way of demonstrating the coherence and peculiar organization the society possessed, of apprehending it in miniature. Anyone who has watched New York movies of the thirties is aware of how linguistic characterization feeds into a picture of the city as a whole: the stock ethnic and professional types, the cabbie, the reporter, the flatfoot, the high society playboy, the flapper, and so forth. Needless to say, the decay of this kind of movie results from the disintegration of such a picture of the city, such an organization of reality. But already the Los Angeles of Chandler was an unstructured city, and the social types are here nowhere near as pronounced. By the chance of a historical accident, Chandler was able to benefit from the survival of a purely linguistic, typological way of creating his characters after the system of types that had supported it was already disappearing. A last hold, before the dissolving contours of the society made these linguistic markers disappear also, leaving the novelist faced with the problem of the absence of any standard by which dialogue can be judged realistic or lifelike.

In Chandler the presentation of social reality is thus immediately and directly problematized by language itself. There can be no doubt that he invented a distinctive style, with its own humor and imagery, its own special movement. But the most striking feature of that language its use of slang, and here Chandler’s own remarks are instructive:

And Chandler comments on O’Neill’s use in The Iceman Cometh of the expression “the big sleep,” “in the belief that it was an accepted underworld expression. If so, I’d like to see whence it comes, because I invented the expression.”

But slang is eminently serial and impersonal in its nature: it exists as objectively as a joke, passed from hand to hand, always elsewhere, never fully the property of its user. In this, the literary problem of slang forms a parallel in the microcosm of style to the problem of the presentation of the serial society itself, never present fully in any of its manifestations, without a privileged center, offering the impossible alternative between an objective and abstract lexical knowledge of it as a whole and a lived concrete experience of its worthless components.

III

Part of the appeal of Chandler’s books for us is a nostalgic one. They are among a whole class of objects we once called “camp,” including: Humphrey Bogart movies, certain comic books, hard-boiled detective stories, and monster movies, among other things. Pop art was the principal contemporary manifestation of this nostalgic interest: it is not unlike art about other art, for in spite of its simplicity it has two levels within it, a simplified outer expression, and an inner period atmosphere which is its object and which is evoked by balloon speeches, the enlarged dots of newspaper print, the faded faces of celebrities and well-known imaginary characters. Rather than art about art, it would be more accurate to say that it is art whose content is not direct experience, but already formed cultural and ideological artifacts.

Yet the experience of nostalgia remains itself to be explained. It is not a constant of all periods, and yet when it does appear, it is generally characterized by an attachment to a moment of the past wholly different from our own, which offers a more complete kind of relief from the present. The Romantics for example reacted against the growth of an industrial society by recalling examples of pastoral, hierarchically organized ones from history or from travel. And limited sections of our own society continue to feel this kind of nostalgia, for Jeffersonian America, for example, or for the conditions of the frontier. Or else they satisfy their nostalgia in a concrete way by tourism in countries whose life and ways are the equivalent of some pre-capitalistic stage of historical development.

But the nostalgia which gave birth to pop art fastens for its object on the period immediately preceding our own, one apparently from a larger historical perspective not very different from it: its objects all come from a span of years too often referred to simply as the thirties and which in reality extends from the New Deal well across the parenthesis of World War II, and up to the beginning of the Cold War. This period is marked by strong political and ideological movements, and with the revival of political life in the sixties these too have been the object of admiration and nostalgia. But they were themselves results and not causes, and are far from being its most significant features.

The atmosphere of a given period is crystallized first of all in its objects: the double-breasted suits, the long dresses of the new look, the fluffy hair-dos, and the styling of the automobiles. But our nostalgia for this particular time is distinct from the evocation of museum-piece objects from the past in that it seeks out not so much the life-style behind them as the objects themselves. It aims at a world like our own in its general conditions, industrialism, market capitalism, mass production, and unlike it only in being somewhat simpler. It is partly a fascination with dating, aging, the passage of time for its own sake: like looking at photographs of ourselves in old-fashioned clothing in order to have a direct intuition of change, of historicity. (And undoubtedly the existence of the movies as a form does much to account for the peculiar intensity of this nostalgia: we can not only see the past alive before us tangibly, without having to rely on our own imagination of it; more than that, we can feel this past personally by seeing young actors whom we ourselves have grown familiar with as older figures, even by seeing movies we dimly remember from our own pasts.) But this historicity is itself a historical thing. It is as far from the ritual cycle of the seasons as is the turnover in clothing fashions. It is a rapid change intimately linked with the production and marketing of objects for sale.

For the beginning of the Cold War also marked the beginning of the great post-war boom, and with it, the prodigious expansion in advertising, the use of television as a more vivid and suggestive way of selling competing and similar products—one that mingles them more intimately with our lives than did the newspaper or the radio.

The older products had a certain stability about them, a certain permanence of identity that can still be captured here and there in farm country, for example, where a few sparse signs point to the attachment to a few indispensable products. Here, the brand-name is still synonymous with the object itself: a car is a “Ford,” a lighter is a “Ronson,” a hat is a “Stetson.” In this early stage of the marketing of industrial products, the brands require a stable, relatively unchanging identity in order to become identified and adopted by the public, and the relatively primary and simplified advertising is merely a way of recalling something already familiar to the public mind. To be sure, the advertisements tend to blend with the image of the brand itself, but for that very reason in this period the advertisements also change very little and have a kind of stability of their own. Thus the older kinds of products remain relatively integrated into the landscape of natural objects; they still fulfill easily identifiable needs, desires which are still felt to be relatively “natural”; lying midway between nature (land, climate, foodstuffs) and human reality, they correspond to a world in which the principal activity is still the overcoming of the resistance of nature and of things, and in which human need and desire arise as a function of that struggle.

But with the post-war boom the premium comes to be placed on rapid change and the evolution of products rather than on their stability and identity. In automobiles, in cigarettes, in soaps, among many other things, this wild proliferation and transformation of marketable objects can be observed. Nor can scientific or technical advance (the invention of cigarette filters, of the automatic transmission, of the long-playing record) be held responsible for it. On the contrary most of these technical innovations were feasible earlier; it is only when frequent styling changes are desirable that they are appealed to. The cause of this wholesale alteration in our purchasable environment would appear to be twofold: first, the increasing wealth and diversification of the various manufacturing companies which no longer have to depend on a single brand and which can now invent and eliminate brands at their convenience. Second, the increasing autonomy of advertising, which is able to float any number of unfamiliar new objects in a hurry—in a kind of time exposure in which the older, slower familiarity is artificially reproduced by around-the-clock stimuli.

What is being created in these advertising exposures is not so much an object, a new type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire, a kind of mental or ideological symbol by which the consumer’s craving to buy is associated with a particular type of packaging and label. Evidently in a situation in which most basic needs have already been satisfied it is necessary to evolve ever newer and more specialized ones in order to continue to be able to sell products. But the change has its psychological dimension as well, and corresponds to the turnover from a production economy to a service one. Fewer and fewer people are involved with objects as tools, with natural objects as raw materials; more and more are involved with things as semi-ideas, busy marketing and consuming objects which they never really apprehend as pure materiality, as the product of work on resisting things. In such a world, material needs are sublimated into more symbolic satisfactions; the initial desire is not the solution of a material problem, but the style and symbolic connotations of the product to be possessed.

The life-problems of such a world are radically different in kind from those of the relatively simple world of needs and physical resistance which preceded it. They involve a struggle, not against things and relatively solid systems of power, but against ideological fantasms, bits and pieces of spiritualized matter, the solicitations of various kinds of dream-like mirages and cravings, a life to the second power, not heightened and intensified but merely refined and confused, unable to find a footing in the reality of things.

Such a world clearly poses the most difficult problems for the artist trying to register it. It is full of merely spiritualized, or in our conventional terminology, merely “psychological” problems which do not seem to stand in any direct, observable relationship to the objective realities of the society. At their upper limit, presented for themselves alone, these problems lose themselves in super-subtleties and uninteresting introspection; while the presentation of the objective reality itself strikes the modern reader as old-fashioned and without any relevance to his lived experience.

But the most immediate and visible effects of this situation are stylistic. In the time of Balzac manufactured objects, products, have an immediate and intrinsic novelistic interest, and not only because they record as furnishings the taste and personality of their owners. In this earliest period of industrial capitalism, they are in the very process of being invented and marketed by contemporaries, and where some books tell the very story of their evolution and exploitation, others allow them to stand mute around or behind the characters themselves, as testimony to the nature of the world being created at that moment, and to the stage which human energies have been able to reach. In the era of stable products to which Chandler’s books belong, however, there is no longer any feeling of the creative energy embodied in a product: the latter are simply there, in a permanent industrial background which has come to resemble that of nature itself. Now the author’s task is to make an inventory of these objects, to demonstrate, by the fullness of his catalogue, how completely he knows his way around the world of machines and machine products, and it is in this sense that Chandler’s descriptions of furniture, his description of women’s clothing styles, will function: as a naming, a sign of expertise and know-how. And at the limits of this type of language, the brand-names themselves: “I went in past him, into a dim pleasant room with an apricot Chinese rug that looked expensive, deep-sided chairs, a number of white drum lamps, a big Capehart in the corner” (LL, III, 481). “I got a half-bottle of Old Taylor out of the deep drawer of the desk” (HW, XII, 372). “The sweetish smell of his Fatima poisoned the air for me” (HW, XXXV, 462). (Hemingway is of course the chief representative of this style of brand-name-dropping, but it has currency throughout the literature of the thirties.)

By the time we come to that cross-country inventory of Americana which is Nabokov’s Lolita, the attitude to objects has changed significantly. Precisely in order for his descriptions to be representative, Nabokov hesitates to use the actual brand-names of the products: the aesthetic reason, that such language is of a different nature from the language of the narration generally and cannot be crudely introduced into it, is part of a more general realization that the physical product itself has long since been dissolved as a permanence. Like the “substances” of philosophy, of mathematics, of the physical sciences, it has long since lost its essentiality and become a locus of processes, a meeting place for social manipulation and human raw material. Where Nabokov occasionally does use names, they are brand-names invented in imitation of the real, and as such his use is a way of rendering, not the product, but the process of nomination. But in general he describes the jumble of commercial products in the American landscape from the outside, as pure appearance without any reference to functionality, since in the new American culture of the fifties, functionality, any practical use in the satisfaction of need and desire, is no longer of great importance or interest.

The famous pop art Brillo box represents yet another and different kind of attitude towards objects: the attempt to seize them, not in their material, but in their dated historical reality, as a certain moment and style of the past. It is a fetish representing the will to return to a period when there was still a certain distance between objects, when the manufactured landscape still had a certain solidity. The Brillo box is a way of making us stare at a single commercial product, in hopes that our vision of all those around us will be transformed, that our new stare will infuse those also with depth and solidity, with the meaning of remembered objects and products, with the physical foundation and dimensions of the older world of need.

The comic strip drawing does much the same thing for the world of culture, as jammed as the airwaves with bits and pieces of stories, imagined characters, cheaply manufactured fantasies of all kinds, even where newspaper and historical truth have come to be assimilated to the products of the entertainment industry. Now suddenly all the floating figures and shapes are simplified down, stamped with exaggeration, blown up and reduced to the size of children’s daydreams. The transfer to the fixed object which is the painting takes place in imitation of the material consumption by the child of the comic books themselves, which he handles and uses as objects. For the nostalgia for this earlier world operates just as strongly on the forms as on the content of its materials. Humphrey Bogart, for example, obviously stands for the hero who knows how to find his way around the dangerous anarchy of the world of the thirties and forties. He is distinguished from the other stars of his period in that he is able to show fear, and his fear is the organ of perception and exploration of the dark world lying about him. As an image, he is related to Marlowe (indeed, briefly coincides with him in the movie version of The Big Sleep), and a descendant of the Hemingway hero of the earlier part of the same period, in whom the trait of purely technical know-how was even more pronounced.

On the other hand his revival has its formal dimension as well, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. For in our recognition of Humphrey Bogart as a culture hero is also included a regret for the smaller black-and-white ninety-minute movie in which he traditionally appeared, and beyond that, for that period in the history of the medium when work was done in a small, fixed form, in a series of small works rather than in isolated, enormous, and expensive productions. (This evolution in the movie industry parallels the movement in serious literature away from the fixed form of the nineteenth century towards the personally invented, style-conscious individual forms of the twentieth.)

Thus the perception of the products with which the world around us is furnished precedes our perception of things-in-themselves and forms it. We first use objects, only then gradually do we learn to stand away from them and to contemplate them disinterestedly, and it is in this way that the commercial nature of our surroundings influences and shapes the production of our literary images, stamping them with the character of a certain period. In Chandler’s style the period identifies itself in his most characteristic feature, the exaggerated comparison, the function of which is at the same time to isolate the object in question and to indicate its value: “She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island” (BS, XXXII, 134). “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest-dressed street in the world, he looked about as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” (FML, I, 143). “There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those moustaches that gets stuck under your fingernail” (LL, XXXV, 604). “This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall” (LL, XXXVI, 609).

As in the hard-boiled movies, the narrator’s voice works in counterpoint to the things seen, heightening them subjectively through his own reactions to them, through the poetry his comparisons lend them, and letting them fall back again into their sordid, drab reality through the deadpan humor which disavows what it has just maintained. But where the movies already present a divided structure of vision and sound ready to be played off against each other, the literary work must rely on some deeper division in its material itself. Such a tone is possible for it only against the background of a certain recognizable uniformity of objects, among which the outlandish comparison serves as a pause, drawing a circle momentarily around one of them, causing it to stand out as typical of one of the two zones of the novel’s content, as either very expensive or very shabby. It avoids the flat and naturalistically prosaic on the one hand, and the poetic and unreal on the other, in a delicate compromise executed by the tone of the narration. And because it is a spoken account in its very essence, it stands as testimony, like the records of old songs or old comedians, to what everyday life was like in a world similar enough to our own to seem very distant.

IV

Raymond Chandler’s novels have not one form, but two, an objective form and a subjective one, the rigid external structure of the detective story on the one hand, and a more personal distinctive rhythm of events on the other, arranged, as is the case with any novelist of originality, according to some ideal molecular chain in the brain cells, as personal in their encephalographic pattern as a fingerprint, peopled with recurrent phantoms, obsessive character types, actors in some forgotten psychic drama through which the social world continues to be interpreted. Yet the two kinds of form do not conflict with each other; on the contrary the second seems to have been generated out of the first by the latter’s own internal contradictions. Indeed, it results from a kind of formula on Chandler’s part:

For the detective story is not only a purely intellectual mode of knowing events, it is also a puzzle in which the faculties of analysis and reasoning are to be exercised, and Chandler here simply generalizes a technique of outwitting the reader. Instead of the innovation that will only work once (the most famous is of course that of Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where as is well known the murderer turns out to be the narrator himself), he here invents a principle for the construction of plot as such.

It is of course the presence of this kind of plot construction in all of his books, the persistence of this fixed intellectual purpose, that accounts for their similarity as forms. Yet the two aspects of the works hardly seem commensurable, seem to involve different dimensions that miss each other in passing: the intellectual puzzle is a purely temporal one, it abolishes itself when it is successful, and when the reader realizes that he has been misled and that the real solution to the murder is to be found elsewhere. The narrative is on the other hand more spatial in character: even after the temporal reading of the book is finished we have a feeling of its continuity spread out before us in a pattern, and the earlier, misleading twists of the plot (which the pure mind rejects as illusory filling just as soon as it guesses the secret to the puzzle) remain for the imagination of form as an integral part of the road traveled, the experiences gone through. In Chandler’s books we are therefore confronted with the paradox of something slight in density and resonance being at the source of some incomparably larger solid, of a kind of nothingness creating being, of a shadow projecting three-dimensionality out from itself. It is as though an object designed for some purely practical purpose, a machine of some kind, suddenly turned out to be of interest on a different level of perception, on the aesthetic for example; for the rather negative technical device, the quantitative formula for purely intellectual deception given above in Chandler’s own words, is responsible by way of a kind of dialectical accident for the positive qualitative nature of his forms, their lopsided, episodic movements, the characteristic effects and emotions related to them.

The initial deception takes place on the level of the book as a whole, in that it passes itself off as a murder mystery. In fact Chandler’s stories are first and foremost descriptions of searches, in which murder is involved, and which sometimes end with the murder of the person sought for. The immediate result of this formal change is that the detective no longer inhabits the atmosphere of pure thought, of puzzle-solving and the resolution of a set of given elements. On the contrary, he is propelled outwards into the space of his world and obliged to move from one kind of social reality to another incessantly, trying to find clues to his client’s whereabouts.

Once set in motion, the search has unexpectedly violent results. It is as if the world of the beginning of the book, the imaginary Chandler Southern California, lay in a kind of uneasy balance, an equilibrium of large and small systems of corruption, in a tense silence as of people straining to listen. The appearance of the detective breaks the balance, sets the various mechanisms of suspicion ringing, as he crosses the boundary lines snooping and preparing to make trouble in a way that isn’t yet clear. The upshot is a whole series of murders and beatings: it is as though they existed already in a latent state, the acts that had merited them having already been committed, like chemical substances juxtaposed, waiting for a single element to be withdrawn or added in order to complete a reaction which nothing can stop. The appearance of the detective is this element, allowing the predetermining causes to run their course suddenly, to burst into flame on exposure to the open air.

But as has already been made apparent in Chandler’s description of his own plot construction, this trail of bloodshed is a false scent, designed to draw the reader’s attention to guilt in the wrong places. The diversion is not dishonest, inasmuch as the guilt uncovered along the way is also real enough; the latter is simply not that with which the book is directly involved. Hence the episodic nature of the diversionary plot: the characters are drawn in heightened, sharp fashion because we will never see them again. Their entire essence must be revealed in a single brief meeting. Yet these meetings take place on a different plane of reality from that of the main plot of the book. It is not only that the intellectual function of our mind is busy weighing and selecting them (are they related in some way to the search or are they not?) in a set of operations which it does not have to perform on the materials of the main plot (the client and his or her household, the person sought and his or her connections). The very violence and crimes themselves are here apprehended in a different mode: since they are tangential and secondary for us, we learn of them in a manner not so much realistic (novelistic) as legendary, much as we would hear about occasional violence in the newspaper or over the radio. Our interest in them is purely anecdotal, and already constitutes a kind of distance from them. Whether we know it yet or not therefore, these characters of the secondary plot exist for us in a different dimension, like glimpses through a window, noises from the back of a store, unfinished stories, unrelated activities going on in the society around us simultaneously with our own.

The climax of the book must therefore involve a return to its beginning, to the initial plot and characters. Obviously the person searched for must be found. But in a perhaps less obvious way, the guilty party (since a murder, a crime, is always in some way involved in the search) must turn out to be in one way or another a member of the family, the client or a member of his entourage. Chandler’s novels are all variations on this pattern, almost mathematically predictable combinations and permutations of these basic possibilities: the missing person is dead and the client did it, or the missing person is guilty and the body found was that of somebody else, or both the client and a member of her entourage are guilty and the missing person is not really missing at all, and so forth.

In a sense this pattern is in itself little more than a variation on the law of the least likely party, since it seems to make little sense that a criminal would go to a detective in the first place and ask him to solve a murder of which he or she was in reality guilty. And then there is a secondary, sociological shock: the comparison between all the secondary, relatively institutionalized killings (gangland murders, police brutality) and the private-life, domestic crime which is the book’s central event and which turns out to be just as sordid and violent in its own way.

But the principal explanation of this pattern of a return to the beginning is to be found in the ritual unveiling of the murderer itself. A kind of intellectual satisfaction might be derived from a demonstration of the necessity for such-and-such a minor character, met only briefly in passing, to be the murderer, but we have already seen that the emotional effect of the revelation of the murderer depends on a certain familiarity with its innocent mask; and the only characters in Chandler whom we stay with long enough to develop this familiarity, whom we ever get to know in any kind of depth of character analysis, are those of the opening, of what has been called the main plot.

(In ingenious and metaphysical detective stories such as Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes or Doderer’s Ein Mord den Jeder begeht, the logic inherent in this situation is pushed to its conclusion and the murderer turns out to be the detective himself, in that abstract equation of I = I which Hegel saw as the source of all self-conscious identity. In a more Freudian way, Chandler’s imitators such as Ross Macdonald have experimented with situations in which, after a search through time as well as through space, the criminal and the victim or the client and the criminal turn out to be related to each other, in an Oedipal variation on the various generations. Yet in all this the detective story plot merely follows the basic tendency of all literary plots or intrigue in general, which is marked by the resolution of multiplicity back into some primal unity, by a return to some primal starting point, in the marriage of hero and heroine and the recreation of the original family cellular unit, or the unveiling of the hero’s mysterious origins, and so forth.)

On the other hand, it would be wrong to think of Chandler’s stories as conforming in their final effect with the description we have given of the unveiling of the murderer in the classical detective story. For the discovery of the criminal here is only half of a more complicated revelation, and takes place, not only as the climax of a murder mystery, but also as that of a search. The search and the murder serve as alternating centers for our attention in a kind of intricate Gestalt pattern; each serves to mask off the weaker, less convincing aspects of the other, each serves to arrest the blurring of the other out into the magical and the symbolic and to refocus it in a raw and sordid clarity. When our mind is following the motif of the murder, the search ceases to be a mere literary technique, a pretext on which to hang a series of episodes, and is invested with a kind of depressing fatality, like a circular movement narrowing down. When on the contrary we focus on the search as the organizing center of the events described, the murder becomes a purposeless accident, the senseless breaking off of a thread, of a trail.

Indeed, it would not be too much to say that there takes place in Chandler a de-mystification of violent death. The fact of the search tends to arrest the transformation involved in the revelation of the murderer. There is no longer behind the unveiling that infinity of possibilities of evil, that formlessness behind a determinate mask. One character has simply been transformed into another; a name, a label, has wavered and then gone to fix itself to someone else. For the attribute of being a murderer can no longer function as a symbol of pure evil when murder itself has lost its symbolic qualities.

Chandler’s de-mystification involves the removal of purpose from the murder-event, unlike the classical detective story, which always invests murder with purpose by its very formal perspective. The murder there is, as we have seen, a kind of abstract point which is made to bear meaning and significance by the convergence of all lines upon it. In the world of the classical detective story nothing happens which is not related to the central murder: therefore it is purposeful, if for no other reason than to organize all that raw material around itself. (The actual purpose, the motive and cause, is worked up after the fact by the author, and never matters very much.)

But in Chandler the other random violence of the secondary plot has intervened to contaminate the central murder. And by the time we reach its explanation, we have come to feel all violence in the same light, and it strikes us as being just as shoddy and cheap, just as physically abrupt and as morally insignificant.

Murder comes to seem moreover in its very essence accidental and without meaning. It was the optic of the classical detective story, the distortion of its formal perspective, that made the murder take on the appearance of Necessity, and look like the almost disembodied result of a process of purely mental planning and premeditation, like the jotting down on paper of the results of mathematical operations performed in the head. Now, however, the gap between intention and execution is glaringly evident: no matter what planning is involved, the leap to physical action, the committing of the murder itself, is always abrupt and without prior logical justification in the world of reality. Thus the reader’s mind has been used as an element in a very complicated aesthetic deception: he has been made to expect the solution to an intellectual puzzle, his purely intellectual functions are operating emptily, in anticipation of it, and suddenly, in its place, he is given an evocation of death in all its physicality, when there is no longer any time to prepare himself for it properly, when he is obliged to take the strong sensation on its own terms. Was it then simply, as Chandler himself suggests in our epigraph, to substitute an experience of space for that of the temporality of problem solving, that these shill games were constructed?