Notes
Chapter 1: Shill Game
1Raymond Chandler, Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen, May 7, 1948, in Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. D. Gardiner and K. S. Walker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 219.
2These no longer fashionable references are to be explained by the fact that this text—let’s call it stereoscopic rather than synoptic—is the synthesis of several perspectives on Chandler developed over the decades. Earlier versions appeared in: The Southern Review (“On Raymond Chandler”, Vol. 6, 1970), Littérature (“L’éclatement du récit et la clôture californienne,” Vol. 49, #1, 1983), and Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjek (“The Synoptic Chandler,” Verso, 1993). A somewhat different version of this book has appeared in French, translated by Nicolas Vieillescazes (Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014).
3Page references in the text to Chandler’s first four novels, collected in The Raymond Chandler Omnibus (New York: Modern Library, 1975), are abbreviated as follows: BS—The Big Sleep (1939); FML—Farewell, My Lovely (1942); HW—The High Window (1942); LL—The Lady in the Lake (1943); to which, for convenience, chapter numbers for the quotes are also added.
4Letter to Alex Barris, March 18, 1949, in Raymond Chandler Speaking, p. 80.
5Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen, May 7, 1948, ibid., 219.
6“Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” (1949), in Raymond Chandler Speaking, p. 69.
Chapter 2: Mapping Space
1See A. J. Greimas, On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), and in particular my introduction, which offers a kind of user’s manual for the semiotic square.
2Photographs are also central in The Little Sister and, more surprisingly (see below), The High Window, where the terms of the description are richly suggestive from a Freudian standpoint: “‘Why that’s Mr. Bright,’ she said. ‘It’s not a very good picture, is it? And that’s Mrs. Murdock—Mrs. Bright she was then—right behind him. Mr. Bright looks mad.’ … ‘Look,’ I said… ‘that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window. He’s falling. Look at the position of his hands. He’s screaming with fear’” (HW, XXXV).
3Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 247–8. See also Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (New York: Schocken, 1976), particularly Chapter 5.
4Roman Jakobson, “Concluding Statement”, in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358.
5Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), p.4.
Chapter 3: The Barrier at the End of the World
1See Tania Modleski’s brilliant chapter on the soaps as an emergent form of decentered narrative, in Loving with a Vengeance (Handen, CT: Archon, 1982), pp. 90ff.
2Radio is thus impeccably Sartrean, by which I refer to the classic discussion of narrative in Nausea, trans. L. Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 38–40. “Nothing happens while you live … But everything changes when you tell about life,” etc. Jean-Paul Sartre, Oeuvres romanesques (Paris: Pleiade, 1981), pp. 48–50.
3I like this one, for example, which might still “render” Southern California today: “On the highway the lights of the streaming cars made an almost solid beam in both directions. The big corn poppers were rolling north growling as they went and festooned all over with green and yellow overhang lights” (FML, IX, 176).
4“Dwelling” (Wohnen) designates an active relationship to the earth and to being, one of a primordial but also Utopian type. See Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen Denken”) in Vorträge und Aufsättze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1985), pp. 139–56.
5Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” Communications 11 (March 1968), pp. 84–9.
6An indispensable aid to these sites is available in the form of “The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map,” published by Aaron Blake Publishers (1800 S. Robertson Bldvd., Suite 130, Los Angeles, California 90035) (1985).
7The reference is to the addendum to Althusser’s essay “Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971).
8But see, for a more orthodox application of the structuralist aesthetic, my “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” in S. Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, 1992).
9In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 139–212.