Chapter 3

The Barrier at the End of the World

Still, Altman’s modification of the ending of The Long Goodbye, which rescues it as an essentially episodic structure, does not yet solve for us the problem of the failure of The High Window as a narrative form. The Long Goodbye was vitiated by its sentimental content, something that cannot be invoked in an analysis of the earlier novel. Nor can the latter’s conclusion—the great height of the eponymous title, the fall into the void, not waving but “screaming with fear”—be thought to lack the power, either of a solution to the mystery or of the conclusion of the narrative. But closure and the sense of totality are somehow formally distinct from endings and solutions. Inveterate rereaders of Chandler will know that it is no longer for the solution to the mystery that they do so; if indeed the solutions solved anything to begin with. The story of Bogart’s argument with Hawks during the filming of The Big Sleep is well known: very late at night, after much drinking, they disagree over the status of the dead body in the Buick in the ocean off the Lido pier—murder, suicide or some third thing? They finally call Chandler himself up, still awake and drinking at that hour, and he admits he can’t remember either. Sometimes he aggressively foregrounds the more improbable plot mechanisms, daring us to throw the book away in disbelief: “‘And at that point,’ I said, ‘you run into a real basic coincidence, the only one I’m willing to admit in the whole picture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man named Bill Chess in a Riverside beer parlor and for reasons of her own married him and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake’,” etc. (LL, XXVII, 578). At others it is presumably the speed of rotation of the plot that can be counted on to distract us from everything that is unmotivated or gratuitous about certain episodes: that of Amthor and the marijuana cigarettes in Farewell, My Lovely, for example (triumphantly refashioned into a whorehouse with a Lesbian madame in Dick Richards’ 1975 film version). Finally it is for the episodes themselves that you reread; in this, as in a few other features, Chandler participates in the logic of modernism generally, which tends towards an autonomization of ever smaller segments (the separate chapters of Ulysses are only the most dramatic emblem of the process). But as Chandler’s project-units remain sub-generic, this has the unexpected bonus that we can compare successive versions of the same form in their published variants, which have not, as in the “great moderns,” been welded together in some single “book of the world” whose repetitions would be stylistic rather than narrative. So it is that little by little we begin to collect these episode-types (at least in the four first and canonical novels; Chandlerians will have their weakness for this or that feature of the later two, but we are there already beyond the naive or natural operations of the original form): we juxtapose Harry Jones and George Anson Phillips (inept private detectives); or Laird Brunette and Eddie Mars or Alex Morny (likeable mobsters); or Vannier, Marriott or Lavery (quintessential gigolos)—and a new kind of stereoscopic reading emerges in which each scene retains its sharpness in our eye but designates a well-nigh Platonic (yet social-typological) ultimate unit behind it that the reading eye can no longer see as such but only intuit.

So it is that the ideal reader of these detective stories begins to dream of a synoptic Chandler which like the equivalent edition of the four Gospels would run the equivalent episodes side by side for our inspection, projecting some canonical Ur-version of the archetypical Chandler master narrative by way of the ultimate dialectic of Identity and Difference. Unfortunately for this illusion of the ultimate mythical ur-text, the form of the autonomous episode, like the atom itself, is ultimately not really indivisible: for when the would-be compiler of such synoptic columns works his way back to the pulp-magazine short stories that are predictably their first versions (and that in hindsight lend the mature Chandler novel that truly “modern” sense of patches sewn together in which the seams and transitions constitute the truest locus of aesthetic production), he discovers—as with electrons and quarks within the seeming unity of the atom as such—that the “original” episodes have themselves already been contaminated by the autonomization process and thereby dissociated or uncoupled into so many micro-episodes in their own right. The alternate interpretation is plausible enough—that Chandler “lacked imagination” and, reduced to these few episodes and charactertypes, found himself obliged to repeat them over and over again under different guises—but those who feel this way will probably not wish to read any further in the present pages, whose thesis is rather that it was his society that “lacked imagination” and that such undoubted limits are those of the narrativity of Chandler’s socio-historical raw material.

Still, the discovery of this micro-episodic dimension of the text beneath the larger official and ostensible plot mysteries and solutions of the Chandler novel as such suggests two new and complementary lines of inquiry. The first lies in that of a system whose intelligibility could be expected to displace and replace that causal explanation in terms of the interrelationships of intrigue and action that we have already found to be somewhat less than reliable: this would presumably be a synchronic system in which the various episode- or character-types entertained formalizable semiotic relationships and oppositions with each other.

Alongside the project of disengaging that system, and in direct proportion to the success in doing so, there then emerges a second kind of analytic interest, bearing on the peculiar nature of Chandler’s plot construction: for the older logic of cause-and-effect (or of deduction) will here evidently be replaced by some new criterion for the dealing out of a hand of episodes and some new aesthetic whereby the rhythm of their succession or alternation is governed. I’ve suggested that at a higher level of historical or periodizing abstraction, this operation probably rejoins the modernist form-problem par excellence, which is the invention and production of transitions. But Chandler’s version of it is specific and has its own logic.

Meanwhile, both these lines of inquiry converge on the supreme matter of what we have called narrative closure, which, whatever its fate in the modern and postmodern, continues to reign supreme in the mass culture of this period, and is if anything exacerbated by the peculiar nature of the detective story as such. (It could be argued that even the serial—the fundamental exhibit in any case for the openness or indeterminacy of the newer mass culture¹—reconfirms the value of closure over and over again by its intent to thwart and frustrate it.) Yet Chandler liked to argue, as we have already seen, that in matters of style he tricked his audience by giving them something other (and better) than what they wanted, thereby satisfying them in spite of themselves: perhaps in the matter of closure something similar is going on, whereby the satisfaction of the detective-story-puzzle has in reality been assuaged by something else—in the event something doubly spatial, as we shall see later.

I

The first source of closure is, however, the narrative content itself, whose deeper finitude is reflected in something more temporal than its capacity to be wrapped up neatly and tied into a well-made plot: it is a temporal closure more strongly marked in French than in English, and there theorized (by Gide and others) under the distinction between récit and novel, where the untranslatable generic word designates the classic tale-telling of events which are over and done with before the story begins or the narrator lifts his voice, something signaled by the more elaborate system of French tenses and in particular the use of the preterite, whose presence is generally invisible in English, being undistinguishable from our generalized past tense. But this—rather than the distinctions in social content or in gentility or violence—is the mark of the more fundamental generic shift from English to American (hard-boiled) detective story, namely that where the classic tradition (continued in the former) maintained a structural discontinuity and differentiation between open narrative (the detective’s quest) and the closed récit of the crime to be reconstructed, the newer American form, as it began to emerge in the pulps, redoubled the closure of the crime with that of the surface quest itself, which it also staged, after the fact, as a completed adventure.

What we witness here, I think—what is now difficult to perceive from the hindsight of a future in which the originary medium has itself virtually disappeared—is the omnipresence of radio culture as it resonates out into the other genres and media. Both pulp or hard-boiled detective stories and film noir are indeed structurally distinguished by the fundamental fact of the voice-over, which signals in advance the closure of the events to be narrated just as surely as it marks the operative presence of an essentially radio aesthetic which has no equivalent in the earlier novel or silent cinema. Allusions in the classical art-story to oral narrative or traditional yarn-spinning (as in Conrad) are regressive and have virtually nothing in common with this new reproducible oral aesthetic (which found its supreme embodiment in Orson Welles). One may meanwhile pursue its structural specificity by way of physiology and psychology (provided these are appropriately historicized): the visual being presumably always incomplete, the auditory determining a synchronous recognition that can be drawn on for the construction of the new forms of a radio age. The thirties aesthetic, which has stereotypically been grasped as a kind of return to realism, a reaction against the modernist impulse and a renewed politicization in the period of depression, fascism and left-wing movements alike, needs to be reconsidered in the light of this then most modern of the media, whose possibilities fascinated Brecht and Benjamin and not much later generated the lugubrious Adorno-Horkheimer vision of the “culture industry.” The triumph of Hollywood seems to have fused many of these aesthetic developments into an undifferentiated mass, which it might be desirable to disentangle by thinking of the “talkie” as being initially a kind of radio film, for example.

It is at any rate clear that the voice-over of the hard-boiled detective in general, and of Marlowe in particular, offers a specifically radio pleasure which must be paid for by the closure of the case, and which allows the novel’s past tenses to resonate with doom and foreboding, marking the detective’s daily life with the promise of adventure.² This temporal set towards language also seems to play a significant enabling role in what one may call the Flaubertian side of Chandler’s stylistic production, which paradoxically marks one final unexpected development in the aesthetic of the mot juste. For it is precisely as the ultimate somersault of Flaubert’s belief in the existence of one unique combination of words that Chandler’s most outrageous effects are also to be grasped: “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” (FML, I, 143). This conveys Moose Molloy—already over-determined by his gigantic frame and his outlandish clothes—not least because he is a white man in an all-black neighborhood, allowing all of Chandler’s most racist caricatural instincts to begin to come into play. (The least politically correct of all our modern writers, Chandler faithfully gives vent to everything racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise socially resentful and reactionary in the American collective unconscious, enhancing these unlovely feelings—which are, however, almost exclusively mobilized for striking and essentially visual purposes, that is to say, for aesthetic rather than political ones—by a homosexual and malebonding sentimentalism that is aroused by honest cops and gangsters with hearts of gold, but finds its most open expression in the plot of The Long Goodbye.) The practice of the outrageous simile, whose relations to radio might also be investigated, shares with Flaubert’s quite unmetaphoric handicraft of the sentence a commitment to sense-perception as what is ultimately to be rendered and set down in indelible letters: those accustomed to frequent Chandler know how many ephemeral experiences of the Southern California landscape are in his pages eternally retained in passing.³

At the other extreme of this production, then, we have found the problem of closure posed in terms of the system of Chandler’s characters, who manage in some of the novels to project a kind of Lukácsean “effect of totality,” without all of the sociological bases necessarily being touched. But this is something we can only reconstruct in retrospect by testing the completed novels for missing categories. Here are the quintessential American middle classes, for example:

But the Graysons (“he was a C.P.A. and looked it every inch”) are virtually the only middle-class characters in all of Chandler; and they are there to show that in matters of wealth and power (their daughter has been murdered) the police cannot be counted on to protect even these most solid and respectable average citizens. As for the working class, Bill Chess in the same novel can be thought to stand as their “representational representative,” but he is a cripple and an alcoholic and a wife-beater and makes Chandler’s problem even clearer: how to convey the average and the everyday in the course of pursuing the “memorable” and the exceptional, of registering what breaks the routine, challenges the serene reproduction of the social order and counts as crime and adventure. In fact, the “lower” classes in Chandler are either impoverished petty-bourgeois or lumpens, and have their lack of money stamped on them as catastrophe. Yet the rich (with the exception of the Kingsley figure in this novel, a business executive) are in Chandler not altogether normal specimens of a conventional ruling class either…

But at this point I propose to combine the now obligatory sociological survey with a somewhat different inquiry that approaches the relationship between aesthetic value and closure or the Lukácsean “totality-effect” from a somewhat different angle. We have already suggested that what makes this particular inquiry exceptionally verifiable, for Chandler, is the presence, among the first four novels, of a book not normally thought to be one of his best, which, however, turns out, on our synoptic perspective, to contain some of the all-time best and most memorable episodes in Chandler. This is The High Window, whose astonishing parts (Elisha Morningstar’s office, George Anson Phillips’ apartment in Bunker Hill, the Vannier house) oddly do not seem to add up to the imperfect whole. It may therefore be worth trying to determine why it fails to cohere in a formal situation in which in any case the episodic is the law rather than the exception.

Mrs. Murdock’s house, for example, may be a good deal less dramatic than the Sternwood estate, in opening pages that clearly attempt to reproduce the remarkable effects of The Big Sleep’s way into the narrative (something the Grayle house only distantly tries to approximate in Farewell, My Lovely). But Mrs. Murdock’s cantankerous port-drinking only imperfectly approximates General Sternwood’s hothouse, and in any case a sumptuous house in Pasadena (with a fairly prosaic fortune) is no match for the Sternwood oil rigs and military ancestors (nor, perhaps, in Chandler’s unconscious, is an authoritarian female for an authoritative male). Meanwhile, as we have already observed, the Brasher Doubloon would seem to be a regression on the nude photographs of The Big Sleep, replacing the technological image with older forms of minted value and thereby threatening a slippage back into the more romantic formulas of the older Hammett narrative, with its falcons and curses. Yet on the synoptic view the episodes remain equivalents and suggest a conception of the more interesting rich which is akin to sequestration—they are withdrawn inside their expensive dwellings like injured creatures, seeking shelter and protection (a characterization that also holds for Grayle himself with his twin collections, of Fei Tsui jade and the legendary “Velma”). What it is crucial to retain of this micro-structure is the relative gap and distance between the character and the setting, or rather, the way in which the character-type is itself predicated on that gap or tension. Unlike Balzac, for example, the dwelling in Chandler does not immediately express the truth of the character who dwells in it: dwelling is here not a semiotic or expressive category;⁴ or perhaps it might be better to question whether these supremely privileged Chandler characters, despite their immense fortunes, are able to dwell in any traditional strong sense of the verb. They are within their rooms in a rather different way, which will for the other end of the social spectrum have its equivalency in fear and vulnerability (and which is for General Sternwood and Mrs. Murdock merely motivated and rationalized away as impotent old age and guilt, respectively).

But we must now reverse our procedure in the preceding chapter, and instead of taking an inventory of the differences in these various Chandlerian rooms, disengage from them a single archetypal space which can stand for the human dwelling as such. The reader will have already guessed that it is the office as such, which is in Chandler, if not a well-nigh ontological category, then at least one which subsumes a much wider variety of social activity than it is normally understood to do—indeed, the very notion that work is somehow fundamentally related to the space of an office is itself a sociologically revealing class marker. Here, to be sure, Elisa Morningstar’s office and office building are among the quintessential evocations:

It would be a mistake to assume that these empirical details, which document age and neglect on the one hand (the dust) and a specific professionalism (the jeweler’s scales, etc.) on the other, exemplify that “reality-effect” which Barthes attributed to a realism (which, unlike his sometime anti-representational colleagues on Tel Quel, he himself read with relish) that he can be said to have demystified into a realism-effect per se.⁵ If in Balzac the object-world was meant to give a metonymic signal, like a wild animal’s den or an exoskeleton, on the Barthesian view of Flaubert’s descriptions, these last were simply meant to emit the signal “we are the real, we are realism”—by virtue of their very contingency. It was because such details (the ornate clock, the barometer) played no part in the action, and unlike their Balzacian equivalent did not mean or express anything, that they were able to stand in for the sheer massive contingency of reality itself.

But in Chandler—however often aspects of both these descriptive logics sometimes seem to function—something else also seems to be at work, which I can only characterize as the construction of a vacancy, of an empty space. Whatever the objects mean (the superannuated furniture of the Graysons, the undusted junk of Morningstar or Jessie Florian, but also the elegance of the Grayle mansion: “a nice room with large chesterfields and lounging chairs done in pale yellow leather arranged around a fireplace in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt” [FML, XVIII, 214]), they also outline a space of a specific type which can either be empty or contain a presence. The description of Morningstar’s office which has just been quoted at some length, for example, is followed by the appearance of the “elderly party” himself in the inevitable swivel chair. But what is operative in Chandler’s description of this particular office cannot be discovered empirically by an inspection of any of these enumerated details: it is, on the contrary, only ratified by Marlowe’s second visit, which discloses its essential emptiness as it does the demise of its inhabitant, now just another object on the floor.

The second visit in Chandler, indeed, the return at night, under modified conditions, suggests that it is not particularly the criminal who needs this reassurance, but the detective and the novelist who pass their specific realities in review, and by rotating them throughout a variety of situations (as Monet did with his haystacks) cause them to emerge ever more strongly as formal entities. There is, for example, the date with the ill-fated Harry Jones in his dilapidated office:

Even more strikingly, there is the return to the cabin at Fawn Lake, which presents the psychically or psychoanalytically interesting structure of the repetition of a repetition (the first return is surprised by the local sheriff, lying in wait for Marlowe in the dark). But then, stubbornly Marlowe goes back again:

I want to use this particular synoptic equivalence for a structural deduction that may well seem an outrageous leap: it will involve the proposition that for Chandler’s narrative economy the vacant murder cabin functions less as a dwelling place, even a former dwelling place, than as a kind of figurative office in its own right—the “office” of those in flight; for example, the pseudonymous Muriel Chess before the novel opens, and at the end, Kingsley and finally Degarmo himself. The point of this formal deduction lies in problematizing the common sense or “natural” conception of dwelling as such in Chandler; its advantage, for instance, will lie in retroactively transforming our first sub-form—the “dwellings” of the rich (the hothouse of General Sternwood, the jade collection of Grayle, Mrs. Murdock’s port-drinking room)—into spaces of retreat and withdrawal which are somehow more analogous to offices than to houses or even quarters or apartments. There follows thereby a prodigious “metaphysical” or philosophical expansion of the category of the office per se in Chandler, whereby we may now return on his other city spaces in order to test them against this one, which is derived (it will be remembered) from some initial distance between the “person” and his or her space, in other words, from the calling into question structurally of the identity within the act of “dwelling” between character and spatial housing or envelope.

But at that point it becomes clear that a second narratively very significant group of Chandlerian former dwellings at once now explicitly demand subsumption under the enlarged figurative category of the office: these are the sumptuous private houses of the various gigolos, from that of Lindsay Marriott in Farewell, My Lovely, hidden away above the coast highway (“It was a nice little house with a salt-tarnished spiral of staircase going up to the front door…” [FML, VIII, 168ff.]), to that—classically and repetitively “revisited” in the above sense—in which Vannier lives and dies in The High Window (see HW, XXIX, 437ff.) and its immediate, structurally varied replay in the “dwelling” of Chris Lavery in The Lady in the Lake (LL, III, 480ff.; XV–XVI, 531ff.; XX, 552ff.), both of which include what we may call complementary or mirror-image “revisits” analogous to that involving the murder in the office next door of Harry Jones by Canino in The Big Sleep. But clearly the principle that these luxuriously appointed private dwellings are to be considered offices can be persuasively argued from the source of the livelihood of the various males who use them as places to meet the wealthy women on whom they prey: at which point retroactively the Geiger house in the inaugural Big Sleep also comes to range itself under this category (underscoring the peculiar slippage, in Chandler’s unconscious, between male homosexuality and high-class male “prostitution,” whose gigolo practitioners he seems to have felt to be somehow “effeminate” as well).

Yet if we consider that the Geiger house—itself also like Monet’s cathedrals seen under a variety of weathers, from driving rain via afternoon sunlight to moonlit night—is something like a professional office in the way in which it houses Geiger’s other line of “work,” namely nude photographs taken with a view towards blackmail, then this new kind of extension leads on into a further sub-category with a rich new harvest of appropriate examples. Such are indeed virtually any of the institutional spaces provided in Chandler for the satisfaction of the (other) “vices” of the rich: not merely Geiger’s “other” office, the pornographic bookstore, but also and above all the casinos and gambling joints in which his various heiresses run up illicit IOUs and are subsequently blackmailed—from the Cypress Club (in The Big Sleep) through its various avatars in Farewell, My Lovely (the Belvedere Club) and The High Window (Eddie Prue’s Idle Valley Club, which knows a virtually posthumous formal reappearance in The Long Goodbye) to the wartime Lady in the Lake which can only offer the London-style male club as a structural substitute. Even here, however, in this general sub-category, in the gradual enlargement of the private club or casino into a whole closed enclave of the private development with its gates and private police, we witness something like a replay (or to use the new Chandlerian category, a “playback”) of the transformation in reverse of dwelling into office. Now at once even more illicit needs associate themselves with these, in particular the drug sources: from the relatively high class doctors’ offices (Amthor in Farewell, My Lovely, Almore in The Lady in the Lake) to the Bay City dope houses or “private hospitals,” such as Dr. Sonderborg’s in Farewell, My Lovely, a return movement that might well lead us on into the even seedier lobbies of the various Chandlerian hotels (a combination tryst-space and rundown dwelling, the Prescott Hotel in San Bernadino, is extensively explored and deployed in LL, XIII, 523ff.), that now eject us back, at the other end of this rather skewed class spectrum, into the lower ladder of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie in the various offices or dwelling spaces of the down-and-out.

(The shift has literally been acted out for us in the illicit transfer of Geiger’s pornographic loan library from the bookstore on Las Palmas to the unlucky Brody’s rundown apartment on Randall Place [BS, X, 32–3].)

As has been suggested above, The High Window is uniquely interesting for the way in which it yields a double-barreled identification of both these variants, in Elisha Morningstar’s office and George Anson Phillips’ virtually archetypal Bunker Hill murder room, a dwelling which is once again for a classical loser of his stamp both private and public all at once and does double duty for an office in the literal sense (he makes an appointment there with Marlowe).

Leaving aside the peculiar extension of this not-so-genteel misery, filled with broken furniture and dust, to the various offices of Chandlerian police officers, crooked and honest alike, it becomes clear that at the end of this particular structural sequence of forms we suddenly reemerge into familiar territory, which is, however, hereby dramatically and unexpectedly transformed. For the final office we necessarily confront at the conclusion of this lengthy inventory can only be Marlowe’s own, the romantic overtones of which are as indistinguishable from his unique persona in much the same structural fashion as the other social character-types are “identified” with their particular spaces—which is to say also, as we have repeatedly attempted to demonstrate, that they and he are also at a certain structural distance from those urban places as well. (We have, in other words, neither the Balzacian organic identification, nor the Flaubertian-Sartrean radical contingency, but a kind of substitution of an architectural language for that of individual characters: it is not so much that these “people” in Chandler are their spaces, as that in Chandler these spaces are “characters” or actants.)

As for Marlowe himself, as is well known,⁶ we begin with the classical private eye’s office at 615 Cahuenga Blvd., an ostentatiously empty and dust-filled space without a secretary in the inevitable outer office (where only bills arrive in the mail), which is archetypally a place of waiting (for clients, for phone calls, for envelopes or packages you mail back to yourself) in which, in an equally typically Chandlerian displacement, this particular plot function is used as a cover or a structural pretext for urban or ecological perception, a monadic window from which something of the deeper truth of Los Angeles is able to be disclosed:

According to the economy we have described above, it will come as no particular surprise to find that Marlowe’s living quarters (the Bristol Apartments on Bristol Ave., then the Hobart Arms at Franklin and Renmore) become something like extensions of his office in this respect. What it is crucial to observe is that we may deduce a momentous change, not merely in Chandler’s narrative form itself, but in the history and the social relations from which the particular narrative shape of his content springs, when, as has been observed in The Long Goodbye, we find that he has moved from the classical urban apartment building into a private home: “I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district. It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees along the way…” It is the end of an era: and the moment at which Marlowe’s marriage (to money) and relocation to La Jolla become unexpectedly imaginable.

II

The system we have initially traced through here—our first, essentially synchronic one—now suggests two further comments. The first has to do with closure as such, for there can be no question that this particular “map” of the social totality is a complete and closed semiotic system on its own terms: unified by the category of the “office,” its various positions and inversions are able in a satisfactory and satisfying manner to span the breadth of the social system from wealth to poverty and (in the area of crime and vice) from public to private. This is, to be sure, an ideologically motivated vision or scale-model of the social, which strategically omits or represses production as such, along with the law-abiding average peaceful middle classes themselves (although it would be a mistake to imply thereby that any non-ideological, “scientific,” representationally adequate map of the social could be imagined to take its place—following Althusser’s definition of ideology,⁷ all visions of the social in this sense will be equally ideological, although not equivalent in political or even aesthetic value).

But the very closure of this system now presents a problem in its own right. We have so far largely followed the implications of a classical structuralist aesthetic, which tended to conflate structural systematicity and aesthetic value, or at least the aesthetic effect of formal closure and formal satisfaction: although it is nowhere very explicitly argued (Barthes comes closest in various passing remarks), the suggestion is that a work or a narrative is felt to be completed when it has been able to touch all the bases in some underlying semiotic system; that unconscious cognitive acknowledgement of systematicity is then transferred to the surface of the work of art, which can be pronounced in one way or another a full form, a completed thing.⁸ Indeed, all four of Chandler’s first novels (with the few specific historical modifications we have registered for The Lady in the Lake) touch all these bases and are in that sense very complete itineraries throughout the social system of the Chandlerian cognitive map.

But that is precisely the problem, since we started from the (not merely personal) impression that The High Window was somehow, despite the rare quality and intensity of some of its individual episodes, distinctly less satisfying as an overall narrative than the other three. How is this now to be accounted for, given the operation in this particular novel of the same social and semiotic system we have found at work in the other novels and to which we have been tempted to attribute their value and aesthetic effect?

The obvious first step lies in a critique of the limits of what we have done so far, but it proposes a twofold critique, both empirical and methodological. We may begin by seeing what was omitted from the previous system, but we should not neglect the possibility that it is the very way in which the semiotic concept of a system is framed that may be at work here. In the first case, it is conceivable that another system might be constructed and projected which would not be altogether coterminous with the first, and which might allow the difference between The High Window and the other novels to become visible. In the second case, the dissatisfaction with our analytic results would tend to move us towards a more general critique of semiotics as such, as a system which is capable of including or processing certain kinds of materials of a uniform type, whether these be semes or realities. Such a critique of semiotics would not then automatically lead the critic to posit an alternative type of system, but rather, more dialectically, to designate conceptualities or reflexivities, negativities, absences, which do not register on the essentially positivistic apparatus of the semiotic recording device.

I think, for example, of some of the truly wondrous effects in The Lady in the Lake which can scarcely be conveyed by the socio-spatial notations we have devised so far, because they derive from the shock of a radical shift in worlds altogether: not from their unexpected relationship so much as from a sudden perception of their radical incompatibility. This is the moment, for instance, in which Marlowe makes his way down from Fawn Lake, where he has discovered a dead body, explored the tourist village and the cabins, had lengthy encounters with the local sheriff, and finally interrogated the rather seedy bellhops in the hotel in San Bernadino where the fleeing suspect is likely to have spent the night. The next day, in Bay City (Santa Monica), he visits the expensive home of one of those playboys we have already mentioned, which stands across the street from the equally expensive home (or “office”) of a shady society doctor. But the shift is so extraordinary as to make us imagine we have opened the pages of a different novel: something like a generic-ontological discontinuity, a well-nigh phenomenological substitution of worlds, which are for that reason not merely to be described in simple social terms. Lavery, for instance, has visited the lake; the Kingsleys, whose cabin Marlowe went to see, clearly inhabit both worlds, which can scarcely be seen as city and country in the older agricultural sense, but at best in terms of an opposition between tourist industry and workplace. Still, what used to be called nature must somehow be in play here, if only because of the deployment of mountain roads and the extraordinary visuals of the drowned body, which first “waves” hesitatingly beneath the water and then boils up to the surface along with accompanying objects (“an ancient rotted plank popped suddenly through the surface, struck out a full foot of its jagged end, and fell back with a flat slap and floated off” [LL, VI, 499]). Even the ending—the soldiers on guard on the bridge across the Puma Lake dam—bears witness to an unusual semic combination of history, nature, and human production rare even in Chandler.

In this respect it is also worth recalling other combinations of motifs in these novels which one might have been tempted to think of as purely aesthetic or formal, but which in this context now begin to come before us as the insistence, through a purely social-typological fabric, of other orders of being or reality. These are the color motifs, by which people and their settings (Vivian Regan’s “white” apartment, the “gray” insistently associated with Eddie Mars) are as it were reunified into metaphorical actants in which the relationship between characters and space or furniture is relatively more organic and quite different from the tensions and syncopated inconsistencies described above. And these combinations give us the secret of the meteorological rhythms noted in the preceding chapter, for example, in The Big Sleep itself, where a host of precise and vivid indications signals the change of weather from scene to scene, thereby reuniting the interior chapters, the indoor experiences as it were, to the atmospheric unity of the Los Angeles basin as a whole. Here too then, a different kind of “totalization” can be found at work, which has nothing to do with the overall plot itself or with the social-character system, but which somehow sketches in the presence of some vaster absent natural unity beyond this ephemeral set of episodes in punctual human time.

In any case, Los Angeles has so often been thought of as a different kind of city—sunbelt megalopolis of the future, portending fundamental changes in the classical urban structure and incorporating modern transportation media in new structural ways—that it is worth allowing for the possibility that (quite unlike Hammett’s San Francisco, for example) this particular deployment of the “urban” includes nature in a dialectically different way which may escape the older kinds of semic oppositions.

Everything that has been said so far, however, suggests that we have an interest in trying to think of these formal peculiarities in Chandler according to some scheme which flexes dualisms while remaining deeply suspicious of them, and which programmatically avoids the attribution of any a priori content to terms hitherto implicitly predefined by such traditional oppositions as subject and object or culture and nature.

At least one contemporary aesthetic—that of Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art”⁹—would seem capable of offering a way of theorizing this dual system in Chandler; and if the conjunction between German philosophy and the hard-boiled American detective story seems incongruous, the “nationalistic” flavor of Heidegger’s essay should be recalled, which assimilates the inaugural “poetic” act in question to the comparable philosophical act (the deconcealment of Being) and also to the act of political revolution (the inauguration of a new society, the production or invention of radically new social relations). Los Angeles has, however, so often been praised or damned as a mutation in urban relations, and Chandler so often identified as the novelist par excellence of this new megacity, that the latter’s work necessarily raises issues about the collective or protopolitical dimensions of art which are really not as far from Heidegger’s concerns as the latter’s rather traditional examples (the Greek temple, the Mörike lyric, the Van Gogh painting) might lead us to think (the ultimate identification of the figure of Hölderlin by the philosopher unites collective identities, politics, landscape and the social in a more suggestive and modern way).

At any rate the two systems we have begun to identify in Chandler’s narratives find a certain articulation in Heidegger’s description of the work of art, which emerges, according to him, from (or within) a “rift” between what he calls World and Earth—terms we can rewrite for our own purposes as the dimensions of History and the social project on the one hand, and Nature or matter on the other (ranging from geographical or ecological constraints all the way to the individual body). The force of Heidegger’s account lies in the way in which a constitutive gap between these two dimensions is maintained and even systematically enlarged: the implication is that we all live in both dimensions at once, in some irreconcilable simultaneity, at all moments both in History and in Matter, at one and the same time historical beings and “natural” ones, living simultaneously in the meaningendowment of the historical project and in the meaninglessness of organic life. But this in turn implies not only that no philosophical or aesthetic synthesis between these dimensions is attainable, but also that “idealism” or “metaphysics” can be defined by this impossible project, whose logical alternatives are marked out by the obliteration of history and its assimilation to Nature, or by the transformation of all forms of natural resistance into human, historical terms. For the Heideggerian position, then, such conceptual mystifications or mirages have their aesthetic and critical equivalents as well: in the various “symbolic” concepts of the work of art, similar repressive or masking strategies are at work, in which naturalization or humanization result in the production of unified or organic symbols of various kinds. One would then be tempted to characterize Heidegger’s aesthetic as “allegorical,” in its repudiation of the mirage of symbolic unification and its insistence on the constitutive rift, gap, distance or discontinuity within the work itself. Heidegger’s identification of the subject/object opposition as the categorical fall into “Western metaphysics” and the loss of Being can be grasped as the attempt to translate the World/Earth gap into some more manageable dualism.

From this perspective, not only can the work of art not be called upon to heal this fundamental “rift” in our being between World and Earth, or History and Nature; its vocation lies quite the contrary in the holding open of just that scandalous rift, in the affirmation, or better still, the active staging, of the gap between these two realms, a gap which alone—in the Heideggerian mode of speech—allows each of them to be what it is: for the first time allows Earth or matter to be felt as profoundly material, and History or World to be sensed in all its historicity. The function of the work of art is then to open a space in which we are ourselves called upon to live within this tension and to affirm its reality.

Yet Heidegger’s illustrations—visual, architectural or lyric—do not give us a very clear idea of how the novel or narrative generally could be modeled in terms of this description, or what the latter might produce in the way of practical criticism of individual texts (even if it were able to generate some normative “aesthetic” of the novel as a form). Chandler’s novels seem to me extremely suggestive for precisely this task, since their reading entails a perpetual shifting back and forth between two systems and two “isotopies” (or levels of attention) which are given in advance as irreconcilable, and which can therefore presumably only alternate. But this alternation cannot be simply conceived as that between two social worlds, such as the world of Fawn Lake as it were, versus the world of Altair St. in Bay City. But this is not yet a satisfactory way of reformulating the Heideggerian “gap,” since in his initial version both sides of the tension seemed to be given us in the terms of the one, the Earth, while in our translation, it is the opposite term World which has extended across the chasm and drawn its other back into uniformity.

Heidegger’s deployment of his opposition at the moment in which he touches on the art object as such can point a way out of this dilemma: it is the materiality of the object, he tells us, the sonority of the language, the smoothness of the marble, or the slick density of the oil paint, which marks the part of Earth in it; while it is the semiotic features of the work, the meanings and meaningfulness—what is paraphrasable in the verse, the functions of the building, the object imitated by the painting—which are the share in it of World as such. What seems crucial here and specifically Heideggerian is that the opposition between Earth and World be understood as irreducible in the last instance, no matter how greatly each becomes implicated in the other, no matter how crushing the preponderance of one term in their struggle. Thus, the work of art itself, although exhibited in that worldly place which is the museum, and drawn into a web of social and worldly relationships—those of sale and investment, interpretation and evaluation, pedagogy, tradition, sacred reference—must always somehow scandalously exceed all those worldly relationships in the ultimate and irreducible materiality of its earthly element that cannot become social, the color that cannot be made altogether human. In the same way, clearly, its emergence as a kind of aerolith in sheer space—a meteor from the void, taking a place, being measurable, weighing, being accessible to the physical senses—can never quite entitle it to full inert status as a thing among other things. Allegorically, indeed, this primal opposition in Heidegger’s aesthetic can be read as a refusal of fundamental philosophical dualisms while acknowledging the inevitability of their existence and persistence: the meanings of World suggesting any number of idealisms in which reality is thought to have been successfully assimilated to Mind once and for all, while the resistance of Earth marks the resurgence of the various materialisms that try to stage their sense of the fragility of meanings in physical reality by way of meaningful words. The ontology that wishes to escape ideological imprisonment in either idealism or materialism can then only do so by foretelling the inevitable temptations of both and using them against each other in a permanent tension that cannot be resolved.

We will suggest, then, that World, from the Heideggerian perspective, be understood in another terminology as History itself, that is to say, as the ensemble of acts and efforts whereby human beings have attempted, since the dawn of a human age, to bring meanings out of the limits and constraints of their surroundings. Earth, meanwhile, is everything meaningless in those surroundings and what betrays the resistance and inertia of sheer Matter as such and extends as far as what human beings have named as death, contingency, accident, bad luck or finitude. What is distinctive about Heidegger’s proposal is then the insistence, not merely that these two “dimensions” of reality are radically incommensurable with each other, and somehow unrelatable in terms of either, but also that philosophy, and following it, aesthetics, and perhaps even politics as well, must now find its specific vocation, not in the attempt to paper over the difference or to mystify it and theorize it away, so much as to exacerbate and hold it open as an ultimate situation of unresolvable tension (I avoid the word “contradiction,” since it is so often wrongly felt to promise its own resolution in idealist fashion).

This is the perspective in which the work of art emerges, not to heal this rift or even to assuage what is seen as an incurable wound in our very being, this gap between History and Matter, or World and Earth. Rather, the great or authentic works (for Heidegger’s aesthetic, like aesthetic systems as such, necessarily includes a normative moment) are those whose vocation consists in holding the two incommensurable dimensions apart and in allowing us thereby to glimpse them simultaneously in all their scandalous irreconcilability: in other words to grasp Earth or matter in all its irreducible materiality, even and particularly where we have been thinking about it in terms of meaning and human and social events; and to grasp World or history in its most fundamental historicities even where we have been assuming it to be inert nature or nonsocial landscape. Although its aesthetic relevance would have been utterly alien and repugnant to him, Adorno captured the spirit of this alternation-in-tension aptly in another context, when he recommended that we constantly defamiliarize our philosophies of human history by rethinking them in terms of natural history, and demystify our positivistic impressions of natural history by thinking that through again in historicist and social ways. But in Heidegger, at least in these privileged instances among which the work of art is numbered, the alternation becomes a blinding simultaneity, both incompatible dimensions now momentarily coexisting.

The rift in Chandler, however, if we are able to posit one, can surely not take on so benign an appearance as the opening of a human and a social drama out onto an essentially natural landscape, particularly since that landscape has already been itself fully humanized by the process of urban construction, and also since the social system we have discovered at work in Chandler has already tended to endow itself with spatial expression, so that the character-types are already at least styles of architecture and gardening, and associated with specific neighborhoods or even ecologies (as Reyner Banham called them). Nothing is indeed quite so depressingly human or social as the tourist industry itself, so that the distinctive phenomenological “world” we have posited for Fawn Lake cannot have much to do with its survival as the sheerly natural and inhuman, as over against the world of human streets and occupations and passions down below. Yet Fawn Lake is in another sense something like the end of a trajectory, a point beyond which neither writer nor character can seem to go, and which marks the end of the road by being somehow beyond it. We may indeed here want to recall the equally memorable ending of Farewell, My Lovely, which, also couched in the language of distance or space, seems to attempt to transcend it by canceling it out: “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone” (FML, XL, 315). But it is not because Fawn Lake is associated with death after the fashion of this last sentence that we reach the end of the road as such, but rather the other way around: it is because of the spatial peculiarity and involution that the theme of death can win back such power of evocation.

It will be instructive here to pass from a novel which is on the formal level a relative failure (The High Window), from which Nature, this “end of the road,” is missing, to what is surely Chandler’s best book.

Farewell, My Lovely is Chandler’s most ambitious novel, as well as his most romantic; and it thereby offers as promising an occasion as any other for an examination of what, in the enumeration of the separate and specific episodes, seems to exceed that socio-typological system we synoptically abstracted from the superposition of the four novels upon each other. It has the space of the rich (the Grayles, to be sure less fully developed than in The Big Sleep or The High Window); the space of poverty and marginalized people and things (Jesse Florian’s house); it includes one of the memorable playboy villas, that of Marriott somewhere in between Geiger’s house and the various gigolo establishments; along with the usual gambling casinos; several distinctive dens of vice (Amthor’s oddly modernistic dwelling and Dr. Sonderborg’s “hospital”); and also several different police offices, with some visits to Marlowe’s own. But Chandler tried to move, not always successfully, into new territory here; the unresolved episode of Anne Riordan introduces the possibility of a partnership-romance to which Chandler will not return until Marlowe’s marriage. Meanwhile, Marlowe is in this one knocked out several times, by a blow to the head and by drugs—something Dick Powell exploited memorably in his film version (Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, 1944), but which is less consistent with the premium placed on disabused lucidity by the voice-over format. Indeed, it seems to me that we may well here find ourselves in the presence of a first clue: in the rare attempt to draw the non-conscious into a narrative—the other of conscious observation and of as it were a signed “point of view”—Chandler was generally careful to keep at a certain generic distance from the adventure format (where, as in Dick Francis, the hero is regularly beaten up, tortured, pursued, etc.).

There is also a way in which such moments—which imitate death itself in the way in which the conscious or named personality touches on its own end or extinction—do something to the space at which they occur. Sonderborg’s “hospital” is to be sure not so metaphorically outside the world, but Marlowe’s first bout of unconsciousness is even more interesting. It takes place literally at the end of a road, at the dead end of an unbuilt street beyond which Marlowe and Marriott are supposed to rendezvous with the thieves who have offered to sell back Mrs. Grayle’s Fei Tsui jade. The place, called Purissima Canyon, is marked “by a white fence of four-by-fours” (FML, IX, 176) at the end of the paved street; and this white wooden barrier (like the memorable wood fence in Antonioni’s Blowup), which is neither symbol nor contingent reality-effect, neither expressive semiotic nor social sign, is surely one of the most fascinating and enigmatic objects in all of Chandler, as though it somehow marked the end of the world itself.

But if this is what we are looking for, any reader of Farewell, My Lovely knows that its ultimate strong form is to be found elsewhere in that novel—in the dramatic closing sequence on the gambling boats moored out beyond the three-mile jurisdictional limit, riding on the open sea in front of Bay City. These boats—immense floating casinos—are indeed virtually as far from Los Angeles as one ever gets in Chandler (save in the last two novels, where we touchdown in Kansas [The Little Sister] and Mexico [The Long Goodbye] respectively):

To be sure, social relations onboard are not much different from those we have left behind (Brunette here standing in for the stock Chandler type of the likeable gangster with a heart of gold), but Marlowe’s adventuresome arrival has all the mythic qualities of the perilous journey, the passage to another realm or world, while the sea itself, here in the essentially urban Chandler, glitters with all that mineral fascination, that radically non-human, cold, even unnatural mystery that the ocean often has in writers who do not specialize in sea-stories, or in cultures which are non-maritime. This is to say that—particularly as we do not fantasize Los Angeles as a port city (unlike Hammett’s San Francisco as it memorably greets the arrival of the La Paloma)—the liquid element is here not within the narrative world, not a part of its semiotic system, but rather what lies beyond it and cancels it as such. We need a stronger negative for this unimaginable exterior face of the monad (that we can ourselves only witness from within, as a complete world, for us precisely without limits), particularly since the inner system is itself made up of a host of differentiated negations (contraries and contradictories alike), about which what one wants to say is that they too—negatives as well as positives alike, all swept up together in a jumble of semic existents—are what this chill outer realm refuses and repudiates. Nor is it really worthwhile pronouncing the very word Otherness, which so strongly reaffirms its secret internal relations with the thing itself. The sea is here cleansed even of otherness; and it would be tempting to associate it with death itself, that non-place and non-space where Velma goes, and where the big sleep of the earlier novel is slept. But even this strikes me as a sentimentalism, and the attribution of an inner-worldly content to a non-space whose very function it is—anti-semiotic yet poetic all at the same time—very precisely to revive even the word death and to lend it a specific and hauntingly Chandlerian tone.

In other words, death itself in Chandler is something like a spatial concept, a spatial construction; as is nature, when at its farthest verge—staring down into the uncommon depths of Fawn Lake—it touches on the outer edge of Being itself. We find here therefore the operation of a second system or dimension in coordination yet in tension all at once with the first socio-semiotic one: this last organized people and their dwellings into a cognitive map of Los Angeles that Marlowe could be seen to canvass, pushing the doorbells of so many social types, from the great mansions to the junk-filled rooms on Bunker Hill or West 54th Place. But this dimension—in Heideggerian language the level of “World” in the Chandlerian narrative—has no grounding or resonance unless it circulates slowly against the rotation of that other deeper anti-system which is that of Earth itself in Chandler, and which can include space and “nature” only at the price of transcending it and enveloping it in its own global negation, coupling it with the non-space of the outer limit, the white wooden barrier at the end of the world.

In retrospect, this ultimate dimension can be detected retroactively in The Big Sleep as well, and not only in the oil derricks that seem to mark the seam between a prehistoric nature and the fitful traces of heroic political history in this social world which, after the deeds of Rusty Regan’s IRA or the General’s Mexican War ancestor, seems in a state or condition of the most feeble survival, warming itself in its own decadence with so many forms of vice (it will, however, be the last time in Chandler’s work that this particular elegiac note is sounded). But one fails to come to terms with the peculiar form of this narrative, that can at first seem broken-backed and clumsily divided in half, when the search for Eddie Mars’ wife is suddenly substituted for the completion of the Geiger matter, unless we see that the garage in which the fugitive is held is itself yet another such place at the very edge of Being.

Indeed, another kind of inquiry might want to make some connections between this spatial involution and the intermittent visions of Evil in Chandler (for not the least original feature of his modification of the detective story is that his crimes do without villains; or if you prefer that the villains are social—police corruption—rather than antisocial in the conventional meaning of this word). But here, in the remote garage, we find the more sinister Canino, who poisoned Harry Jones and prepares to torture Marlowe to death; his function is, however, not finally to supply us with a villain and with evil, but rather, like the space itself, to stand as the absolute other and the negation of that true but human and inner worldly murder which is the shooting of Regan (and indeed the source of the other violent crimes throughout the novel). Meanwhile, as for nature itself, as though the remote location of the hideaway were not enough, and in the spirit of the meteorology of the other chapters, Chandler drowns this one in pouring rain, deep inland restoring the watery element that is the sign of the non-human axis of matter in these novels.

I claim, indeed, that it is this opening onto the not-World, onto its edge and its end, in the void, in non-human space, in death, that is the ultimate secret of Chandelarian narrative. For the final element in his characteristic form is that the underlying crime is always old, lying half-forgotten in the pasts of the characters before the book begins. This is the principal reason why the reader’s attention is diverted from it: he assumes it to be part of the dimension of the present, of the events going on before him in the immediacy of his narrated universe. Instead, it is buried in that world’s past, in time, among the dead evoked in the memorable closing page of The Big Sleep.

And suddenly the purely intellectual effect of Chandler’s construction formula is metamorphized into a result of unmistakable aesthetic intensity. From the point of view of abstract curiosity we might expect the reader to have a reaction not altogether unmixed: satisfaction at the solution of the puzzle, irritation at having been misled through so much extraneous material which had no real bearing on it. On the aesthetic level the irritation remains, but transfigured.

For now, at the end, all the events of the book are seen in a new and depressing light: all that energy and activity wasted to find somebody who had in reality been dead for so long, for whom the time of the present was little more than a process of slow physical dissolution. And suddenly, at the thought of that dissolution, and of the mindless lack of identity of the missing person so long called by name, the very appearance of life itself, of time in the present, of the bustling activity of the outside world, is stripped away and we feel in its place the presence of graves beneath the bright sunlight; the present fades to little more than a dusty, once-lived moment which will quickly take its place in the back years of an old newspaper file. And our formal distraction at last serves its fundamental purpose: by diverting us with the ritual generic aim of the detection of the criminal and of his transformation into the Other, it is able to bring us up short, without warning, against the reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of its own moldering resting place.