Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

E R N E S T FO N T A N A Xavier University Chivalry andModernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep In this essay it will be assumed that the case for the literary status of Raymond Chandler’s fiction has been made.1 Most notably, perhaps, Frederick Jameson argues that the private detective — Philip Marlowe — is a significant Active invention, a figure who ties together the “separate and isolated parts” of “a new centerless city, in which various classes have lost touch with each other because each is isolated in his own geographical compartment.”2 Although the conventional, surface plot of Chandler’s fiction is directed to the solution of a murder or disappearance, the literary project of Chandler’s novels is “organizing essentially plotless material into an illusion of movement.”3 The essential contents of Chandler’s books are the “scenic” constituents of the spatially diffused post-industrial city, of which Los Angeles is the American prototype.4 Marlowe has access to the inaccessible; he connects the apparently disconnected, and he records with lucidity and stylish, verbal economy the formless immensity of a centerless metropolis.5 Like the freeway system of contemporary Los Angeles, Marlowe’s field of perception is a trustworthy and efficient connector, a means of perceptual transit through an urban and social space that has metastasized beyond the confines of the traditional novel. The Big Sleep (1939) is Chandler’s first sustained Active negotiation with post-industrial Los Angeles. Curiously, Chandler here appears to turn to the past, evoking images of chivalry and allusions to romance to define his narrator’s relation to this new urban environment and to suggest that Marlowe is not merely an observer, as Jameson argues, but a complex, subjective presence as well. These allusions to romance and chivalry have 180 Western American Literature been recently addressed by both Jerry Speir and Paul Skenazy. Speir reads The Big Sleep “as chronicle of the failure of romance,”6 while Skenazy argues that we have instead “a redefinition of romantic roles. Marlowe speaks in a new modern voice, but he is no less heroic”7than the traditional chivalric hero of courtly romance. In this essay I intend to pursue Speir’s suggestion that The Big Sleep is a failure of romance and to examine the reasons why the completion of the chivalric quest ends, in The Big Sleep, not with a sense, for both narrator and protagonist, of closure, fulfillment, and renewal, but with a sense of “general uneasiness,”8with the hero feel­ ing he is “part of the nastiness” he had thought he was combatting. The first reason I shall adduce for the failure of romance as genre and of chivalry as personal code is Chandler’s perception of the growth of the post-industrial city. This world is delineated in The Big Sleep through literal images of disease and physical climate, which, cumulatively, become metaphoric substitutions, suggesting the opacity, pervasiveness, and intrac­ tability of the detective-knight’s adversaries. A second reason is the absence, in this new urban milieu, of authentic and compelling lords to whom the chivalric knight can swear feudal submission and loyalty. Over the entrance doors of both the narrative and the Sternwood mansion is an Art Deco stained-glass panel, “showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.”9 The knight has pushed his visor back and is fiddling with the ropes, not trying very hard to rescue the young lady. Marlowe feels that if he lived in that house he “would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.” Of course, the lady is Carmen Sternwood whom Marlowe will find nude twice in the novel, first in the murdered Geiger’s living room and then in his own bed. In the traditional romance, the tied nude “lady” has been abducted and tied by a villain. The knight-hero’s rescue of the lady involves slaying her abduc­ tor and evil guardian. In The Big Sleep there is, however, no external villain, no seamonster for Marlowe-Perseus-St. George to...