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Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.4 (2002) 368-391



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Philip Marlowe's Labor of Words

John Hilgart


In a short comparison of Raymond Chandler's detective novels to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Scott Christianson notes that both feature the "isolated modern hero sitting before a spectacle of modern chaos and trying to make sense of it all" (142). Both, he says, reflect the "modernist attempt to arrive at personal autonomy, a unity of self-presence" (144). His comparison reminds us of how like detective fiction many modernist texts really are; absent centers, fragmentary evidence, and conflicted, margin-walking, historian-narrators populate the work of numerous other writers, including among the Americans, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cather, and Ellison. Trying to make sense of early twentieth-century modernity itself, with its urban geographies, confused relationship to history, ambiguous social hierarchy, commodified culture, and unexpected connections between high and low, detective Philip Marlowe is easily aligned with literary modernism's narrators, and as Christianson suggests, Marlowe is regularly concerned with the difficulties of self-determination presented by modernity.

The formal features of modernist narrative implied by these conventions are extended by the more local and distinctive features of Chandler's aesthetic. Fredric Jameson points out that it is not for the plot that we reread Chandler, but for the remarkable, self-contained episodes, through which "Chandler participates in the logic of modernism generally, which tends towards an autonomization of ever smaller segments" ("Synoptic," 33). The fragmentary appearance and experience of modern society takes its mimetic form in Chandler's discrete and often short chapters, each of which is technically a piece of a puzzle, though most of the time the connection between part and whole is quite beyond the understanding of both Marlowe and the reader. This alignment of content and form, narrator and reader, extends in the opposite direction as well, toward that whole, in Marlowe's own, integrative structural aesthetics. Marlowe takes pleasure not merely in solving the mysteries—in assembling those disparate episodes—but in the formal elegance of the finished products; he compares his completed maps of events and social connections to the beauty of a completed chess game played by a master. There is, then, an evident formal tension in the novels, between the nearly autonomous [End Page 368] episodes and their eventual role in a comprehensive pattern, and this duality of independent and interdependent significance is equally apparent in a yet smaller "unit"—the virtuoso passages that define Philip Marlowe's voice itself.

At once the most local of acts and the force that holds the narratives tenuously together, Marlowe's voice brings us back as often as the well-crafted episodes. Such passages take Jameson's "autonomization of ever smaller segments" to a more minute level in brief stunning moments that stand out from the surrounding prose and raise the inevitable questions of why a man with this kind of talent is a private detective. Marlowe's voice is justly famous for its metaphors ("On her smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young" [LS II: 205]), but the wisecrack is only one register of Marlowe's compositional habits. 1 Most provocative are his imagistic descriptions, which are not at all hard-boiled:

All the noise in the building, except the vacuum cleaner, seemed to have flowed out into the street and lost itself among the turning wheels of innumerable cars. (LS II: 270-71)

The poinsettia shoots tap-tapped dully against the front wall. The clothes line creaked vaguely at the side of the house. The ice cream peddler went by ringing his bell. The big new handsome radio in the corner whispered of dancing and love with a deep soft throbbing note like the catch in a torch singer's voice. (FML I: 787)

Such passages resemble nothing so much as the most famous ones in The Great Gatsby—Nick Carraway's description of women in white ballooning about the Buchanan living room (actually the site of a fraught marriage) and his enticing voyeuristic...

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