Hard-boiled Rhetoric: The "Fearless Speech" of Philip Marlowe

Abstract

Existing scholarship on the detective novel has established the genre's tendency and capacity to represent Enlightenment privileging of the rational mind, and the hard-boiled version has garnered attention for the ways in which it challenges and interrogates such assumptions. The hard-boiled detective novelist creates a dark and unpredictable world in order to dramatize the traps and false leads inherent to the so-called scientific method; within this world, the detective comes to recognize that the demands of his job endanger not only his life, but his moral code—the abstract "truths" by which he lives. Consequently, truth itself becomes the mystery. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's Fearless Speech , which traces the concept of parrhesia (frank truth-telling) through classical texts, this article extends the notion of fearless speech to modern times in order to illuminate the rhetorical power of Raymond Chandler's detective novels. In particular, the concept of parrhesia reveals Chandler's particular response to the 20 th century problem of truth and illuminates the significance of Philip Marlowe as a modern day parrhesiastes . Interpreting Marlowe's rhetoric through Foucault's lens not only deepens our appreciation for Chandler's art, but also reveals early 20 th century attitudes toward free speech and skepticism regarding the capacity of anyone to speak—or recognize—the truth.