Philip Marlowe's Labor of Words

Abstract

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 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 selfdetermination 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