Ross Macdonald’s Violent California: Imagery Patterns in The Underground Man

Abstract

DePaul University Ross Macdonald’s Violent California: Imagery Patterns in The Underground Man It is easy to underestimate the literary merits of any given detective story: we study Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of ratiocination in our literature courses because we agree that his arabesque psychological stories are masterpieces; we often read Sherlock Holmes in our popular culture courses, for we know that Conan Doyle created the first truly “popular” detective; and Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett have a place in our classroom syllabi, particularly as their works contribute to the development of film study and to concepts of the hero. But we have not heretofore considered the detective story as a “serious” work of literature, one worthy of our study as an artistic process; indeed, there have been relatively few detective novels which even pretend to literary significance. But finally, after nearly a century and a half of mystery fiction, there emerges a writer of the first rank, one who is both a master of the detective story and its conventions and a “serious” literary artist of uncommon distinction. Ross Macdonald, writing what he has himself called “modern Oedipean legend(s),”1 explores the significance of the past as it intrudes itself on the present, and he does so with as much regard for historical implications and literary artistry as the reader is likely to find in a novel by Cooper, by Dreiser, or by A. B. Guthrie. But Ross Macdonald is no Cooper, no Dreiser, no Guthrie: where these writers use historicity to examine the New World’s mythic past, the impact of determinism in America, and the course of change on the Western frontier, respectively, Macdonald’s historical analyses are attempts to explain the violence of his California social milieu. And that violence is described not simply in the narration of the violent incidents common to the mystery story; Macdonald pushes beyond the conventional limitations of his genre, and of utmost import­ ance in his perceptive vision is a metaphoric world — the violent events E L ME R R. PRY ^ ‘Foreword” to Archer at Large (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. x. 198 Western American Literature are complemented by patterns of imagery which help to explain the chaotic literal level of the novel. The symbols and imagery patterns are nowhere so effective as in what is perhaps the best of the Lew Archer novels, The Underground Man. Of course, character and plot are important also. Advancing his works as “serious” novels, Macdonald insists that “the life-blood of the story” is not in who-done-it suspense, but in “the moral life of the characters.”2 And, explaining his efforts to conjoin the detective novel and “mainstream novel,” he argues that “plot” must be seen “as a vehicle of meaning.”3 As we shall see, The Underground Man is conNevins (Bowling Green, 1970), p. 303. cerned with the moral lives of its characters; and the plot is as complex as the society which it describes. The story line itself is highly involved, as a large cast of characters moves in and out of the action surrounding three generations of the affluent Broadhurst family; and the original crime, that which culminates in several other murders and a kidnapping, is fifteen years old when detective Lew Archer answers Jean Broadhurst’s plea to find her young son Ronny. There is little point here in enumerating the dozens of names of the characters and explaining their roles, or in explaining the complex development of Macdonald’s plot: enough instead to note that many of these California citizens will be considered in the essay itself, and that there is indeed an organic relationship between Ross Macdonald’s vision of the society, the plot of his novel, and the symbols and imagery which give the book its shape. The central symbols in the novel are, first, an all-powerful canyon fire which rages out of control throughout the book, consuming what is already a decaying Southern California, and second, the implications in Stanley Broadhurst’s search for his father, the young man’s attempt “to put him(self) back together.” ' The loss of the father, so common in Macdonald’s California, carries with...