![]() But in the earlier works, modernism was a reaction against narration, against plot: here the empty, decorative event of the murder serves as a way of organizing essentially plotless material into an illusion of movement, into the formally satisfying arabesques of a puzzle unfolding. These writers and their artistic contemporaries represent a kind of second wave of the modernist and formalistic impulse which produced the great modernism of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The detective story, as a form without ideological content, without any overt political or social or philosophical point, permits such pure stylistic experimentation.īut it offers other advantages as well, and it is no accident that the chief practitioners of art-for-art’s sake in the late modern novel, Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet, almost always organize their works around a murder: think of Le Voyeur and La Maison de Rendezvous think of Lolita and Pale Fire. In this, the lived situation of the writer of a borrowed language is already emblematic of the situation of the modern writer in general, in that words have become objects for him. ![]() The naive and unreflective attitude towards literary expression is henceforth proscribed, and he feels in his language a kind of material density and resistance: even those clichés and commonplaces which for the native speaker are not really words at all, but instant communication, take on outlandish resonance in his mouth, are used between quotation marks, as you would delicately expose some interesting specimen: his sentences are collages of heterogeneous materials, of odd linguistic scraps, figures of speech, colloquialisms, place names and local sayings, all laboriously pasted together in an illusion of continuous discourse. Language can never again be unselfconscious for him words can never again be unproblematical. In that respect his situation was not unlike that of Nabokov: the writer of an adopted language is already a kind of stylist by force of circumstance. And, though a born American, he spent his school years, from the age of eight, in England, and had an English public school education.įor Chandler thought of himself primarily as a stylist, and it was his distance from the American language that gave him the chance to use it as he did. As an executive of the oil industry, he lived in Los Angeles for some fifteen years before the depression put him out of business, enough time to sense what was unique about the city’s atmosphere, and in a position to see what power was and what forms it took. Two aspects of his earlier experience seem to account for the personal tone of his books. The short stories he had written over that period are for the most part sketches for the novels, episodes that he will later take over verbatim as chapters in the longer form: and he developed his technique by imitating and reworking models produced by other detective story writers: a deliberate, self-conscious apprenticeship at a time of life when most writers have already found themselves. He published his first and best novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939, when he was fifty years old, and had studied the form for almost a decade. That the detective story represented something more to Raymond Chandler than a mere commercial product, furnished for popular entertainment purposes, can be judged from the fact that he came to it late in life, with a long and successful business career behind him. My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing - just held up the action. ![]() The post below is excerpted from the first.Ī long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like “He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.” They took it out when they published the story. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of the Totality presents a "stereoscopic" perspective on the great American detective novelist in three essays synthesized from Jameson's writings on Chandler over the years. Fredric Jameson has been writing about Raymond Chandler since 1970.
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