Raymond Chandler by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The Barrier at the End of the World

Still, Altman’s modification of the ending of The Long Goodbye, which rescues it as an essentially episodic structure, does not yet solve for us the problem of the failure of The High Window as a narrative form. The Long Goodbye was vitiated by its sentimental content, something that cannot be invoked in an analysis of the earlier novel. Nor can the latter’s conclusion—the great height of the eponymous title, the fall into the void, not waving but “screaming with fear”—be thought to lack the power, either of a solution to the mystery or of the conclusion of the narrative. But closure and the sense of totality are somehow formally distinct from endings and solutions. Inveterate rereaders of Chandler will know that it is no longer for the solution to the mystery that they do so; if indeed the solutions solved anything to begin with. The story of Bogart’s argument with Hawks during the filming of The Big Sleep is well known: very late at night, after much drinking, they disagree over the status of the dead body in the Buick in the ocean off the Lido pier—murder, suicide or some third thing? They finally call Chandler himself up, still awake and drinking at that hour, and he admits he can’t remember either. Sometimes he aggressively foregrounds the more improbable plot mechanisms, daring us to throw the book away in disbelief: “‘And at that point,’ I said, ‘you run into a real basic coincidence, the only one I’m willing to admit in the whole picture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man named Bill Chess in a Riverside beer parlor and for reasons of her own married him and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake’,” etc. (LL, XXVII, 578). At others it is presumably the speed of rotation of the plot that can be counted on to distract us from everything that is unmotivated or gratuitous about certain episodes: that of Amthor and the marijuana cigarettes in Farewell, My Lovely, for example (triumphantly refashioned into a whorehouse with a Lesbian madame in Dick Richards’ 1975 film version). Finally it is for the episodes themselves that you reread; in this, as in a few other features, Chandler participates in the logic of modernism generally, which tends towards an autonomization of ever smaller segments (the separate chapters of Ulysses are only the most dramatic emblem of the process). But as Chandler’s project-units remain sub-generic, this has the unexpected bonus that we can compare successive versions of the same form in their published variants, which have not, as in the “great moderns,” been welded together in some single “book of the world” whose repetitions would be stylistic rather than narrative. So it is that little by little we begin to collect these episode-types (at least in the four first and canonical novels; Chandlerians will have their weakness for this or that feature of the later two, but we are there already beyond the

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