Abstract
This chapter explains how Philip Marlowe’s methodically elaborated hardboiled masculinity systematically and categorically rejects romance in its chivalric particulars, but ultimately leaves a patina of romance intact. First I consider the Marlowe-as-knight thesis, and proceed to look at the multiple ways in which the protagonist violates any putative knightly characterization. Most glaring is a pattern of violence against women, including sexual assault. I survey other violations of “the code,” including Marlowe’s fully written but often ignored libido, and his anti-aristocratic class positioning. Despite this definitive denial, I conclude, resonances of the romantic ideology survive within Chandler’s work. These persist most dramatically in a recurring thematic of love, and also in an indelibly elegiac tone.
In an intentional novelistic hybrid, … the important activity is not only … the mixing of linguistic forms—the markers of two languages and styles—[but] the collision between differing points of views on the world that are embedded in these forms.
—Mikhail Bakhtin , “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935)
You’ll laugh when I tell you what I write. Me, with my romantic and poetical instincts. I’m writing sensational detective fiction.
—Chandler, 1933 letter
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Notes
- 1.
There are oodles of definitions and overviews of hardboiled: my favorite for brevity, comprehensiveness, and panache is Megan E. Abbott’s in The Street Was Mine (2002, 10–19). James Baldwin (1998) insightfully links hardboiled with the protest novel in his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” For an illuminating overview of the surprising conjugation between modernism and the pulps, see David M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (2016). For the imbrication of realism, modernism, and hardboiled, see Thompson 1993. And for a wonderful schematic of all of this intergeneric classification, go back to Abbott (2002, 201).
- 2.
For excellent sociohistorical studies of the hardboiled genre in Chandler’s time, see Smith (2000 ) and McCann (2000) . For strategies of Chandlerian realism, see Jameson (2016). Of course, literary genres are fluid and heterogeneous rather than fixed and homogeneous. However, literary markets and movements (or in the case of pre-Gutenberg romance, patronage and audience) tend to encourage replication of recognizable patterns and features. Chandler was writing in the heyday of pulp magazines explicitly codified by genre (detective, adventure, western, love, etc.) That said, there are always artists and texts that challenge and transgress the boundaries: I will return to this in the Conclusion. For some definitions and problematizations of hardboiled even in Chandler’s time, see Macdonald (1971), Bruccoli (2002, 248–9), and Bruccoli and Layman (2002, ix). And for interrogation of the genre of medieval romance, and indeed a theory of how genres are constituted generally, see the classic essay by Jauss (1982) .
- 3.
Of course, exceptions can be found, the most notable of which (to my mind) is “Pearls Are a Nuisance,” from Chandler’s annus mirabilis of 1939. This romp burlesques the contours of hardboiled masculinity, and might quite instructively be read alongside TBS as the novel’s impish doppelgänger (Chandler 2002b).
- 4.
The Annotated Big Sleep (hereafter TABS) provides excerpts from the stories in which many scenes rewritten for The Big Sleep (hereafter TBS) originally appeared. The generic and stylistic differences are remarkable. Part of this may of course be explained by the fact that Chandler was deliberately “raising” the literary level from a pulp to a hardcover market, from Black Mask to Knopf. That said, Knopf also published more straight-hardboiled authors like James M. Cain and works like Hammett’s Red Harvest , so the intergeneric game Chandler enacts cannot entirely be explained by the publishing transposition.
- 5.
Chandler’s writing reverberates with such shout-outs: for a survey of Chandler’s Arthurian echoes, see Andrew E. Mathis’s chapter on Chandler in his The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature (2002).
- 6.
- 7.
This is especially driven home if one reads (as I do) Marlowe’s comment as intended to be racy—a heteronormative wink and nudge to the reader that the lady’s nakedness would motivate him more than it seems to be motivating the presumably chaste knight. I will return to this below.
- 8.
Tellingly, in place of the stained glass, the original version of the mansion’s hallway in “The Curtain” (1936) sports “several suits of time-darkened armor” (2002a, 531), an echo out of the first chapter of Don Quijote . Of course, this aligns the General and not the detective with the hidalgo that time forgot: an interpretation supported by the fact that the General is the only one said to actually ride a horse in the novel. Significantly, he was crippled in a steeplechase—not a propitious bit of symbolism for a proxy knight!
- 9.
TABS provides some discussion, the tip of an iceberg, at Chandler (2018, 99n15).
- 10.
As a reminder, some titles: “Three Gun Terry” (Daly ), “Gundown” (Cain), “One Shot” (Booth), “Ten Carats of Lead” (Sterling), and so forth. For commentary, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 173n18, 299n1, and 381n38. Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America (2016) historicizes gun culture in the United States, and makes the point that there was a widespread backlash against gun manufacturers during the twenties and thirties (see ch. 20). Of all the hardboiled works of the period, TBS may be the only one that registers this backlash.
- 11.
See TABS (Chandler 2018, 214–227) for the full scene and commentary. This too is an established trope in Chandler: Marlowe’s manliness contrasts with effeminate characters with androgynous names like “Carol” (TBS), “Lindsey” (Farewell, My Lovely) , and “Leslie” (The High Window) .
- 12.
- 13.
It is true that such aggression is written into what Kathryn Gravdal calls “the medieval romance of sexual violence,” as we saw in Chap. 2. But in romance, as Gravdal shows, “literal violence” gets “systematically erased, elided, displaced” in a dance of decorous indirection (1992, 570, 569). There is no such evasion in Chandler, or in hardboiled at large: the domination is both blatant and celebrated.
Let us not let romance off the hook too hastily, however. Gravdal’s work authoritatively shows that medieval romance fosters what we would now call “rape culture,” which includes the legal right to claim a woman’s body if one knight defeats another in an individual combat over her possession (1992, 582; see also Kaeuper 2000, 31). This submerges sexual violence into a chivalro-legalistic apparatus that negates and subsumes female volition—which recapitulates in fantasy rules that actually obtained in reality, as Gravdal shows. Repellent as this is, I am arguing that it is qualitatively different from openly exulting in the representation of “literal violence” committed against women by unquestioned heroes—some of whose heroic glow in fact derives from the mastery displayed by such ostensibly admirable acts of violence against women.
- 14.
Other critics note that the liaisons occur off-screen, symptomatic of Chandler’s aversion to the depiction of healthy female sexuality. Perhaps. But that does not negate the unambiguous sexualization of the protagonist.
- 15.
This banter can be found in TBS too: see in particular the scene in the Las Olindas parking lot with Vivian (2018, 302–304). These are great examples of Chandler’s whimsical streak, which also goes virtually unnoticed in the reception. The two aren’t unrelated: in order to register some of Chandler’s suggestiveness, we have to be able to register his wry humor.
- 16.
Joseph McBride’s book on Lubitsch is wonderful on this. He quotes James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges to make the point that “‘Like nearly all the working filmmakers in the Hollywood of the time, he played the game,’ but Lubitsch was special because he ‘made movies about playing the game’” (2018, 4; Hays Code on 25). I am indebted to my TABS collaborator Owen Hill for this reference.
- 17.
Besides Megan Abbott, Fredric Jameson is the only critic I’ve come across who even comes close to connecting the dots, calling the Marlowe-Riordan relationship an “unresolved episode” which “introduces the possibility of a partnership-romance” (2016, 82).
- 18.
Another word on that context: Monikers are particularly ironic in The High Window, and commented upon as such (see 1992b, 12 for “Linda Conquest” and 19 for “Lois Magic”). There is even a cocker spaniel named “Heathcliff,” in context a joke about the name’s terrifically incongruous high-romantic provenance. “Heathcliff” also allows us to chuckle at the class that names their dogs so preciously, and at the class that has never heard of Wuthering Heights (42–3) . Chandlerian humor intricately embeds itself in webs of social signification—Dr. Carl Moss’s “Galahad” quip not excepted.
- 19.
I have barely mentioned the homoeroticism that pervades Chandler’s writing and which provides another dimension of crackling but knotty libido. I will return to this theme in passing below; I don’t analyze it directly because it is eminently covered in the commentary: see, particularly, Plain (2001) ; and Abbott (2002, 81–8). Also, it probably does not qualify as “overt sexuality,” despite its much less ambiguous presence in the non-Marlowe story “Pearls Are a Nuisance.” And anyway, medieval romances buzz with knightly homosociality and homoeroticism, so it’s no great swerve from tradition—just from our idea of it.
- 20.
In fact, Chandler was already taking shots at upper-crust smugness as early as 1911: see his early essay “The Genteel Artist” (2003, 25–7).
- 21.
A point made by Barber (2000, 111; cf. Frappier 1982, 165). For a sociological reading of the introduction of the errant mode, see Nerlich (1987, 4–7). Regarding the folkloric trope, it is number 11 in the great folklorist Vladímir Propp’s registry of functions (“THE HERO LEAVES HOME” [1971, 39]), and became Joseph Campbell’s famous “call to adventure” (1973, 49–58).
- 22.
- 23.
There are also the Latino presences which Chandler shunts into the margins of The Big Sleep’s Los Angeles. For discussion in TBS specifically, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 61n4, 179n3, 287n2 and n4, and, esp., 321n6. For Chandler’s ethnoracial politics in general, see Abbott (2002, chs. 1–2, and McCann 2000, 159–63). See also McCann’s important ch. 1, “Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction” (with particular reference to Chandler at 68 and 84).
- 24.
For some countervailing voices that make significant reference to Chandler, see Frankie Y. Bailey’s indispensable African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study (2008); Pim Higginson’s Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel (2011); and Scott Bunyan’s “No Order from Chaos: The Absence of Chandler’s Extra-Legal Space in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley” (2003). See also Abbott 2002 for acute analysis, and the valuable anthology of essays edited by Alice Mills and Claude Julien (2005). For Black mystery writers eloquently contending with white supremacy in their nonfiction, see <?IndexRangeStart ID="ITerm149"?>Chester Himes’s autobiographies The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976, in which he describes his coming to the hardboiled genre)<?IndexRangeEnd ID="ITerm149"?> , and Walter Mosley’s Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History (2000).
- 25.
- 26.
The classic work is C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (1951). For the long view, see Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1983). For a recent reassessment, see R. Howard Bloch’s Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1991). And for issues with the term and its definition, see Moore (1979).
- 27.
For a competing feminist assessment, see Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (2008). And for a brilliant exposition of the “political economy of love” in the early twentieth century that is particularly relevant to Chandler, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1997), introduction and chs. 1–2.
- 28.
Even critics who directly consider sentimentalism in Chandler do not consider conventional romantic love: Leonard Cassuto (2008) focuses on fantasies of domesticity and community in Chandler, while Sean McCann (2000) looks at Chandler’s glorification of male camaraderie and populist affiliation. They are not wrong. But there is a yet more obvious sentimentalism at play.
Gill Plain’s chapter “When Violet Eyes are Smiling: The Love Stories of Raymond Chandler” (2001) does a great job of delineating Chandler’s homosocial fantasies in three novels. But the work that most fully explores the thematic of love chez Chandler does so as a structuring element of his life. That work is Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (2007). In Freeman’s account, Chandler himself inhabits the role of archetypal knight, interpellated as such by his wife Cissy (this is at the core of the book, but see especially 180–81 and 326). While I am completely convinced by Freeman’s sensitive reading of the life, I think that Chandler was doing something else in his hardboiled fiction.
- 29.
Readers who wish to read what Chandler might have done with the romance motif unimpeded by hardboiled generic and market exigencies should read “English Summer” (published posthumously in 1976). There is horse riding, there is an “Inspector Knight,” and there is a chivalric subordination of the male lead to the female lead. She expresses her gratitude thus: “‘My knight,’ she whispered. ‘My plumed knight. My glistening one’” (1976, 108). Even here, however, the female lead betrays the romantic ideal in the end.
- 30.
Chandler’s masculinization of Mona, as of Vivian, may be lifted and transfigured from Hammett’s Red Harvest (first serialized in Black Mask in 1927–28) , and that novel’s manly Dinah Brand. For an insightful sociohistorical reading of how hardboiled fiction “encourages cross-gender identification,” see Smith 2000 , ch. 6 (quote on 165).
- 31.
For the latter moonlight encounter, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 300 and 301n3.
- 32.
Male sexual aggression is such an established part of the twentieth-century version of romance that Janice Radway explores the varying degrees of its acceptability in her classic study, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1991, 71–6, 141–44, 173–74, and 216).
I am aware of the troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange’s song in which he comically defines the rules of love ex negativo by advocating his listener to “menace” ladies (the same word used by Chrétien’s Erec) and “plant your fist across their nose” (1972, 108). The humor of this twelfth-century jeu may be lost today, but it should go without saying that the intent is to shock and amuse by stating the opposite of accepted behavior.
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Rizzuto, A.D. (2021). Games with Knights: Philip Marlowe, Hardboiled Masculinity, and the Ungentle Negation of Romance. In: Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_4
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