Raymond Chandler and the Big Metaphor

I have been teaching The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler this last week for my "Heroes and Villains" course. I am not sure why I chose it initially--I vaguely remembered reading it in a hotel bathroom in New York City (on a trip with the Swensons) and taking particular note of Philip Marlowe as a kind of 20th Century hero figure. Of course, in the edition I ordered for my course, one of the blurbs on the back says:

"Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical

and rebellious." --Robert Parker, The New York Times.

Well, that takes care of my first day's lesson plans, I guess. By the way, my first experience reading the novel was tinged with irony. I was with the Swensons, a lifelong Los Angeles foothills family, reading about crime, wealth, and the underworld of the Pasadena foothills, but I was visiting and thinking about New York City, which is the great antithesis to Chandler's LA. At any rate, the book has taught pretty well despite the discussion of "heroes" wrapping up within 15 minutes of the first class period. I thought I would comment on a couple of quotes from The Big Sleep that generated some great discussion in class, and in the meantime remind everybody how really great Raymond Chandler's novels are.

The first one occurs when Marlowe breaks into a home that he had been staking out for a while:

"I straddled the fence at the side of the runway and leaned far out to the draped but unscreened French and tried to look in at the crack where the drapes came together. I saw lamplight on a wall and one end of a bookcase. I got back on the runway and took all if it and some of the hedge and gave the front door the heavy shoulder. This was foolish. About the only part of a California house you can't put your foot through is is the front door. All it did was hurt my shoulder and make me mad. I climbed over the railing again and kicked the French window in, used my hat for a glove and pulled out most of the lower small pane of glass. I could now reach in and draw a bolt that fastened the window to the sill. The rest was easy. There was no top bolt. The catch gave. I climbed in and pulled the drapes off my face.

"Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead."

This, to me, is really good writing. The paragraph gives you an acute sense of the scene, especially for understanding which of Marlowe's actions were fluid and which were abrupt (look at the first sentence compared to the last four sentences--the difference is all in the sentence lengths and the transitive and intransitive verbs). "The catch gave" is an onomatopoeic staccato sentence of clicks--"catch"--and openings--the long "a" and "v" of "gave." But besides the writing imitating the action, sounds, and images, the voice is distinct and witty enough to make the actions mean something. Marlowe's comment about California houses is not just snark, it contributes to the ridiculousness of his hurt shoulder and his anger by giving us a sense of his "knowing better" as well as his vitriol after realizing his foolishness. Marlowe's sense of ruefulness is endearing, but also slyly admirable. He feels sorry for himself rhetorically, deceiving the reader into believing his thoughts remained on the surface level of sardonic observation rather than on the gravity of the current situation. It makes a character interesting.

But the greatest part of the passage is the second paragraph, which is the last line of that particular chapter, of course (if only Dan Brown could make his cliffhangers this damn clever). The line immediately draws the reader into several intriguing situational assumptions. I mean, show me a better sentence that can urge you to wonder what happened previously. But the line also continues to develop what it means to be dead, a theme in The Big Sleep indicated by the novel's title. Being dead means not to notice, but the other figure in the room does not notice either, and this is one of the major clues to the sense of that figure's inhumanity, crucial for understanding the rest of the novel. The joke, cliffhanger, clue, thematic development--it is all tightly compacted in one nice toss-off.

So the book is clever. So what? So is Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosely, and any other number of "hard-boiled" writers ("hard-boiled" is one of my least favorite adjectives because I am not sure I believe the metaphor). Well, there is a lot more to what Chandler is doing. Chandler's (and Marlowe's) narrative implications go far beyond a tight and witty narrative into the realm of metaphor itsel. If I were asked what the major theme of Raymond Chandler's novels is, I would answer "the creation of metaphor." The metaphors come from everywhere and Marlowe experiments with them in a way that allows this novel to be good for a class called "Metaphors 101: Making the Abstract Concrete" My favorite line in the novel comes as Marlowe is taking one of the femme fatales home, and they pull off to look at the Pacific Ocean:

"I braked the car against the curb and switched the headlights off and sat with my hands on the wheel. Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness."

Tons of wonderful work has been done on metaphor, not the least of which is by Emerson and Nietszche, who basically claim that all language bases itself in metaphor: Emerson's famous example is about how "right" meant "straight road" once and "wrong" meant "curvy road." We define ourselves in metaphor, we make sense of the world in the same way--yada yada yada. When we say "love is a rose" we are describing love in terms of a rose: beautiful, delicate, thorny, fragile, seasonal, regenerating, and so on. When we say "love is red rose" the metaphor starts to grow: sensual, bright, startling, beautiful. Right. We could do this exercise with any number of metaphors, and it has been done many times. But look at Marlowe's above: Wouldn't that metaphor make a lot more sense if it was the other way around? A thought forming itself is like fog curling. Makes sense, no? Instead, the concrete image (the tenor)--thinning fog--is described by using the abstraction (the vehicle)--thought forming itself.

The cool thing about this is that metaphor itself, if Nietszche and Emerson's ideas about metaphor and language are true, is formed on the edge of consciousness. If we speak and think consciously in metaphors, then only the unconscious exists pre-metaphor. That is, the edge of consciousness is where metaphor initially takes place. Marlowe is constantly playing with metaphors, but for this one, he reverses the normal vehicle and tenor, and then comments on his own ability to create that metaphor. The whole novel is a constant curling and creaming of metaphor, language, and consciousness into a kind of foggy haze that gives noir its name. The title, The Big Sleep, is the big metaphor: to be dead is to lose consciousness and subsequently the ability to produce metaphors, but to sleep is to allow unconsciousness to swirl around and let metaphors produce themselves without tenors. The big sleep is the big beyond, without the language of borrowed attributes--a state of perfect language. A place that, I get the feeling, Marlowe might like.