The following text is taken verbatim from my final assignment for Critical Reading in English Studies, University of Indonesia, 2014.

Philip Marlowe, illustrated by Tom Adams.

Brevda, W. (1999). The double nihilation of the neon: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 41(1), Nature, Law, and Representation, 70–102.

Tate, J. O. (1993). Raymond Chandler’s Shakespearean touch. The Sewanee Review, 101(2), 257–268.

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There must be reasons why a fictional character lives for more than its author’s lifespan, and in the case of Philip Marlowe, it would only seem natural to perceive so. Made by Raymond Chandler in 1939 for his novel The Big Sleep, the sharp-tongued, moody private investigator spent his career enthralling great minds of Chandler’s time, later gaining immortality to inspire — he was played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation which also starred Lauren Bacall, and his elements were incorporated in several characters throughout the manga Meitantei Conan, for examples. Marlowe is acknowledged as an effort to mix the literary with the pulp, to “make a novel out of detective story and literature out of entertainment” (Tate, 1993). I have compiled several academic journal articles which engage in this discussion, and selected two of them, which will be the subject of this writing. The first article is from J. O. Tate, which discusses Raymond Chandler’s Shakespearean Touch, and the second is The Double Nihilation of the Neon: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles from William Brevda. I will look at both and highlight several points in which their discussions meet in regards of Chandler’s literary worth in his creation of Philip Marlowe.

Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.

Tate kickstarted her writing with a passage from The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s most critically-acclaimed novel, which showed Marlowe meeting a girl at the bar, where the girl, after hearing Marlowe’s name, suddenly quoted a dialogue from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. From this interesting introduction, Tate went on to explain how, in both Chandler’s prose and Marlowe’s character, this “Shakespearean touch” immersed itself thoroughly. Being an admirer of Chandler’s works myself, I am impressed by the way Tate connects these allusions with her knowledge of not only Shakespeare’s works, but also Elizabethan theaters in overall. She gives insights on these allusions’ effects on the narrative in contemplation — which is very like Shakespeare in that manner — such as the ironic “and nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth” from The Little Sister, which was addressed to the seemingly-innocent, yet enigmatic Orfamay Quest (it is ironic because at the end of the book, she was revealed to be a much viler creature than Lady Macbeth ever was) (p.9). Tate’s thoroughness can be seen from her material arsenal: it was not enough for her to utilize only the Philip Marlowe books and overall knowledge of Elizabethan theaters, she also had to include the letters of Raymond Chandler himself, in which the author gave many wonderful insight on his writings. These letters, interspersed with passages from the Marlowe books and historical bits of Elizabethan theaters, make a seamless and cohesive analysis altogether. In hindsight, the choice of topic is actually nothing so special — perhaps for people with so-so knowledge of Shakespeare, such as me, it is quite unexpected, but for those who know a lot, such as Tate, it is already clear — but still, the way Tate prepared and wrote her analysis is really commendable. She noticed, by the means of Chandler’s letters, how the author actually reflects an incarnation of Shakespeare in the modern era (“He nearly says that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would be… Raymond Chandler”) (p.5). This is hardly a surprise for her train of thought, which is why such a bordering-on-fantastic assumption actually makes sense, after all proof she had gathered and explained.

While Tate brings out the literary god in Chandler, Brevda takes a whole different approach on his interpretation: Marlowe is a quixotic knight who still clings to “a world of transcendent ideas” when God (ideals) is dead and all that is left is nothing (p.5). While such reading is also found in other articles which I have gathered, Brevda exceeds the others in that he connects this anti-nihilism with the imagery of Los Angeles in Chandler’s works, the nihilistic dictions of Marlowe, and the overall tone of the stories, to synthesize a notion of “double-nihilation”. While I don’t completely get the notion, let us look at Brevda’s train of thought. He began the article with a line from The Little Sister about neon lights, which Marlowe thought should be praised since it was “something out of nothing”. He then quoted a line from Chandler’s biography: “I have lived my life on the edge of nothing”. Apparently, this “nothing” features quite a lot in Marlowe’s stories, and Brevda painstakingly proves so by listing more examples. He uses these examples to expose a hole in Marlowe’s soul, bringing Nietzsche all the while into the discussion. This hole, this “nothingness”, haunts Marlowe especially whenever he returns to his office, according to Brevda, and its danger lingers on him even when he was out on the mission — which is “to deny our nothingness”. Here Marlowe is compared to Huckleberry Finn, his “predecessor”, “a Diogenes searching for an honest man” in “a world of almost universal corruption” (p.12). And so Brevda continues to the big symbol of nothingness, which is Los Angeles, “a beautiful nothing”. He noticed a sense of anachronism and “the garden of lost presence” (p.13) in Chandler’s LA and California (“the most compelling of American myths”), of which Marlowe was lamenting. My understanding of Brevda’s analysis is that this sense of anachronism, which perhaps resulted from the clash between the Hollywood-LA and the LA in Marlowe’s lamentation — between “neon-lighted slums” and “the Athens of America” — is a double-nihilation, especially when we compare Marlowe with his author, who, according to Brevda, found California clashing with the British and Platonic forms in which he was raised up, or in Brevda’s words, “in California [Chandler] found himself not.”

A bit confusing, yes, but we should look at what follows. Brevda noted how Marlowe’s witticism and hard-boiled speak, sometimes, if not often, make self-aware commentary on the nature of detective fiction. Philip Marlowe himself was preceded by Hammett’s Sam Spade (which was also played by Bogart in the movie adaptation) in detective fiction, and even during the publishing period of Chandler’s novels quite a lot of hard-boiled fiction and 1930s gangster films popped out to the mass. There was a danger of similarity, a danger of sounding like others, and Chandler brilliantly deflected this by what Brevda called “a self-scrutiny of the ‘knower’”. Brevda shows how Marlowe gives sarcastic comments on the superficiality of his situations before the readers, robbing us of the privilege of doing so because he knows exactly how superficial it feels. “Everyone has seen the movie” (p.14). Now we can understand what the “double-nihilation” means, which is when we notice something is not, and in doing so, we make it exist as a not. Marlowe sees everything as “Hollywood” (fake), a play, not a real thing, and he refuses to be so. This returns to LA and California: “A city that advertised itself as a ‘heaven on earth’ could only pursue its own double nihilation and become its own noir myth” (p.21). “The real has become an anachronism. Chandler, through his double, shows us the real in a double nihilation — that it is and that it is not” (p.17). Marlowe is a sad, weary, broken idealist in a world without gods — a living anachronism. Here Brevda slipped in a nice comparison between Marlowe and Nietzsche: “even Nietzsche cannot bear a universe divested of all illusions” (p.23). Marlowe fights for a world he remembers, just like his author, who fought to find a middle way between “the feather of formula fiction and the rock of high brow modernism” (p.24). Brevda then concludes with a lengthy philosophical discussion on the mythical quality of Chandler’s works, and seeing from all these meaningful insights, I daresay he terribly had the right to do so.

LA.

While it is certainly lengthy and at some points complicated, the insight I got from reading Brevda’s article is really rewarding. I do not pretend I have the proficiency in understanding the high concepts of philosophy Brevda tackled on, but as a reader of Chandler, I find his extrapolations understandable, his “double-nihilation” makes sense. His analysis is hinted with sadness, a looming grief of what we shall become when the ideals are as bad as reality. Alan Moore, one of my favorite writers, attacked this issue in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009. When the ideal world goes bad, the material will follow suit. Life imitates art, said Oscar Wilde, and no one has ever proven otherwise. Here is where Tate’s explanation finds its place. Yes, Marlowe is trapped in a world of nothingness. But he himself is not nothing — he is the last warrior in the world, the beacon of light amidst the fake neon. Chandler might have made nothing new, but by drawing on the gods he pulled out something that stands out among the others, a hero from the past, the lost world of ideals. While Brevda dived deep into the philosophical darkness, Tate looked back at the glittering corridors of history, of gods named Shakespeare and Marlowe, and looked at them as Chandler must have did. It would be interesting to find out Chandler’s reaction were he could have read Tate’s article: compared with Shakespeare? I think he would have liked that. Perhaps he would write a letter to Tate in which he was all flattered without actually saying the word. And he might say that Brevda thought way too much.

I believe in what Brevda and Tate said. Both delivered their thoughts impeccably, though Brevda had to take a longer route naturally since his destination was farther than Tate’s. Both writings are really well-researched, and I cannot find any apparent errors. The admiration towards Chandler in both articles is clear, and it extends to become admiration towards both of them. A lot of fictional characters do not stay for long, and when one does, we can expect that there is a great factor which made it so. In my own experience I have stumbled upon a lot of well-constructed mysteries, head-scratching murders, and thrilling night chases, but rarely have I found myself reading a detective book twice, when the questions have been answered and the shock was long stale. But I found myself opening Farewell, My Lovely and The Little Sister again and again, and discovered that it was not about the plot, but the prose. After reading Tate’s and Brevda’s insights, I discovered more. Anyone who is an admirer of Chandler, or even the detective fiction in general, would benefit greatly from reading these articles. As for a closing note, I think Marlowe’s quest echoes decades later in the other side of the world, in the form of an arrogant, show-off genius of a brat — Kudou Shinichi from Meitantei Conan, with the motto “Shinjitsu wa itsumo hitotsu” — there is only one truth, and he will not cower against those whose truths are twisted and maligned. Amongst the faceless hard-boiled PIs that ever haunted the world of fiction, Marlowe stood out with his ideals, and I never knew it as much as I do know, after reading Brevda’s and Tate’s articles, how Chandler has created a masterpiece out of beautiful nothings.