Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Philip Marlowe's Labor of Words

2002; University of Texas Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tsl.2002.0022

1534-7303

John Hilgart,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

In a short comparison of Raymond Chandler's detective novels to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Scott Christianson notes that both feature the "isolated modern hero sitting before a spectacle of modern chaos and trying to make sense of it all" (142). Both, he says, reflect the "modernist attempt to arrive at personal autonomy, a unity of self-presence" (144). His comparison reminds us of how like detective fiction many modernist texts really are; absent centers, fragmentary evidence, and conflicted, margin-walking, historian-narrators populate the work of numerous other writers, including among the Americans, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cather, and Ellison. Trying to make sense of early twentieth-century modernity itself, with its urban geographies, confused relationship to history, ambiguous social hierarchy, commodified culture, and unexpected connections between high and low, detective Philip Marlowe is easily aligned with literary modernism's narrators, and as Christianson suggests, Marlowe is regularly concerned with the difficulties of self-determination presented by modernity.