Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

by Fredric Jameson

The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novelRaymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler’s work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler’s invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.

Genres: Nonfiction, Noir, Philosophy, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, Biography

95 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 17, 2015

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Paul O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Believe it or not, this isn't the first example of a Marxist philosopher commenting on Raymond Chandler. Zizek examined him and his work briefly in Enjoy Your Symptoms. This is the first full book treatment, though; or, perhaps more accurately described, rather an elongated essay divided into three parts set between hardcovers. Marxist syntax remains notorious for its viscid and sometimes confounding style. Jameson is very much one of its leading practitioners today. Parts of this book reflect that peculiar skill set, but most of it is quite readable. The interesting question that shan't go begging is, of course, who is this work written for? I must admit, I've scratched my scalp almost raw contemplating this. Chandler fans will enjoy Jameson's insightful analysis of the Marlowe novels, although they will likely wince at the leftist academic verbiage. Marxists will follow along with much of it, but I think they could grow impatient with the Heideggerian turn toward book's end. This is a text written for a very select audience that probably never would've have found a publisher if it weren't for Verso. Kudos to Verso, once again, for I mostly enjoyed this book from beginning to end, though I am an old Chandler fan, but no Marxist. Some aspects of this book will not surprise the causally educated and active reader. The prominence of "play" between the "haves" & the "have nots" in Chandler will not reveal anything one didn't already know, or at least guess at after reading, say, The Big Sleep. Subtlety requires depositing in Chandler's work, for you won't find it within unless you lend it. Jameson is generous in this respect. Attributing to descriptions of the weather the power to hinge a Marlowe novel's life-world together rather than merely serving to set a literary atmosphere is undoubtedly elaborating beyond Chandler, its creator & author. Jameson's likening of Marlowe to a picaresque character, however, between the classes is immensely delightful, if not entirely convincing. No matter how disheveled or dissolute my thoughts may be at times, I doubt I would ever have paired Chandler with Smollett, randomly, the reverse, or any otherwise. Jameson, ever the good Marxist, takes note of the lack of a proper bourgeoise in Chandler's works. This is interesting. But Chandler's characters are almost all part of the "underworld", whether they have money or not, whether they live in the city slum or on an estate. In fact, Marlowe is less picaresque and much more a Virgil of the 30s & 40s, escorting his reader down into human darkness, intimate & forbidden secrets of tribe, and ritual death. I personally believe this allows Jameson to momentarily escape the allure of Marxist alienation, albeit just for the moment, and unpack his readings of Heidegger for a little metaphysical interpretation of detection as an ontological uncovering of death in the world historical, the essence for Jameson of Chandler's literary importance. Kind of fun, but it does require you to buy into it(pun intended). Jameson naturally seems move at home when he makes observations such as Marlowe's unfortunate relocation of residence from apartment in the city to small house in the suburbs. For Jameson, this is a sad ending point. On a par with Virgil discovering he'd rather sit in his easy chair by the television. I have to admit, when reading The High Window many, many years ago, this minor story detail stood out for me, too, as somehow incongruous. Jameson's works are always challenging, strangely unique(for a Marxist), and, even more strangely, pay their dividends outright.

[X · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some interesting insights in here, but they were buried in pages and pages of the most useless, annoying white noise. This, I recall, is why I don’t read lit crit/lit theory.

Tbh as I write this review I think the most frustrating thing about it is that there *were* good ideas in here but I was too lazy to write them down as I came across them and now there’s absolutely no way I’m flipping back through to try to find them - so I guess they will only exist vaguely in my memory!

The other most frustrating thing about it is that although, again, there were some good ideas in here, they felt stunted by the fact that the author’s only references seemed to be modern/postmodern philosophers (and the movie adaptions of Chandler’s books). So many people have written so much great stuff about/based on/interpreting/in conversation with Raymond Chandler’s work over the years, and this book just didn’t……. know?

It was published in 2016 at which point the author would have been in his 80s, so that might help to explain why the book feels like it was written decades earlier. (Like seriously - was it? I couldn’t find any indication that it had been published before, eg as essays, but it would make total sense if it had.)

Anyway, if you are a detective novel/noir commentary completist (like me), I would recommend this book. Otherwise, probably not.



I read the Verso (New Left Books) 2022 paperback reprint, which was apparently printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, located in Croydon. (I assume CPI doesn’t stand for Consumer Price Index but that’s all I can see when I look at the name haha.) The book was typeset in gentle, soothing Garamond - the most uncomplicatedly good aspect! - by MJ & N Gavan (of Truro, Cornwall).

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jameson is a notoriously labyrinthine writer, and I often felt more than a bit like Philip Marlowe himself in my attempt to navigate this bewildering textual landscape. But there was something peculiarly pleasant about feeling utterly lost, unexpectedly tripping over a blinding insight, and then losing my bearings once again; this won't be the last time I wander down these mean streets, I'm sure.

2ND READING: A great pleasure to revisit, & as often is the case with densely theoretical texts, I didn't find it nearly as inaccessible as I did on my initial read. There's something I find deeply enjoyable about the brain-teasing quality of "high theory" being applied to Chandler's peculiar, brilliant mixture of populist impulses & artistic pretensions. Jameson doesn't just aesthetically appreciate RC's work but has great personal affection for it too—& somehow that comes through (exactly how I'd be hard pressed to say, but it does). Am tempted to bump this up to five stars for the spectacular first two chapters, but alas I find the third a bit of a dud.

"...a case can be made for Chandler as a painter of American life: not as a builder of those large-scale models of the American experience which great literature offers, but rather fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature."

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon reading the sad news of Fredric Jameson's death on 22nd September, I searched the library catalogue for his books. The search turned up this short volume about Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, which I love. Jameson's reflections were not only interesting but also in places vindicating. In my 2013 review of Playback I wrote, 'But the point of Chandler mysteries is never to secure tidy justice or send criminals to jail. Marlowe is far too cool and postmodern for that.' Jameson makes that very same point with a great deal more theoretical precision. I particularly appreciated his careful examination of how critically important the spatial is in Chandler's fiction. It is more interested in place than society, as befits the spatial and social fragmentation of 1930s (and later) Los Angeles; 'an unstructured city' as Jameson puts it.

Jameson reflects on Chandler's snappy dialogue and wonderfully memorable similes, which he connects with the popularity of radio at the time of writing:

It is at any rate clear that the voice-over of the hard-boiled detective in general, and of Marlowe in particular, offers a specifically radio pleasure which must be paid for with the closure of the case, and which allows the novel's past tenses to resonate with doom and foreboding, marking the detective's daily life with the promise of adventure. [...] The practice of the outrageous simile, whose relations to radio might also be investigated, shares with Flaubert's quite unmetaphoric handicraft of the sentence a commitment to sense-perception as what is ultimately to be rendered and set down in indelible letters: those accustomed to frequent Chandler know how many ephemeral experiences of the Southern California landscape are in his pages eternally retained in passing.

Although Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality is a short book and doesn't take long to read, it contains many thought-provoking ideas and new angles on Chandler's classic noir mysteries as well as their film adaptations. I found it a lot less technical than Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. The only word I had to look up was 'preterite tense', which is le passé simple or past historic in French (and a number of other languages that aren't as lax about tenses as English). Now I am tempted to reread some of Marlowe's adventures, much imitated but never equaled.

[Ethan]

This is a rather niche kind of book. An essay that formulates and describes Raymond Chandler's aesthetic written by Fredric Jameson is likely appealing to only a few people. I enjoyed this greatly though.

The essay is formed broadly of three sections, each of which takes up a certain aspect of Chandler's writing and analyses it in greater depth. Most rewarding in this book, I think, was its phenomenological observations in a slightly surprising comparison with Heidegger. Invocations of Lukacs were also par for the course (as implied by the title perhaps).

Overall, good but probably reserved for those who quite like Chandler and are already philosophy-inclined.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

You probably should be a big fan of Chandler if you're going to read this. And maybe a big fan of Jameson too. Chiefly this is enjoyable like sitting around with a smart person riffing on the work of a great American author. Some nice observations are made, but it also feels breezy, in the good way that makes it light and fun, but also in the way where you kind of purse your lip and think to yourself, yeah, maybe? But you might need to build up that argument a bit? Jameson's major, so, heck, he's probably right to think to himself, you know, I don't have to chase all these leads down. I can just toss these ideas around, maybe someone else will want to actually run them down and see if they work.

The bits reflecting on spatiality in Chandler are especially good and interesting.

Your mileage may vary.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality Fredric Jameson returns to his work on the detective novel, focusing this time on Chandler. As usual Jameson makes nuanced observations and posits very reasonable and well-argued points for their presence. Some basic readers may claim Jameson is claiming things Chandler never consciously intended which, while in some cases may be true, is moot in that reading is a dynamic partnership and both the writing and the reading are contextualized within different realities (era, location, social and cultural norms, etc) so Chandler consciously choosing something makes no difference to what it may represent about Chandler's time or about a reader's time.

For Chandler fans there is much to appreciate. Jameson grounds his observations with textual support. One may agree, wholly or in part, with his interpretations or disagree but one cannot say it isn't textually based. Whether discussing spatiality, particularity (Ford rather than car) or Chandler's social typography Jameson highlights aspects of the texts that may have, for most readers, been nothing more than setting the scene. yet setting a scene, like taking a photograph, is as much about choosing what is seen and what is not seen. Those choices were indeed Chandler's.

For literary theorists, whether Marxist or not, Jameson gives many new perspectives with which to look at the novels. Non-theorists will just dismiss with a wave of the hand and claim Chandler didn't mean it, which, as I stated, means nothing. Theorists and serious readers will find some agreement with Jameson or perhaps find other ways of explaining the themes and trends Chandler had running throughout his novels.

This is not a casual read but neither is it a particularly dense nor convoluted read. It will be accessible to most readers, particularly those who choose to engage rather than dismiss before even engaging. I would recommend this to both Chandler fans, with the caveat that this is not a basic overview of plots, and those interested in how literature (particularly popular literature) works and what it can say about the society that both produced and consumed it.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Vince · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the blurb on the back:
"Not often in American since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force... The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror."
- Benjamin Kunkel, London Review of Books

Kunkel is funnin' us a little bit. My alternative title for the book is "Fredric Jameson: Deflections of Textuality". It is clear that literary theory has little, if anything to do with literature and everything to do with... literary theory. In Totality. Jameson occasionally makes a trenchant observation about the change in American culture between the 30s and 70s, but they tend only to serve the narrative that if only Chandler had had the good fortune to have Jameson as a guide, he could have really understood what he was writing about. To revive an old term which has gone out of "style" with the "advent" of "deconstructuralism" (which is what Jameson perpetrates upon poor Chandler in his TENTATIVELY FORCEFUL way), Jameson is a humbug. Not to be overly denegrating, like Zizek, who I think he is akin, Jameson can be entertaining... for about five minutes.

[Hobart Mariner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't find it that interesting when he was setting up his overly tight formal systems, but when the guy cuts loose and just riffs on his favorite parts of Chandler it's great. He also kicks against the Adorno-Horkheimer stuffiness towards genre stuff which I appreciated.

The last third or so of the book is an attempt to figure out why The High Window fails even though it has some of the best bits in Chandler (according to him). Unlike most of the other stuff, he doesn't spell it out for us, but I think the idea might be that it fails to illustrate some Heideggerian rift between History and Nature....possibly by not looking at death enough.

Very enjoyable little pamphlet for all noir fans. Some howlers: people do *not* trust most national politicians, and I would take pretty major issue with the idea that Hammett is less romantic than Chandler. Again, he's interesting in setting up formal semiotic systems that account for the books' success, and you may (like me) find these little diagrams of contraries and contradictions to be snooze-worthy. But his overall reading is pretty enjoyable.

[Martin]

“since World War II, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization, and the organic social unity of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead from one monad to another. Communication in this new society is upwards, through the abstract connecting link, and back down again. The isolated units are all haunted by the feeling that the center of things, of life, of control, is elsewhere, beyond immediate lived experiences. The principal images of interrelationship in this new society are mechanical juxtapositions: the identical prefabricated houses in the housing project, swarming over the hills; the four-lane highway full of cars bumper to bumper and observed from above, abstractly, by a traffic helicopter. If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life.”

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some amazing stuff in this book and I love how he extracts a two-system structure for each of Chandler’s novels — the ‘subjective experience’ of location and character, sensation, description, content, world versus the ‘objective structure’ of the plot qua intellectual puzzle, hidden, like history, from being revealed by the merely phenomenal — and then compares it to similarly important structural rifts at the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy. Not an exposition I expected from a book about detective fiction, and some really choice quotes from Chandler’s letters elaborating his uniquely productive aesthetic work. However, he does repeat himself because the book is assembled out of three articles and you can tell.

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depois de finalmente terminar de escrever um texto sobre o Jameson e de saco um tanto cheio dos maneirismos todos, resolvo descansar do texto sobre o Jameson.... lendo um livrinho do Jameson que eu não sabia que existia.

(e que é uma versão meio à clef, meio temperada de Heidegger, da ideia básica do livro sobre o realismo, mas deslocada p/ essa espécie de flaubertiano temporão que parece ser o Chandler. De qualquer forma, o jeito como ele lida com a presença da natureza [em sentido muito amplo e peculiar] nos livros do Chandler por si só já teria valido a leitura)

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This brief book is much clearer to me on my second reading today. In 2018, it was the first Jameson I read; if you think it'll be forgiving because you like Chandler, think again.

The book offers many ways to read Chandler: colors, interiors, exteriors, male friendship and support, and ways different characters look or see as they interrogate each other and their predicaments.

What helped me get more out of the book a second time? Reading ten other Jameson books this year was essential.

It was also a pleasure.

[Brian Rothbart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is, at times, very dense and heavy. It does use Marxist theory to help aid his understanding of Chandler's work. The writing, at times, can also be a little confounding. Not a bad book. but you really need to be into Chandler or Jameson's writing to fully enjoy this book. Some chapters were interesting and well written. Others were too dense for me.

[Natalia Hernández Moreno · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Chandler liked to argue, as we have already seen, that in matters of style he tricked his audience by giving them something other (and better) than what they wanted (…) perhaps in the matter of closure something similar is going on, whereby the satisfaction of the detective-story-puzzle has in reality been assuaged by something else—in the event of something doubly spatial.”

[Lou · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first time reading Jameson and it was not enjoyable, although it had its moments over philosophical and spatial examination of Chandler's work. Since I wasn't familiar with much Marxist criticism, it made sense being familiar with semiotics. Basically, I might reread it (it's quite short) and also made me want to read Chandler again.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was hanging just fine until the heidegger

[Michael Flick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Better to read Chandler’s books than a book about his books—little reward in that.

[Susanne (Pages of Crime) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purely literary criticism, this book is only really useful if you are studying the work of Raymond Chandler or Noir fiction/film.

[Ezra Schulman · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's the GOAT. I have to read Farewell, My Lovely now.

[David Rodriguez]

Need to reread after I make it through his more theoretically focused works, think I left it in storage in Highland, NY...,

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extended version of essay in collected volume. Best bits were in the essay but he’s got a good read of Origin of the Work of Art and a delightfully opaque diagram of BS. Lots of “the logic of”…

[Matthew Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jameson makes great observations throughout the whole book and then at the end when he really dives into the whole Earth vs. World thing, you feel like you got hit by the world’s largest truth bomb.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fredric Jameson continues to demonstrate why he is the master literary theorist of his generation. Using the lens of Marxist theory Jameson reads Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlow novels as examples of how crime fiction in America can demonstrate the divides between issues of class and experience. Jameson uses Chandler's vision of Los Angeles in the novels to argue that spaces like offices and homes and references to products illustrate the influence of capitalism and money on American people. Written in a manner similar to Barthes S/Z Jameson analyzes what he refers to as Chandler's formula to better understand the hidden messages embedded within the novels. I received an advanced copy of the book thanks to Verso and Netgalley.

[Ray Palen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jameson takes readers on an introspective and highly interpretive look at the writing of the late, great Raymond Chandler. Crime noir was the literary world Chandler lived in and his 1939 release of THE BIG SLEEP woke up the land of crime fiction forever.

DETECTIONS OF TOTALITY takes readers into both the social and literary impacts Chandler's writing had and how he was able to create Los Angeles as a microcosm for his work. A short essay but very entertaining.

[Eileen Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting critique of Raymond Chandler and his novels.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Verso Books via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.