Poet, not a fool

"...The remote source of [the Prefect's] defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools."

"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."

"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect."

"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.

"...The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra...The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example.

...I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action..."

-- Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter

So. Sorry for the wicked long intro. I read this for the first time in years (Wishbone!) for Crime: Fiction and Film a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed the outrageous nature of C. Auguste Dupin's suppositions and "rational logic" nearly as much as I liked the hardboiled Sam Spade, though not as much as the great Philip Marlowe. This was my favorite observation of Dupin's, though: that the greatest geniuses are masters of both mathematical reasoning and the poet's creativity and human understanding.

And I gotta run. Will finish later.

Detective Philip Marlowe

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

That is from the New York Times Book Review for The Big Sleep, as quoted on the back of the Vintage paperback edition I have of it for my Crime: Fiction & Film class. We read it this week, and quite frankly, it was awesome. Though his work was traditionally dismissed as trashy "pulp" mystery stories, it really is great genre stuff. The style fascinated me. On the one hand, it was dry and plain, but it was so rich in detail and description - the figurative language and imagery were great. And come on: murder, porn, blackmail, kidnapping - all in one book! The guy definitely can plot.

Our protagonist and narrator, private investigator Philip Marlowe, is a fantastic character. On the surface, he's the stereotypical hardboiled P.I.: he's a hard, thick-skinned wiseass who speaks in similes and isn't afraid of bending a few laws to protect his client. His disregard for the law, though, is born of his years working for the LAPD and witnessing the corruption first hand. He's kind of gutsy, and sticks to his principles. And yes, he actually has principles: he's got his own idea of what it means to be honorable and noble that defies contemporary society's dictums. Though he's pretty misogynistic, it's almost understandable - Chandler paints his female characters in such a negative light, you almost don't want Marlowe to treat them as ladies, though he does anyway. And while he never states it outright, we discussed in class how Marlowe seems to consider himself a knight of sorts. He's very Rick Blaine. And a bit old Western cowboy.

In an essay about realist crime stories, Chandler concludes with what he thinks a realist detective should be:

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am not quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

"The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

- Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

I think I'd like to meet Philip Marlowe. I liked the NY Times reviewer's choice of adjectives, and liked even more that he chose to lump them under the title of "American hero". Marlowe really is a very American hero. He's smart and strong, sensitive but not soft, cynical yet hopeful. He's honorable effortlessly, and he has a certain disregard for authority that the rebellious side of Americans has always admired. In his narration, there is a lack of pretentiousness (that again, haha), a plainness that is appealing to Americans, who don't have formal social classes. Like Chandler says, he's a common man who walks among common people. And, perhaps most notably, Marlowe is independent - and very much alone, in an almost romantic way. That, I think, is one of the most brilliant aspects of the novel: that it manages to capture so many traits and ideas that are considered to be very American, and that are respected by Americans.

On a side note, I also thought it was really interesting how Chandler used animal imagery and comparisons nearly every time a woman showed up, especially with this one crazy and promiscuous girl, Carmen. It reminded me of how Albee's plays tend to come back to the idea of the animal side of human nature. But, while Albee doesn't distinguish between the animal nature in men from the animal in women, Chandler does, and he uses it to degrade women. I just thought it was interesting how they both use the idea, just to different ends.

That is all.

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