Davis on Chandler

[Mark Kohut]

Sometimes a knight errant is just a metaphor become archetypal, yes?

And Doc's 'lawyer' by default is called Saunch....as in Sancho Panza.

--- On Wed, 8/19/09, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Davis on Chandler
> To: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2009, 9:03 AM
> > I've been reading Raymond
> Chandler over the last two/three weeks, in the
> > wake of a couple of whacks at Inherent Vice. When I
> say that Philip Marlowe
> > is a time traveller, I'm exaggerating, but only a
> little:
> >
> >        The main hallway of the Sternwood place
> .....
> >        showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a
> lady who was tied to
> >        a tree .....
> >        Raymond Chandler: "The Big Sleep"
> >
> 
> Yes yes, we recognise the 'detective as knight' thing, and
> that
> Pynchon likes quests. I quoted that very passage in my
> review of
> Inherent Vice, and it's very well known.
> 
> What I'm disagreeing with is any attempt to claim Marlowe
> as an actual
> olden days knight. If Marlowe does yearn for an older time
> - and he
> sometimes does, I agree - it's not that old a time he
> yearns for, it's
> a more recent past, which in itself is more apt when
> considering Doc
> in IV.
> 
> 
> > My reading of Chandler can't be that out of
> > joint—Leigh Brackett saw fit to open up that aspect
> of the Long Goodbye when
> > she wrote the screenplay for Altman's film. While the
> theme of mysteries
> > being solved more by kismet than real work is found
> many times in Noir, The
> > Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are
> all examples where that
> > theme takes up greater space in those stories.
> >
> 
> Leigh Brackett would know: she co-wrote the screenplay for
> The Big
> Sleep. But she - and Altman - imagined a 'Rip Van Marlowe',
> someone
> transported from the 40s to the 70s and thus out of synch.
> That;s a
> hell of a lot less out of synch than taking King Arthur and
> setting
> him down in 1940s L.A.!
> 
>