Abstract
This chapter sums up the argument of the book. I conclude that Philip Marlowe is no knight, but that Chandler crafted a startling and possibly unique dialectical relationship between the genres of hardboiled and romance. I speculate about what might have led the author to experiment with such polyvocal play; consider other examples of such dialogism in literary history; and make some inferences about the reception that has ordained Philip Marlowe as a species of “knight.”
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For Chandler’s clear-eyed approach to the writing of pulp stories as an occupation, see MacShane 1976, ch. 3.
- 3.
Such speculation is properly the province of biographers, four of whom cover this territory superlatively: in chronological order, Frank MacShane (1976), Tom Hiney (1997), Judith Freeman (2007), and Tom Williams (2012). To these I’d like to add Sarah Trott’s War Noir (2016), ch. 2, which offers a compelling analysis of Chandler’s experience in the war, based on new research.
- 4.
Indeed, we can see the coming-into-being of chivalric romance itself as just such a game. There was nothing inevitable about the twelfth-century romanciers combining two hitherto antithetical forms, the martial chansons de geste and highly stylized love poetry, let alone setting those into further dialogue with oral legend, Celtic folklore, Eastern tales, classical myth, saints’ lives, and more. To paraphrase Robert Earl Keen: the road goes on forever and the parley never ends.
- 5.
“It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colors and modifying their specific features” – Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1971, 126).
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Rizzuto, A.D. (2021). Conclusion: The Mean Streets of the Dialectic. In: Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_5
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