In the Background of Chandler's "The Big Sleep"

Last post, I spoke about Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and class in the novel. Today, I want to briefly return to a subject that I explored in "'Idle White Rich' in Catherine Carmier;" in that post, I talk about the fleeting references in Gaines' novel to the white who own the land and who spend their time involved in leisure activities such as racing along the river in a speed boat. Gaines presents whites in the background of the novel. They are there, they exist, and they have an effect on the characters that populate Catherine Carmier. Likewise, Chandler, and other white American authors, populate their novels with African American, Mexican American, or other characters that appear only fleetingly throughout the text. The presence of these characters, as Toni Morrison argues, cannot be ignored. Morrison, in Playing in the Dark (1993), argues that "canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States" (5). by pushing "minority" groups to they margins of the texts, authors work, as Morrison continues, to define an "Americanness" that excludes those that appear only in passing. With that in mind, I want to look briefly at Chandler's novel and a couple of instances where those on the margins of American society during the 1930s appear, then disappear, while the white characters perform their duties.

When Philip Marlowe enters Eddie Mars' casino in chapter "twenty-two," he begins by describing the "Mexican orchestra" performing on stage. He states:

It was about ten-thirty when the little yellow-sashed Mexican orchestra got tired of playing a low-voiced, prettied-up rhumba that nobody was dancing to. The gourd player rubbed his finger tips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretense was as wasted as the music. Nobody was looking at them. (135)

This brief passage contains an enormous amount of information, specifically within the final four tightly constructed sentences. The musicians play; however, no one in Mars' joint listens to them. To the patrons, the orchestra remains invisible, blending into the background. Likewise, when the performers take a drink from underneath their chairs, they present an image that the people gathered to gamble away their money expect to see, Mexicans drinking tequila. However, the musicians, according to Marlowe, due this only as facade. They probably only drink "mineral water," thus countering the stereotypes of the patrons who do not even pay any attention to them. The musicians occupy a space in the background, removed from the main plot of Chandler's novel.

Another instance of marginalized characters appearing in the novel, but not in a fully fleshed out manner occurs with the Sternwood's maid. As Marlowe meets with Vivian for the first time, she finishes her drink then rings a bell, calling a servant to come and pour her another drink. Marlowe describes the maid simply by appearance. Later, the butler provides her name: Mathilda.

A maid came into the room by a side door. She was a middle-aged woman with a long yellow gentle face, a long nose, no chin, large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service. (18)

While it is not clear if the maid is African American, Asian American, or white, it is clear that she does not have a large part in the novel. She appears a few times, always being referred to by Marlowe as the maid, performs an action, then disappears. What makes this interesting to me is that the chauffeur and butler both have more pronounced, albeit still small, roles in the novel. What does the maid's removal to the background say?  Can it be seen in the same way as the Mexican orchestra that performs at Eddie Mars' club? Even if the maid is white, we still get into issues of class and standing in society, as I talked about last post.




In regards to all of this, I want to explore how Chandler's portrayal of the orchestra and the maid relate to historical facts regarding Mexican American's, African American's, and Asian American's statuses in Los Angeles during the time of the novel. I'm not sure what this would add to the discussion, especially considering I have not read any other novels by Chandler, but doing preliminary research, it looks like exploring these angles may be useful in examining characters like the ones discussed above. I am also very much interested in how this novel became a major film in 1946. Based on the subject matter in the novel, I find it fascinating that the film got made then.

To see more information of race in Chandler's oeuvre, look at  the Chandler and racism entry in A Reader's Guide to Raymond Chandler.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.