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Rereading Chandler's 'The Big Sleep'
Aug. 7th, 2014 11:40 pmIt's been ten years since I read The Big Sleep for the first time. What strikes me is the anachronisms--not in the original story, but in my recollections of the story vs. how it hits me now.
I became politically aware in the Reagan era, and I used to think that the 80's would be looked back on as a decade where the culture changed as much as in the 60's. This was so wrong. There were no watershed lines where deep ideas fundamentally changed in the 80's. In fact, I've grown to appreciate how much things were still in flux when I was an anklebiter in the 70's, that a healthy portion of the truths I cut my teeth on were in fact revolutionary for many of the humans who were already here.
We're in the midst of that kind of cultural change right now. I know, because when I read this 1939 novel in 2004, some of the lenses I was looking through have been discarded, updated, rotated and flipped like a fucking optometrist's been rearranging the optics. Some of it is that I have ten more years of life under my belt, and some of that's been spent writing. But culturally, I'm looking across the valley from a different hill.
I'm seeing more of what's going on in the story. I'm also seeing some of the deep beliefs and truths in that culture that pen the story in, give it shape, compel the characters, and are also, in nascent cynical breezy form, being sketched and examined by Chandler. There are seeds in this of the time I'm in now, ideas either timeless or back in fashion, but on the main it feels more like a historical piece at age 75 than it did at 65.
It sounds ridiculous to say, but I can't help thinking about how the Kiddo views her world, at almost eight years in, and realizing how many assumptions and broken truths are in this novel that you'd have to explain to fully grok character motivation.
Maybe I'm just floored to realize that stories I used to take in without noticing now require mental stretching to process, because the culture of my childhood has become dated to the point of needing footnotes. It's like when I realized that 'adulthood' no longer carried the pervasive note of cigarette smoke it did when even nonsmokers had to waft through clouds of it in every public space and most private ones. The day comes closer when I too will mortally embarrass my descendants with anachronistic biases and neon flashing signs that I grew up in the last fucking century.
And so, I toddle off to bed.
I became politically aware in the Reagan era, and I used to think that the 80's would be looked back on as a decade where the culture changed as much as in the 60's. This was so wrong. There were no watershed lines where deep ideas fundamentally changed in the 80's. In fact, I've grown to appreciate how much things were still in flux when I was an anklebiter in the 70's, that a healthy portion of the truths I cut my teeth on were in fact revolutionary for many of the humans who were already here.
We're in the midst of that kind of cultural change right now. I know, because when I read this 1939 novel in 2004, some of the lenses I was looking through have been discarded, updated, rotated and flipped like a fucking optometrist's been rearranging the optics. Some of it is that I have ten more years of life under my belt, and some of that's been spent writing. But culturally, I'm looking across the valley from a different hill.
I'm seeing more of what's going on in the story. I'm also seeing some of the deep beliefs and truths in that culture that pen the story in, give it shape, compel the characters, and are also, in nascent cynical breezy form, being sketched and examined by Chandler. There are seeds in this of the time I'm in now, ideas either timeless or back in fashion, but on the main it feels more like a historical piece at age 75 than it did at 65.
It sounds ridiculous to say, but I can't help thinking about how the Kiddo views her world, at almost eight years in, and realizing how many assumptions and broken truths are in this novel that you'd have to explain to fully grok character motivation.
Maybe I'm just floored to realize that stories I used to take in without noticing now require mental stretching to process, because the culture of my childhood has become dated to the point of needing footnotes. It's like when I realized that 'adulthood' no longer carried the pervasive note of cigarette smoke it did when even nonsmokers had to waft through clouds of it in every public space and most private ones. The day comes closer when I too will mortally embarrass my descendants with anachronistic biases and neon flashing signs that I grew up in the last fucking century.
And so, I toddle off to bed.
