“As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”: Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem

Abstract

In developing the hard-boiled style, through his iconic Philip Marlowe series, Raymond Chandler hoped to redeem detective fiction from being, as he believed it, “a cheap, shoddy, utterly lost kind of writing” and move it into the realms of “something that intellectuals claw one another over”. A key part of that style is what Jonathan Lethem has termed Chandler’s “vernacular surrealism”. In particular, animal imagery abounds in his work. From the opening of The Big Sleep (1939), where Marlowe encounters “trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs”, to his animalistic femme fatales, animal figuration allows Chandler to skewer his subject, with linguistic economy and wit. In Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), however, Chandler’s metaphorical, non-present animals are actualised. Taking for his epigraph one of Chandler’s characteristic wisecracks from the late novel Playback (1958)—“the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”— the dystopian society of Lethem’s hybrid noir-sci-fi is home to “evolved” animals who have been genetically developed to act like humans, but who are treated like second-class citizens, including the detective’s nemesis, the kangaroo-gangster, Joey Castle. Looking at Lethem’s appreciative pastiche of Chandler’s hardboiled style, which allows him to build his dystopian world with sharp and disorienting brevity, this chapter explores the disruptive function of Lethem’s literal animals in the novel’s aggressively policed present, where citizens are kept in a state of government-sanctioned amnesia. Drawing together these strands on animetaphor and memory, I argue that the novel unsettles the assumption that humans constitute an evolutionary pinnacle, supporting Deborah Bird Rose’s contention that noir—with its focus on self-destructive protagonists and its blurring of the lines between criminal and victim—is an exemplary genre for criticising the problems of the Anthropocene.