Everything I have said so far, however, suggests the necessity of thinking these formal peculiarities in Chandler according to some scheme that is capable of flexing dualisms while remaining deeply suspicious of them, and that programmatically avoids the attribution of any a priori content to terms hitherto implicitly predefined by such traditional oppositions as subject and object or nature and culture. This is, as is well known, the very programme of Heidegger’s philosophical revolution, and I hope it will not be taken as an ideological endorsement of this particular philosophy when I suggest that its speculative machinery — particularly as evidenced in The Origins of the Work of Art — may well turn out to offer a theoretical solution to some of the problems posed by Chandler’s narrative structures. The juxtaposition of the detective story novelist and the Central European philosopher—sage — rendered even more incongruous by the palpable high-cultural conservatism of Heidegger himself, and his more general suspicion of modernity and technology as such, let alone of formal and aesthetic reproducibility - may be justified, from a different angle, by the way in which the philosophers aesthetic proposition assimilates in advance the act of poetic inauguration he wishes to think to other forms of the inaugural or the originative: to the philosophical itself, for example, which reopens the question of Being; or to the religious; or to the political, in which a new type of society and new social relations find themselves - from Romulus to Lenin - instituted in what can only be described as a revolutionary act and break. Although Los Angeles lacks any radical legendary foundational act of this kind, the historical novelty of its structure — which has so often been transferred to Chandler, as the writer equally often considered to be that city's epic poet — may encourage us to consider the relevance of Heidegger's argument which, to be sure, mobilizes the far more classical texts of the Greek temple and the more explosive modernity of Van Gogh's oil painting. Any attempt to adapt narrative as such to Heidegger’s scheme would seem, however, to do it violence at the same time as (no matter how classical the narrative in question) it would require a good deal or analytical and interpretive ingenuity.

For the terms of Heidegger’s aesthetic - which seeks, as we shall see, to include and transcend space as such - are still expressed in a spatial metaphor that tends to immobilize them, to impose on them a kind of static condition that may initially make them seem more suited to the visual arts and architecture (something his own examples, as we have seen, do nothing to overcome). Indeed, he predicates the work of art (and, by implication only, the other inaugural acts I have enumerated) as emerging from a gap or rift between World and Earth. I will of course attempt to name this gap or rift in other ways and with codes quite unrelated to these, but it is initially clear, none the less, that such language continues to figure incommensurability on the model of the mountain crevice, the glacial crack or fissure, the unbridgeable chasm or canyon between plateaux that can no longer be reunited or even recombined in the unity of a single thought: the world of Fawn Lake as it were, versus the world of Altair Street in Bay City. But this is not yet a satisfactory way or reformulating the Heideggerian 'gap', since in its initial version both sides of the tension seemed to be given to us in the terms of one, the Earth, while in our translation it is the opposite term, World, which serves this same function.

Pp. 47-8

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