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Feb. 3rd, 2014 10:03 amSeeing Philip Seymour Hoffman's face on the same websites where people are squabbling about the Woody Allen business is giving me Doubt flashbacks.
Feb. 3rd, 2014
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Feb. 3rd, 2014 05:36 pm1. The Maltese Falcon
Like The Big Sleep in that it retrospectively impresses you with the movies' attempts at accuracy (in most regards). More helpful than The Big Sleep at erasing the image of Bogart, though. The devil/spade stuff is interesting, and fits the obsession with what we might catch from Spade's face and mannerisms if we'd wandered in while he operated. Hammett treats us as serial bystanders, basically. So the mystery is whether our hero's a hero, and if so of what kind, as I guess befits the inaugural novel of the genre. Marlowe's the progenitor of Byrne in Miller's Crossing, a sort of undercover, consequentialist samurai, but Spade isn't quite that. Everyone in his world but his naive secretary and dumb-ish cop friend turns out to be in thrall to base motivators (c. 1930 edition), and the various back-stories implicate broad stretches of the globe and history in that world. His great power is that he understands this.
I think we're supposed to understand that his numbered list of motivations at the end of the book is honest and accurate, the actual and independent reasons for his decisions, though perhaps in rough order of priority. He's a consequentialist who knows his own consequentialism is contingent - on desires as much as on principles, those distinct irrationalisms. The greatest good for the greater number becomes something stranger when not just persons' interests but those of impulses (of various strengths!) are being aggregated. Spade gives the sense, as Marlowe and Byrne more rarely do, that this isn't just an exhausting, homeless sort of life of infinite calculation, but an often amusing one, where one gets to see things, talk about people, take pride in one's ingenuity and evasions. Even evasions of one's own powerful wishes, where necessary. Hammett takes pains to make it clear that his superman feels emotions exactly where he ought to, though he suppresses or exaggerates these when necessary. He sets individual emotions aside for the good of the emotional collective at those times. The story of the man from Seattle seems key: you're going to die and you have a nature shaped by your (ultimately bodily) desires that will finally reassert itself but can be temporarily escaped from when doing so will keep those desires met more thoroughly or safely later on. Because you're still you dreams of thorough change, like the falcon presumably represents, are ultimately silly. Smaller, less risky rewards (Iva rather than Brigid) are the ones you pursue.
I think we're supposed to also believe Spade when he says that he's only able to operate outside of law/principle because he eventually turns in criminals - the interior analogue of this relationship with the police is that he can only let himself escape existing definitions of the good by promising himself to adhere to better ones whenever they appear. It's possible we're to understand that he has a legitimately satanic element, and doesn't just appear demonic to the rulebound majority, and exercises this freedom from morality in the complex dissemblings enabled by his job - he seems to enjoy hating the "punk" for example. Maybe Kafka's Quixote parable applies here: perhaps naughtiness and principle aren't just similarly irrational but in some sense commutable, of one substance, and the rational portion needs to convert them back and forth till a desirable balance is found. Or perhaps until they neutralize one another long enough to permit some saving thought. No clue how you'd go about doing any of that, though. It only works for Spade because Hammett wants it to.
In a sense Spade's a Marlowe whose employer is his larger, later self.
Like The Big Sleep in that it retrospectively impresses you with the movies' attempts at accuracy (in most regards). More helpful than The Big Sleep at erasing the image of Bogart, though. The devil/spade stuff is interesting, and fits the obsession with what we might catch from Spade's face and mannerisms if we'd wandered in while he operated. Hammett treats us as serial bystanders, basically. So the mystery is whether our hero's a hero, and if so of what kind, as I guess befits the inaugural novel of the genre. Marlowe's the progenitor of Byrne in Miller's Crossing, a sort of undercover, consequentialist samurai, but Spade isn't quite that. Everyone in his world but his naive secretary and dumb-ish cop friend turns out to be in thrall to base motivators (c. 1930 edition), and the various back-stories implicate broad stretches of the globe and history in that world. His great power is that he understands this.
I think we're supposed to understand that his numbered list of motivations at the end of the book is honest and accurate, the actual and independent reasons for his decisions, though perhaps in rough order of priority. He's a consequentialist who knows his own consequentialism is contingent - on desires as much as on principles, those distinct irrationalisms. The greatest good for the greater number becomes something stranger when not just persons' interests but those of impulses (of various strengths!) are being aggregated. Spade gives the sense, as Marlowe and Byrne more rarely do, that this isn't just an exhausting, homeless sort of life of infinite calculation, but an often amusing one, where one gets to see things, talk about people, take pride in one's ingenuity and evasions. Even evasions of one's own powerful wishes, where necessary. Hammett takes pains to make it clear that his superman feels emotions exactly where he ought to, though he suppresses or exaggerates these when necessary. He sets individual emotions aside for the good of the emotional collective at those times. The story of the man from Seattle seems key: you're going to die and you have a nature shaped by your (ultimately bodily) desires that will finally reassert itself but can be temporarily escaped from when doing so will keep those desires met more thoroughly or safely later on. Because you're still you dreams of thorough change, like the falcon presumably represents, are ultimately silly. Smaller, less risky rewards (Iva rather than Brigid) are the ones you pursue.
I think we're supposed to also believe Spade when he says that he's only able to operate outside of law/principle because he eventually turns in criminals - the interior analogue of this relationship with the police is that he can only let himself escape existing definitions of the good by promising himself to adhere to better ones whenever they appear. It's possible we're to understand that he has a legitimately satanic element, and doesn't just appear demonic to the rulebound majority, and exercises this freedom from morality in the complex dissemblings enabled by his job - he seems to enjoy hating the "punk" for example. Maybe Kafka's Quixote parable applies here: perhaps naughtiness and principle aren't just similarly irrational but in some sense commutable, of one substance, and the rational portion needs to convert them back and forth till a desirable balance is found. Or perhaps until they neutralize one another long enough to permit some saving thought. No clue how you'd go about doing any of that, though. It only works for Spade because Hammett wants it to.
In a sense Spade's a Marlowe whose employer is his larger, later self.