Making Literature of It

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Making Literature of It

ammett nd igh ulture

Mark McGurl

Whatis the thing in itself? We shall not reach the thing in itselfuntil our thinkinghasfirst reachedthe thingas a thing.

Martin Heidegger, TheThing

Thethingin itselffolded itself up insideitself likeyou might old a

thing up to be anotherthing which s that thinginside in that thing.

GertrudeStein, Portraits andRepetition

Thenyou think the dingusis worth two million?

Sam Spade, TheMaltese Falcon

1. Commerce andTheology

It is often argued that culture in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries begins to be dispersed to either side of

a Great Divide between modernism and mass culture, highculture and low, and though there are many different accounts

of the form and function of the objects divided in this way, the

values they embody or pursue are normally assumed to be

strictly opposed. For Andreas Huyssen, most prominently,modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of

exclusion of mass culture, to which it showed obsessive hos-

tility (vii; see also Jameson 207). Lawrence Levine, similarly,

speaking to the specifically American context, describes how inthe late nineteenth century an elite highbrow culture, reactingto the shock of mass immigration, began to define itself in oppo-sition to the lowbrow culture of the unruly multitude. What

had been a rich shared public culture (9) was replaced, he ar-

gues, by a view of culture that increasingly excluded any com-

merce between the sacred art of the elite and the profane enter-

tainments of the mass.



AmericanLiteraryHistory 703

Certain period accounts of the conditions of culture, how-

ever, complicate these later accounts even as they, to a degree,confirm them. Take, for instance, Van Wyck Brooks's 1915 dis-

cussion on 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow ' (1-19), in which the

analysis of this peculiarlyAmerican form of the high/low opposi-tion makes its first sustained appearance. Brooks argues that the

cultural divide these terms signify, far from a recent occurrence,has been a feature of American life since its very beginnings.Unable to merge the steep, icy and pinnacled (6) theology of

Jonathan Edwards with the civic commercialism of BenjaminFranklin, [h]umannature itself in America has ever since ex-

isted on two irreconcilableplanes, the plane of stark intellectu-

ality and the plane of stark business (15). For Brooks the dis-

tinction between high and low is not tied, as in Levine'saccount,to specific social groups. It is a division within the American

mind as a whole, and it is a problembecause it has left the task

of government entirely, if covertly, in the hands of commerce.

Writing 12 years later, T. S. Eliot claimed, as recent critics do,that the divergence of high and low narrative forms occurred in

the early twentieth century, the result of a dissociation of the

elements of the old three-volume melodramatic novel into the

various types of the moder 300-page novel. But, as Eliot's use

of the term dissociation makes clear, the distinction of genrebetween such-and-such a profound 'psychological' novel of to-

day and such-and-such a masterly 'detective' novel of today

(409; see also Chinitz) is not a promising sign of the seriousness

of the post-Jamesiannovelist but lamentableevidence of cultural

ill health.

Though the interpretivemodels of Huyssen or Levinemightsucceed in absorbing this anomaly, what remains surprisingabout earlier accounts of the Great Divide, from our perspective,is their effort to locate this cultural division outside the discourse

of modernism itself. For Brooks and Eliot, at least, the produc-tion of a Great Divide is not an aspiration but an inheritance, a

sort of curse. While in retrospect this distinction may appear a

suspiciouslymodest denial of modernism'sresponsibilityfor,and

interestin, producing

culturaldivision,

itmight profit

us to lin-

ger briefly on this aspect of its self-understanding.This will al-

low us to recover an important moment in the dialectic of early-

twentieth-century modernism that has, since the consolidation

and self-promotion of postmodernism as a discourse of recoveryfrom modernist elitism, received little attention; it will also allow

us to draw renewed attention to the intimacy between modern-

ism's preoccupation with literary form-in particular with the

text's status as a thing, or object-and the materialistic mass



704 Hammett ndHighCulture

culture it purportedly rejected.' The following pages read an im-

portant strand of American modernism not as aspiring to pro-duce a Great Divide between high and low-that is, to distance

itself from mass culture-but as responding to a divide that

seemed to have a vestigially religious significance.This response to a divide between high and low, between

theology and civic commercialism, simultaneouslyintensifies the

text's claims to both materiality and spirituality, as thoughthe two might thus be made to signify the same thing. A model

for this approach can be found in Edgar Allan Poe's detective

fiction. Poe was deeply embedded in the mass culture of the mid

nineteenthcentury;however, t is not an accident, I think, that he

became theguiding spirit

of FrenchSymbolism,

whoseapparenthostility to unholy mass culture is so striking (see Jonathan El-

mer'sReading at the Social Limit. Affect, Mass Culture,and Ed-

gar Allan Poe [1995]).Though the detective story serves for Eliot

as an emblem of the contemporary low genre, it has functioned

under this guise as a privileged site in modem culture for the

negotiation of the high and low, especially when these terms

mark an opposition between theology and civic practicality,as

they do for Brooks. To the degree that the detective genre is de-

fined by its engagement with policing, it partakes of the largerdiscursive project of realist narrative of making individuals ac-

countable to social norms and to the law, as D. A. Miller has

shown in The Novel and the Police (1988). One might howeverbalance this view with that of Gertrude Stein, who in the essayWhat Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them

(1936) speaks of the asocial masterpiece and the detective storyin virtually the same breath:

In real life people are interestedin the crime more than theyare in detection . . . but in the story it is the detection that

holds the interest, . . . it is another function that has verylittle to do with human nature that makes the detection in-

teresting. And so always it is true that the master-piecehas

nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to

do ... with a thing in itself and not in relation. The momentit is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody canfeel and know it and it is not a master-piece. (149)

This version of the detective story,which turns the genre inward,instead of to the outward production of common knowledge,runsdirectlycounter to policing, or what Stein calls governing,which has completely to do with identity but has nothing to do



AmericanLiterary History 705

withmaster-pieces 153).For Stein the philosophicalpurityof

detective iction serves God, not Mammon. ndeed,her ac-count can be seen to linkdetective iction to the long traditionof the Christianmystery,whichaddresses he unbridgeable is-tance of God from humannature. The detectivestory genrethus could be said to inhabitthe verybreachbetweenthe highand low,the theologicaland the practicaldescribedby Brooks.If for Brooksthe problemwith poetry n his dividednationisthat it is hiddenaway, oo inaccessible, oo intangible, oo un-real in fact everto be brought nto the open (15), Poe'spur-loined letterrespondsratherprecisely o thisproblemof intangi-bilityandinvisibility.Turnednsideout andhidden n plainview,Poe's etteradmits, ndeedasserts, ts presenceas a physicalob-

ject in social space.At the same time, it suggeststhat a text'shigher ruth s not available n its surfaceas empirical,or com-

mon, knowledge.In this way,Poe's text offers a model of thesocial relationsof a certainkind of modernist ext. Advertisingboth its physicalavailability nd its spiritualdifficulty,his textseeks to serve God and Mammon at once.

This search,however,does not necessarily ucceed,as weshall see in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930),which recalls ThePurloinedLetter 1845)-as well as subse-

quent crimenovels uchas NathanielHawthorne'sTheScarletLetter 1850),WilkieCollins'sTheMoonstone1868),andHenryJames'sThe GoldenBowl(1904)-in

proposinga characteristi-

cally symbolistanalogybetweenan objectin the novel and the

objectthat is the novel itself.2Thisrecursivegesture,whichen-foldsa versionof the textin the social world t imagines, nablesthe text'sinterrogation f its own social function. As a result,Hammettultimately ecognizeshis failure o merge hehighand

low,and this sense of failure s, as we shallsee, important.3ButHammett'sdeep involvementwith these problems s confirmednot only by the ambiguousnatureof his chosengenrebut also

by his peculiarstatuswithrespect o early-twentieth-centuryit-

erary nstitutions,whosecomplexityhas not, I think,been ade-

quatelyaddressed.For whileHammett's areerbegins nthepulp

serials,most

notablyn Black

Mask,it takeshim rather

quicklyinto the literary nstitutionsof the smart et, where his workfunctionsnot so much to exemplify he low as to representand

interrogatehe mechanismsof distinction hat generate his ab-

ject category n the firstplace.Admiredby suchas AndreGide,AndreMalraux,and Stein,Hammett's ictionechoes the more

obviouslyelite modernismwhose central texts he appreciatedand discussedevenas he continued o sell his workto the pulp

Admiredbysuch as

Andre Gide,Andre

Malraux, and Stein,Hammetts fiction echoes

the more obviouslyelite

modernismwhosecentral

texts he appreciatedand

discussed evenas he

continued to sell his work

to thepulp audience. Hiswork shows us both what

modernism ooks like to

mass culture and what

mass culturelooks like to

modernism,without

canceling the relative

autonomy of these two

discourses.



706 Hammett and High Culture

audience. His work shows us both what modernism looks like to

mass culture and what mass culture looks like to modernism,without canceling the relativeautonomy of these two discourses.

Hammett'sown sense of the complexity of his position and

his frank aspiration to produce high art emerges in a letter he

wrote to Blanche Knopf upon being taken up by this highly re-

spected publisher in 1928, after six years of publishing in the

pulps: I'm one of the few ... people moderately literate who

take the detective story seriously.I don't mean that I necessarilytake my own or anybody else's seriously-but the detective storyas a form. Some day some body's going to make 'literature'of it,.. and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes, however slight the

evidentjustification may

be(qtd.

in Johnson72).

To bepub-lished by Knopf was for Hammett a badge of distinction, a sign

that his work had somewhat departed the grubby milieu of the

serials where his sleuth, as he once put it, had degenerated nto

a meal-ticket (qtd. in Johnson 53). Here the fragmentshe pub-lished in pulp would be bound together and presented whole bya publisher as famous for the beauty and high production values

of its books as for its importation of serious European modern-

ism into America.4 Hammett would now rub shoulders with the

likes of Andre Gide, whose novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs(1925)

Knopf had published in 1927 as The Counterfeiters.For his partGide would claim, to Hammett's satisfaction, that the greatestAmerican

writersof

the time were William Faulkner and Ham-mett (Johnson 12).Hammett's statement of high purpose to Blanche Knopf,

however, suggests the inadequacy of the idea either that Ham-

mett's work unambiguously partakes of literature or that, inthe manner of our recent postmodernist populism, Hammett

simply saw through the insidious Great Divide. The distinctionbetween high and low retains an obvious force, where the rela-

tion of Hammett's actual work to an ideal form of the detec-tive story is managed in the affective register of seriousness.

My contention here, pressing this idea further,will be that the

problem of Hammett's ambiguous place in early-twentieth-

centuryculturalhierarchies,which he hoped to overcome by tak-ing his genre seriously,paradoxicallyreveals itself in his habitual

lack of seriousness with respect to the ontological status of hisown representations.In this he echoes the critique of stable, or

popular, symbolism by the rigorously hermetic Symbolists, and

by their self-conscious heirs such as Eliot.

Hammett'sproblemwith representationbecomes explicit atthe very end of his career. In the penultimate paragraph of theunfinished novel Tulip (1952), the Hammett-like narrator






with writing, perhaps it emphasizes, by associating those that do

with portable chairs, how curious Hammett thought the thingsof writing to be.

For thing is what dingus,related by way of Dutch to the

German Ding, more or less means. Like whatchamacallit,thing-

amajig, gizmo, and doodad, dingus acts as a linguistic place-holder, a way of noting the thingly quality of some thing whose

adequate designation is unknown, avoided, or caught on the tipof the tongue. At the same time, saying dingus rather than

simply thing makes fun of the process of naming, feigns catch-

ing it mid-stride, before thing and noun are fused: once upon a

time, dingus seems to say, words like pot-holder or parrot or

plasma,or

penor

pencilor

paper, mayhave sounded

equallyawkward. Likegizmo, however,dinguscalls attention as much to

the peculiarity of the thing not named as to the speaker'sinabil-

ity to name it. Dingus is not merely a place-holder or parody of

naming, but the beginnings of a bemused or a mildly contemptu-ous specification.

For instance when Hammett, in correspondence with his

editor at Knopf, said of his recentlyrevised novel TheDain Curse

thedingus is still undoubtedly rathercomplicated (qtd. in Lay-man 103), he no doubt had the words noveland book at his com-

mand. By recourse to the phallic diminutive dingus, he diffi-

dently deprived the thing he had just revised of a small portion

of its dignity.But what for Hammett makes a short story or novelor black falcon a dingus?These literarydinguses share a proxim-ity, for Hammett, to the problem of conceiving the artifact he

produces as one thing at all. In other words, dingus is complica-tion, in the root sense of thing as the product of combination orof a folding together. Insofar as an artifact is seen as a plural-

ity, it becomes difficult for Hammett to think of it as a thingafter all, for he will trouble the movement-e pluribusunum-in

which what is conceivable as a number of things is also conceiv-

able as one thing. Calling his literaryartifact a dingus, hen, at

once draws attention to and questions the artifact's status as anindividual thing.

Take, for instance, The Dain Curse. It had originally beenpublished serially in four issues of Black Mask and, accordingto Knopf editor Harry Block, still fell too definitely into three

sections as a novel (qtd. in Johnson 74). These three sections nodoubt endure as the three Parts of the published book-thefirst two corresponding more or less to the first two magazinesegments, the last being a combination of the last two magazine




segments. Still bearing the traces of its serial origins, it needed,Block thought, a connecting thread (qtd. in Johnson 74).

Block's aspirationsfor TheDain Curse are familiarenough:a demand for unity in any artistic project has been one of the

more common demands of prescriptive aesthetics. In the case

of The Dain Curse,however,the editor's prescription of unity is

thematized in the central question driving the novel, namely,whether the theory that there [is] some connecting link (39)in a number of murders-note the similarity between connect-

ing link and Block's connectingthread -will hold up to scru-

tiny.Hammett'sunnamed detective the Continental Op, who has

stopped believing in accidents (138), thinks it will, and the

questionthen becomes what

connectinglink he will uncover.

The Dain curse is adduced by severalcharactersto explain as

supernatural the common source of a number of murders that

occur in the vicinity of Gabrielle Leggett, whose mother was

a Dain. The Continental Op sets himself the task of finding a

more tangible, logical andjailableanswer than any curse (188),

namely, a human being, one body and one mind with a sys-tem that he likes, and sticks to (169).

This one mind, as it turns out, belongs to Hugh Fitz-

stephen, a novelist who looks conspicuously like Hammett did.

Such coy self-reflexivitysuggests a familiar analogy between the

author who presides over his created world, endowing it with

coherent intention, and the will of God Himself. That the answerto the question Whodunit? in TheDain Curse s the author does,

however,reinforcethe notion that the novel interrogatesthe pos-

sibility of its own unity. Form and theme converge in The Dain

Curse, since the potential unity the novel ponders is conspicu-

ously its own. Its possibility hinges on the ability to map to a

single person the novel's discrete parts-conceivable now either

formally as sections of the book or thematically as its numer-

ous murders. Appropriately enough, this person is both a mur-

derer and a novelist. When at the end of part 1 the Op says we

[at the Agency] wrote Discontinued at the bottom of the Leggettrecord (66), the question of continuity that would bother Block

is inscribed, indeed italicized, in the pages of the novel itself.When a few sentences later the Op is told that the Leggett mat-

ter is active again (67) because someone else has been murdered,this announces at once the continuation of the Leggett record,the continuation of the novel The Dain Curse,and the renewedsearch for the single person who forces both of these narratives

onward.




But can either the Op, or the text itself, find this single per-son? A conversation between the Op and the novelist Fitz-

stephen-the former concerned with realities,the latter with rep-

resentations-suggests that discovering this unity will be

difficult:

Are you-who [as a detective] make your living snoop-

ing-sneering at my curiosity about people and my at-

tempts to satisfy it?

We'redifferent, I said. I do mine with the object of

putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as

much as I should.

That's not different, he said. I do mine with the ob-

ject of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, thoughnot as much as I should.

Yeah,but what good does that do?

God knows. What good does putting them in jaildo?

Relieves congestion, I said. Put enough people in

jail and cities wouldn't have trafficproblems. 22)

For all the apparent similarities between the snooping detec-

tive and the curious novelist, then, putting people in books

only makes flesh into representationswhich, as the Op would say,are not

jailable.So even if the

Opsucceeds in

jailingthe

singlebody responsible for the murders, the novel itself only ambigu-

ously succeeds in locating the individual author/murderer that

will guarantee its own unity.The convergenceof the formal and the thematic in TheDain

Curse s held, that is, in a state of incompletion. Fitzstephen maybe the origin of the murders in the book, but as he tells the Op,in court the numberof my crimes will be to my advantage, on

the theory that nobody but a lunatic could have committed so

many.And won't they be many? I'll produce crimes and crimes,

dating from the cradle (220). The Op (to Fitzstephen's dismay)does in fact think the novelist is a lunatic. The sheer number of

the novelist's crimes makes the category of intentionality uselessfor the Op, and the body that is sent to the prison-psychiatric

hospital will not have the status of a responsible, intending sub-

ject. The (moral) unconsciousness implied by Fitzstephen's in-

sanity,then, mirrorshis necessary unconsciousness of the formal

problemsin the novel of which he is a part. Only a representationof an author, he may not be held responsible for resolving its

formal pluralities.

Beyond the Op's grasp, the real author is present in the








Hammett once averred that the language of the street is in fact

not only excessively complicated and repetitious, but almost

purposeless in its lack of coherence, while [s]implicityand clar-

ity ... are the most elusive and difficult of literary accomplish-ments (qtd. in Johnson 54-55; see also Marling 116-18). Ham-

mett suggests here that he intended the sparseness of his proseto resist the incoherence of the man on the street for whom he

nonetheless wrote. Similarly, producing many characters repre-sents the many, while murdering them symbolically resists the

imposition of a social relation between writer and audience. In

this construction the purer realm of literature s not so much

realized in the work as produced as the work's timeless negative

image, an uninhabited, asocial space.I believe we should read the pursuit of the graillikestatuette

in The Maltese Falcon, an object centuries old but now lost, in

this context. For the falcon's very pricelessness suggests that its

value, if realized, would transcend the logic of exchange. When

Sam Spade asks Gutman what the maximum value of the

dingus might be, Gutman refuses to guess : You'd think me

crazy. I don't know. There's no telling how high it could go, sir,and that's the one and only truth about it (130). It is probablyno accident that the novel that produces an image of timeless

value is precisely the novel of Hammett's upon which literary

history begins, though tentatively,to confer the status of litera-

ture. The Maltese Falcon hasrelatively

fewcharacters,

and its

small number of murders all occur offstage, so to speak. Its for-

mal unity, as one biographer puts it, [makes]no concession to

magazine publication (Layman 107) and, like that of the grailitself, resists periodicity as such, or timely social history.7The

Maltese Falcon as novel aspiresto the absolutevalue, or unity, of

the Maltese Falcon as object.8But, notoriously, the object actually acquired in the novel

turns out to be a fake, not the real thing. And this suggests, first,that the falcon remainsmerely a commodity, trapped in the logicof commodity fetishism as described by Marx. In this familiar

account the commodity provokes, but never truly satisfies, a de-

sire for the existential plenitude it represents.Thus Spade says toGutman, demanding payment for his services even though the

falcon has turned out to be fake: Yougot your dingus. It'syourhard luck, not mine, that it wasn't what you wanted (203). This

counterfeit continues Hammett's distinction between the col-

ored bubbles he produces in his fiction and the transcendental

thing to which he aspires, and which no accumulation of riches

won by his writing can buy for him.9 The sarcasm Hammett

heaps upon the novelist Fitzstephen's Holy Grail Cult in The




Dain Cursecould in this context be read as a measure of his sense

that the time of a legitimate theological culture has passed andthat the obvious religious preoccupations of his own work as a

novelist can only unfold in the similarly debased form of the

dingus.1

Predictably,then, The Maltese Falcon, a study in narrative

economy, ultimately collapses back into the multiplicity so

evident in the earlier novels. When the treacherous Brigid

O'Shaughnessy begs Sam Spade to admit that he loves her, he

does so, but only to state the impotence of his love in the face of

the sheer multiplicity of practical reasons she should be hanged,which Spade proceeds to list. His seventh reason is a question of

odds,since he does not even like the idea of

thinkingthat there

might be one chance in a hundred that he is being played ...

for a sucker. His last reason is the eighth-but that's

enough.... Maybe some of them are important. I won't argueabout that. But look at the numberof them (214).

This confession of failure to find the One is precisely what

in retrospect will make Hammett appear so much the shadow

modernist, the producerof literature. ndeed, even as for Ham-

mett access to high-cultureinstitutions meant the unification of

his serial fragmentsin the form of the beautiful Knopf book, for

T. S. Eliot the hermetic heap of broken images (38) of The

Waste Land (1922) had become the properform of modern po-

etry.In the context of elite modernism, that is, something like thechaos of Hammett'sfirst two novels, so bothersome to his editors

and critics, will be revalued as a sign of modernism's critiqueof romantic unities and traditional forms. Without denying the

obvious differences between the two texts, then, we can see the

degree to which protocols of readingdeterminewhat is normallyassertedto be a quality inherent in the object itself. In Eliot's case

the high-culture reader could be asked to supply, as an erudite

hermeneut, the spectral unity of The Waste Land 'sfragments.The comparatively low Hammett, speaking to the many, was

requiredto make sense.

Inspired,he tells us, by his readingof Jessie Weston'sanaly-

sis in From Ritual to Romanceof the grail legend, which Westonargues had its origins in ancient rites surrounding the harvest,Eliot figuresLondon life in TheWaste Land as a bleak urban

desert, deprived of spiritual nourishment. In the Unreal City of

his poem, Acrowd flowed over the London Bridge, so many,/ I

had not thought death had undone so many (39)-an imagethat in a sense looks forward to the carnage, the red harvest,of the many characters of Personville. And while Hammett de-

clined to pursue the project of Christian cultural renewal that




Eliot would take up in lateryears, Lillian Hellman gives evidence

that Hammett was reading The Waste Land around the timehe wrote The Maltese Falcon (we know as well that Eliot was a

fan of low detective fiction). Both works make conspicuoususe of the timeless value of the Holy Grail as a measure of the

inauthenticity of the merely representational culture in which

they areproduced and which in turn producesthem, not as singleartifacts able to do work of God and Mammon at once but as

two seemingly different kinds of object.1'In later years, it is true, Eliot became less concerned to

champion the necessary pleasures of the popular, as he had in

the essay Wilkie Collins and Dickens -less concerned to figurethe dissociation of the high and low as the unfortunate ruptureof a single thing. Increasingly, he became the impassioned

spokesman for elite culture that he is now remembered to have

been. The cultural-hierarchicalcomplexities his later careerpres-ents are worth pondering, however, since even as he began to

speak in the unambiguous accents of privilege he was raised to

the status of popular modernist icon, departing the rarefiedmi-

lieu of the little magazines to appear, in 1950, on the cover of

Time. No one thinks of me as a poet any more, Eliot would

lament, but as a celebrity (qtd. in Gordon 192).This ironyis in

many ways reciprocal to that in the career of the low modernist

Hammett, the self-appointed beacon of literature flashingfrom the mire of the social mass.

Perhapswe could

say,then,that

in the convergence of Eliot and Hammett-each lamenting the

absence of the grail, the cure for a divided culture-we begin to

see, if not finally to solve, the truemysteryof the relation of mass

culture to modernism.

Notes

1. Modernistnovelists n particular, s the occasionalbest-seller tatusof

suchasF ScottFitzgerald,ErnestHemingway,ndevenGertrude teinattests,never ost sightof thisgenre'sraditionalntimacywiththeidea,if not alwaysthe fact, of the mass audience.On the cultural-institutionalpecificityof the

modernistnovel,see Berman41-42.

2. Forphilosophicalmplications f symbolist elf-inclusion,ee Irwin.

3. Thepervasivenessf modernism'senseof failure nmerginghehighand

low hasno doubtencouraged ostmodernismo rewrite his failureasmodern-ism'saspiration.

4. I liked he look of those ... books, WillaCatherwouldwrite,explainingwhyshebegan o publishwithKnopf. Every ublisher owadaysries o make




his books look interesting (jacket, cover, type, make-up), but... it was Alfred

Knopf who set the fashion (10). This fashion became widespread enough thathistorians of the publishing industry now refer to the late 1920s and '30s as a

golden age of the American book.

5. By contrast Leaviswould champion the highbrownovelist, who, if he 'cre-

ates' character at all[,] is apt to produce personalities that do not obey the liter-

ary agent's rule ('The principal characters must be likeable. They must be hu-

man'), that do not lend themselves to [such] fantas[ies of friendship] (60).

6. Two other titles Hammett pondered for what eventually became Red Har-

vest- The Seventeenth Murder and Murder Plus -would have indicated

the mathematical sublimity of this bloody project.

7. About high literature's resistance to time, Gertrude Stein observes that

the word timely as used in our speech is very interesting but you can any onecan see that it has nothing to do with a master-piece.... The word timely tells

that master-pieces have nothing to do with time (153).

8. In The Maltese Falcon Hammett for the first time in his career uses third

person narration, which allows Hammett to present his named detective, Sam

Spade, as a visible body, an object. Thus are we told that the steep, rounded

slope of [Spade's]shoulders made his body seem almost conical-no broader

than it was thick (4), which suggests the ontological intimacy of the objectthat Samuel Spade is, the object that he as an author-figure pursues, and the

object, in this case named after an object, which is the novel itself. The novel's

quest, no less than Gide's in The Counterfeiters o include its own authorship,is thus a quest for the reconstituted unity of author and book in the transcen-

dental object that Stein describes as serving God: Now serving god for a writer

who is writing is writing anything directly,it makes no difference what it is butit must be direct, the relation between the thing done and the doer must be

direct. In this way there is completion (38-39).

9. On these grounds I would dispute James Naremore's claim that Hammett

managed to reconcile some of the deepest contradictions in his culture (49).

10. Thus Hammett traces a constitutive lack at the center of individual iden-

tity-like that in the account of JacquesLacan-to its origins in the social and

historical realm, where in dialectical turn it is seen to produce the constitutive

discrepancy internal to the individual representation. In this Hammett appears

precursive, in some respects of the Marxism of FredricJameson, who similarlyreads modern culture as a sort of fall into market relations (see Jameson 285).

11. The transposition of the high/low division from the Americanmind tothe realm of objects themselves is perhaps the most important and ultimately

disabling legacy of modernism's failure to merge the high and low in a single

object. As John Guillory, following Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrates in Cultural

Capital: The Problem of Library Canon Formation (1993), what we mean by

highness is best understood not as a quality of certain objects but as a privi-

leged relation to knowledge. The modernist texts I have been examining here

had the virtue at least of partly recognizing this fact, though they tended to

understand it not as an outrage but as an opportunity: an opportunity to pro-duce social distinctions within the common space of mass culture.



American Literary History 717

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