“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” – Marcel Proust
Literary critics and deep readers of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (this year’s Big Read book) are justifiably entranced with what has come to be called the “Flitcraft parable.” Next to the symbol and search for the falcon itself, Flitcraft’s story is the most intriguing puzzle in the novel.
Readers are jarred when suddenly reaching out from the pages of The Maltese Falcon, almost stopping the flow of the developing mystery, Sam Spade offers up the Flitcraft tale.
Briefly, the parable (read it for yourself in chapter 7, “G In the Air”) goes like this:
Flitcraft is a comfortably fixed professional, a model family man, no skeletons in the closet, no personal or business problems or tests on the horizon. He lives an acceptable and accepted life in Tacoma, Washington. On the way to lunch, a large steel beam falls from an upper story on a building construction site, just barely missing him. His escape from a random death brings Flitcraft to this belief: in the sensible ordering of his existence, “he had got out of step, not into step, with life.” Flitcraft never goes home that day; he disappears from the life he had been living.
Sam Spade traces Flitcraft down years later. He’s moved to Spokane. He’s settled down, renamed himself Charles Pierce, remarried, plays golf. It’s the Tacoma-life all over again. As Spade puts it: “I don’t think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove . . . But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
This interruption, this digression, sounds like nothing else in the book.
Here’s vintage Sam Spade dialogue: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him.” Spade speaks in a series of short punches to the solar plexus and moves on. In telling Flitcraft’s story, however, Hammett’s detective holds our attention for over three pages. By far the longest of Spade’s speeches. And the parable’s impact is to choke rather than punch. It’s not aimed at the stomach. It seeps into the night side of our being.
And the Flitcraft parable is a parable in the sense that it serves up a lesson, or some kind of truth. But unlike the “lessons” in today’s ubiquitous advice books, those offering simplistic, well-defined steps to success in everything from raising children to erasing credit card debt, the elusive truth in the Flitcraft parable is not one you can take to the bank and deposit in a “Ten Ways to Really, Really Be Very Happy” account.
Flitcraft’s truth is unsettling, not reassuring. It serves the willing reader by delving deeply into the meanings of living with ambiguity and chance while yearning for predictability.
Scholars of Hammett’s work seize on the Flitcraft story with relish. Many feel it’s the Rosetta stone to everything Hammett/Spade. And that’s well worth the brain exercise. But as Big Read readers, we can also lean forward and do our bad Sam Spade imitations, asking the experts: “Yeah, right. Flitcraft, Hammett/Spade, falling beams. If I read your damn book, what’s in it for me?”
Each reader eventually answers this question for her or himself. One thing is certain and applies to all. As readers we are readers of ourselves. We may “escape” into a book, but we choose the form and force of that escape. We may “identify” with characters, but identification comes through looking into a mirror. And we may dismiss a novel as “not real,” but that “not real” judgment comes from a gathering up of our personal experience, or the studied avoidance of the same.
So Flitcraft and the parable, too, is in ways shallow and deep, about us, the reader. As Proust puts it, readers have the unavoidable burden to be “. . . the reader of his own self.”
And could this burden be one reason why more Americans do not read powerful books? Are non-readers leery about what they may find out about themselves in the pages of such books? Are we, like Flitcraft, ready to adjust ourselves, “settle(d) back into the same groove,” and live trance like lives that seem easier, more comfortable, less demanding while we ignore the truths in the falling beams of great literary works?
Ah. Now that’s the stuff dreams, or is it nightmares, are made of.
[published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 9, 2008-- Go Here]
9 comments:
It seems to me that the message of the parable is the theme of the story -- people don't change. Not Brigid, not Sam, not Lt. Dundy, not even, after 17 years, the fat man -- who will continue his quest for the Maltese Falcon.
I think your interpretation of Flitcraft makes a lot of sense. It nicely fits in with that very short interlude when Sam comes back to the office and an entirely new client is waiting to see Sam. He takes the 50 bucks retainer and out goes the client. So Hammett writes into this brief scene an inkling of Sam's "adjustment" to the "beams" falling all around him. The falcon caper will end and it will be back to business as usual.
And isn't there a bigger question being begged here? Is this anyway to live our lives?
Possibly the only way -- which also may have been part of the message in the Flitcraft parable.
“Possibly the only way -- which also may have been part of the message in the Flitcraft parable.”
Your “Possibly” would seem to open doors to alternative responses. I’m not a fan of Sam Spade the character just because of his willingness to “adjust” and return to the same groove in his personal and professional life. A groove as you can see from my most recent post I find distressing.
I went back and read your previous post. I agree with you. My "possibly the only way" statement was in reference to Sam's take on life -- his constant justification for his 'machismo' code, which I think really comes through in his repeated refrain to Brigid, "I won't play the sap for you."
But for us in Spokane, the question has deeper implications that few outsiders ever ponder: why Spokane? Check out http://www.inlander.com/topstory/290998944020752.php for a local, but nationally recognized, author's take on the subject.
Great piece on Hammett and the Spokane/Flitcraft connection. So, fictionqueen, Spokane being all walled in that way, do people there spend more time reading than the rest of the country? Sounds great to me.
Hammett's Pinkerton experience is a real mystery to me. I know he needed the money, but it just doesn't fit with his social conscience and activism of his later years. Ye gads, the guy joined the CP and worked hard for the voting rights of African Americans living in the segregated South!
There’s a lot to discuss. Tacoma History, Stan’s graphic, C. S. Peirce and abduction in reasoning, Hammett’s sobering Flitcraft moment and much more.
Actually, the people do change, but don’t remain changed. I’m pretty sure that’s what you meant. In fact, Hammett’s Flitcraft moment seems to have motivated him to change (permanently) into the genre establishing leader of hard boiled detective fiction and, eventually through John Huston’s film interpretation, of film noir.
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