RARA-AVIS: to jumpstart Hammett

Frederick Zackel (fzackel@bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Mon, 24 Nov 1997 08:59:44 -0500 (EST) Dashiell Hammett was 100% medically disabled with TB when he wrote The
Maltese Falcon. His wife and his children were not allowed to live with
him. I contend he "knew" he was dying, and as a consequence his book is
about death.

The Flitcraft parable is the key. Falling beams and all. The parable
stops all the action in the novel, just as Hamlet's scene with the
gravedigger stops the action in Hamlet. Both scenes are going mano y mano
with the Grim Reaper.

Sam Spade is desperately frightened of death; like many in that position,
he now longer trusts life. He becomes obsessed with the World, the Flesh
and the Devil; they terrify him.

Women especially terrify him. He sounds like a male chauvinist pig with
Effie, but he always asks for and takes her advice. Brigit is a
manifestation of Kali, the goddess of death. Face white as bone, nails
and lips and hair crimson as blood. (See another manifestation of her in
the boat with death in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner; same
description, plus she also plays dice with Death.) It was Chance that
sent Archer up the alley instead of Sam Spade.

By rejecting her, Spade rejects the gamble with Death.

The last lines of the book shows Spade's absolute fear of Woman Who Equals
death. "He shuddered."

So, everyone on board?

Frederick Zackel
Bowling Green State U.

(P.S. Brennen was born poor, white and Irish in the "Irish Mission" of San
Francisco.)

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