Found this day in another delibitating rag called Guardian,
UK...but maybe of interest... Montois
Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
When digressions get right to the point
Chris Routledge
February 26, 2008 12:32 PM
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/02/when_digressions_get_right_to.html
Roundabout route ... Dashiell Hammett in 1951 being taken to
court accused of abetting communism
Like most readers, I often wonder what it is that makes some
books more appealing than others. It's an impossible problem
to solve definitively, but the explanation I'm finding most
persuasive this week is that part of it - possibly the
greater part - is in the digressions. Digression in writing
is risky: nobody wants to read 500 pages when 250 will do.
But in the right hands it's exhilarating.
This is especially true in the kind of writing that otherwise
gets right to the point. In fact one of the most remarkable
and arresting digressions I've ever come across is the
"Flitcraft parable", which appears about a third of the way
into Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.
By reputation Hammett is a writer of tough, pared-down prose
and ought not to be associated with digression. His detective
novels are plot-driven and fast-paced, with an A to B
momentum that barely lets up. His audience in the 1920s and
1930s, mostly the readers of pulp magazines such as Black
Mask, were not looking for philosophy when they went to the
newsstand in the morning. They did their reading for
entertainment, not enlightenment.
Yet as literary digressions go the Flitcraft parable is near
perfect: it is completely unexpected, forcefully significant
in an oblique kind of way, and beautifully formed. In the
three pages or so in which Sam Spade tells Brigid
O'Shaughnessy the story of Flitcraft, who "left his
real-estate office, in Tahoma, to go to luncheon one day and
never returned", we are presented with a glimpse of Spade's
hard-boiled world view and a little treatise on the
arbitrariness of life. Like O'Shaughnessy we are left baffled
by it.
The story of Flitcraft is a simple one. A successful
real-estate agent, with a happy family life and money in the
bank, Flitcraft steps out of the office for lunch. A beam
from a building site falls on the pavement near to him and he
is lucky to escape with his life. But instead of returning to
the office he just walks away, finally returning to the
Pacific Northwest years later when he takes a job in Spokane,
Washington under the name Charles Pierce. He remarries, and
when Spade finds him he is living a very similar sort of life
as before, but with a new wife, house, and responsibilities:
"He adjusted himself to beams falling and when no more of
them fell, he adjusted to them not falling".
The parable itself is curious enough, with its hat-tip to the
pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce, its fascination with
the ruthless lack of moral values in a man whose life is
otherwise respectable and mundane. But the mode of its
delivery is also extraordinary. Spade and O'Shaughnessy are
in Spade's apartment waiting for the arrival of Joel Cairo.
It is as if this is a digression not just for us, but for
them too. She is "more engaged with his purpose in telling
the story than with the story he told". It's almost as if she
too is wondering why the plot has paused and she has to wait,
but she is drawn in to what Spade is saying.
Hammett's digression is soon over and the plot of The Maltese
Falcon resumes. But the Flitcraft parable hangs over the rest
of the novel. The idea that anything can happen, that even
stable family men can switch at any moment, makes for a
disturbing, distrustful atmosphere. This is not a digression
in the usual sense; it is not additional information or an
interesting side-issue. The Flitcraft parable is a beam
falling onto the centre of the novel and, it turns out, the
key to its aesthetic: that everything you know and trust can
be gone "like a fist when you open your hand".
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