PARTISAN REVIEW
369
he adjusted himself to their not falling.' .. End of parable. Brigid of
course understands nothing of this, as Spade doubtless knew before–
hand. Yet what he has been telling her has
to
do with the forces and
beliefs and con tingencies that guide his conduct and supply a structure
to his apparently enigmatic behavior.
To begin with, we may note that such a sustained passage is not
the kind of thing we ordinarily expect in a detective story or novel
about crime. That it is there, and that comparable passages occur in all
of Hammett's best work, clearly suggests the kind of transformation
that Hammett was performing on this popular genre of writing. The
transformation was in the direction of literature. And what the passage
in question is about among other things is the ethical irrationality of
existence, the eth ical unintelligibility of the world. For Flitcraft the
falling beam " 'had taken the lid off life and let him look at the
works.' .. The works are that life is inscrutable, opaque, irresponsible,
and arbitrary-that human existence does not correspond in its actual–
ity
to
the way we live it. For most of us live as if existence itself were
ordered, ethical, and rational. As a direct result of his realization in
experience that it is not, Flitcraft leaves his wife and children and goes
off. He acts irrationally and at random, in accordance with the nature
of existence. When, after a couple of years of wandering aimlessly
about, he decides to establish a new life, he simply
reprodu~es
the old
one he had supposedly repudiated and abandoned; that is to say, he
behaves again as if life were orderly, meaningful, and rational, and
"adjusts" to it. And this, with fine irony, is the part of it, Spade says,
that he " 'always liked,' " which means that part that he liked best. For
here we come upon the unfathomable and most mysteriously irration–
al part of it all-how despite everything we have learned and every–
thing we know, men will persist in behaving and trying to behave
sanely, rationally, sensibly, and responsibly. And we will continue to
persist even when we know that there is no logical or metaphysical, no
. discoverable or demonstrable reason for doing so.
I
It is this sense of
sustained contradiction that is close to the center-or to one of the
centers-of Hammett's work. The contradiction is not ethical alone;
it is metaphysical as well. And it is not merely sustained; it is sus-
I.
It can hardly be an accident that the new name that Hammett gives to Flitcraft is that
of an American philosopher-with two vowels reversed-who was deeply involved in
just such speculations.
