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STEVEN MARCUS
pose, and thus demystify the fictional-and therefore false-reality
created by the characters, crooks or not, with whom he is involved.
More often than not he tries to substitute his own fictiona l-hypotheti–
cal representation for theirs-and this representation may also be
" true" or mistaken, or both at once. In any event, his major effort is to
make the fictions of others visible as fi ctions, inventions, concealments,
falsehoods, and mystifica tions. When a fi ction becomes visible as such
it begins
to
dissolve and disappear, and presumably should reveal be–
hind it the " rea l" rea lity that was there all the time and that it was
maski ng. Yet what happens in Hammett is tha t what is revea led as
"rea lity" is a still furth er fi ction-making activity-in the first place the
Op's, and behind that ye t another, the consciousness present in many
of the Op stories and all the novels tha t Dashiell Hammett, the writer,
is continually doing the same thing as the Op and a ll the other charac–
ters in the fiction he is creating. That is to say he is making a fic tion (in
writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself, is
coherent but not necessarily rational. Wha t one both begins and ends
with then is a story, a narra tive, a coherent yet questionable account of
the world. This problematic penetrates to the bottom of H ammett's
na rrative imagina tion a nd shapes a number of its deeper processes-in
The Dain Curse,
for example, it is the chief topic of explicit debate
tha t runs throughout the entire novel.
Yet Hammet's writing is still more complex and integral than
thi s. For the unresolvable paradoxes and dilemmas that we have just
been describing in terms of narra tive structure and consciousness are
reproduced once aga in in H ammett's vision and representation of soci–
ety, of the socia l world in which the Op lives. At this point we must
recall that H ammett is a writer of the 1920s and tha t this was the era of
Prohibition . American society had in effect committed itself to a vast
collec tive fiction. Even more, this fiction was false not merely in the
sense tha t it was made up or did not in fact correspond to reality; it was
fa lse in the _sense that it was corrupt and corrupting as well. During
this period every time an American took a drink he was helping to
undermine the law, and American society had covertly committed it–
self to what was in practice collabora tive illegality.3There is a kind of
3. Matters were even murkier than this. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitu–
tion was in effect from January 1920
to
December 1933, nearly fourteen years. During
thi s period Americans were forbidden under pena lty of Iilw to manufacture, sell , or
transport any intoxicating liquor. At the same time, no one was forbidden to buy or
