374
STEVEN MARCUS
social relations are dominated by the principle of basic mistrust. As
one of his detectives remarks, speaking for himself and for virtually
every other character in Hammett's writing, " 'I trust no one.' "
When Hammett turns to the respectable world, the world of re–
spectable society, of affluence and influence, of open personal and po–
litical power, he finds only more of the same. The respectability of
respectable American society is as much a fiction and a fraud as the
phony respectable society fabricated by the criminals. Indeed he un–
waveringly represents the world of crime as a reproduction in both
structure and detail of the modern capitalist society that it depends on,
preys off, and is part of. But Hammett does something even more radi–
cal than this. He not only continually juxtaposes and connects the
ambiguously fictional worlds of art and ofwriting with the fraudulently
fictional worlds of society. He connects them, juxtaposes them, and
sees them in dizzying and baffling interaction. He does this in many
ways and on many occasions. One of them, for example, is the Mal–
tese Falcon itself, which turns out to be and contains within itself the
history of capitalism.
It
is originally a piece of plunder, part of what
Marx called the "primitive accumulation"; whefl' its gold encrusted
with gems is painted over it becomes a mystified object, a commodity
itself; it is a piece of property that belongs to no one-whoever pos–
sesses it does not really own it. At the same time it is another fiction, a
representation or work of art-which turns out itself to be a fake, since
it is made of lead. It is a rara avis indeed. As is the fiction in which it is
created and contained, the novel by Hammett.
It
is into this bottomlessly equivocal, endlessly fraudulent, and
brutally acquisitive world that Hammett precipitates the Op. There is
nothing glamorous about him. Short, thickset, balding, between thir–
ty-five and forty, he has no name, no home, no personal existence apart
from his work. He is, and he regards himself as, "the hired man" of
official and respectable society, who is paid so much per day to clean it
up and rescue it from the crooks and thieves who are perpetually
threatening to take it over. Yet what he-and the reader-just as per–
petually learn is that the respectable society that employs him is itself
inveterately vicious, deceitful, culpable, crooked, and degraded. How
then is the Op to be preserved, to preserve himself, from being con–
taminated by both the world he works against and the world he is
hired to work for?
To begin with, the Op lives by a code. This code consists in the
