I had a really cool moment in class today during our discussion of where Dashiell Hammett (if I spelled that wrong, a thousand apologies) fits in on the scale of literary modernism, the two ends being Virginia Woolf’s theory that literature should be a window into the conscious mind and Joseph Conrad’s idea that it should be “something something justice to the visible world.” The consensus was that our present author definitely fits more on the Conradian side of the equation, due to his almost obsessive preoccupation with not letting us into the minds of his characters and even going so far as to create a kind of unreliable narrator situation where we weren’t even sure if the surface information we were getting was right. Talk about confusing. I, of course, loved this. Even though pretty much every English teacher I’ve ever had persists in telling me that authorial intent does not matter and only hinders interpretation of the literature as a freestanding event, or whatever, I persist in maintaining that it does matter and offers valuable insight into said freestanding event (or whatever). So it was cool to get the theoretical background behind Mr. Hammett’s story.
But my problem here is that in doing what he did–the ultra-focus on surface details and eradication of all insight into the character’s thoughts, the existential despair, and so on and so forth, the general perfection of hardboiled detective fiction that Dashiell Hammett wrought so skillfully–in doing this, I feel like he sacrificed some of his characters. Well. Not really. I feel like he sacrificed Ned. At the very least, I was incredibly shocked by how much weaker the Ned in the book is compared to the Ed (Hollywood screenwriters, was one letter really that important?) of the film. Film Ed is stoic, yes, and detached, but somehow he still comes across as a character who bounces back from whatever hits him (read: his gay lover Jeff’s meaty fist). Book Ned though, no matter how unaffected, how stoic, how strong he is on the inside, is portrayed only in terms of his outside reactions: how his mouth looks, how he smiles, how he moves after he gets hit. And, perhaps because we only see his body and never his mind or mental state, he comes across as much weaker. A man with a black eye may have a perfectly tranquil mental state; may be planning to get even; may not give a damn. For Dashiell Hammett, a man with a black eye is only a man with a black eye. Poetic as he may be, he leaves the readers to draw their own conclusions.
And, for me at least, the character of Ned suffered greatly because of this.
