What are the images evoked by “red”? What are the title words telling us?
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. [3]
In the opening paragraph of Hammett’s Red Harvest, we have presented to us a wealth of information about the narrative to follow. First, we have the classic “first person” narrator. Second, he does not introduce himself or, throughout the rest of the text, give us a glimpse into his personal history, as did Humbert Humbert or Saleem Sinai (recall though that HH wasn’t his real name and Saleem was not really a member of the Sinai family, both situations leading to questions of (un)reliability); in fact, the narrator remains nameless throughout the story, much like Joseph Conrad’s sea-captain narrators. What does this nameless quality do to the relationship between reader and narrator? Who is “the man with no name,” as he has been called elsewhere?
We do, though, learn the name of a “red-haired mucker” whose only appearance in the entire novel occurs in the opening sentence. Despite this short and only appearance, his presence—in terms of how the narrator characterizes him (physical features and manner of speech), of his name, and of where the narrator met him and first heard the city called Poisonville—contributes to the early characterization available to us of our narrator: what sort of person hangs about in saloons in Butte, Montana, and is on speaking terms with red-haired muckers who are unable to “manage their r’s” (and who clearly are NOT from Montana)?
Consider this portrait of a “mucker” from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel of the same name:
Billy Byrne was a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago’s great West Side. From Halsted to Robey, and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name. And, in proportion to their number which was considerably less, he knew the patrolmen and plain clothes men equally as well, but not so pleasantly.
His kindergarten education had commenced in an alley back of a feed-store. Here a gang of older boys and men were wont to congregate at such times as they had naught else to occupy their time, and as the bridewell was the only place in which they ever held a job for more than a day or two, they had considerable time to devote to congregating.
They were pickpockets and second-story men, made and in the making, and all were muckers, ready to insult the first woman who passed, or pick a quarrel with any stranger who did not appear too burly. By night they plied their real vocations. By day they sat in the alley behind the feedstore and drank beer from a battered tin pail. [my emphasis]
I find it interesting that the muckers appearing in two different (and roughly contemporaneous) works both have surnames associated with oppressed and marginalized (and thereby criminalized) ethnic-Celtic groups: Dewey (Welsh) and Byrne (Irish). Whether that has any bearing on the story-rhetoric in Red Harvest, or not, we can suss out later. The word “mucker,” though, has—like most words in English—undergone a variety of transformations from its original Old English/Old Norse) sense of a farmer or field hand who works in the muck, or rich, moist soil (we are surrounded by muck-farms in Oswego; they are old river bottoms). Most of those transformations in meaning are the result of (il)logical extensions of the images evoked and invoked by the notion of “muck.” Consider the following gleaned from a web page devoted to ERB’s novel (http://www.erblist.com/erblist/muckersum.html, written by David Bruce Bozarth):
WHAT IS A MUCKER?
The 1828 Webster Dictionary has the following entry: MUCK’ER, v.t. [from muck.] To scrape together money by mean labor or shifts. [Not used in America.] Webster’s 1913 dictionary adds the following definition: n. A term of reproach for a low or vulgar labor person. [Slang]. [ . . .] The 1936 Merriam’s Collegiate Dictionary reports: slang (U.S) A coarse vulgar person, esp. one capable of offense against courtesy or honor. A 1973 Random House College Dictionary states: (Brit. Slang) a vulger, ill-bred person. So what is a mucker? I do not own enough dictionaries to sort this out! However, traditional American slang from 1913 until at least 1973 (my recent dictionaries do not list “mucker!”) is fairly consistent with “low, vulgar, coarse, offensive to courtesy or honor.”
So, in terms of characterizing our narrator based solely on the opening paragraph I believe it would be fair to say he is a hard-traveled and experienced man of dubious and conflicting qualities. Other thoughts?
By the end of the paragraph, we also learn that what we are about to read will eventually explain why “men who could manage their r’s” still chose to call Personville Poisonville. And we are able to glean that the story to be told is the result of the narrator’s own experiences in Person/Poisonville. Certainly much can be made of (and I am sure we will do so) the “anonymous” quality of a name like Personville (e.g., Anytown, Erehwon-Nowhere, among many) and the not so subtle play on words in its variant, Poisonville, in terms of both the quality of life (and death) within its city limits and the affect it has on those who cross/transgress its boundaries (in more ways than one).
I think this gives us a pretty good start . . .
But, I want to throw in here at the start some, what Gerard Genette would call, paratextual material, that is, extra-textual stuff which may or may not affect our readings of the story, but is inescapable. The Salon.com piece in the link below provides some interesting tid-bits and insights into where the story in Red Harvest has gone—literally and figuratively—since it was first written by Hammett.
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2005/02/28/hammett/index.html
12 Comments
After the first chapter I am going to go out on a limb and claim that the “Red” of Red Harvest will be more blood than Communism. The mental overhead and entertainment of this book will be tracking the dialogue, a problem I can live with if it includes more interaction like this:
On the word “mucker”: you have mentioned a reference to Wales and Ireland, have you considered that the Wiki Dictionary entry (one of my favorite reference materials) for “mucker” states that it is “southern English and Northern Irish slang for friend or acquaintence” and “used exclusively by a man to another man.” The research by David Bruce Bozarth is definitely more concise. “Mucker” is a tasty word from 1929 that we may not be able to easily translate to 2006.
Do you know the provenance of “thieves’ word”? I had not heard of the phrase before but I have heard of word play like “richardsnary” for “dictionary”. A google search wants to correct my search to be “thieves’ world”. Perhaps “thieves’ word” is similar in purpose to cockney slang, though I am not sure why anyone would want to speak about dictionaries in a cipher language.
You find the name Dewey an interesting choice and I find the name Hickey Dewey interesting. Is it the era? I have never known anyone named Hickey or Willsson with two els, two esses. Pete the Finn, Whisper, and Lew Yard seem just as unlikely. I am preparing myself for some interesting characters.
Yakima Shorty, the guy with the blackjack who is shot by Elihu Willsson: see last paragraph in previous comment.
I keep getting caught up with translating these conversations. I understand most of it but there is something nagging at me in the back of my mind that hints I haven’t got it all. DH was sometimes kind to his future readers. He gives us some contextual help with Dan Rolff, the man Dinah Brand is “keeping,” who has the misfortune of having tuberculosis (p.28). When the OP visits Dinah Brand, Dan Rolff gets the adjective “lunger” (p.31). I keep translating but I get the distinct impression it will only help when reading more novels by Dashiell Hammett.
Hmm, do you think it is the spelling of the author’s name that prompted a character with two ells and two esses?
I could not find a translation of “Fatimas” in the canting dictionary:
The apparition of Fatima occurred in 1917 so it is contemporary with Red Harvest. I just don’t see the Op as a religious person, nor do I know why one would burn Fatimas. I spent a few minutes doing some research and got many references to Fatima but none to any related ritual that involved burning. This is a somewhat unimportant passage — and I have considered that it may be slang for smoking cigarettes — but it stalled me for a moment.
Page 68 gives us the first reference to the harvest:
And, ever the slang finder, I found this on page 74 while the Op was talking to Ike Bush (a confluence of names that DH surely couldn’t predict),
A ducat is a gold coin but the slang form is an admission ticket.
On page 88 is an interesting bit that I might use at a cocktail party,
In trying to work this out, the most interesting reference is another weblog discussing a similar reference: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001172.php.
Words, words, words . . . and their power to invoke and evoke!
For the Fatimas, follow the link below. I seem to recall coming across them in Hemingway and, consequently, blew right over the reference. I suspect that, had they been around in the 70s, I’d have been smoking them . . .
http://www.wclynx.com/burntofferings/adsfatima_brown.html
Thanks for pulling the thread on “ducat.” I thought about the reference to money; never thought about the idea of a ticket home to Philly, though the words are phonetically similar enough. I thought, perhaps, a reference to Ducati and a fast trip home on a police motor bike. A stretch.
Pulling the “money” thread a bit harder, though . . . the roots of “dollar” lie in the nordic word “thaler;” Thaler being our gambler makes this an interesting “coin-cidence.” I initially read him as the Jewish hood in the story, but thinking about it more . . . Max is also a nordic name; and he does have some nordic boys as helpers (recall they are described as blonde); and it IS Montana (supposedly, though even that is open to speculation as the location of Personville is never specified; all we know is that the Op meets Hickey Dewey in a bar in Montana).
One bit of slang I read over this evening–and you probably did as well–is our ant-/protagonist’s reference to the hoods in town as being “slated for the chutes” [68]. I read that as describing Noonan, the Finn, Yard, and even Thaler (though he is in the room at the time), and their respective armies, as just so much meat on the hoof, scheduled for the slaughterhouse.
On your singling out “Hickey” as an interesting name, the character played by Christopher Walken in Last Man Standing is named Hickey. On the doubling in Willsson’s name, much critical capital has been minted speculating on the doubling of letters in a variety of character’s names, not least of which is Leggatt in Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” It could very well be Hammett playing off of the doubling of letters in his own name. It could also be a textual echo of the duplicitous behavior of the ant-/protagonist and his nemeses; the story is after all grounded in duplicitous behavior. But the Continental Op’s is a funny sort of duplicitousness, very unlike the (un)reliability issues with Saleem and Humbert.
In the next day or two I want to post something dealing with the ideas of prolepsis (or forecasting) and irony. Prolepses are elements of the text that look ahead to the (possible) future. Some stories use analepsis (or recollection) and prolepsis quite a lot. Some prolepses are very hard to see until you are reading the story a second or third time around. Their relation to irony is something that interests me.
The next two days I will be traveling home, but I will try to put the post together and get it added to the discussion.
I am wondering if I have ever read a crime story before. In Red Harvest, the criminal element thrives because the police are corrupt, and the anti-hero is happy to shoot at either group. DH’s sleuth is personally familiar with blackmail, extortion, fixing fights. All citizens of Personville are self-serving or otherwise tragically flawed. It is no wonder this novel was used as a foundation for A Fistful of Dollars and how ironic is it that a movie attempt of Red Harvest was put on notice for rights infringement by the makers of that film?
Hollywood could never vet a movie true to Red Harvest. The only possibility for an effective film version would be by the Coen brothers, starring William H. Macy as the Continental Op, John Goodman as Sheriff Noonan, Steve Buscemi as Whisper, Anthony Hopkins or Billy Bob Thornton as old man Willsson, and Francis McDormand as Dinah Brand (Madeline Khan is too short, Scarlett Johansson too pretty.)
If you want subtlety, read a good mystery whodunnit.
I appreciate DH’s completion of dialog themes. On page 150, the Op is discussing Jerry,
A right bower is a term popularized in the Euchre card game, in which the highest card in a trump suit is the jack of that suit, known as the right bower, and the jack of the off-suit of the same color, the left bower, is the next highest card. Call trump and the regular guys can finally bump off aces, kings, and queens.
Whisper commences his departure from the discussion with a simple, “Deal me out.”
I was curious about the term, “blood-simple”, first used on page 154,
My only knowledge of this term is from the movie (Coen brothers, of course!), “Blood Simple”. Wiki claims the movie title is a reference to Red Harvest.
Not being a card-player, the reference to “right bower,” and the teasing out of that analogy to the closing “deal me out,” blew right by me. Thank you for that. We should consider annotating a book such as this (or did we already mention that?). On the notion of “blood simple,” I can only make the connection to the apparent madness into which some hunters are reported to fall when they “taste” too much killing. I am not personally familiar with it, but have heard my hunter-cousins talk about inexperienced hunters in this way, though not with this term. We also “see” it manifest in certain movies that involve berserkers or kill-maddened soldiers—though none come to mind immediately.
On a different note, one of the “strategies” used in engaging and involving readers in narrative is anachrony, or (as Gerald Prince defines it in his little book, A Dictionary of Narratology) “a discordance between the order in which events (are said to) occur and the order in which they are recounted” (5). The classic example is that of a text which starts the reader in the middle of things (in medias res) and then backtracks (somehow) to bring the reader up to date with respect to the events which constitute the narrated present of the story (all narrated stories are anachronies of a sort, but we’ll bracket that for some other discussion later); the opening of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is such an instance: we enter the drama encountering the ghost of Hamlet’s father as seen by two terrified guards at Elsinore and then later get the backstory (so to speak). This particular kind of anachrony is called analepsis (borrowed and extended from the medical term, analeptic, or restorative), or flashback(ward). It is pretty common in both textual and filmic narratives.
While chronologically “correct” in its relation to the narrated events, I see the opening paragraph of Red Harvest as an anachrony of the flashback variety. Our narrator steps out of the narrated (and narrating) “present” to give us some insight, based on his past experience, into the nature of the story we are about to be told and the place in which it occurs. To a certain extent it even characterizes the type of people we are to meet there.
But I am interested not so much in analepses as in those few (and difficult to identify) prolepses, or flashes forward into the yet to be narrated possible futures of the story being told, that crop up in a text. Unless executed very carefully, with close attention to what is being “said” and how it is being said, first readings of texts (I include here viewings of films) do not generally catch these anachronies. Rather, on the second and third readings, once the story is grasped as a whole and the elements of the action that drive the story are lodged in our memory, these moments leap off the page, often in a sort of epiphanic “A-ha!”.
Consider the following, from early in Red Harvest. The Op is dealing with Dinah Brand in a curiously—one might say, uncannily—prophetic way:
Now, why would he have made the point of telling us “I think I said it three or four times, quite earnestly” (my emphases)? He “thinks” (as in he doesn’t recall because he was drunk), “quite earnestly” (assuring the reader), that he “said it three or four times”? Or, he thinks he said it quite earnestly (at the time) because he was maybe feeling a little frustrated with dealing with her? I admit, on first reading this exchange, I passed blithely over it as a recalled conversation between two people half-in-the-bag. But on my second reading of the book, it leapt off the page with a sinister tone, colored by what eventually happens to Dinah. The differing possible readings of the text adds an ironic twist to the proleptic possibilities.
The possible reading of this encounter as foreshadowing the end of Dinah is reinforced by the (dare I say it) proleptic appearance of the ice-pick in a later scene, after the fixed fight, when the Op has stopped by for drinks. The ice-pick isn’t identified explicitly, but what else would one chop ice with (refer to page 81), particularly during the “historical” time of the story? And this reading is consistent with the dictum attributed to Anton Chekhov (I paraphrased it in an earlier post and attributed it, incorrectly, to a Russian theorist): “if one introduces a revolver or a shotgun in the early part of a story, it must go off before the end” (source yet to be identified).
So . . . ironic prolepses, or proleptic ironies? Are these intentional (ugh, there’s that word again) foreshadowings on the part of the flesh-and-blood author, or the narrator, that the reader interprets ironically (in the sense of shared knowledge not available to all characters in the story)? Or, are they ironies sensed/perceived by the reader and accorded some sort of anticipatory “power” in the context of the story?
As an aside to the post above, it might be worth thinking about/discussing what sorts of textual markers there are that would indicate a potential prolepsis. I have an article around here, somewhere, that deals with that question, though from the perspective of 19th Century French Literature. The “theory” portion hangs together well, and could stand on its own for some ideas to consider. I’ll see if I can find it and post a few of the scholar-author’s ideas.
As to your last post, here is a marker that is something of a sledgehammer (p.159),
This might be DH talking about his writing style but it is certainly one of the last cogent thoughts the Op makes on the night of Dinah’s demise. But as for the appearance of passages that could be foreshadowings, this one certainly made me re-read the preceding dialog between the Op and Dinah. Did you honestly think that Dinah was going to last much longer?
Regarding the ice pick marker, I certainly think that particular reference is intentional. The author has put our narrator into a gin-plus-laudanum stupor during which an event occurs that drives much of the remainder of the story. Later, the Op will remember that he has seen the ice pick, touched it, knows where it is kept. We are led to be as unsure as the Op about those events and are induced into his feelings of guilt and worry. Colleagues think he may have done it, he thinks he may have done it, and there is another reference to blood-simple in the dialog preceding the above quote.
Dinah was a very interesting character: a player, amoral, but strangely likable. I’m not sure DH knew what to do with this character and so her thread ends, her stature in the story line provides an opportunity for a more complicated termination.
Thoughts on prolepsis and (re)reading Red Harvest
Okay, this is going to border on stream-of-consciousness writing at times, but here goes . . .
Thinking specifically about the apparent prolepses which (may) signal the inevitability and manner of Dinah Brand’s death in relation to Teresa Bridgeman’s article (and the work of others) on prolepses, several questions come to mind–almost simultaneously: (1) given that prolepses are anachronies, do they represent slippage/breaks in narrated time (that is the temporal flow of the story from beginning to end), narrative time (that is, time of narration as opposed to story time), the reader’s “global” sense of the story, all three? (2) why are (some?) prolepses, or apparently proleptic ironies, in the story not apparent to the reader until the story is re-read? (3) and, following on that, are they really prolepses? and, did the author intentionally place them there as proleptic cues/clues as to potential directions the story might take? (4) to what extent are our perceptions of prolepses evoked as a consequence of generic schemata, that is, expectations we might have developed over our range of experience associated with a particular genre?
I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of these right now, but I want to try, and in the process propose some not fully thought out answers as potential starting points.
For question (1), I believe all three “spaces” I mention (and there may be others) are affected with slippage/breaks (but this raises the additional question as to whether the slippage/breaks are IN the spaces or IN the reader). Consider the following from Bridgeman’s article, where she recounts Gerard Genette’s explication of prolepsis:
So, this suggests that certainly story time experiences slippage, or a break from “normal” temporal flow. But, I think the notion of prolepsis goes beyond this simple story time anachrony to include suggestions of what might possibly happen in the future, which represents in my mind a slippage in the time of narration: that is, the narrator steps out of the flow of the telling and “suggests” a possible future course the story could take. Which fits with Bridgeman’s notion of the annonce, or forshadowing of things (potentially) to come.
As for the potential for temporal slippage or breaks in the reader’s sense of possible story-worlds that are running in parallel as a consequence of cues/clues received in the reading “so far”:
This is supported farther on in the essay by the following, when considering how, while reading, the reader “constructs” a working model of the story-world:
This also points to a possible answer to question (2). Once we have a full “picture” of the story, textual elements which we may have glossed over as relatively unimportant, say for instance the possible readings of the tone of the Continental Op’s dialog with Dinah over money (“I’m sure you will”), take on new “meaning.” The early mentions of the ice pick and the detailed description of it and Dinah’s use of it the night she is killed coupled with the Op’s desultory diatribe on death take on the aspect of a RED NEON ARROW pointing to one conclusion. Which is why question (3) has to be dealt with.
And, as for question (3), here we see our old “friend” the Intentional Fallacy rear its pointly little head. Going back to something I believe I mentioned in a past email or post: considering the degree to which some authors (a) heavily revise and rework stories under production and (b) mark up galley-proofs and change story elements AFTER the story is “fully” written, I cannot but believe there is some INTENTIONAL placing of proleptic cues/clues, including some that turn out to be really red herrings.
The following seems to lend credence to the notion that we ARE affected by generic schemata (question (4)):
“[A]nticipated recall”: interesting term. So, I “recall” potential futures based on what I have read so far, as I read the text. But, it isn’t just the text. It includes the paratext(s). As you pointed out in an earlier post, this IS a “gangster” story. There are certain expectations, “anticipations” we have before we engage the text. They affect how we read INTO the story. The fact that Chekhov made the remark with which he is credited concerning the appearance of a pistol or shotgun early in the story is a paratextual “memory” that affects our all of our future reading after being made aware of it. So, the ice pick . . .
And, of course, our next book opens with a proleptic statement:
Actually, I should clarfy my last statement. In terms of story-time, it is a proleptic statement as we have not gotten to that point in the story yet and it gives a (possible) preview of what is to come. On the other hand it is, in terms of time of narration, an analepsis, or flash-backward, for the narrator . . . just not as far back as the opening of the story.