Taking an example from Lolita, this is what I am talking about:

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, …”

I don’t even have to quote the entire sentence. The adjective “photogenic” coupled with a parenthetic remark to which other writers might have given an entire chapter. The demise of his mother was left to my imagination, which is not pretty.

If I don’t record these while I’m reading, they will fade into a distant memory, an area that is all too easily reached these days. The serious critical stuff, please put in the main thread; those phrases you read and read again smiling, please put them here.

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