The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1999 by Carl D. Malmgren

In a world of nonstop talkers, the Op himself is a man of few words; his partner sarcastically complains, "You're going to ruin yourself some time telling people too much" (194). The Op also has a keen ear for linguistic mumbo jumbo or rhetorical gas, a talent he uses most frequently with Elihu Willson, the client continually manipulating words to get what he wants. The following exchange between the two is typical:

"You're a great talker," [Willson] said. "I know that. A two-fisted, you-be-damned man with your words. But have you got anything else? Have you got the guts to match your gall? Or is it just the language you've got?"

There was no use in trying to get along with the old boy. I scowled and reminded him:

"Didn't I tell you not to bother me unless you wanted to talk sense for a change?"

"You did, my lad." There was a foolish sort of triumph in his voice. "And I'll talk you your sense. I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. It's a man's job. Are you a man?"

"What's the use of getting poetic about it?" I growled. "If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on. But a lot of foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything to me.

"All right. I want Personville emptied of its crooks and grafters. Is that plain enough language for you?" (39)

Even at the end of this exchange, Willson is only apparently using "plain language" since he obviously exempts himself from his charge, and he is the biggest crook of all. Later the Op responds in a similar no-nonsense way to the pontifications of the shyster lawyer Charles Proctor Dawn.

But even the Op succumbs to the linguistic evasions that affect discourse in Personville. The Op describes the aftermath of a particularly bloody evening as follows: "I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn't keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep" (108). Here the Op goes "native" and uses euphemistic language of the clumsiest kind--"my very un-nice part"--to gloss over his involvement in the massacre. When he later tells Mickey Linehan that in Personville the end justifies the means, his line of argument is undercut by Linehan's response, itself an example of the plain talking that the Op supposedly values: "What kind of crimes have you got for us to pull?" (109-10). And the Op's multiple attempts to excuse his actions in the city finally seem "overcooked." Regardless of whom or what he is blaming--the woman Dinah Brand; Noonan, the chief of police; the assignment; the "damned burg" (142)--his protestations come across as self-servin g, suspect, themselves products of the rhetorical effluence that infects Personville.

At one point Dinah Brand equates language with money, insisting that the latter is the only language she speaks (31). Brand's throw-away line actually passes over a profound resemblance. Jean-Joseph Goux remarks that money metaphors haunt discussions of language and "betray an awareness, as yet veiled and embryonic, of the correspondence between the mode of economic exchange and the mode of signifying exchange" (96). Both money and words, Goux argues, are abstract "general equivalents" with no necessary connection to the values (economic or semantic) that they substitute for. Under the system of capitalism, money is the privileged medium of exchange, and "commodities are universally evaluated only through the detour of specie--that is, through signs, masks, representations" (38). In the world of the 1920s, where the U.S. Treasury is printing more and more greenbacks, each of which is, as a result, more abstracted from the real labor-value it supposedly represents, this kind of specie, paper money, would be r evealing its specious nature. Brand may prefer money to language, but in Hammett's world both of them are undergoing an extended period of inflation that undermines their value. It's all paper money and paper language. [4]