There is a particularly deepseated prejudice among Spanish critics nowadays, one that almost makes you think they must have been brought up on a diet of detective novels, and according to which—it’s assumed—every character, every episode, every detail must have a purpose, a meaning, or, to put it more clearly, must be a clue. (They also appear to have swallowed whole Chekhov’s fa-mous and rather stupid dictum: if, at the beginning of a story, a nail appears, it should be the nail from which the protagonist hangs himself at the end.) The continual demand for every detail to be “necessary” or “pertinent,” the call for that simplistic thing “narrative unity,” is shocking proof of the current and long-standing myopia afflicting critics still dominated by a utilitarian view of literature. If there is a model of the modern novelist, it is Cervantes, with Rabelais as possible predecessor and Sterne as successor. The last thing you find in all three writers is that so-called unity, for their works are literally filled with episodes that are neither necessary nor pertinent to the story: in the case of Don Quixote it isn’t only a matter of his famous, much-criticized, and yet fundamental interpolation of “El curioso impertinente” (“The Man Too Curious for His Own Good”), for almost the same applies to all of the other adventures, which hardly ever add anything to the story as a whole or to our knowledge of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The best novels in the Western tradition, from Cervantes to Proust, from Sterne to Faulkner, from Conrad to Nabokov, are, on the contrary, highly digressive, full of detours and diversions and asides, or what those critics would call “gratuitous elements”; and yet far from being gratuitous, the digressions play a vital part in shaping those literary worlds. What is important in a novel is the flow, not how it ends or how the plot line leads the reader straight to that ending.
What is even more surprising is that not even detective fiction, at its very best, fulfills the requirements of those shortsighted unitarian reviewers, and this is particularly striking in the case of Dashiell Hammett. It’s true that people have tried to come up with alternative ways to describe his books other than as “detective fiction,” but then again, his work does usually involve a chase, at least one murder, a revelation, a mission to be fulfilled or a case to be solved, and so they could, without too many caveats, be included in the genre, even though they also transcend the genre. Anyway, given that Hammett has gone down in history as one of the most accomplished and most influential writers of detective fiction, it’s odd to discover that even in his books, intrigue or plot is almost unimportant, the solution is completely secondary, and the loose ends or “whimsical,” “irrelevant” episodes are the real heart and soul of his fictions. These works depend far more on flow and on narrative voice than on the facts being described, which are in themselves of little significance and could easily be found in many other novels and films.
What invites Hammett’s readers to pay close attention and to keep on reading isn’t curiosity or the plot line, which is often so complicated and obscure (and so trivial, too) that it’s sometimes hard to follow; it isn’t finding out or wanting to find out what happens, because the last thing you remember about his novels and stories is the dénouement. On the contrary, what stays in the memory is precisely what more than one critic would consider expendable or fortuitous: the atmosphere, the characters, the caustic rapid-fire dialogue, the choice of an unusual adjective or one that is simply chillingly precise—in short, the detail. (As Nabokov said, “In high art and pure science detail is everything.”) What remains of Hammett is what remains after reading any great novel: a voice, a tone, a scene, a gesture, the way someone spoke or held a cigarette or tipped his hat, certain sharp one-liners or the death of a dog.
I’ve just finished reading his novella Woman in the Dark and, having barely closed the book, I’m already beginning to forget what it was about, what happened to the characters and why they were being pursued: none of that mattered except when I was actually reading the book, and even then not a great deal. Nevertheless, there are two things I won’t forget, and the first is possibly what most intrigued Hammett himself, given that he spends more time and space describing it than anything else—namely, the opening scene, in which he describes how a woman, about whom we know nothing as yet, twists her ankle, breaks the heel on one of her shoes, and falls over: “The wind blowing downhill from the south, whipping the trees beside the road, made a whisper of her exclamation and snatched her scarf away into the darkness.” The second is the death of that dog I mentioned earlier: soberly or, rather, coolly, as is usual in Hammett, he describes how a man brought out a black pistol, put its muzzle close behind one of the dog’s ears, and shot the animal through the head. What chills the blood, though, and still haunts my memory is an even shorter sentence, which comes a few lines later. It is then that Hammett suddenly tells us: “The dog’s legs stopped moving.” As I said, I won’t remember the plot or the motives or the names or even the curiosity I felt while reading, which, like so many other feelings of curiosity, vanished without a trace once satisfied. On the other hand, I certainly won’t forget those “irrelevant” details that are the mark of a great novelist, whether of detective fiction or not, and Hammett both was and wasn’t a great novelist. I will never forget that scarf snatched away by the wind in the darkness or the dog’s legs that, to my horror, had, without my knowing, been moving all the time, until, that is, they stopped.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Javier Marías is perhaps Spain’s most famous contemporary novelist. His latest novel, Tomás Levinson, has just been published in Spain. Margaret Jull Costa has been his translator since 1992.
