Authors-At-Law: the Jurisprudence of Investigation in the Detective Fiction

COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Authors-at-Law The Jurisprudence of Investigation in the Detective Fiction of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner Diana Louis Shahinyan A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. I hereby declare that, except where indicated in the notes, this thesis contains only my own original work. 30 August 2013 1 Authors-at-Law The Jurisprudence of Investigation in the Detective Fiction of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner 2 For my parents – The first hero and heroine I ever knew. 3 Acknowledgements The first person I must acknowledge is my supervisor Dr. David Kelly at the University of Sydney, who has, consistently over the years, approached my work with equal portions of astute criticism and good humour. His expansive knowledge of and contagious interest in American literature, culture and history, as well as his easy and cavalier availability to me made my candidacy a good deal more fun than it necessarily should have been, and rendered the final stages of writing relatively free from the pangs of anxiety with which no doctoral student is unfamiliar. I thank him for helping to clarify what I often struggled to say – sometimes to the point of clairvoyance. He has been the perfect supervisor. Thank you Dave. Immense gratitude goes to Dr. Sarah Gleeson-White at the University of Sydney, my associate supervisor, for reading and editing drafts, and without whom I would still be utterly confounded by both Faulkner’s prose and the daunting plenitude of Faulkner scholarship. Heartfelt thanks also go to Dr. Melissa Hardie, my original supervisor, and Professor Paul Giles, who both read, edited, and guided my thesis in its early stages. I am also thankful for the kindness and encouragement of peers like Stefan Solomon who critiqued my chapter on Requiem for a Nun, in the frantic final month before submission, when he was under no obligation to do so. And thank you to all my friends and family, too many to mention here, who have supported me with kindness and magnanimity throughout this lengthy endeavour. This thesis is humbly dedicated to my parents, Shahan and Susan Shahinyan, without whom none of this could have been possible. Everything I do is in honour of you, and the sacrifices you have made for twenty-seven years so that I could unrestrictedly and whimsically pursue my interests – a luxury you have never known. In the end, this accomplishment is as much yours as it is mine. I love you more than I could ever say. There is also a special place in these acknowledgements for my cocker spaniel, Bronte, who – a sentinel, a fixture throughout the long and tiresome days and nights at my computer – was faithful to the point of cliché. Finally, I must thank my partner, Dr. Ari Mattes, beside whom – nay, because of whom – I have become the woman that I am today. For your intellectual companionship, your tireless patience, midnight proofreading bouts, and your unflagging commitment to and belief in this thesis, I love – and am forever indebted to – you. You have made finishing this thesis an exciting beginning, and not an ending. 4 Contents Abstract 6 Introduction: The Detectives of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner 8 Chapter One The Spirit of Investigation: Theories of American Justice 36 Part I: Dashiell Hammett’s Mean(ingless) Streets 62 Chapter Two Red Harvest: The Op Goes “Blood-Simple” in a Nightmare Town 73 Chapter Three The Maltese Falcon: The Fall of Sam Spade 95 Part II: Gavin Stevens: William Faulkner’s Lawyer-Detective 130 Chapter Four Speech, Silence and the Law in “Go Down, Moses” and Intruder in the Dust 143 Chapter Five Knight’s Gambit: The Triumph of Community Justice 181 Chapter Six Requiem for a Nun: Faulkner’s Trials 201 Part III: An Untenable Genre 241 Chapter Seven Not a Game for Knights: The Thin Man, “Knight’s Gambit,” and the End of 242 Investigation Bibliography 263 5 Abstract The configuration of law and literature has produced a rich field of studies in which, inter alia, critics have looked to literary texts in order to gain access to narratives pertaining to justice that do not need to conform to the substantive and procedural norms of the law. The private detective, who traditionally operates outside of and is unrestricted by the law and its exigencies, is an apt personification of the nexus of law and literature: the private detective is commissioned to find clues and weave narratives around a central crime, to understand and subsequently narrativize a criminal landscape. The hardboiled, modern detective of the early twentieth century is a particularly enticing figure: he detects through epistemological uncertainty, and, unlike the formal judicial function of the law, is able to evade conclusiveness and instead appreciate the paradoxical, the local, the ontologically perverse, the emotional, the whimsical, the meaningless and the relative – and the possibility of the formless and arbitrary simultaneity of these conditions. This thesis will examine the detective stories and novels of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner, and argue that both authors, in employing the figure of the private detective, attempt to bring into question and resolve perceived injustices of their time. What explicitly links Hammett and Faulkner is that they present detective-heroes who conform to a classic American jurisprudential model which locates justice not in a specific destination but rather in the activity of interpretation, oratory, and the pursuit of meaning. Moreover, in tracing the evolution of Hammett’s detectives – from the Continental Op, to Sam Spade, through to Nick and Nora Charles – alongside the evolution of Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens, this thesis charts the struggle of the private detectives to understand the world around them, even with the extra-legal and extra-systemic freedom the genre affords them – perhaps because of it. Ultimately, both Hammett and Faulkner wound up at the same place, with the genre suffering a defeat: the detectives, overcome by cynicism, retire to stasis and abandon their pursuit, 6 effectively deferring to the law to make sense of the senselessness against which they failed to forge meaning and narrative. For both Hammett and Faulkner, it is not that the law wins – it is still as problematic as ever. Rather, as intimated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary, the law triumphs because – in its tenacious search not for truth but for resolution, and not for meaning but simply for consistency and uniformity – it is “in lieu of anything better.”1 1 William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1993), 194. Originally published 1931. 7 Introduction Hammett’s and Faulkner’s Detectives1 It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. - Chief Justice Marshall, Marbury v Madison The relationship between Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner is shrouded in mystery; from a dearth of information the young scholar, tantalized, is forced to play detective. A clue is finally uncovered in an anecdotal aside in Lillian Hellman’s first memoir, An Unfinished Woman, published in 1969. Hellman recalls moving from Los Angeles to New York with Hammett, and settling into a hotel managed by Nathanael West. There Hammett was writing The Thin Man. Hellman and Hammett drank with West, and the visiting William Faulkner, late into one night, Faulkner and Hammett arguing about books and art. Soon after, Hammett got serious about his own book, and Hellman writes, life changed. The drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way; the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out even for a walk for fear something would be lost.2 In the absence of any more information explicitly linking the two, but with the high romance of circumstantial biographical and even physical similitude clouding the young scholar’s mind, she turns her eye to their writing. For beyond the distinguished and prematurely silver hair, moustaches, hard-drinking, and 1 I am indebted to Joseph Blotner for the title of my thesis. See Blotner, “William Faulkner: Author-at-Law,” Mississippi College Law Review 4, no. 2, (1984): 275-86. 2 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman (New York: Bantam, 1979), 236. 8 even the Hollywood scriptwriting stints, both authors have written novels and short stories that attempt to understand specific American landscapes through a jurisprudential lens, in the examination of crime, and the detection thereof.

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