[메모] Flitcraft parable

원출처: Dashiell Hammett, Maltese Falcon. 1929 or 1930 (?)

─. Gutenberg Project Text

─. Quote of the parable:  http://fallingbeam.org/beam.htm


─. Commentaries:

- When digressions get right to the point (Chris Routledge, Guardian, 26 Feb 2008)

- It's A Mystery: "Don't be so sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be" (Irma Heldman, Open Letters Monthly, 01 Mar 2009)

- http://gratzindustries.blogspot.kr/2008/05/flitcraft-parable.html

- The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism (Keith Newlin, OUP USA, 2011. 구글도서)

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

Sam Spade, the detective-hero of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), explains the insignificance of anti-bigamy laws in a parable he tells femme fatale Brigit P'Shaughnessy. (More than a comment about marriage law, the story is a key to understanding the novel as a whole.) A realor named Charles Flitcraft left his office in Tacoma for lunch one afternoon and never returned. He disappeared "like a fist when you open your hand," Spade explains (62). Five years later, he surfaced a few miles away in Seattle, where he owned an automobile agency and a new house and lived under a new name with a new wife and son. "His second wife didn't look like the first," Spade notes, "but they were more alike than they were different" (64). As it happened, Flitcraft had been nearly struck and kiled by a falling beam at a construction site as he walked to lunch five years earlier. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. ... The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair," and "a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things." If "life could be ended for him at random," then "he would change his life at random" (63-64). He drifted for a couple of years and then settled in Seattle "into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma." Put another way, like Darwinian creature in a world of chance, he "adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling" (64). No that he is presecuted as a bigamist, however. He and his first wife were quitely divorced "and everything was swell all around" (63).

The expression, "like a fist when you open your hand"

1. ( ... ... ) They angled off the road and turned the shoulder of the mountain. Below in the moonlight, located in the crotch of two narrow gulches, was a huge rock tumle abutting ths Schofield mine. Light was generous, but Slade was nowhere to be seen. "He's goe," Jimmy said. Fargo nodded. "Gone quick. Like a fist when you open your hand. He has to be in those rocks somewhere."  ( ... ... )

2. ( ... ... ) The lady sitting behind the dest was small and smartly dressed. She looked up from the papers she seemed to be working on and gave the Inspector a fake smile. "Good afternoon sir, how may I help you?" "Good afternoon. I have an appointment with the dean. Police," Inspector Sani said, flashing his I.D. "Okay," the lady's fake smile disappeared like a fist when you open your hand. "Please go in. He is expecting you." ( ... ... )


3. ( ... ... ) Finally, when the sea had subsided to the point that autopilot could handle them, I switched it on and the bosun sank back against the after bulkhead in relief, flexing his fingers after a solid hour of fighting the wheel. "So, Captain," he said, a grin splitting his chubby black face, "the flying Dutchman disappears again eh?" "Poof," I said, showing him how. "Like a fist when you open your hand." ( ... ... )


CF. disappeared, gone, ... "like your lap when you stand up."