City jungles and expressionist reifications from Brecht to Hammett - expressionists Bertolt Brecht and Dashiell Hammett

Hammett's town, with characteristic lack of subtlety, is appropriately named "Personville" (pronounced by the locals as "Poisonville"), an almost direct citation of expressionist abstraction of place into general category. Hammett's description of the town could serve as stage directions for the backdrop of the expressionist metropolis:

the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelter's stacks. (Red Harvest 4)

Nature is hereby reified as a waste product of labor, and the claustrophobia imposed by this industrial sky contrasts to the metaphorical transposition of the jungle onto the activity within the city.

With characteristic expressionist condensation, Hammett's protagonist is named "the Op": a two-letter abbreviation of his economic function as Continental Operative. After noting the infernal character of Personville, the Op spots three caricatures of policemen, unshaved, unbuttoned, and smoking cigars while directing traffic, and he immediately deciphers the absence of legitimized authority in the town. "Don't kid yourselves that there's any law in Poisonville" (Red Harvest 111), he explains later to his recently arrived assistants.

The Op internalizes and absorbs the anarchy of the urban environment and embarks on a strategy based on the provocation of violence and antagonisms among rival gangs in the effort to have them destroy each other in the process. He explains to his ally, the junky-prostitute Dinah Brand, that he could have accomplished his ends through legal means, "But it's easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and, now that I'm feeling this way, more satisfying" (Red Harvest 145). He derives sadistic pleasure from the replication of the cycles of violence, and he describes his desensitized condition with the same corporealization of interiority as Brecht's Shlink: "I've got hard skin all over what's left of my soul" (145). He identifies the encroaching metropolis as the source of the violent fever that penetrates his subjectivity like a disease: "It's this damned town. Poisonville is right. It's poisoned me" (145). The smothered condition of his soul seeks cathartic release in violent agitation, and he refers to the pleasure experienced from this release as an intoxication.

The Op internalizes and replicates the violence of his environment in the manner of a machine, yet his delirium precipitates a regression to animal instincts. This paradoxical conration of machine and animal serves as the principle of characterization that motivates the inhabitants of the urban pastoral. In "The Poetics of the Private-Eye," Robert Edenbaum observes that in Hammett's novels, "Action is determined mechanistically - or animalistically" (100). The apparent ease with which Edenbaum equates mechanical and animal determinations reflects the instability of these categories in Hammett's narration.