« Secret passages to chaos : Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse » - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Polysèmes Année : 2004

« Secret passages to chaos : Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse »

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse

Résumé

SECRET PASSAGE TO CHAOS : DASHIELL HAMMETTíS THE DAIN CURSE In The Maltese Falcon (1931), Sam Spade tells Brigid a story that clearly fascinates him: a prosperous businessman from Tacoma named Flitcraft disappeared, deserting his wife and children. When Spade finally found him in Spokane, the life he had made for himself in the new place was exactly the same as the one he had left behind. The man explained that ever since the day he was almost hit by a beam as he was walking near a building site, he had been acutely aware of the fact that all men were under a death sentence, and that he himself lived only because fate, or fortune, had so far spared him. He had resolved to readjust his existence to this new awareness, and so he had broken loose from his old life to start a new one afresh. At that point, Spade notices with amusement, he had started to reproduce the pattern of his previous life point by point, without realizing it however: "I donít think he ever knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped off in Tacoma" (430). This anecdote illustrates the dialectics between the "groove" of order and the "jump" of disorder that contemporary science has labelled deterministic chaos, the manifestations of which I propose to study in another text by Hammett, The Dain Curse (1928). Being a mystery story, The Dain Curse rests on the tension between the sequence of the crime as masterminded by the friend of the detective, a writer called Fitzstephan, and that of the detection, the gradual unveiling of the former.

Domaines

Littératures
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
hammett polysemes.pdf (798.14 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-01808836 , version 1 (06-06-2018)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01808836 , version 1

Citer

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse. « Secret passages to chaos : Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse ». Polysèmes, 2004. ⟨hal-01808836⟩

Collections

UNIV-LILLE
32 Consultations
13 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More