Or at least it helps.What about “Red Harvest” you may wonder? Ah, read it please. And wasn't it Empson who co-invented 'close reading'? Ode on a Grecian Urn sort of requires you to know about The Iliad, Achilles, his shield, and what ekphrasis is. So I am not sure why what I am saying is not part and parcel of his "actual work". If he had not written genre fiction no one would hesitate to think of him in terms of long standing literary motifs, and archetypes, in Western literature. I can only stress that Hammett and only Hammett wrote those things. And whatever the mysterious quality "literary mind" might be, for me he had it in spades and it was a writing literary mind.I hope at least that I am every bit as oriented towards the actual text, beyond which there is nothing, as myself. Peirce, I might add, is considered to have arrived in his own way at the basic ideas of the semiotics. And if he was reading Charles Sanders Peirce, and understanding it, that to me is another big clue he was pretty well read.
For all what seems like a certain squalor in his personal life, he had a very refined literary mind and it was not functioning in a vacuum: He knew what Literature is and you cannot know that without reading it. I don't think anyone would say he is just some festering idiot writing pot boilers who imagines himself as good as Shakespeare. He was VERY conscious of what literature is and what place he aspired to in it. Someday somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ out of it. But he does describe himself so: I'm one of the few people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. And am not sure you have to read every word of the “Faerie Queen” or “Paradise Lost” to get the idea. Hyper-interpretation is just the bath water and it being there is our human condition: we are all babies trying not to drown in all the bullshit and confusion which is being churned out at a prodigious rate.I too do not know what Hammett read or not.
And I'll just stick with my babies in the bath water cliché there is a lot of silly nonsense out there, but there is great thought too. And as a disclaimer I often have NO idea what they are talking about. I don't always agree with them but I enjoy them. (Original Review, )Perhaps my deep, identity creating, connections to Germany has made me more open to their critical ideas, and to the effect those ideas have had in the US for the last 50 years.
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