Chapter 14 "Continental Detective Agency" - the first hard-boiled private detective who did not leave his name

Plato in ancient Greece believed that there is an "archetype" for everything.A circle is an absolute circle; a table is an absolute table; justice is an absolute justice.Relatively speaking, in the reality of our life, there are countless circles, countless tables, and various justice statements and propositions, but these are just imperfect copies of reality, and there is always only one prototype, perfect, absolute, and only one. in the idea. For Plato, who was born more than two thousand years earlier, we obviously have no time to ask him: So, what do you think the prototype of a hard-line private detective should be?

In the real world that Plato is not keen on, it is not difficult for us to find this prototype, which is the "Continental Detective Agency Detective" named after him in this book. To be honest, it is not light years away from Plato's perfection.He was middle-aged (thirty-five), short, and fat.It doesn't matter if you're not pretty (remember, we're reading a detective story, not a romance), and you can still be charming if you're not pretty, like Christie's chunky Inspector Poirot, who has a strange egg Shaped head and beard that is always pointed with wax paste, full of intellectual humor and good taste of old-fashioned European aristocrats; or like the "thinking machine" Professor Van Dusen described by Futrell.Most people may not remember his appearance, but we must never forget his huge and strange head, and we must also remember what the Soviet Chess King who lost to him said, "You are not a human being, you are just a brain — a machine — a thinking machine”.It's still a pretty fascinating look at some sort of paranoid genius scientist, like Einstein.

However, the agent of Wuming Mainland Detective Agency has none of these things. We don't even know his name. No one worships him, and no women admire him. In his hands, he just wanted to use this method to get out (but as far as I know, he didn't succeed). In the later novel "Bloody Harvest", the unnamed detective confessed: "Look, I sat at Wilson's (client's) table tonight and played with them like trout. Yes, had a great time. I looked at Noonan (the rogue cop leader in the case) and knew that because of the way I handled him, he had no one in a thousand chances to live another day. I smiled and felt warm inside I'm so happy, it's not me, I'm a hard skin, only my soul is left. After twenty years of fighting criminals, I can face any murder, see nothing but my job, see the example OK job..."

Hammett once said, "The job of the contemporary novelist (at the time he was speaking) is to cut out parts of real life and make them appear directly on the white paper, and, if more directly from the street Moved up to the paper, the novel is of course more real." The prototype of the detective of the Continental Detective Agency is obviously based on this idea. Its more specific source, Hammett once claimed, was based on a colleague of his Pinkerton Detective Agency Baltimore branch named James Wright. Wright); however, he also said that, in fact, the character of this middle-aged titan is basically comprehensive, composed of many people he knows, you and I, and there is more than one source.

Which of these two statements, all from the mouth of the original writer, is correct?My personal opinion is quite wishful, I think both should be close to the facts and not contradict each other—anyone who has a basic understanding of novel creation activities knows that people in novels, especially the main characters, are rarely “fabricated” completely out of thin air When it comes out, he often uses the name, identity, occupation, appearance characteristics, an interesting encounter or an interesting internal psychological state of a certain real person as the starting point, and then uses this point as the magnetic field center to absorb the novelist Combination of other materials required.

To be honest, who or where this point is is usually not important to the readers at all, just like whether the starting point of our mainland agent's appearance is Wright or Jack, it doesn't matter at all, and it doesn't affect the reading at all; But for the creator, it is often a matter of life and death, because the imaginary world he faces is vast, free, and unbounded. The creator needs to find a point (although it can be arbitrary and random) as a point to mark the coordinates. The origin is to let his imagination start without drifting, or as the jumping point of imagination, so that he can start to jump vertically with peace of mind, as the third line of "Qian Gua" said, "or jump in the abyss, auspicious, No blame"—meaning, the dragon that wants to fly into the sky starts to jump vertically from the water surface, even if it is not successful, the place where it falls is still a water abyss, and there will be no danger.

A kind of pure freedom is confusing, just like the ancient Greek mathematicians didn't know how to deal with the concept of "infinity". Life starts with boundaries. García Márquez, a Colombian novelist with gorgeous and abundant imagination, in his great book, let the beauty rise into the sky with only a white sheet. It made the novel colleagues all over the world trying to make his characters fly into the sky dumbfounded (it turned out to be so simple!), however, we say that even Marquez still has to rely on this sheet with clear material properties , to accomplish this beautifully.

Marquez once said, "Imagination without a realistic basis is the ugliest." That's right, here I can't help but take Marquez's beauty, the launch in broad daylight, and especially the white sheets used for the launch, as an allegory of some kind of creation.I think that ordinary readers, even more seriously, including many novel writers, often have too much "imagination" of the unrestrained imagination, thinking that only there is the promised place for the creator; Many imperfect, heavy, restrictive, and even ugly real worlds are the great enemy of imagination, and should be fought against and struggled to break free - such ideas are overly articulated, and it is easy to produce what Marquez called out of thin air. , commonly known as "random thinking"; thus writing what Marquez called the ugliest work, commonly known as "scribbling".

Life starts from the real world, characters and symbols are sampled from reality, paintings imitate reality, legends and writing originate from reality, human beings have lived with this real world for tens of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of years, and have been pulled by gravity for a long time. Underneath, there are indeed unbearable troubles, just like the "cave theory" described by Plato. The so-called real world situation in life is like a prisoner in a cave by iron chains. It prevents us from going further. On the upper floor, I can see another more vivid and perfect world of ideas - so the ancient Greek philosophers would rather look up at the starry sky and wander in the mathematical knowledge, and the Indian Buddhists created many more beautiful, cool and fragrant things that are not in reality In the world in the world, the romanticism of literature wants to replace the hard work of imitating the real world with will and imagination, and the impressionism of painting tries its best to break free from the unchanging physical reality that we see with our naked eyes.

Looking forward and seeking beyond, has always been with human beings. However, when Levi Strauss commented on the seventeenth-century French painter N. Poussin in his book "Regarder · Couter Lire", he raised a very interesting question: In the world of , the power of lifelike painting is always unabated?Although Impressionism rejected it, people of insight ridiculed it (such as Rousseau said: "The beauty of the cliché seems to have no merit except to overcome difficulties." Pascal said: "What vanity is painting, which arouses people by the similarity of things?" admiration, but at the same time people have no appreciation for the original.”), and the emergence of photographic equipment that captures the subtleties of objects more sharply once made people believe that realistic paintings have been replaced and should fall into the ashes of history up.However, the paintings that can be faked, grapes covered with a layer of fruit cream, vases with a porcelain texture, and even horses seem to jump out of the paper still attract people's attention.

Levi-Strauss's answer is: "This is not accidental. It discovers and shows that, as the poet said, inanimate things also have souls. A piece of material, a jewel, a fruit, a flower, a A piece of tableware, like a human face, has an inherent reality.” “[The painter], through certain technical procedures, miraculously achieves a fusion of fleeting and elusive aspects of the sensitive world.” Levi-Strauss further pointed out that lifelike painting is not simply a copy of the physical object, but a reconstruction. The painter must focus on developing a deep cognition of the object (painting object), and at the same time conduct deep introspection in order to obtain the object and subject. complete fusion.It is in this process that lifelike paintings are completely different from photography, which simply reproduces real objects, and from the so-called Neo-Image Art School, which directly draws color photos (Levi-Strauss harshly used "disappetite" to describe this) A school of painting) - Levi-Strauss sharply added that if you really want to pursue it, the pictures that can be called beautiful all appeared in the early days of the invention of the camera, because the crude equipment at that time forced the artist to use it. Not investing your own intelligence, your own time, and your own perseverance. "The human hand is still a crude device compared to the human brain." Clearly, Levi-Strauss believes that matter with tightly arranged atoms does not mean that there is no room for feeling, thinking, and imagination to turn around. It is not necessary to be like Plato (and the Impressionists, etc.), who have to break apart and go outside the real thing to seek No. Let's go back to Hammett and his Continental agents. From this, we find that Hammett succeeded in creating the archetype of this hard-boiled private agent, but his own explanation is flawed (it is not uncommon for a novelist to explain himself less than the work itself), because the mainland agent is not directly "Cutting" from his colleague named Wright, in fact, the mainland agent has more sources of experience that are difficult to describe (consciously or subconsciously), and a lot of Hammett's own feelings about the world , proposition, imagination and value, this is the complete fusion of subject and object that Levi-Strauss said. Or, we should say that it is more correct: Hammett’s claim of fictional realism borrowed from Henry James is undoubtedly a too brief and too rigid a view of “single fact”. This view is not accurate and outdated. However, This is not enough for us to rush to get the completely opposite view of either or that, thinking that realism is just the transplantation of real things on black and white, and people with imagination disdain it. Never underestimate the value of "truth" in the world of fiction writing. Compared with the unfailing power of realistic paintings in the world of painting as claimed by Levi-Strauss, the power of real people, events and events is definitely more than that of novels. It has a strong grip and gives The indescribably complex connection between the novel and the world, such a full and powerful connection, is often beyond the reach of the creator's consciousness and design, it also casts a solid foundation for the novel, making the imagination simple and focused, There is no need to look back repeatedly to find the ultimate rationality-truth, to some extent, regulates the imagination, but in the end, it releases the imagination. More importantly, it didn't allow the imagination to bring the novel into the world of pure games, but kept it in the humanistic thinking—even though, it seems that this is just an interesting genre novel.