Modernism and Disciplinary History: On H. G. Wells and T. S. Eliot

Abstract

Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade's face, which was placid. The fat man asked: Well, sir, what do you think of that? I don't know. The fat man smiled complacently. These are facts, historical facts, not history, not Wells's history, but nevertheless. --Dashiell Hammett (124) Mr. Wells's serves as a casual point of reference in Caspar Gutman's account of appearance and subsequent disappearance of Maltese from recorded history. As he explains to Sam Spade, Knights of Rhodes ordered making of a tribute to Emperor Charles V that reflected and celebrated their unabashed looting of East: a glorious golden falcon assembled by Turkish slaves, encrusted from head to foot with finest jewels in their coffers ... finest out of Asia (124). But it never reached emperor because it was stolen--and had been stolen repeatedly ever since. As most academically invested twentieth-century seeker of falcon, Gutman's complacent avarice makes him modern historical authority of moment, since historical facts are as steeped in contented criminality as he is. As both thief and historian, he brushes received, schoolbook against grain to expose forgotten thefts. Sam Spade's placid, noncommittal response to relish with which Gutman narrates falcon's bloody travels suggests a present gone blandly indifferent to exotic, high-stakes backdrop of crusades, conquest, slavery, greed, and international piracy. In this context, Wells's history--that is, The Outline of History--appears naively distanced from historical facts, a vague outline removed from insistent materiality of falcon's travels through time. (1) If Sam Spade's outward refusal to be moved by past violence stems from his hard-boiled sense that modernity is characterized by everyday bloodshed, Wells's Outline stands for a kind of soft-boiled modernity. Simply unaware of either past, exotic brutalities or present, routine ones--lacking both Gutman's and Sam Spade's insights--The Outline, like many of Wells's interwar works, adheres to a belief in universal humanity's enlightened progress toward a secular world government, a condition that would render obsolete crusading past that interests Gutman. And yet history nevertheless possesses a complicated allure for Sam Spade as well as Gutman. A kind of cultural knowingness attaches to historical facts that Gutman conveys to Spade, a sense that we men of world know how greed and bloodshed really propel history, not sanitized, bloodless innocence of Edwardian popular historians. The desire that both men share to hold implies a desire to hold material of in one's hands, to touch barbarically authentic in what Walter Benjamin might recognize as this tainted ... cultural treasure (256). Of course, Hammett will counter Gutman's narrative with subsequent discovery that is a fake. Gutman's rara avis (204) is both a copy and a rarity: not real thing, but evidence of a rarely expressed desire for kind of brutal crusading efficiency that novel's hardboiled present can only weakly imitate. For all weight of this falcon, holding it implies holding nothing at all--the stuff that dreams are made of, in John Huston's fortunate, if un-Hammett-like, addition to his film. In Gutman's depiction, authentic falcon's origins are implicated in highly effective barbarism: systematic looting of East coupled with efficient exploitation of the anonymous toil (Benjamin 256) of enslaved workers. In contrast, clumsier efforts to obtain by both Spade and Gutman's gang come to be implicated in a wistful dream to reproduce success of such extortion. In The Maltese Falcon, gangster ineptitude and haphazard, wasteful violence are only feeble contemporary echoes of an older, more exacting order of barbarity, as when Sam Spade awkwardly steps on hand of dead man who has just toiled to deliver fake to him, while his own widespread fingers exhibit ownership in their curving over it (159). …