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“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and the State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

ANDREW PEPPER
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Abstract

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , May 2010 , pp. 333 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Ronald R. Thomas, for example, has argued that the rise of detective fiction was “coincident with the development of the modern police force and the creation of the modern bureaucratic State.” See his Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.

2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 263.

3 As a Pinkerton agent working in the western US between 1919 and 1922, Hammett would have witnessed the repressive or punitive measures adopted by mining companies (and sanctioned by agencies like the FBI and the Army) to break strikes and smash the power of the International Workers of the World (IWW) union; these measures included the criminalization of union membership, the deployment of federal troops against striking miners and the unofficial sanction of vigilante actions taken against IWW activists like Frank Little (who was tortured and murdered on the night of 31 July 1917).

4 Heise, Thomas, “‘Going Blood-Simple Like the Natives’: Contagious Urban Spaces and Modern Power in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest,” Modern Fiction Studies, 51, 3 (Fall 2005), 485–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 487 and 489.

5 Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 6.

6 Heise, 505; also see McCann, 78.

7 Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick, ‘Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest’, PMLA, 106, 2 (March 1991), 209–21, 213.

8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 85.

9 Stephen Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, 1975), 326. Also see Christopher Bentley, “Radical Anger: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest,” in Brian Dochery, ed., American Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 54–70.

10 Much has been written about the interpenetration of the western and hard-boiled detective fiction forms; see, for example, Cynthia S. Hamilton, Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987); John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

11 See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

12 Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166–67.

13 Within Marxist criticism, there is some debate as to whether Marx sufficiently examined the role that consent (rather than simply coercion) played in the maintenance of capitalist rule and whether his insistence on the primacy of economic determinism blinded him to the autonomy or relative autonomy of the political domain. While I do not have the time and space to examine such arguments in detail, they are relevant to my purpose here because they draw attention to ways in which Gramsci sought to build upon and develop Marx's theories in the 1920s and 1930s.

14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed., David Forgas and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 369, 374.

15 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, in The Four Great Novels of Dashiell Hammett (London: Picador, 1982), 13. All subsequent page references, given parenthetically in the text, refer to this edition.

16 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 210.

17 Ibid., 293.

18 Ibid., 262–3

19 Ibid., 272.

20 Ian MacKenzie, “Power,” in Fidelma Ashe et al., eds., Contemporary Social and Political Theory (Buckingham and Indiana: Open University Press, 1999), 72.

21 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 285.

22 Freedman and Kendrick, “Forms of Labor,” 211.

23 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 207.

24 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, trans. David Fernbach (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), xi.

25 Buci-Glucksmann, 70.

26 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 258

27 Heise, ‘“Going Blood-Simple like the Natives”’, 501, 491.

28 Gramsci, 261.

29 Freedman and Kendrick, “Forms of Labor”, 210.

30 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 304.

31 The notion of hard-boiled crime fiction in general and Red Harvest in particular as a cultural fantasy of masculinity is developed by Christopher Breu's Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

32 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 261.

33 Ibid., 204.

34 Buci-Glucksmann, xi.

35 In this respect, Gramsci's work constitutes an important touchstone for later Marxist theories of the state, notably Nicos Poulantzas's State, Power, Socialism (London: NLB, 1978).

36 David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 283.

37 According to Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Rolland's slogan was adopted by Gramsci as early as 1919 in Ordine Nuovo; see Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 395.