{"id":142,"date":"2003-07-25T00:29:11","date_gmt":"2003-07-25T04:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=142"},"modified":"2003-07-25T00:29:11","modified_gmt":"2003-07-25T04:29:11","slug":"dashiel-hammett-meets-derrida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"Dashiel Hammett Meets Derrida"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh<\/em><\/a> is a hardboiled crime novel, and also a meditation on language and writing, and memory and complicity. (Thanks to Ashley Crawford <\/a>for recommending O’Connell). Like Hammett’s Red Harvest<\/em>, Word Made Flesh<\/em> uses the detective genre, and a story about competing gangs in a small city (Personville, sarcastically called Poisonville, in Hammett; Quinsigamond, a kind of dream version of Worcester, Massachusetts, for O’Connell) to convey a hellish vision of power, of a world in which “people are brutalized for the simplest reason of all: because they can be. Because when someone else holds power, they can fuck you over in ways that your imagination has never even considered” (215). But O’Connell replaces Hammett’s gritty realism with a phantasmal irrealism in which violent economic and political power, expressed through horrifying assaults on the body, accompanies, and seem almost interchangeable with, the power (which is also the delusive anti-power) of words and texts. So the violent, noir<\/em>ish plot turns out to involve a quest for a missing book, an Anne Frank-like work of impotent, yet enduring, testimony to a massacre (or worse than a massacre, since it sought to obliterate, not just people, but the memory of those people’s ever having existed). And we encounter such phenomena as a gang of violent terrorists who seek, on philosophical grounds, to eliminate all written language; a parasitic disease that feeds on the language centers of the brain, as well as on the tongue; not to mention a bevy of competing bibliomanes, literary scholars, linguistic theorists, and religious visionaries obsessed with the Word. All in all, a strangely gripping and compelling novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh<\/em><\/a> is a hardboiled crime novel, and also a meditation on language and writing, and memory and complicity. (Thanks to Ashley Crawford <\/a>for recommending O’Connell). Like Hammett’s Red Harvest<\/em>, Word Made Flesh<\/em> uses the detective genre, and a story about competing gangs in a small city (Personville, sarcastically called Poisonville, in Hammett; Quinsigamond, a kind of dream version of Worcester, Massachusetts, for O’Connell) to convey a hellish vision of power, of a world in which “people are brutalized for the simplest reason of all: because they can be. Because when someone else holds power, they can fuck you over in ways that your imagination has never even considered” (215). But O’Connell replaces Hammett’s gritty realism with a phantasmal irrealism in which violent economic and political power, expressed through horrifying assaults on the body, accompanies, and seem almost interchangeable with, the power (which is also the delusive anti-power) of words and texts. So the violent, noir<\/em>ish plot turns out to involve a quest for a missing book, an Anne Frank-like work of impotent, yet enduring, testimony to a massacre (or worse than a massacre, since it sought to obliterate, not just people, but the memory of those people’s ever having existed). And we encounter such phenomena as a gang of violent terrorists who seek, on philosophical grounds, to eliminate all written language; a parasitic disease that feeds on the language centers of the brain, as well as on the tongue; not to mention a bevy of competing bibliomanes, literary scholars, linguistic theorists, and religious visionaries obsessed with the Word. All in all, a strangely gripping and compelling novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}