What struck me as important in this last part of the book is that we are finally given a certainty of sorts. When Gould begins to describe the book we are now holding, and talking about Hammett, as well as when he talks about seeing this character in the modern day, we know that the constructed view of Gould given within the book is impure, in the sense that we can now ultimately know Gould is not trustable. There is no way he could have possibly existed in the current day. This leads me to believe the book was, as Hammett said he was writing in those last few pages, a hoax Hammett wrote about early Tasmania.
But then I thought, what if these last parts, the ones that reference the book, could have merely been Hammett’s corruptions of Gould’s book. Perhaps there is a core truth to Gould’s narrative that was actually not part of Hammett’s fabrication. I really can’t exclude Gould, and the book went back to the same number of layers of narrative complexity there were before. In fact, in a sort of disheartening fashion, I realised that the fact this was a possibility means that the novel could be reinterpreted from Hammett’s scope, which seems to be trying to craft the novel into a fable of Tasmanian national identity, a process I hadn’t been looking at the book from.
Which leads me to a hardly related annoyance – a large portion of literary theory is devoted to the idea that the text is unrelated to the author. This makes writing no longer an inscribed form of verbal discourse, because when we listen, we consider the motives and context of the words to perceive the meaning of the author. To me this seems counterproductive, as if when the speaker makes a syntax error, but one that we can correctly understand through the way they said the sentence, as if theorists are the grammar nazi who calls out the speaker by interpreting their speech literally, simply by the words they are saying. Eg: “You don’t like killing children?” “No!” “Ok, you do like killing children, how inhumane!” When we read, if we focus on the words rather than the author’s meanings, how is anyone supposed to communicate what they are truly trying to say, through writing, sans becoming a robot and writing with perfect logic? (tl;dr – langue is nothing without parole.)
How this relates is that my system for reading a book depends heavily upon deciding how the text corresponds to the goals of each responsible character and narrator, including the author. This can be seen somewhat in my method in the first two paragraphs.
The problem with this method, of course, is page 404 – when Flanagan decides to tell us HAY GUYS there are a large number of characters here that have had different goals who are actually the same character, so have fun with your interpreting the text through characters scheisse, it is lame and I do not respect it. This second part, of course, is only true of what he says if you believe, like I do, that as an author he’s trying to defy all literary structure to prove a point.
However, I think this is sort of a failure, because Gould’s madness can be thought akin to a multiple-personality disorder, and we can vocally interpret that in a feasible manner.
In any matter, I think Hammett is a more important character than we may have possibly given him credit for. Perhaps we should have talked about him some more.
