We're not sad: The death of Miles Archer

As if the title of this post doesn’t spell it out, Miles Archer, the partner of The Maltese Falcon’s protagonist Sam Spade, dies. It isn’t a heroic or noble death after a novel’s worth of adventures and near misses designed to bring the two into harmony. To borrow a cinematic term, Archer dies off-screen between the first and second chapters.

So, what’s he there for? While there’s an argument to be made about Archer’s death getting the plot going, it would have been easier to just not have Archer at all. Why bother, then? Archer and his death, rather than creating sympathy, remorse, or advancing the plot, are acts of world building: they cue us to the laws and morals we’re dealing with in The Maltese Falcon.

As a person, Miles Archer is a cad. He's flirtatious, “appraising” their client's, Miss Wonderly’s, form, and is quite keen to take her case. After Spade tells him not to “dynamite her too much,” Archer declares, “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.” Sam is more prudent, but doesn't condemn his partner's actions, remind him about Mrs. Archer (more on that), or point out the client is young enough to be his daughter. These aren’t gentlemen working for the sake of justice or craft, they’re guys.

And then comes Chapter 2, “Death in the Fog”, which opens with a telephone call waking Spade in the night. Only getting what Spade says, we learn someone's dead. The story follows Spade, almost step by step, to the crime scene where we learn Archer is the victim, and through this sequence, Spade shows little emotion, let alone remorse. We get nothing of Spade's thoughts, and he remains stolid and unemotional throughout: he approaches it as if it’s just another murder.

So how was their partnership? What did Spade think about his deceased partner? Two events answer this question. First, Spade instructs his secretary to have the “Spade & Archer” on their door changed to “Samuel Spade”, literally expunging his memory from their offices. Second, when Spade takes the widowed Mrs. Archer into his office, the two kiss like the boat is sinking. Her mourning is rendered superficial and she’s willing to continue her affair with her late husband’s partner, even if he isn’t. Everyone just worries about themselves because they all have something they’re hiding.

The result of all this is, when Miles Archer is dead, no one – not his partner, wife, secretary, or even the reader – is saddened by the tragedy. There's a little anger and frustration, but there's no emphatic eulogizing, remorse or regrets. His brief appearance in Chapter 1 shows an unsavory, albeit not villainous, fellow, so it isn’t much of a loss. We don’t even know how good a detective he was, and Sam and Mrs. Archer benefit from his death. Everyone is too busy looking out for their own safety and keeping track of their lies to care about, let alone mourn, someone’s death.

I find the death of Miles Archer interesting and significant, not just for The Maltese Falcon, but for the genre as a whole: we're given a pair of detectives, little to go off of to understand them, and when there's a death, nothing is done to give us any reason to mourn. I can't even call Archer's murder a symbolic death of the noble private detective, men like Holmes because he's the opposite of that archetype, nor is his death symbolic of the death of these kinds of characters because of Sam's own double dealing with Mrs. Archer and the other characters. Archer's death is an indication of the kind of world we're entering: one where no one is to be trusted, everyone holds something back, no one cares much for each other, and people die; where heroes can be as despicable as the villains and the villains appear as innocent as schoolgirls, blurring the lines between good and bad and pitching the black and white of Holmes' world into a sea of gray.

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Works Cited

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Print. 

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 4: A Symbolic Death

As the fourth, and last, post dealing with sympathies, audience, and Anton Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the end of the play, wherein an image and a sound are powerfully juxtaposed. The image is of Firs (the old valet) dying, and the sound is the cherry trees being cut down. It seems simple enough, and yet this juxtaposition carries significant symbolic weight.

Firs has been a mainstay at Ranevsky's estate, and even fondly remembers the time before the emancipation of the serfs. After all, he had it pretty good as a valet, one of the head servants, and probably saw his fellow servants go their separate ways once they were emancipated and the estate grew too poor to keep them on. He rose to the highest position he could as a servant, misses the others after they have left, and his closing words, the words that close the play, are “I'm good for nothing.“

As for the felling of cherry trees, Lopahin has made no secret of his desire to do so. He had encouraged Ranevsky to save her land by felling the orchard and building estates. He had used his business savvy to know what would be the best thing to do financially, and will now do the same, making his investment work for himself. But he does so quickly, felling the trees even before the family has left so Ranevsky watches her beloved orchard fall as she leaves her family’s estate.

Ending a narrative is a daunting task: everything has to be carefully resolved, and a Russian play with its full cast is no exception. By this time the other characters have already left and Firs is alone. So the question is, why end the play on this note, with the sound of the ax and the death of an old valet?

The characters represent more than just themselves. Just as Lopahin represents the nouveau riche and Ranevsky the noblesse oblige, Firs represents an old generation, so rooted in its ways that even when emancipation came, he did not accept it and continues to live the same life he always had. Firs, by virtue of his position, his age, and his attitude about serfdom, represents an older way of life, even though he has few lines and little attention. He brings with him a lot of social and cultural baggage and he, ironically, is willing to carry it while the audience must decide how to sympathize with him and what he represents. Even as he dies, he complains that Gaev, Ranevsky's brother, probably left in an inadequate coat. Firs, as a former serf who stayed with the family and became the valet, is a strong representation of that time and that mentality. He's like the cherry trees: an old establishment representing a bygone era. Ranevsky assumed that since they always had been there, they always would be.

So what about when the character dies? All of that dies with him. When a character represents something, like a historical period, a certain mindset or occupation or lifestyle, dies, it means that, unless there's another character that also represents it, everything they symbolize dies as well.

And if they're killed? Firs' death is interesting because it has the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. Firs stands old and symbolic, alongside the cherry trees, and the two are only further linked symbolically through the juxtapositions of their deaths. Lopahin is responsible for the cherry orchard's removal, just as how Ranevsky is responsible for having lost her money and the estate. Lopahin does not take the ax to Firs, but by felling the orchard, Lopahin symbolically brings about the death of an era, initiating a new world governed by hard work and business rather than estates and inheritances. It's a world that has no place for the old serf Firs. And so, there's nothing left for him.

We don't just sympathize with people. We sympathize with what they represent, and how we demonstrate that sympathy shows how we sympathize with their representations. To pity Firs' death is to pity an old lifestyle. Similarly, to lionize Lopahin would be to lionize all he represents. Characters and people cannot be separated from what they do and what they represent.

Simple Symbols of Love

Ah, February. a short month punctuated with varying shades of red and pink hearts; bare-bottomed, infantile archers; and a continuation of the winter holidays binge eating. There’s still plenty of sugar to go around.

And poetry, lots of poetry.

Poetry and literature about love is as common as carbon, so... why not do a few romantic poems these four weeks of February.

Love is a difficult thing to represent or describe, which is why we have a proliferation of certain colors, shapes, and pictures to represent it. We use these colors and images to try to shape and define this abstract concept. Love is so profound, and yet so common, we use these images because they symbolize something significant.

Imagery and symbolism, like lovers, go hand in hand. It's possible to have one without the other, but you usually find them in tandem. Sometimes we see symbolism as trying to dig out the author’s deeper meaning behind symbols and images, and we expect symbolism to be deep, profound, and elusive. Not all symbolism has to be so elusive, though. Sometimes, it’s as simple as the symbols of love.

The poem I want to discuss is one of these simple ones. It appears in anthologies and classrooms. I don't think there's anything deeper or more profound in it than its being a love song. Edmund Waller’s “Song” or, as it is more commonly known, “Go Lovely Rose.”

This poem is special to me. I don't have any great romantic attachments to it, but it makes for a beautiful song, and I sang it in my high school choir. It's simple, sweet without being saccharine, and invokes simple, beautiful imagery of a single, impermanent, significant rose.

Roses are simple, delicate, beautiful, and when the speaker of the poem says, “Tell her...when I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fair she seems to be” (2-5) the speaker addresses the rose and tells the rose to tell the woman he is wooing how he compares the rose to her. The poet relies on the symbolism of the rose, and yet, tries to imbue it with his own symbolism. Roses are common in Western culture as a ubiquitous symbol for love. Giving a person a rose will send a very different message than sending them columbines or poppies, because there's something delicate and romantic in a single rose.

What the speaker of the poem is trying to do is take the collective, societal symbolism of the rose and individualize it – personalize it. He does this by addressing the rose itself about its own symbolism, but he adds to it in the process. He suggests the rose's beauty would have been “uncommended” (10) had it bloomed in a desert. He suggests beauty is beauty whether it is recognized or not. For the speaker, the rose isn't just a beautiful flower symbolic of love because convention says so. He encourages this added symbol of the barren desert as a way to encourage her to “suffer herself to be desired,/And blush not so to be admired” (14-15). The speaker isn’t content to accept the rose as a symbol in and of itself, but mingles the symbolism of the rose with the image, and thereby the symbolism, of the desert to make it as unique as his love.

He then reminds us, and the rose, that the rose will die, regardless of whether it bloomed in a desert or not. There’s a departure from the romantic. Roses don’t symbolize death, and love poems don’t usually end on a note of “and we’ll die some day.” He doesn’t forget that he’s dealing with a plant that lives and dies and not just emotions and abstract symbols. He knows the rose won’t last long, a fine detail vendors don’t mention, but he’s not going to shirk from the truth, and is going to use it to his advantage. In short, to say they should take advantage of “how small a part of time they share” (19).

The speaker takes the rose, relies on the rose’s traditional symbolism, and develops upon that symbolism to make it his own. Which is what we do with love.

Romantic love has kept writers of every sort employed for centuries, each one wringing some new significance, form, model, or moral from it in order to delve deeper into this ubiquitous emotion. I mean, Nicholas Sparks has published 17 novels, and the rose has remained a symbol of love for centuries. Edmund Waller wasn't doing anything new here but his piece does say something about the nature of love and our relationship with it: we try to make it personal.

In a culture where people can build careers on the serialization of romance, and yet, it's something abstract. We can't put our finger on it, and its different for everyone. So the speaker of this piece finds himself in a plight not unlike that of most every person who has fallen in love. He has so many ways to convey this love, but he wants to do something unique.

It isn't just a poem about a man wooing a woman nor is it just about how roses are symbolic of romantic love. It's about how we take these symbols of love and breath new life, new love, into them.

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Works Cited

Waller, Edmund. "Go Lovely Rose." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180684>.

Waller, Edmund. "Song." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 1006-7. Print.