Frames, Honesty, and The Maltese Falcon

Most detective stories start out in a similar fashion: a client goes to the detective and enlists their help resolving a mystery or righting some wrong. The Maltese Falcon is no different. It opens with Ms. Wonderly hiring Spade & Archer to help her find her sister who has run off with a man named Floyd Thursby. She pays them generously for their work, generously enough, that Spade doesn’t believe her story.

This places Spade at a disadvantage: as a detective, he’s supposed to fill in the gaps, to complete incomplete narratives. If a detective were told a complete story, there'd be little need for them. In this respect, detective fiction owes something to frame narration.

However, in most frame narratives, there will be a chapter or so introducing the main narrative, only returning to that frame at the very end. Detective fiction takes this and puts it in a blender; or shoots the frame up with a tommy gun would be better. There are two main reasons for this: the first is the presence of many narratives within the main narrative for the detective to sift through, and the second is, like Ms. Wonderly, not everyone is honest.

Narrative Framing: As a detective detects, they seek out clues and witnesses, gathering information from them. The characters that populate a detective story will have different perspectives and experiences that relate to the case, and they will have different things to say and share. It's from these bits and pieces the detective solves the case. Detective fiction is therefore about narrative and narrative construction: it's a story of someone figuring out what really happened and then presenting it to the people involved at the end. Each time they speak with someone and get more information, they'll get a different frame and they need to figure out just how it fits with the main narrative, like a puzzle piece, and lob off whatever is unnecessary.

Character Honesty: Of course, most detective fiction relies on someone doing something dishonest or deceitful. If everyone was perfectly honest about everything, the detective would be obsolete. People don't like admitting to stealing, murder, or any number of other malfeasance, so it's up to the detective to find out who is lying, who is telling the truth. The separate fact from fiction and extrapolate the truth when people actively try to keep them from it.

Returning briefly to Sherlock Holmes stories, It's pretty much taken for granted that the clients tell the truth. They give Holmes a reliable piece of the puzzle immediately. However, in a post-war, cynical era where the author had professional detecting experience and was therefore probably lied to on a regular basis (I bet detectives get lied to much more often than physicians, or at least they'd be more serious lies), it stands to reason more people are going to lie, including those you’re supposed to trust.

Enter the characters of The Maltese Falcon, where the kinship and trust you had for Sherlock Holmes gets left in another century. Now, we have people who lie, cheat, steal, deceive, and it isn't clear what their motivations are: it could be business or pleasure, for personal gain or social justice. They fluctuate based on their needs to avoid bad situations, to get out of a dangerous spots with as little injury as possible to their pride and their bodies. And people get killed.

So, with The Maltese Falcon, we leave a world of black and white morality and enter a much grayer one.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Works Cited

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

Framing Frankentsein Part 3: Developing and Questioning Reliability

Near the end of Frankenstein, Victor admonishes Walton to beware the monster's eloquence. However, in the following pages, Walton describes how Victor's own eloquence buoyed the men of his ship. This creates an inconsistency: if the Monster is not to be trusted because of his eloquence, why should Victor be trusted for possessing the same talent? And from there, if Victor is eloquent and persuasive, can we really believe his fantastic tale? (For what it's worth, while Victor cheered them, he could not convince them to continue on their dangerous voyage.)

This highlights one of the great issues with a frame narrative, especially Frankenstein: reliability. Reliability is a surprisingly complex issue, one literature scholars continually address and reevaluate. It forces us to stop and think about how and why we trust or distrust, narrators, characters and their stories; and because Frankenstein is focalized through Walton, it is necessary to consider his reliability first.

Walton's narration begins with the letters to his sister. Letters are a unique form of writing: they are personal and intimate, which makes it different from novel writing meant to be public. By using letters to initiate the story, Shelley makes it seem more reliable, more realistic because while a narrator may be unreliable, we expect a brother writing to his sister to be honest and sincere. These opening letters establish Walton's reliability so we will trust him when he takes Victor Frankenstein at his word. This is compounded, at the end of the novel, after Victor has completed his narrative, the monster appears to Walton, removing the Monster from Victor's narrative, and putting him in Walton's.

Why have the monster appear? Because we trust Walton more than we do Frankenstein. Reliable narrators need to do more than accurately tell what happened, but also be able to accurately interpret and understand it. This means Walton is necessary to make the narrative reliable because Victor is harder to trust. Victor, in the course of his narrative, is incapacitated several times and experiences deliriums. He is also unsteady: he switches from one perspective to another, eagerly creating the monster, then shunning it and fearing it, and most importantly, misinterpreting what is around him.

The most prominent example of Victor's failure to interpret is when the monster declares he will be with Victor on his wedding night. Victor takes this as a sign that the monster will try to kill him on his wedding night. However, this is not the monster's goal, and there is actually little evidence to suggest it: the monster elsewhere suggests he wants to make Victor miserable as he has made the monster himself miserable, and has already done this by killing and framing for murder friends of the Frankenstein family and the monster's threats come after Victor has destroyed the woman companion the monster commissioned him to make. The evidence is there: a miserable life, murdered friends and family, the abandoned monster-bride, and yet Victor insists the monster targets him despite all evidence to the contrary.

Between Victor's deliriums, his changing perspective, and his inability to interpret, he becomes an unreliable narrator. However, it is only his ability to interpret we can readily call into question. Walton, conveniently stranded in the arctic, has no means to confirm any of Victor Frankenstein's story, and because Walton believes Victor, and we are intended to believe Walton, we therefore believe Victor. The monster doesn't appear to confirm Walton's narration, but to confirm Victor's and his own narration. His few statements align with Victor's narration, which the monster was absent from, so had Victor contorted the story, the monster could not have known.

Ironically, then, all of the reliability hinges on Walton: is this the fantastic story of a man who was in the right place at the right time, or could he be fabricating this story? It's hard to tell: we have Victor and the monster to confirm one another's stories, but Walton has to rely on narrative devices and techniques: the letters, his station as captain, his dire situation, to affect his own reliability.

But this leads to a perhaps unanswerable question: is Walton's frame a narrative device to make himself reliable, or was he really in the right place at the right time?

Framing Frankenstein Part 2: Frames and Focalization

Focalization is, in its simplest sense, a matter of whose perspective the information is coming from. As a concept it was introduced by French literary critic Gerard Genette, in his book Narrative Discourse, as a replacement for saying first, second, or third person narrator. It is a useful term because it suggests that narrators can be read and understood beyond their use of pronouns.

I bring this up in this discussion of Frankenstein and frame narration because focalization helps us to stop and really think about where the information is coming from, not just who is saying it or their relationship to the events being described: each framed narrative cannot be properly read without considering its relationship to its frame, or, how each level is focalized.

Take, for example, fellow horror fiction Dracula. Dracula is an epistolary novel: collections of letters, diary, and journal entries recreated (presumably) faithfully. Within the context of Dracula these narratives were gathered from many sources and lined up in a logical form. In doing so, each piece is put on the same level, in tandem with one another: it's not a matter of how Jonathan Harker met Van Helsing who told Harker about his pupil, Dr. Seward, who told about his experiences with his zoophagous patient Renfield, but how each character relates their own personal experiences. The epistolary nature of such a story even adds to its immediacy: each character presents relevant information as, or shortly after, it was being experienced. Mina Harker and Dr. Seward do not amend their diaries to reflect what they would learn later. This keeps the information up to date and each voice presented in the narrative is unmediated by any others. When Jonathan Harker speaks, it is focalized through Harker and no one else. 

It would be a grave mistake to call Frankenstein’s layered narration “Unmediated”.

It may be easy to see both as a collection of related stories, but it is not that simple. Where Dracula features different narrators taking turns to tell their own narratives, Frankenstein is about Captain Walton telling the story of Victor Frankenstein, which includes his own narrative about how the monster told his own narrative, which even includes telling the story of the French family, which itself includes the Turkish merchant's story. Dracula is many snippets cobbled together to tell one story. Frankenstein is one story telling other stories.

And just as there are framed narratives, there are also framed narrators. Victor and the monster both assume the role of narrator at their respective moments, with the novel funneling down into and up out of its narrative construction. It's just all the information has come through different narrators, who we trust to relate everything the others have said. And Walton's letters, his doubt his sister will even receive them, mixed with Frankenstein's deathbed confession, serves to frame the story to remove doubt: to make this fantastic tale seem realistic and plausible. But this raises a serious issue with narrative reliability, and we must ask ourselves, to what extent can Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster be trusted? After all, Walton could have altered either Victor or the monster's narrative, and Victor could have altered the monster's. Layers of narration create the facade of reliability, but do more to complicate it. More on that next time.

Framing Frankenstein Part 1: Understanding Frame Narration

I was in college the first time I read Mary Shelley's horror story, Frankenstein. Admittedly, the only image I had of the monster was Boris Karloff’s from Universal Studio's horror hay-day, so I was surprised when the monster turned out swift, nimble, and eloquent. It was an enjoying read, but the horror elements weren't what would stick with me. Instead, it was how the work strove to appear reliable and believable. I realized this a few months later while tutoring at a high school, a student came in with a copy of Frankenstein. I picked it up with excitement (a healthy balance to her sighs) and started discussing frame narration.

Frame Narration is an interesting narrative choice because it embeds one narrative within another, it isn’t so much like a picture in a frame, but more like a painting of a painter painting a painting. We see not just the one painting, but all of them, and take all of them into consideration. So, back to narratives we have to understand each narrative within the context of the situation it’s being told, and each frame impacts the way we read the storied being framed and the frames themselves, making it possible to give a piece several different readings based on how these narratives are read and compared. Frame narratives require a different kind of reading because it forces you to think about what the two narratives have to do with one another, in terms of themes, symbols, and even the contexts in which the narratives are themselves framed.

Frame narration is kind of like gossip: one person gained information they want to pass on, but part of passing on that information is describing where that information came from. For example, you found out that a friend just got a new job and you want to tell someone else about it (or even explaining to the person who got the job how you know about it), but rather than just say “Rick got a new job teaching Driver's ed,” You say, “I was having lunch with Laura when a driver's ed car drove by and she wondered if Rick was the instructor. I said 'Rick doesn't teach Driver's ed, and Laura said, 'He does now. He just interviewed for the position. He's going to quit his night job.''”

In the first example, there is a single narrative, with Rick as the protagonist and the focus being his new job. The second involves telling a narrative about having lunch and an event triggering the other narrative. This is a simple formulation, but it's still framing the narratives.

Shelley's Frankenstein goes considerably deeper than this.

It opens with the sailor writing letters to his sister: we get a glimpse of who he is, his motivations and interests, and then, one day, a man is discovered on the ice: Victor Frankenstein. Once Frankenstein is well, he begins to impart his tale to Captain Walton, who is in turn, transcribing it. It is a tale of modern and arcane science and how his studies and a death in his family led him to try reanimating dead tissue. From these experiments, the monster is born and turned loose on the world, who then has his chance to tell his story to Victor Frankenstein, halfway through the book, which includes the tale of the disenfranchised French aristocratic family, all of which is then embedded within Victor Frankenstein's narrative. Once the monster's narration concludes, Frankenstein himself returns to his tale of science and tragedy, before the sailor becomes the primary narrator again, and because he began the narrative, he is able to end it.

This creates an interesting set of questions: Why have the sailor? Why even use these deep levels of first person narration? There are “found manuscript” narratives like The Scarlet Letter, Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote, and other frame narratives where the top narrative is the most important, like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but Frankenstein doesn't work like these, but this framing device does influence the narrative in primarily two ways: first, it actually establishes a sense of reliability, and second, it develops significant themes, but in order to understand how it does these things, it helps to know just what is going on in a frame narrative.