Passports
Abstract Discovered by Spade, Joel Cairo’s three passports—Greek, French, and British—suggest the character’s connections to nineteenth-century fiction, when the burgeoning European metropolises of London and Paris had begun to render every identity suspect (see Balzac and Dickens). Cairo, of course...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | unknown |
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Oxford University PressNew York, NY
2008
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195322910.003.0068 https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52623928/isbn-9780195322910-book-part-68.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract Discovered by Spade, Joel Cairo’s three passports—Greek, French, and British—suggest the character’s connections to nineteenth-century fiction, when the burgeoning European metropolises of London and Paris had begun to render every identity suspect (see Balzac and Dickens). Cairo, of course, is a crook, and his proliferating passports merely fill in that portrait. Determining his origins, imagine the hermetically sealed space of The Maltese Falcon as one large theatrical set, the Swing Your Lady poster seems like a door in the stage’s rear wall, suddenly flung open to reveal the actual world. The very lack of attention accorded the poster achieves another effect. As Barthes points out, when real historical characters (or objects) get introduced into a fiction obliquely, in passing, “their modesty, like a lock between two levels of water, equalizes novel and history.” After The Maltese Falcon’s success, Warners would exploit such “locks,” casting Bogart in a series of World War II adventures (Across the Pacific, Casablanca, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara, Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not), the first of which, 1942’s Across the Pacific, concerns the Panama Canal. |
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