Here is one fairly straightforward observation that follows from such reasoning. Adding strong metarepresentational framing to any information about a character's state of mind (that is, implying that the character might be lying about his intentions or feelings) does not simply add an extra level of intentional embedment to the scene in question, as, say, in, "A says that B thinks that C wants D to consider a certain factor X, but B is in fact misleading A about his thoughts." Rather, it fundamentally upsets the whole setup of this particular scene and often of the whole story. Quite naturally, it raises questions about B s motivations. Furthermore, it prompts us to inquire into A's true knowledge and motivations, and into what C really wants, and into what D really cares about. In other words, liars are a liability, both in real life and in fiction. Introducing just one lying character into the plot can have an immediate cascading effect on the rest of the narrative, for we have to reconsider thoughts, feelings, and motivations of other characters who have come in contact with the liar, and such reconsideration can cardinally transform our understanding of the story. Introducing two or more liars multiplies such effects to an alarming degree.
Not surprisingly, then, writers are quite frugal about how many liars they will allow into their stories, and they are very careful about charting out each liar's progress. Each instance of lying, be it the Golden Dustman's pretending that he is mean and avaricious to test Bella, or Bulstrode's concealing his past to conquer Middlemarch, or Wickham's telling Elizabeth about Mr. Darcy's past cruelties, or Humbert Humbert's talking himself and his readers into believing that Lolita has really seduced him, is a potentially destabilizing structural event. The author, thus, should be very particular about delineating the liar's sphere of influence by specifying who is liable to be affected by the liar's behavior, at what point in time and in what particular ways. Of course, a story can run away from its creator if the readers think they have a reason to question the author's description of the limits of the liar's sphere of influence. But, if anything, such reading against the author's apparent intentions testifies to the enduring shock value of every act of lying and our need to test the boundaries of truth once the potentially reordering element has been introduced into the narrative.
Let me bring together several points that I have made so far. On the one hand, it is possible that detective stories tease our metarepresentational ability by taking to the extreme our cognitive capacity to, first, store information under advisement and, then, once the truth-value of this information is decided, to think back to the beginning of the story and to readjust our understanding of a whole series of occurrences. On the other hand, storing information under advisement, particularly if the information concerns one character's manipulation of the state of mind of other characters, could be cognitively "expensive" because lying does not simply add an extra level of intentionality to the given situation. Instead, it frequently has a "cascading" effect, demanding from us a readjustment of what we know about other characters' knowledge, the knowledge that they in turn may have used to influence the states of mind of other characters, and so forth. Thus, a story whose premise is that "everybody could be lying" is a narrative minefield, and turning it into an enjoyable reading experience may require a particular set of formal adjustments.
Such adjustments include the drastic narrowing of the focus of the story. A whodunit allows that anybody and everybody can be lying (and, famously, in Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, that actually turns out to be the case), but the threateningly expanding universe of information about the characters' mental states that we thus have to store under advisement is mercifully constrained. Everybody's lying tends in the same direction, focusing on his/her relationship with the murdered Roger Ackroyd; or on that string of pearls that went missing from Mrs. Penruddock's household (in Raymond Chandler, "Pearls Are a Nuisance"); or on those hate letters that have been disrupting the quiet life of Shrewsbury College (in Sayers, Gaudy Night). If I am correct in considering lying in fiction as potentially cognitively "expensive," then the narrowing of the focus of a
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
story insisting that any of its characters may turn out to have been lying to everybody else is not even a matter of choice for the author. It is rather an absolute prerequisite of making this story cognitively manageable. Again, I am speaking here about the kinds of detective narratives that currently dominate the genre; future generations of writers may develop ways of circumventing or reorienting this prerequisite.
(b) There Are No Material Clues Independent from Mind-Reading
Let me restate the key point of my argument. Whereas any work of fiction engages our Theory of Mind, detective novels engage our ToM by experimenting in a particularly strenuous fashion with certain aspects of our metarepresentational ability. By creating a narrative framework in which everybody could be lying, such novels push to its furthest limits our ability to store information about our own and other people's mental states under advisement.
Given what we know now about our mind-reading capacity, we should thus be quite wary about advancing any interpretive framework that either ignores the "Theory-of-Mind" aspect of a detective narrative or insists on separating the analysis of the "material" clues present in such a narrative from the analysis of the states of mind of its protagonists. Witness a recent work of Ronald R. Thomas, who argues that the emergence of "detective fiction as a form" coincided "with the development of the modern police force and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state." The detective story has thus participated in the "cultural work performed by the societies that were increasingly preoccupied with . . . bringing under control the potentially anarchic forces unleashed by democratic reform, urban growth, national expansion, and imperial management." As the new forensic technology was a crucial means in identifying and controlling the potential deviants, the fledgling genre became particularly apt at reporting the clues that would allow the investigator to "read" and manage the "criminal body."3 Following this compelling analysis, however, is a startlingly dualistic assertion that "the detective novel is fundamentally preoccupied with physical evidence and with investigating the suspect body rather than with exploring the complexities of the mind."4
Here is how Thomas's argument can be qualified using the cognitive perspective: We care about the clues provided by the criminal bodies because other people's bodies are our pathways to their minds (however misleading and limited these clues may turn out to be). Furthermore, it can certainly be argued that the desire to read minds via bodies becomes particularly pronounced at the times of "urban growth, national expansion, and imperial management," when one is constantly thrown in with strangers whose social accountability is virtually unknown. Overwhelmed by the influx of foreigners in their community, people can indeed be particularly hungry for the fictional narratives that assure them that bodies, if read correctly, can offer them some valid information about the states of mind behind them. What Thomas characterizes as the desire to manage the criminal body is in reality a desire to manage the criminal mind.5
It seems almost superfluous to quote a passage from a detective story in order to demonstrate that "physical evidence" matters only insofar as it helps the detective to reconstruct the states of mind behind it, for no functional whodunit uses clues in any other fashion. Still, I will turn to one such passage, coming from Leblanc's 1907 story "The Red Silk Scarf" (not least because Leblanc had prefigured some of the later experimentations with combining the detective and the criminal in one figure, which I will discuss in one of the following subsections). At one point in the story, Arsene Lupin, an amateur sleuth, presents Chief Inspector Ganimard of Paris (a stock "dense policeman" character) with a pile of objects presumably relevant for the crime that Ganimard will soon need to solve, and invites him to figure out the meaning of these objects:
There were, first of all, the torn pieces of newspaper. Next came a large cut-glass inkstand, with a long piece of string fastened to the
lid. There was a bit of broken glass and a sort of flexible cardboard, reduced to shreds. Lastly, there was a piece of bright scarlet silk, ending in a tassel of the same material and color. (182)
After ascertaining that the objects don't hold any meaning for the dumbfounded inspector, Lupin tells the story that he has deduced from them, still leaving out, however, with small titillating exceptions that I will italicize, the stuff that we really want to know—the history of minds behind the "exhibit" as well as Lupin's own thought processes:
"I see that we are entirely of one mind," continued Lupin, without appearing to remark the chief inspector's silence. "And I can sum up the matter briefly, as told us by these exhibits. Yesterday evening, between nine and twelve o'clock, a showily dressed young woman was wounded
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
with a knife and then caught round the throat and choked to death by a well-dressed gentleman, wearing a single eyeglass and interested in racing, with whom the aforesaid showily dressed young lady had been eating three meringues and a coffee eclair. (183)
"Interested in racing" is a pretty straightforward attribution of a state of mind. Thomas may argue, however, that some of the other descriptions that I have highlighted, such as "showily dressed" or "well-dressed," indeed point to the text's "preoccupation with physical evidence and with investigating the suspect body" rather than with "exploring the complexities of the mind" of the young woman and the gentleman in question. However, this would be an untenable distinction. "Showily dressed" catches our attention because it implies a mind concerned with impressing other people in a certain way. "Well-dressed," on the other hand, implies a person who can afford to dress well and has taste. Moreover, contrasted with "showily dressed," "well-dressed" indicates the workings of yet another mind, that of Lupin himself, attuned to the variety of subtle ways in which different people try to manipulate other people's states of mind by their appearance.
Of course, in spite of Lupin's ironic, "I see that we are entirely of one mind," we haven't yet arrived at the actual explanation of the crime. When that comes, the material evidence— specifically, the red scarf—will acquire at least five different meanings, all of them reflecting the workings of scheming human minds attempting to influence other people's thinking.
It turns out that the showily dressed young lady was an aspiring singer who had in her possession a precious stone, a "magnificent sapphire" (187). Foreseeing that one day somebody may try to steal the stone (one instance of mind-reading, that is, of predicting what somebody else will be thinking in the future), she has stitched it into the tassel of the red scarf that she wore. When the murderer, who had pretended to be her admirer (another complex instance of mind-reading and mind-misreading) stabbed her with a knife, he used the scarf to wipe the blood off the knife, so as to leave no traces for the detectives (thus foreseeing and attempting to influence the detectives' thinking). The scarf was torn into two pieces during the scuffle accompanying the murder. The piece with bloody marks was found by Lupin, whereas the piece concealing the sapphire was held as material evidence by police, who did not know, however, what was hidden inside the tassel. When, acting on Lupin's suggestions, Ganimard arrests the murderer, he cannot prove the suspect's guilt to the public because to do so he needs the part of the scarf bearing the bloody marks. Ganimard, thus, cannot make the public share his views about the murder scenario without producing both halves of the scarf {yet another example of attempting to influence other people's state of mind).
Lupin knows all along that Ganimard will at some point find himself in this predicament, and he makes an appointment with him requiring him to bring along the piece of scarf found by the police. During the meeting, Lupin unravels the tassel and takes out the sapphire under the astonished gaze of the inspector who then tries to prevent Lupin from getting away with the precious stone only to find out that Lupin has anticipated the inspector's reaction {massive agglomeration of mind-reading) and has outfitted the doors of their meeting place with special locks that he but not the inspector can open. The actual act of murder, in other words, and the apparently crucial piece of evidence, the red scarf, are there to lead us to the real business of the detective story: the reconstruction of the plotting minds, whose machinations play off each other in unexpected ways to the delight of the reader.
Let us see how the story "works out" the reader's metarepresentational capacity. The story begins when one morning, Inspector Ganimard notices a "shabbily dressed" man in the street, who stoops "at every thirty or forty yards to fasten his bootlace, or pick up his stick, or for some other reason." Each time he stoops, he takes a "little piece of orange peel from his pocket and [lays] it stealthily on the curb of the pavement." This behavior is naturally puzzling, and here is our first bit of mind-reading that can explain this behavior and that we store as a metarepresentation, that is, as an explanation that is good for now but will very likely get modified as more data come in: "It was probably a mere display of eccentricity, a childish amusement" not deserving anybody's "attention" (178).
Inspector Ganimard, however, is never satisfied "until [he knows] the secret cause of things." He begins to follow the man and soon notices something even stranger. The man seems to exchange mysterious signals with a boy walking on the other side of the street. After each such exchange, the boy draws with a piece of chalk a white cross "on the wall of the house next to him." Inspector Ganimard now has good reasons to dismiss the previous interpretation of the situation, for clearly the first man is not just a harmless eccentric. And here we have the second bit of mind-reading that the story prompts us to store as a metarepresentation. Inspector Ganimard is now convinced that those two "merchants" are "plotting" something (179).
At some point, the two "merchants" finally come together and start
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
talking to each other. The hypothetical explanation of their behavior, that is, that they are plotting something, seems to get a strong boost when "quick as thought, the boy [hands] his companion an object which [looks]—at least so the inspector believed—like a revolver. They both [bend] over this object; and the man, standing with his face to the wall, put his hand six times in his pocket and [makes] a movement as though he were loading a weapon" (180). The two are clearly planning a crime— or such is the latest metarepresentation of their minds that the author wants us and Ganimard to consider now.
The suspicious duo enter the "gateway of an old house of which all the shutters [are] closed," and Ganimard, of course, hurries "in after them" (180). Awaiting him on the third landing is Arsene Lupin himself. We now get the real explanation of the situation and thus have to radically revise the information about the man's and the boy's minds that we have been storing as metarepresentations. It turns out that Lupin hired the two in order to attract the inspector's attention in the street and to bring him to this abandoned house. Given Lupin's past brushes with Parisian police and the inspector's dislike and even fear of him, Lupin knows that had he "written or telephoned," the inspector "wouldn't have come .. . or else [he] would have come with a regiment" (181) to arrest Lupin.
Once the first set of metarepresentations is taken away and replaced with the true explanation, we are immediately offered another mind-reading mystery. Why has Lupin gone to all this trouble to see the inspector? Lupin explains that he wanted to present the inspector with a bunch of clues (the above-mentioned pieces of newspaper, cut-glass inkstand, a string, a piece of bright scarlet silk, etc.) connected to the crime which was committed in Paris yesterday and which Lupin wants the inspector to solve. This explanation, however, is maddeningly incomplete, for it leaves open the question, Why does Lupin care about this crime in the first place? Is he driven by the righteous desire to see justice served? Is he in love with the young woman? Is he somehow implicated in the crime? Does he want to ruin the man whom he accuses of the murder? Does he want to humiliate, as he has in the past, the inspector who has to
reluctantly rely on his help while being unable to figure anything out himself? The story thus subtly offers us one metarepresentation after another that can explain the workings of the mind behind Lupin's actions, only to surprise us at the very end with the truth, which is that Lupin needed the inspector to bring him the other end of the scarf in which the sapphire was concealed. It is also quite possible that Lupin saw no harm in having justice served and the inspector humiliated, but these were destined to remain his secondary motives.
Whew. This is what I call a workout for our metarepresentational capacity.
(c) Mind-Reading Is an Equal Opportunity Endeavor
Agatha Christie's 1926 novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is considered something of a watershed in the history of the genre. Challenging the established tradition of a clueless narrator/sidekick, Christie made the "Dr. Watson" figure of her story the murderer. This "trick," writes Hay-craft, "provoked the most violent debate in detective story history . . . , in which representatives of one school of thought were crying, 'Foul play!'" while other readers and critics "rallied to Mrs. Christie's defense, chanting the dictum: 'It is the reader's business to suspect every one."'6 And so it is. (And so it has been, we should add, at least since the publication of "The Silk Red Scarf," in which Lupin treads a thin line between being a criminal and a detective.)
WhyWeReadFiction Page 18