WhyWeReadFiction
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There is a good reason why no literary convention specifying immunity of one type of character or another from turning out to be the criminal (or the investigator) remains unchallenged for long. Because we are in the business of mind-reading, one mind is as good a candidate for being concealed, misread, and willfully misrepresented as any other. Looking back at the development of the detective story in the last one hundred fifty years, we see that mind-reading, mind-misreading, and mind-concealing are truly equal opportunity endeavors, even if specific historical epochs have worked hard to ascribe either subhuman or superhuman qualities to criminals and sleuths of specific social and ethnic backgrounds. Yesterday's unspoken injunctions, whether dictated by literary tradition, by racial, social, and gender prejudices, or by current mores of political correctness about who could or could not be caught lying, are tomorrow's extra selling points.
The entire history of the detective genre thus can be viewed as a chronicle of the writers' experimentation with the question of whose minds the readers should be allowed to read and when they should be able to read them. One interesting development here concerns the mind of the detective. Think about Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin, and Hercule Poirot. They rarely divulge their insights until that triumphant final scene, in which the story of the crime—that is, the eclaircissement of the minds
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
behind the crime—is presented for the stunned reader. Some later-day writers, however, have experimented with how much of the detective's mind they can lay bare for us while still ensuring that the final revelation arrives as a surprise. Here is a bit of a game that one can play with a contemporary whodunit. Once we realize that many writers today consider it good form to sustain for as long as possible their readers' impression that they know exactly as much as the detective, we can hunt for those moments in the story when the mind of the detective gets decisively closed off from us. Such moments are rare and not particularly conspicuous, unless, that is, we consciously look for them as part of our project of understanding how fiction "works" our Theory of Mind. Then they literally leap up at us from the page.
For example, private investigator Cordelia Gray in P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman starts off by sharing all of her surmises with us, until we arrive at the following passage describing her reaction to the suicide note containing a quotation from Blake's poem: "It was then that two things about the quotation caught at her breath. The first was not something which she intended to share with Sergeant Maskell but there was no reason why she should not comment on the second" (88). Of course, it is not just Sergeant Maskell, but we, the readers, who get the door into the detective's mind slammed on our hopeful noses. The narrative then continues, having seemingly resumed its earnest intention to divulge all of the investigator's thoughts to the readers. Toward the end of the story, of course, the bit of information that was thus strategically concealed from us develops into a full-blown explanation of the crime as Cordelia addresses one of the criminals: "I wasn't sure if it was you. .. . I first [thought about you] when I visited the police station and was shown the note. It pointed directly to you. That was the strongest evidence I had" (207).
Here is a different novel by the same author. In Shroud for a Nightingale, James makes a point of following every intimate movement of Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh's soul for exactly half of the book. Then, nearly two hundred pages into the novel, we encounter a tiny sentence buried in Dalgliesh's exchange with his underling, one Sergeant Master-son. The sergeant wonders at what point the fatal poison was added to the bottle of milk used for training purposes in a hospital, observing that it "couldn't have been in a hurry." Dalgliesh replies:
"I've no doubt a great deal of care and time were taken. But I think I know how it was done."
He described his theory. Sergeant Masterson, cross with himself for
having missed the obvious, said:
"Of course. It must have been done that way."
"Not must, Sergeant. It was probably done that way." (186; emphasis
added)
We are not to learn, until time is very ripe, what Dalgliesh's "theory" was. After having thus reminded us who is really in charge of the novel's mind-reading, James then reverts to generously elucidating Dalgliesh's surmises for another sixty or so pages. Then she slides in yet another "mind-closing" sentence. Speaking with one of the novel's multiple suspects, Sister Brumfett, Dalgliesh asks a seemingly irrelevant question and immediately apologizes:
"I'm sorry if I sound presumptuous. This conversation hasn't much to do with my business here, I know. But I'm curious." It had a great deal to do with his business there; his curiosity wasn't irrelevant. But she wasn't to know that. (245; emphasis added)
Neither are we to know for many pages what Dalgliesh's question had to do with the issue at hand and how it fed into the "theory" that James had casually dangled in front of her readers earlier.
Other writers have made a point of never obscuring the mind of the detective from us, as have, for example, Sue Grafton in her "alphabet" novels and Sarah Paretsky in Burn Marks and Bitter Medicine. Here is a characteristic passage from a whodunit emphasizing the so-un-Sherlock-Holmes transparency of the detective's thought processes. Presenting a rather stark contrast to Raymond Chandler's previous novels, such as The Long Good-Bye, The Big Sleep, and Playback, it comes from Poodle Springs, the last "Marlowe" story, revised and finished after Chandler's death by another author, Robert B. Parker:
I lay back down on the bunk. . . .
I did some deep breathing.
And where was the picture? Lola would have kept a copy. It wasn't in
her house. If the cops had found it, it would have led them somewhere.
They were as stuck as I was, stucker because they didn't know the things
that I was stuck about. Could be in a safe-deposit box. Except where was
the key? And whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually keep safe-
deposit boxes. Maybe she stashed the negative with a friend. Except
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually trust friends with valu
able property. The simplest answer was Larry again, and the simplest
answer on Lippy was Les. And Les was Larry.
I did some more deep breathing. (191)
Approaching the detective narrative from a cognitive perspective helps us to understand why writers can, if they wish, abandon the Sherlock-Holmesian grandstanding and reveal to the reader every or almost every thought of the detective. It turns out that it does not really matter whose minds we are reading as long as there are some strategically concealed minds to read and as long as the topic of such a reading is highly focused (e.g., on a murder). It appears, then, that the writer's decision of whether or not to leave the thought processes of the detective open throughout the narrative correlates, at least on some level, with the length of the story. The narrative economics of the short story, which necessarily limit the number of minds that could be read and misread, makes it convenient to posit the detective's mind as one of the "mystery" minds, along with that of the main suspect. In a novel, where a larger number of minds can be contemplated, the mind of the detective does not have to be one of them.
Note that this is not some kind of absolute rule. There are plenty of novels in which the mind of the detective is closed off to us along with the minds of the suspects, especially those written early in the twentieth century, during what could be characterized as a cultural transition from the short story to the novel as the main medium of the genre. It seems that by exploring the new mind-reading possibilities of the longer form, writers have gradually discovered that there is nothing sacred about the tendency to keep the detective's thought processes enigmatic. Discoveries of this kind tacitly accompany each individual project of writing, for each whodunit tries something different in its treatment of mind-reading, and
the cumulative effect of the most recent attempts will make the detective narrative of the coming decades different from what it is today.
(d) "Alone Again, Naturally"
Here is a peculiarly tenacious, though not for the want of writers who have worked hard to undermine it, "rule" of a detective story: "In his sexual life, the detective must be either celibate or happily married."7 W. H. Auden formulated it rather succinctly in 1948, although, of course, he was neither
Part III: Concealing Minds
the first nor the last to notice it. Already in 1836, the brothers Goncourt asserted on first reading Poe's detective stories that they bear "signs of the literature of the twentieth century—love giving place to deductions . . . the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head . . . from the drama to solution."8 Haycraft reports that in 1941, Columbia University Press conducted a survey among "several hundred habitual readers" of detective stories, asking them in particular to identify their "pet dislikes." The aficionados of the genre, both male and female, voted "too much love and romance" to the top of the list of the undesirables.' Several years later, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the joint creators of Ellery Queen, echoed, perhaps unintentionally, this sentiment of the survey participants. In response to Dashiel Hammett's question, "Mr. Queen, will you be good enough to explain your famous character's sex life, if any?" Dannay and Lee suggested that "a wife, mistress or even physical love affair planted on Ellery after all these years would upset readers."10 Again, in 1965, Margery Allingham observed that detective fiction is "structurally unsuited to the steady use of romantic love. It can accommodate a brief encounter, or even a series of them, but anything more and the danger of upset becomes an embarrassment" (7).
Writers fought valiantly to loosen up this "strictly puritan"11 bent of the murder mystery. Allingham herself authored a series of novels featuring her favorite detective Albert Campion that explicitly challenged the rigid construction of that "very tight little box whose four walls consist of a killing, a mystery, an enquiry and a conclusion" with no "room for much else" (11). In Sweet Danger, Campion meets and admires the teenage Lady Amanda Fitton, who clearly "fits" his intellectual, emotional, and social class profile. In The Fashion in Shrouds, he sees her again after several years, admires her some more, and even agrees to affiance her. In Traitor's Purse, he is literally bludgeoned by the author into admitting to himself how ardently he loves and is afraid to lose Amanda to whom he has been engaged for the last eight (!) years. At the end of the novel he finally tells her "let's get married early tomorrow . . . I've only got thirty-six hours leave" (505), to which the ever "real cool" (14) Amanda, who has just gotten over her infatuation with the wrong man, replies "yes, . . . it's time we got married" (505). In all three cases, Allingham attempts to upset and complicate the traditional balance of the detective plot by adding to the main mystery of each novel the mystery of Campion's and Amanda's feelings for each other.
Similarly, Sayers structures her Gaudy Night (1936) so that the question of whether or not the professional detective-story writer Harriet Vane
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
will agree to marry the love-struck detective Lord Peter Wimsey is billed as just as important as the question of who has been wreaking havoc in Shrewsbury College by writing hate letters to the faculty and students and destroying their work. By portraying the criminal as driven by a distinctly antifeminist agenda, Sayers connects the straightforward "mystery" part of the novel with Harriet's tortured mulling over of whether a woman can preserve her emotional and professional independence after being married, particularly if the husband is as brilliant and strong-willed as Wimsey.
Sayers has thus anticipated the detective novels of the 1980s and 1990s, in which the question of how much "room" there is in a detective story for "love and romance" was compellingly rearticulated with the introduction of the female private investigator. Though perceived by some of her chauvinist male colleagues as an "alien monster" rather than a "real girl" (Paretsky, Burn Marks, 339), such a heroine is routinely depicted as negotiating romantic relationship, as is Kat Colorado (Karen Kijewski, Alley Kat Blues), V. I. Warshawski (Paretsky, Bitter Medicine), Kinsey Mill-hone (Sue Grafton, "P" is for Peril), Stoner McTavish (Sarah Dreher, Stoner McTavish; Something Shady), and Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair). Some critics have hailed such plot developments as a sign that the detective novel has indeed escaped the "very tight little box" confining its predecessors. Ian Ousby suggests that the female investigator's "personal involvement" with lovers, friends, and family members "is not just a convenience to get the story going but a signal that its theme will be the detective's own self-discovery and self-definition." A private eye is "not just there to solve a mystery but to learn about herself by understanding women from her family past better, or to see herself more clearly by comparing her life with the fate of women friends,"12 an observation that seems to be borne out by the material of, say, Paretsky's Total Recall.
My response to such claims is cautiously optimistic. When researching this topic, I have read more detective novels than I have ever thought possible, and I came to believe that on some important level the kind of mind-reading expected from the reader of the detective novel is indeed not particularly compatible with the kind of mind-reading expected from the reader of the story focusing on a romantic relationship.13 At the same time, it seems that benefiting from the years of experimentation and failure, detective writers have certainly learned how to hierarchize various elements of the two kinds of mind-reading and thus how to successfully incorporate some romantic themes into their murder mysteries.
Contemporary cognitive research offers a fascinating (if, at this point, unavoidably rudimentary and tentative) way of modeling some of those
FIGURE 3. Book cover of MANEATER by Gigi Levangie Grazer reproduced with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Book cover, Copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. Michael Mahovlich / Masterfile (image code 700075736).
failures and successes. First of all, we have to remember that our Theory of Mind is not an adaptation that enables us to apply a single universal set of inferences to any situation that calls for attributing desires, thoughts, and intentions to another living creature. Rather, it could be thought of as a "cluster" of multiple adaptations, many of them functionally geared toward specific social contexts. For example, the kind of mind-reading
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
that we use in the process of selecting and courting a mate is on some important level quite different from the mind-reading we deploy when we try to escape a predator. Trying to guess what that cute person at the adjacent table is thinking every time she provocatively glances up at you from her plate must recruit cognitive adaptations for mind-reading somewhat different from those recruited when you are trying to guess what that tiger is thinking as she leisurely approaches you in the street after having escaped her cage in the zoo. Specifically, the same question aimed at figuring the other's state of mind, for example, "I wonder if she is still hungry?" automatically activates a very different suite of inferences depending on whether it is applied to a potential mate or to a wild animal. (Of course, in certain situations, the two can overlap on select levels: just think of the various fascinating shades of anxiety we may feel when we fall in love with a notorious "lady-killer" or "femme fatale," or consider our emotional response to the cover illustration of Gigi Levangie Grazer's 2003 novel Maneater [figure 3]. I will address this topic later in this subsection.)
Second, trying to figure out how the person that you have a crush on feels about you and what you should do based on your far-from-perfect understanding of his/her state of mind requires a complex balancing and adjustment of several metarepresentationally framed interpretations of the situation. For example, you need to try to keep track of the version of that person's thoughts that are based on your own wishful thinking (this would be a
metarepresentation with a source tag such as, "I would love it if. . ."); as well as of the version that is based on what your friends think about that person's feelings about you as distinct, for example, from what they thought about it yesterday; as well as of what that person has intimated to you about his/her feelings yesterday as opposed to what he/she is telling you today; and so on. This may sound too involved, but I suspect that the cognitive reality of this process is much more complicated, and it is important for us to get a glimpse of this complexity in order to realize how extremely emotionally/cognitively consuming this endeavor can be. Our Theory of Mind gets fully engaged with this task, "turning on," so to speak, the system of inferences that have evolved to enable us to negotiate the mate-selection process.
But, then, trying to decide which of the ten ostensibly pleasant and law-abiding citizens in our snow-trapped train car is a psychopathic mass murderer could be just as emotionally/cognitively challenging because this task also requires us to process numerous interpretations of our fellow-passengers' mental states with various degrees of metarepresentational framing. Only it is likely that in this case our mind-reading processes activate systems of inferences quite distinct from those used in guessing the state of mind of a potential mate. It is possible, for example, that among the mind-reading adaptations activated in this particular context are those particularly geared toward enabling us to negotiate situations involving violations of social contract and situations involving avoidance of predators.
It seems then that the "economics" of the evolved cognitive architecture of our species could explain why one may have a difficult time dwelling on the absent beloved's possible thoughts while being threatened by a homicidal maniac. Detective stories cultivate in their readers a very particular group of emotions, clustering more often than not around fear. And fear, as Patrick Colm Hogan has compellingly argued, drawing on the work of cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, tends to focus our emotions to the exclusion of irrelevant environmental stimuli. It is just as well that it does, so that upon spotting a lion in the distance, we "do not spend time considering all [our] options, potentially getting 'lost in the byways of. . . calculation."14 The "limitation of procedural schemas"—flee or fight!—and the "narrowing of attentional focus"—THINK LION!—"are both clearly functional here."15