Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [74]
One way to approach this question is to suggest that the enjoyment we derive from whodunits is akin to the enjoyment some people derive from watching/reading suspense thrillers: they get to experience the emotional thrill of danger, of chase, of relief, and then, perhaps, of a renewed danger, all the while remaining safe and warm and not at all threatened by a homicidal maniac posing as a kind next-door neighbor one has known for five years (hmm . . .). Moreover, we can stand being kept in the dark for three hundred pages because we know from our previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained. What makes suspense largely unpleasant in real life is that there is no guarantee that we will ever get a complete, or even a partially true, answer to any perplexing question. We can thus enjoy being lied to in the highly structured world of a murder mystery because it offers us a safe setting in which to relieve our anxieties about the uncertainties and deceptions of real life. Or, as Erik Routley puts it, it is the "matter of. . . assurance: it's . . . being allowed for a space to go out of the draught of doubt—that's what the detective story reader thanks his author for."3
I cannot argue with this explanation or with many other fine explanations put forth by literary critics and aficionados of the detective genre in the last hundred or so years. But neither can I pretend to be satisfied with them, for each of them feels incomplete once you start probing deeper. For example, the concept of "relieving-our-anxieties-about-reallife-deceptions" in a safe setting of the novel is useful because it allows us to make some immediate sense of the apparent paradox inherent in our interaction with detective stories, but it does not have any predictive capacity. Postulating that as readers we enjoy dwelling in a state of cruel uncertainty which we would by all means try to avoid in real life implies that, everything else being equal, we should derive pleasure from reading about any activity or about any state of mind that makes us anxious in reality. To a certain limited extent this is true,4 but it sets no boundary condition for its truth. It cannot predict or explain why reliving some of our numerous anxieties in fiction could be a pleasure and reliving others is a nightmare. Even more important, it does not explain why this experience should differ so radically from one reader to another, for plenty of people cannot stand whodunits and thus apparently derive no pleasure, to quote Routley again, from "being allowed" this particular literary "space to go out of the draught of doubt."
2: Reading a Detective Story
This part of the book develops an explanatory framework that can be used to address some of the very basic and yet at the same time very complex issues informing our interaction with detective novels. I approach the question of why some people may enjoy being lied to in the context of the detective narrative by arguing that, although any narrative engages our metarepresentational ability, whodunits tend to "work out" certain aspects of this ability in a rather focused way. I then speculate on the larger implications of this