Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [75]
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WHY IS READING A DETECTIVE STORY A LOT LIKE
LIFTING WEIGHTS AT THE GYM?
Poirot smiled at me indulgently. "You are Like the little child who wants to
know the way the engine works. You wish to see the affair . . . with the eye
of a detective who knows and cares for no one—to whom they are all
strangers and all are equally liable to suspicion. "
"You put it very well," I said.
"So I give you then a little lecture. The first thing is. to get a clear history
of what happened that evening—alivays bearing in mind that the person
who speaks may be lying. "
I raised my eyebrows. "Rather a suspicious attitude. "
—Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 111
ringing in what we currently know about our metarepresentational
ability can begin to explain our strange hankering for being deceived again and again as part of our experience of reading detective novels. I suggest that detective stories "work out" in a particularly focused fashion our ability to store representations under advisement and to reevaluate their truth-value once more information comes in.1 They push this ability to its furthest limits, first, by explicitly requiring us to store a lot of information under a very strong advisement—that is, to "suspect everybody'—for as long as we can possibly take it and, then, as the story comes to an end, to readjust drastically much of what we have been surmising in the process of reading it.
Let me return very briefly to the arguments of Part II to clarify how what I said there about fiction and our metarepresentational ability differs from what I am saying here. There, I considered the possibility that certain fictional stories (especially those featuring unreliable narrators) play in a particularly focused way with our ability to monitor our sources of information. They portray protagonists who fail, on some level, to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations of their own and other people's minds, and, by doing so, they force the reader into a situation in which she herself becomes unsure of the relative truth-value of any representation contained in such a narrative. Detective stories, I propose in this chapter, play a slightly different game with our metarepresentational ability. Rather than encouraging us to believe what a given protagonist (e.g., Lovelace or Humbert) is saying, only then to slap us with a revelation that we should not have trusted him in the first place, the detective stories want us to disbelieve, from the very beginning and for as long as possible, the words of pretty much every personage we encounter. The two types of narratives thus build on the same cognitive capacity for storing information under advisement, but they approach it from different angles.
One may argue, then, that detective stories literally exist for assiduously cultivating what Dr. Sheppard would consider a "rather . . . suspicious attitude" in the reader. In this respect, whodunits can be enjoyable and even addictive in the same way as weightlifting can be enjoyable and addictive: the more you train a certain muscle, the more you feel that muscle and the more you want to train that muscle. Note that I am using the far-from-perfect bodybuilding analogy on purpose to stress that just as not everybody is an avid bodybuilder—though everybody has a body and is in principle able to lift weights to train isolated muscles—so also not everybody is an avid detective-novel reader