Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [76]
2: Reading a Detective Story
shape." The assumption that reading detective stories works out our metarepresentational capacity thus allows us to account both for the enjoyment that we derive from such stories and for the fact that such enjoyment is not universal.
Furthermore, even if weightlifting makes one generally stronger, and detective-novel-reading makes one a veritable expert in the genre, both experiences still remain in many ways decoupled from reality. Just as overdeveloping one's triceps, biceps, and trapezoids generally does not give the bodybuilder any particular advantage in her everyday activities2—it certainly does not make one more adept at handling such crucial items as a pen, a laptop, a phone, and a fork—so keeping on a steady diet of detective stories does not make one a particularly discerning social player. It does not help me see through somebody's lies and it does not help me to know which "clues" to pay attention to in order to get to the truth of a given matter. In fact, applying what I have "learned" from a murder mystery to my everyday life could make me a social misfit: there is an important difference between being able, in principle, to revise one's views based on new evidence and going around deliberately suspecting everybody of being not what they seem, "just in case." In this respect, detective narratives may be said to parasitize on our metarepresentational ability: they stimulate it without providing the kind of "educational" benefit that we still implicitly look for in what we read. Delight they do, but instruct they don't, or at least not in the traditional sense of the word instruction.3
The detective narrative's emphasis on exploring the furthest limits of our metarepresentational ability is the reason I prefer to focus on the novel and not on the classical form of the genre, the short story. Literary critic Jacques Barzun has suggested that the short story remains the "true medium of detection," for turning an elegantly economic piece into a "tangled skein of 150,000 words" accomplishes little else than adding the "artificial bustle and bulge" of false leads. Note, though, that put in "cognitive" terms the difference between the short story and the novel acquires a new meaning. Unlike its shorter counterpart, the detective novel veritably luxuriates in mind-reading; it adds more minds for the reader to consider and more metarepresentational framing to keep track of (or, as Jack Womack puts it on a different occasion, "the difference between the stories and the novels is the difference between coffee and methedrine"4). Of course, one of the founding fathers of the genre, Edgar Allen Poe, was already quite aware that his short stories were all about mind-reading, for as the narrator of "The Purloined Letter" famously discovers, figuring out the crime requires the "identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent" (13). Generally, however, the format of the short story limits the number of minds that could be read in-depth and titillatingly misread.
However heavy-handed it may be, the parallel between detective fictions and weightlifting works on yet another level: in a culture that does not have a concept of weight-training facilities, or that considers muscular bodies ugly, or that frowns upon women exercising in such an "unfeminine" fashion, or that thinks that there is something unbearably ridiculous about setting aside significant amounts of time and money for lugging around pieces of iron, weightlifting of the kind currently widespread in this country would not exist. By the same token, there is nothing historically inevitable about the emergence, wide cultural