Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [77]
This emphasis on historicizing is crucial for the cognitive-evolutionary approach to literature championed by this study, and one of its broader ramifications applies not just to the detective genre. As we learn more and more about our metarepresentational ability, this knowledge may allow us to account, at least on some level, for certain fascinating regularities that we encounter in already existing cultural representations, such as literary texts, but it will never predict what cultural representations we are bound to have or cannot have in the future. Those are grounded in future history and as such are unpredictable even if they build on the same cognitive predispositions that have been with us for hundreds of thousands years.
Thinking of the detective narrative as engaging in a particularly focused way our metarepresentational ability and yet being anything but historically inevitable puts on a stronger footing our project of historicizing the "rise of the detective story" phenomenon. Briefly, critics have offered explanations for the emergence and cultural entrenchment of the genre that range from sociopolitical (e.g., Howard Haycraft's hypothesis of the relationship between the detective genre and democracy) and scientific (e.g., Ronald R. Thomas's correlation of the rise of the detective story with the development of forensic technology), to ideological (e.g., Routley's argument about the relationship between the detective story and the English puritan tradition) and aesthetic (Joyce Charney's view of the detective novel as a latter-day response to the same set of aesthetic needs that used to be addressed by the English novel of manners). The endeavor to historicize the nineteenth- and twentieth-century detective story is often complicated, however, by the acknowledgment that we can find
2: Reading a Detective Story
"proto-detective" narratives in much earlier epochs, from Daniel's interrogating of the elders in the biblical story of Susanna in the garden to Sophocles' Oedipus and Voltaire's Zadig.5 Such acknowledgments seem to undercut, at least on some level, our attempts to situate the detective story in the nineteenth-century or the twentieth-century historical milieu and to explain its popularity by specific sociocultural developments of the moment. For if there is a detective story already present in the Bible, how can we speak about its "emergence" in, say, the 1840s, with the stories of Poe?
The cognitive framework lets us address this issue directly. It suggests that if (some form of) the metarepresentational ability has been with us since the dawn of the human species, then people have always had the potential for being interested in the stories that engage this ability. Consequently, by completely vindicating our suspicions that we have "always" had some sort of detective narratives lurking in our cultural history, the cognitive framework allows us to move on, so to speak, and to focus on the sociohistorical and aesthetic factors that might have contributed to the appearance, in the nineteenth century, of the detective story as a culturally recognizable, new, and special literary genre.
Furthermore, our perspective on the permutations of this genre from the nineteenth century until today may, too, change once we posit as the key underlying characteristic of the detective story its tendency to engage in a focused way our evolved cognitive ability to store information under advisement. That is, we can begin to see the recent history of the detective narrative as a cultural chronicle of writers' experimentation with our metarepresentational ability and our Theory of Mind, pushed to their limits in several different directions. In the process of such experimentation, writers learn to negotiate and redirect cognitive challenges that may have first appeared insurmountable for their readers.
A detective story seems to be particularly fit for such an analysis because