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Now imagine a scene in a novel that embeds five or six levels of intentionality, as in, "A says that B thinks that C wants D to consider E's idea that F believes that X." This is already fairly difficult to follow for any

3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story

reader. Let us, however, complicate it even further and suggest that this is a scene from a detective novel, whose credo is to "suspect everybody." What it would mean is that not only do we have to process five or six embedded levels of intentionality, but we also have to consider on top of it that either A, or B, or C, or D, or E, or F; or both A and B; or C, D, and F; or all six of them are lying. I am not saying that is impossible to write such a scene (in fact, it may have been written at some point), but I strongly suspect that at least in the context of the literary history of our present moment, readers may find it rather incomprehensible. An author could play with multiplying the levels of embedded intentionality, as Woolf did, or an author could deliberately mislead us about the thoughts, desires, and intentions of her characters, as Sayers says all detective story writers should do; but it may take a presently unforeseen form of literary experimentation to usher in a work or a series of works of fiction that could successfully do both. At this point in our literary history, an effective whodunit can offer us red herrings again and again, but it tends to stay around or below the fourth level of embedded intentionality, and more reliably so than a non—detective story.

Here is one fairly straightforward observation that follows from such reasoning. Adding strong metarepresentational framing to any information about a character's state of mind (that is, implying that the character might be lying about his intentions or feelings) does not simply add an extra level of intentional embedment to the scene in question, as, say, in, "A says that B thinks that C wants D to consider a certain factor X, but B is in fact misleading A about his thoughts." Rather, it fundamentally upsets the whole setup of this particular scene and often of the whole story. Quite naturally, it raises questions about B s motivations. Furthermore, it prompts us to inquire into A's true knowledge and motivations, and into what C really wants, and into what D really cares about. In other words, liars are a liability, both in real life and in fiction. Introducing just one lying character into the plot can have an immediate cascading effect on the rest of the narrative, for we have to reconsider thoughts, feelings, and motivations of other characters who have come in contact with the liar, and such reconsideration can cardinally transform our understanding of the story. Introducing two or more liars multiplies such effects to an alarming degree.

Not surprisingly, then, writers are quite frugal about how many liars they will allow into their stories, and they are very careful about charting out each liar's progress. Each instance of lying, be it the Golden Dustman's pretending that he is mean and avaricious to test Bella, or Bulstrode's concealing his past to conquer Middlemarch, or Wickham's telling Elizabeth about Mr. Darcy's past cruelties, or Humbert Humbert's talking himself and his readers into believing that Lolita has really seduced him, is a potentially destabilizing structural event. The author, thus, should be very particular about delineating the liar's sphere of influence by specifying who is liable to be affected by the liar's behavior, at what point in time and in what particular ways. Of course, a story can run away from its creator if the readers think they have a reason to question the author's description of the limits of the liar's sphere of influence. But, if anything, such reading against the author's apparent intentions testifies to the enduring shock value of every act of lying and our need to test the boundaries of truth once the potentially reordering element has been introduced into the narrative.

Let me bring together several points that