Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [84]
At some point, the two "merchants" finally come together and start
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
talking to each other. The hypothetical explanation of their behavior, that is, that they are plotting something, seems to get a strong boost when "quick as thought, the boy [hands] his companion an object which [looks]—at least so the inspector believed—like a revolver. They both [bend] over this object; and the man, standing with his face to the wall, put his hand six times in his pocket and [makes] a movement as though he were loading a weapon" (180). The two are clearly planning a crime— or such is the latest metarepresentation of their minds that the author wants us and Ganimard to consider now.
The suspicious duo enter the "gateway of an old house of which all the shutters [are] closed," and Ganimard, of course, hurries "in after them" (180). Awaiting him on the third landing is Arsene Lupin himself. We now get the real explanation of the situation and thus have to radically revise the information about the man's and the boy's minds that we have been storing as metarepresentations. It turns out that Lupin hired the two in order to attract the inspector's attention in the street and to bring him to this abandoned house. Given Lupin's past brushes with Parisian police and the inspector's dislike and even fear of him, Lupin knows that had he "written or telephoned," the inspector "wouldn't have come .. . or else [he] would have come with a regiment" (181) to arrest Lupin.
Once the first set of metarepresentations is taken away and replaced with the true explanation, we are immediately offered another mind-reading mystery. Why has Lupin gone to all this trouble to see the inspector? Lupin explains that he wanted to present the inspector with a bunch of clues (the above-mentioned pieces of newspaper, cut-glass inkstand, a string, a piece of bright scarlet silk, etc.) connected to the crime which was committed in Paris yesterday and which Lupin wants the inspector to solve. This explanation, however, is maddeningly incomplete, for it leaves open the question, Why does Lupin care about this crime in the first place? Is he driven by the righteous desire to see justice served? Is he in love with the young woman? Is he somehow implicated in the crime? Does he want to ruin the man whom he accuses of the murder? Does he want to humiliate, as he has in the past, the inspector who has to reluctantly rely on his help while being unable to figure anything out himself? The story thus subtly offers us one metarepresentation after another that can explain the workings of the mind behind Lupin's actions, only to surprise us at the very end with the truth, which is that Lupin needed the inspector to bring him the other end of the scarf in which the sapphire was concealed. It is also quite possible that Lupin saw no harm in having justice served and the inspector humiliated, but these were destined to remain his secondary motives.
Whew. This is what I call a workout for our metarepresentational capacity.
(c) Mind-Reading Is an Equal Opportunity Endeavor
Agatha Christie's 1926 novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is considered something of a watershed in the history of the genre. Challenging the established tradition of a clueless narrator/sidekick, Christie made the "Dr. Watson" figure of her story the murderer. This "trick," writes Hay-craft, "provoked the most violent debate in detective story history . . . , in which representatives of one school of thought were crying, 'Foul play!'" while other readers and critics "rallied to Mrs. Christie's defense, chanting the dictum: 'It is the reader's business to suspect every one."'6 And so it is. (And so it has been, we should add, at least since the publication of "The Silk Red Scarf," in which Lupin treads a thin line between