Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [85]
There is a good reason why no literary convention specifying immunity of one type of character or another from turning out to be the criminal (or the investigator) remains unchallenged for long. Because we are in the business of mind-reading, one mind is as good a candidate for being concealed, misread, and willfully misrepresented as any other. Looking back at the development of the detective story in the last one hundred fifty years, we see that mind-reading, mind-misreading, and mind-concealing are truly equal opportunity endeavors, even if specific historical epochs have worked hard to ascribe either subhuman or superhuman qualities to criminals and sleuths of specific social and ethnic backgrounds. Yesterday's unspoken injunctions, whether dictated by literary tradition, by racial, social, and gender prejudices, or by current mores of political correctness about who could or could not be caught lying, are tomorrow's extra selling points.
The entire history of the detective genre thus can be viewed as a chronicle of the writers' experimentation with the question of whose minds the readers should be allowed to read and when they should be able to read them. One interesting development here concerns the mind of the detective. Think about Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin, and Hercule Poirot. They rarely divulge their insights until that triumphant final scene, in which the story of the crime—that is, the eclaircissement of the minds
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
behind the crime—is presented for the stunned reader. Some later-day writers, however, have experimented with how much of the detective's mind they can lay bare for us while still ensuring that the final revelation arrives as a surprise. Here is a bit of a game that one can play with a contemporary whodunit. Once we realize that many writers today consider it good form to sustain for as long as possible their readers' impression that they know exactly as much as the detective, we can hunt for those moments in the story when the mind of the detective gets decisively closed off from us. Such moments are rare and not particularly conspicuous, unless, that is, we consciously look for them as part of our project of understanding how fiction "works" our Theory of Mind. Then they literally leap up at us from the page.
For example, private investigator Cordelia Gray in P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman starts off by sharing all of her surmises with us, until we arrive at the following passage describing her reaction to the suicide note containing a quotation from Blake's poem: "It was then that two things about the quotation caught at her breath. The first was not something which she intended to share with Sergeant Maskell but there was no reason why she should not comment on the second" (88). Of course, it is not just Sergeant Maskell, but we, the readers, who get the door into the detective's mind slammed on our hopeful noses. The narrative then continues, having seemingly resumed its earnest intention to divulge all of the investigator's thoughts to the readers. Toward the end of the story, of course, the bit of information that was thus strategically concealed from us develops into a full-blown explanation of the crime as Cordelia addresses one of the criminals: "I wasn't sure if it was you. .. . I first [thought about you] when I visited the police station and was shown the note. It pointed directly to you. That was the strongest evidence I had" (207).
Here is a different novel by the same author. In Shroud for a Nightingale, James makes a point of following every intimate movement of Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh's soul for exactly half of the book. Then, nearly two hundred pages into the novel, we encounter a tiny sentence buried in Dalgliesh's exchange with his underling, one Sergeant Master-son. The sergeant wonders at what point the fatal poison was added to the bottle of milk used for training purposes in a hospital, observing that it "couldn't have been in a hurry." Dalgliesh replies: