Writers, Like Other Mendicants and Mountebanks

Paradox has been defined as "Truth standing on her head to attract attention." Paradox has been defended; on the ground that so many fashionable fallacies still stand firmly on their feet, because they have no heads to stand on. But it must be admitted that writers, like other mendicants and mountebanks, frequently do try to attract attention. They set out conspicuously, in a single line in a play, or at the head or tail of a paragraph, remarks of this challenging kind; as when Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote: "The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule"; or Oscar Wilde observed: "I can resist everything except temptation"; or a duller scribe (not to be named with these and now doing penance for his earlier vices in the nobler toil of celebrating the virtues of Mr. Pond) said in defence of hobbies and amateurs and general duffers like himself: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they "talk for effect"; and then the writers answer: "What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?" It is a sordid scene.

G. K. Chesterton, "When Doctors Agree," The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond. This is one of my very favorite Chesterton stories. All the Mr. Pond stories start by putting their puzzles in the form of paradoxes; the paradox for this one is that two men once agreed so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other one. The rest of the tale unfolds how this can be true, and the characterization of the benevolently ruthless philanthropist is quite splendid.

A Buddhist Parable

A man set out on a journey to sit at the feet of the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, who lived on a far mountain. It was a long journey and he was an old man, and it took him many months before the mountain even was in view. Upon seeing it, he stopped and asked an old woman working in a field how many days away the mountain was.

The old woman looked at him a moment, then went back to her work. Assuming she was hard of hearing, he asked her the same question in a louder tone of voice. Again she looked at him without speaking and then went back to her work.

Shrugging his shoulders, the man assumed that she was nearly deaf, and began again to walk toward the mountain. He had scarcely walked a dozen or so steps when he heard the old woman behind him say, "Two days! You will reach the mountain in two days."

Turning back to her angrily, the man said, "I had thought you were deaf. Why did you not answer my question when I asked it?"

The old woman shook her head. "When you asked the question you were standing still. How could I know how long it would take you to reach the mountain if I did not know how quickly you would walk, or with what resolve?"

Music on My Mind

historyteachers, "Chinese Dynasties." They have a number of good ones, including one for Thomas Aquinas*, but I think this is the one that works the best.

* Incidentally, I notice that there's a dispute in the comments section about whether "Aquinas was his name" is technically correct, the argument being that 'Aquinas' merely means 'of Aquino'. While this is right, the argument seems to me to assume naming conventions that don't apply in Latin, in which agnominal and cognominal names (of various kinds, depending on the era) were a tradition extending at least a millenium and a half before St. Thomas. It's like arguing that Karinsdatter can't be a name because it's just the description, 'daughter of Katherine' or 'daughter of Karen'; this, however, is to make an illicit conflation of distinct conventions of naming. Such is my two-cent contribution, anyway.

MacIntyre on Philosophy and Universities

Philosophy is in any case a social and not a solitary form of enquiry. It requires a setting in which different and rival answers to philosophical questions can be proposed and objections to each considered in detail, so that such answers may be revised or rejected and such objections themselves subjected to critical scrutiny. And, if the enquiries of philosophy are to be sustained enquiries, as they need to be, they must be continued through different philosophical generations, each of which in turn has to be introduced through teaching to the enquiries and debates that have made philosophical questions what they have become in that particular time and place. Moreover philosophy cannot but draw upon the findings and insights of other disciplines. So that the type of institutionalized setting in which it is most likely to flourish is that of a college or university.

Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities. Rowman & Littlefield (New York: 2009) p. 17. The overall profile is right, although I think history shows that colleges and universities oscillate under social pressures between approximating this profile -- social, examining alternative answers, critical scrutiny, recognition of historical features of discussions, interaction among disciplines -- and deviating from it considerably, even setting aside the point MacIntyre goes on to argue, namely, that philosophy can be strongly affected by the principles of unified education on which the college or university bases itself.

Detection Club Ten Commandments

Another thing for which Ronald Knox is famous is the 'Ten Commandments' he proposed for the Detection Club:

I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
III. No more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
V. No Chinaman must figure into the story.
VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
VII. The detective must not, himself, commit the crime.
VIII. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but only very slightly, below that of the average reader.
X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

The Chinaman rule is to prevent the villainous deed from being pawned off on mysterious foreigners. An interesting game is to think of mystery stories that are (1) competent; and (2) break at least one rule. Probably the most famous is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Chesterton (like a number of others) tends to play with the possibility of breaking rules without actually doing so, but at times he does produce a whoppingly good one that breaks one of the rules; one of my favorites along these lines is "Dr. Hyde, Detective, and the White Pillars Murder" -- which, indeed, is probably the best example of a good mystery story breaking the particular rule it breaks, although one can perhaps argue that it does so by arranging things so that it can both break the rule and follow it simultaneously.

Sherlockismus

Monsignor Ronald Knox died on this day in 1957. From his classic 1912 essay, Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes:

There is a special kind of epigram, known as the Sherlockismus, of which the indefatigable Ratzegger has collected no less than one hundred and seventy-three instances. The following may serve as examples:

‘Let me call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
‘The dog did nothing at all in the night-time.’
‘That was the curious incident,’ said Sherlock Holmes.

And again:

‘I was following you, of course.’
‘Following me? I saw nobody.’
‘That is what you must expect to see when I am following you,’ said Sherlock Holmes.

This is the essay that is usually credited with initiating the "Grand Game," by which one conducts scholarly investigations on the Sherlock Holmes stories on the assumption that Watson and Holmes were real people.

His A Spiritual Aeneid, his account of how he became Catholic, is also worth reading.

Paradox of Suspense

I've talked before about the paradox of fiction, about the paradox of tragedy, about a possible paradox of comedy,and about the paradoxes of expressive music. This is by no means the end of paradoxes associated with the arts. Today I'd like to say something about another such paradox, the paradox of suspense.

In simple form, the paradox of suspense involves the apparent conflict between three apparently obvious claims:

(1) Suspense requires uncertainty.
(2) Knowing what will happen precludes uncertainty.
(3) We can find something suspenseful even when we know what will happen.

The paradox can be made even more acute than this makes it sound. One of Alfred Hitchcock's major suspense techniques, for instance, was to make sure that the audience knew what would happen. It wasn't his only technique, but very often in a Hitchcock movie, he will give you some crucial detail that the characters lack. They don't know what will happen -- but you do. And, of course, it's that sort of thing that, done well, has viewers shouting at the screen for the character to get out because the killer is in the apartment with them. That seems very odd, if you think about it: sometimes things can be more suspenseful if you reduce the uncertainty. The character isn't in suspense precisely because he or she doesn't know anything; but we know, and are on the edge of our seats.

There are three basic ways to handle the paradox. You could reject (3). The major approach people have taken to rejecting (3) has been to propose what is known as emotional misidentification accounts of suspense. If you know that a character will die, you can't be in suspense about it, this view says. Obviously you do feel something. So you must feel something that you are confusing with suspense. Robert Yanal argues, for instance, that you really feel fear, and think it is suspense. The difficulty all emotional misidentification accounts face is in explaining how we make the error. The emotion we confuse for suspense has to be so close to suspense that people commonly confuse it with suspense; but at the same time it has to be sharply different from suspense in not require uncertainty. Fear is an emotion that might plausibly be confused with suspense, for instance; but does it really not require uncertainty? Likewise, fatalistic dread seems to be something broadly in the vicinity of suspense that also doesn't require uncertainty, but is it really so close to suspense that we can easily mistake the one for the other?

You could instead reject (2). The major proposal for rejecting (2) is Gerrig's momentary forgetting account. On Gerrig's proposal, we can know what will happen, but we get so caught up in the story we forget it for a moment. The difficulty is that the knowledge still seems to be in play: if you know exactly what will happen, you notice things that you otherwise wouldn't, no matter how caught up in the story you may be. In general, any rejection of (2) is going to have to say that part of us is certain and part of us is not. This sort of thing does happen; but we'd need precise details of how it would work.

That leaves (1). Perhaps the major proposal for rejecting (1) is Aaron Smuts's desire frustration account. Smuts argues that we don't need uncertainty to experience suspense; all we need is a strong desire to change things, combined with an ongoing inability actually to do so. We want to make a difference -- we want that character out of the apartment -- but we have no way of making it. Uncertainty can enter into this -- it could be that there is some small chance that the character will leave. But it need not. One of the difficulties with this account is that we sometimes seem to feel suspense when it would be very difficult to pin down anything we strongly desire. Watching a very close game, you can feel suspense even if you don't care who wins. The basic issue here is that we can feel suspense when we are wrapped up in the events transpiring; so the question becomes, Do we really need strong desire to change things in order to become wrapped up in the unfolding story?

I'm not convinced any of these are particularly adequate as proposals; I think there is something to be said for rejecting (2), but Gerrig's particular version doesn't seem to be an adequate version of that. I also think there's something to be said for rejecting (3), and Smuts's proposal is a really good proposal for doing so; but I'm not convinced it actually covers all suspense -- in particular, I'm not convinced that strong desire to change things is necessary for the strong feeling of caring about what happens that lets us get wrapped up in the story and feel suspense. What do you think?