Genre, Characterization, and Cognition

Chapter 1 Genre, Characterization, and Cognition 1 Genre Recognition and Character Cognition How do you recognize a detective story when you see one? Is it a constellation of expected features? A list of necessary elements? A “family resemblance” with other detective stories? Do the author’s intentions make it a detective story? Or is it a detective story for social and paratextual reasons—the publish- ing house, the jacket illustration, where it is shelved at a library or bookstore, the literary tastes of the friend who recommended it? Versions of all these ap- proaches have been used to theorize genre, both at the abstract, universal level and also in connection to specific cultures, places, and times. The proposition explored in this book is that generic connections are forged by readers attend- ing to what characters’ minds are doing—what characters are represented as wanting, thinking, and otherwise cogitating. Central to the detective story genre is a detective character that solves a mystery. Perhaps a corpse is discovered under suspicious circumstances; the authorities are engaged; the detective takes the case and works from hunches, inferences, and deduction to find and apprehend the culprit. The reader expe- riences the narrative by sharing in the initial confusion of the still-living characters, by following the detective’s reasoning process as he or she solves the case, and then celebrating vicariously when the perpetrator is identified and apprehended. My reader might now object that there are dozens of ways in which the schema just articulated fails to account for many detective stories. Potential variables are legion. On level of roles and identities: The detective might himself turn out to be the culprit. If the mystery to be solved is a crime, a murder, say, it could turn out that the victim and culprit are the same (e.g., in the event of suicide) or that the victim was killed accidentally, or that the victim is not really dead. Or on the script: The goal may be to solve something other than a crime (e.g., who sent these flowers?). Or an external culprit might be identified but not apprehended (e.g., because he died in the meantime, or escaped the detective’s jurisdiction, or rigged the system in such a way as to escape convic- tion). Flouting a convention that bears on character types or script, however, is to acknowledge a convention. It is a means of participation in the genre with which that convention is associated. Innovations are not innovative without the precondition of expectations; they work in these cases because of the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396043_002 2 Chapter 1 expectation that culprits will be identified, apprehended, and held responsible for their crimes. The conventions noted so far have had to do with character roles and plots, but they work on the level of characterization too. Take the culprit, for exam- ple, who often turns out to be the character least suspected by the audience. This in itself creates an opportunity for innovation. As the notion that the seemingly least suspicious character is probably the villain becomes conven- tionalized, new opportunities for innovation are created for subsequent texts participating in the genre. Now take the conventional figure of the detective as a character. Audiences expect this person to have larger-than-life acumen, better-than-average powers of reasoning, and a keener insight into human nature than his peers. It is recog- nizable as a detective story as much because of what the protagonist’s mind is doing as it is because of the plot, the mystery that needs to be solved. The plot may be only a pretext for putting the detective’s mind to work. Episodes built into the early parts of detective stories often furnish opportunities to demon- strate the detective’s exceptional powers of reasoning. This too is a convention with which storytellers can play, either by making the detective solve a mystery unwittingly, seemingly in spite of himself (à la Mr. Bean or Mr. Magoo), or the detective might be made to solve it using some kind of unconventional reasoning. In either case, audience expectations for these characters have to do with what we might broadly call their “minds”: the detective story is a narrative about how this character’s fictional mind perceives and processes his narrative world to arrive at a predictable outcome. Outcome, process, and character- drawing are all sites of potential innovation. Indeed, we expect texts to break conventions, and are pleased with ourselves for being able to understand how and when they do. The attentive reader will have noted that what I am describing in connection to the conventions of genre sounds very close to structuralism, perhaps prompting the suspicion that what lies in ahead is an attempt to outline “the structures” that determine meaning in some or another genre with the idea that we can then see exactly how a given text conforms and/or innovates with respect to those structures. The suspicion is half right; I do intend to look at structures for representing the minds of characters in a range of ancient genres to which scholars have compared the Fourth Gospel. I do not think, however, that it will ever be possible to have said the last word about patterns or structures in these or any genres. The post-structuralist critique is well received. Derrida has helped us appreciate that centers shift; Foucault has helped us see that attempts to articulate structures are conditioned by our own episteme. .

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