China being brilliant about the detective story–
…detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation.
[Via Glass Hombre. Find the whole piece at Whatever. Oh, & he blogs, here. Or maybe he doesn't.]
so what does that say about narratives in which everyone *is* the murderer?
Hi C. Is that a large sub-genre, rather than just the occasional act of table-turning ? I’d be interested in that (mainly because I believe everyone is the murderer). & do you mean novels in which everyone is the murderer, or novels in which everyone is revealed to be the murderer ? It’s the reveal that China is talking about; it’s the reveal that fails, & inherently, because it collapses the superposition, “cures” the vertigo of uncertain states. All classical plots are disappointing for that reason, not just plots of detection. The promise of a reveal sucks you in & keeps you wriggling with delight. The delivered reveal spits you out, lonely & unclothed again, into the real world desperate for the next fix. Quick, get another popular narrative & stick it in your arm! Only £5.30 at Amazon!
It’s a good essay and I relate to it.
Actually, I read it a while back and was discussing it with another writer at Harrogate Crime Festival last year. He liked it too – but, as well as being about books, the conversation was mainly a drunken, sorrowful discussion of his relationship history and inability to settle down. The Eden of oscillation is everywhere…
actually I was testing the quantum metaphor, questioning Mieville’s choice. in a narrative in which everyone is the murderer, and is revealed to be so, doesn’t that imply there was never a superposition of mutually exclusive states to begin with? it just seems to me that it’s becoming too easy to compare everything to quantum theory, or popular interpretations of quantum theory. I get the point about the vertigo of uncertainty, but it seems to me about time to appropriate a new set of metaphors…just a bit of a chip, really. Mieville remains sharper than most.
Hi Steve. It’s an index of modernity…
Hi C, thanks for elaborating on that.
I think that for the reader of the traditional whodunnit, the metaphor holds. The reveal collapses a guilt/not-guilt superposition.
I agree that China’s figure is a metaphor rather than a point-by-point comparison possessing 100% operational equivalence which the Copenhagen guys could have taken to the bank. (“For Christ’s sake, one of the basic structures of the universe exactly mimics the plot of the detective story. Don’t you see ? If we keep our heads we can clean up here. Whaddya mean, there isn’t really a cat in a box ?”)
We seem to be agreeing, too, that the moment of reveal, the opening of the box, is the crucial mechanism. What’s revealed is less so: no one dunnit would do as well. I like your everyone dunnit experiment not so much because it suggests an alternative generic structure, or shakes the foundations of China’s observation, but because of its implication of global guilt…
If you’re bored with quantum metaphors, fair enough. Physics is full of other ones. Or you could ransack the rhetoric of water polo, if I don’t get there first. Have at it.
point taken on the guilt/non-guilt superposition; and i stand facing the corner chin-on-my-chest for missing the nuance of the term ‘metaphor’ and trying to find an Apollonian rigidity to the concept. (mind you, your cat-in-the-box scenario looks like great fun.)
for something with an ‘alternative generic structure’ based on Mieville’s deconstruction and the idea of these books as ‘quantum narratives’, might i suggest Roberto Bolaño’s 2666?
sorry, me again. a better recommendation might be Bolaño’s The Skating Rink, which seems to directly address Mieville’s concern, though it doesn’t so much sidestep the ‘collapse’ as it renders it irrelevant; Mieville’s argument makes an interesting template for looking into why The Skating Rink does and doesn’t work.