Episode 12: Whodunnit?
The HBS hosts talk about mysteries as both a literary and philosophical form.
In Episode 12 of Hotel Bar Sessions, Leigh, Ammon, and Shannon take on mysteries as both a literary and philosophical form. Is the world in itself a mystery that science and philosophy take different routes to try to solve? How do luck, logic, empirical investigation, and intuition all work together to make sense of the world? What would a solution even look like? Are philosophers basically just detectives? Is a crime requisite to initiate investigations in mysteries? Is the unknown connected to Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins in wonder? Is the mystery genre mostly a battle of reason over unreason? What do philosophers need to do to find new ways to ask questions about the mysteries of the world? Tune in as Ammon tries to convince Leigh and Shannon to watch a six-hour Danish mystery to mixed results.
For further exploration, check out the links below:
- Ernst Bloch was captivated by the mystery genre, as discussed in “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.”
- Philip K. Zimmerman talks about how Wittgenstein was also fascinated by detective novels.
- Turns out, Gilles Deleuze was also interested in crime novels.
- “Did Edgar Allan Poe Create The Modern Mystery Genre?” The Torch Podcast looks into this question.
- Check out a helpful exposition on the relation between the nineteenth century gothic novel and nineteenth century conceptions of epistemology and reason.
- The Leigh Johnson Mystery on The Prestige in philosophy. Christopher Nolan’s movie The Prestige is the inspiration for this connection.
- Ammon’s love of obscure, subtitled mysteries can be understood by watching the Danish crime mini-series, The Investigation.
- For more on the idea of the philosopher as detective and Columbo as the quintessential philosopher-detective.
- HBO’s The Night Of shows how mysteries can be turned into greater investigations of structural inequities, as does The Wire.
- Anita McChesney asks what becomes of detective fiction in the “post-truth” world.
- Is it always just the orangutan or a monkey’s paw?
The victory of reason over unreason…standard structure for mysteries.
But Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick uses and breaks the structure to explore how language provides only unreliable clues and answers.
Brian Evenson (see his novel Last Days for a great example) is an American writer whose epistemological horror fiction routinely subverts that regular form. This from a review I wrote for Open Letters Monthly:
“The truth confronting the detective of sorts in Last Days who is forced to investigate a murder (or is it a robbery?) inside the Brotherhood of Mutilation must be inflicted as well. He receives information about the hierarchical institution only as he himself loses digits and limbs to ritual amputation in order to rise in status:
“Show me the body.”Borchert shook his head. “I can’t allow you to see the body. At the very least you’d have to lose a few more toes.”“This is absurd.”“Be that as it may, Mr. Kline.”
With the secrets of its mutilated hierarchy (perhaps all hierarchies require self-mutilation) and its hard-boiled investigator, Last Days evokes the generic detective novel only to refuse the resolution the genre demands. Who did it? Not only do we not learn the answer to this standard question, we’re left not even knowing for sure what “it” was. What we do come to know is the investigator’s state of mind: “How do you know the moment when you cease to be human? Is it the moment when you decide to carry a head before you by its hair, extended before you like a lantern, as if you are Diogenes in search of one just man?” That, of course, has been the true subject of inquiry throughout.The stories in Windeye, Evenson’s new collection, repeatedly address archeological and teleological questions. “Knowledge,” for instance, is a description of “precisely why I have still not written my detective novel.” Mysteries work within a set of assumptions that all crimes are scrutable and that clues will lead inevitably to the criminal. Attempts to solve the case presented in this story, however, require the investigator to make assumptions about the nature of reality that “end up derailing the genre.” In Windeye’s “The Moldau Affair,” to cite a second example, a detective finds it impossible to break out of the logical circles imposed by the circumstances: “Yet, how to know if the logic I think I am following is not in itself its own trap, a distortion of reality prone to do me more harm than good—just as Stratton’s logic was a trap for him?” The detective assumes his report will do more good than harm. Readers are left to question his optimism.As they seek meaning through language that inevitably distorts the world even as it constructs its meaning, Evenson’s characters lose limbs and eyes and ears and heads and identities.”
https://www.openlettersmonthlyarchive.com/olm/affliction-fiction?rq=evenson
…as you can tell, I loved this episode!