Zunshine Response

            Zunshine's discussion of cognitive psychological approaches to literature brought up a few thoughts, particularly as I am going through the formative stages of writing my final paper for this course. My essay focuses particularly on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and a long-standing debate among scholars about the influence of detective fiction on the novella. Thus, I found Zunshine's discussion of detective fiction to be fascinating for my own, admittedly selfish reasons. What I think was itneresting about Zunshine's discussion was that she has pinpointed in some ways the essence of what makes the genre function, that is, the challenge of multiple layers of metarepresentation, ultimately causing us to question our theory of mind for numerous elements of a narrative.

            In the last fifty years or so, however, detective fiction has been used in some really interesting ways. As far back as 1971 a scholar by the name of Michael Holquist was proposing that detective fiction is to the postmodern novel what myth was to the modernists. (For more on that look into Holquist's essay "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction") However, the application that Holquist identifies is one that operates largely on the metfictional level. As an example he uses Jorge Luis Borges' story "Death and the Compass" in which the detective goes through the motions of the detective genre, locating clues, a series of events that place every individual under suspicion. What differs is that when the detective finds out that he knows where the fourth and final murder is going to take place, he arrives and finds that he is actually the victim of the last murder. There is a kind of embroilment of the detective into the crime itself that lends itself (at least as Holquist argues) to the usage of detective stories as metaphysical commentary in postmodern fiction.

            What I wonder, then, is how metafiction might play into Zunshine's model. I think many of the appeals of metafiction are similar to those that we find in detective fiction, but it seems to alter some of the other things that Zunshine is currently treating as given elements. Her discussion of verisimilitude and emotional investment in narrative despite our awareness of its fictionality seems to be usurped in nearly all instances of metafiction, in which the story preys on the fact that it can constantly remind us that we are reading.

            In dealing with The Crying of Lot 49 I think the question of what the detection elements of the story are doing for us are of concern as well. The story, of course, is of Oedipa Maas, who finds herself unexpectedly the executor of the will of one Pierce Invariarty. Throughout her attempts to deal with the will she finds herself further involved in the investigation of the enigmatic Tristero (a possible alternative postal system for which Pierce apparently has a massive collection of stamps). However, when Oedipa arrives at the end of the novella the only conclusion that can be drawn on the mystery of Trystero is a series of four conclusions, all equally possible and all equally true, which are presented to the reader. Beyond the last word of the novel, hypothetically, we find out if Oedipa is crazy, or if there is a plot of some sort in which she has had a trick played on her, or if Trystero really does exist, or she is hallucinating it all. But there is no possible resolution. Yet, the novella is treated in such a way that we invest ourselves in the mystery of Trystero as we would in a piece of detective fiction. So the novella has me asking on two levels how a cognitive approach would deal with this narrative -- First, how does metafiction play into our metarepresentations, and what complex of cognitive processes does it trigger? Second, what is Pynchon doing that makes the lack of resolution to his 'detective' story so captivating? Is this an instance what Zunshine was saying about infinite genre permutations? Does this particular combination work? 

            Lastly, on a totally unrelated note I wondered about the current literary fascination with genre busting and what Zunshine has to say about manifestations of genre mashup, etc.