Last time I characterized mystery or crime writing as involving paradox. What does this mean?
In mystery stories, the moment of illumination takes the form of a paradox comprised of verbal and pictorial images. Two apparently contradictory elements, [a] the side of the character that cannot be connected with the crime; and [b] the crime itself, are “harmonized” in the detective’s solution.
Consider one of the best and most famous instances of paradox in mystery writing, the solution to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze.” (If you want the spoiler, click here.)
Or think of the climax to Christopher Nolan’s film, The Dark Knight. Batman realizes that in order to achieve his aim of protecting Gotham City he, paradoxically, has to be perceived as a villain.
“What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). Paradox is a strong version of Aristotle’s notion from the Poetics that the climax of a story should be a “marvelous inevitability.” In his book Heretics Chesterton defines paradox simply as mystery (Kenner, p. 14).
A paradox is no mere verbal pirouette; paradox is based upon the reality of things, and arises naturally when “the simplest truths” are put in “the simplest language” (Kenner, p. 15).
But there are two ways of understanding how paradox works in mystery stories. Not an either/or, more of a continuum. One, call it the “Sherlock Holmes approach,” is to see the paradox as a riddle or challenge resolvable by the “scientific” discovery of linkages of material causes. In this case, the paradox is merely mechanical.
But another way to understand the paradox of the detective-story or thriller, call it “the Father Brown approach,” is to see it as resolvable by the discovery of not only material causes, but also what we might call moral causes, in particular the paradox of Original Sin. In Chesterton’s story, “The Secret of Father Brown,” Father Brown confesses that he is a murderer–in the sense that his deep priestly knowledge of the workings of human frailty, most of all his own, allows him to detect causes at work that escape other inquirers.
As I mentioned in my last post, in The Gadfly series I am taking the Father Brown approach.
What are your favorite mystery/crime stories or films, and how do you see paradox functioning within them?
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