Elementary storytelling: the significance of trifles

Detective fiction is a specialised form of storytelling, that implies a world that is constructed, elaborated, and self-sufficient. In this respect it is not the one in which we live, that extends chaotic and sprawling before us, indifferently. The detective is first and foremost a teller of tales.

At least two things are happening simultaneously when we find a pattern in what appears to be chaos. First, we creatively select and pick what matters, what we consider to be significant. Often, we fail to make this move consciously, and in picking an order from chaos, we assume that we are revealing the true order of things. By our indecision, our intellect, our vision, we identify and ring-fence what is real and cast out what we hold to be false. This is the logic of the teller of tales.

The organising principle of much detective fiction is that after the rupture of the ‘crime’, there exists a chain of causality. Beneath the whodunnits, detective fiction quietly argues that human existence is a story which is not only readable but interpretable. Between knowledge and doubt, a border is drawn in the telling of stories.

Consider the children’s board game Cluedo. Dr Black’s body is found in the cellar. Chaos appears to reign. Dinner guests are suddenly suspicious - the otherwise benign Miss Scarlett, Colonel Mustard, Mrs White, Reverend Green, Mrs Peacock and Professor Plum are all cast into doubt. Randomness and malignancy appear to be the way of the world. In this culture of suspicion, nothing is innocent. A candlestick is no longer just a candlestick, nor a rope simply a rope. The world ceases to have 'extras', chance or contingency. This aim of the game, is to move carefully through the house, returning the status of ‘the ordinary’ to all but one person, one place, one object. When we finally convict Reverend Green of bludgeoning Dr Black in the Billiard Room with the lead piping, we also acquit Professor Plum, Miss Scarlett and the rest. Indeed, the form of the game requires accomplishing this, person by person, object by object, and room by room. Once again, the revolver becomes an ornament, the spanner a tool, and the candlestick a table decoration. Objects, people, events and phenomena become a story when they are selected and also when they are deselected.

By these processes we cast suspicion, praise or blame. We find our way out of the chaos. We tell a story and order is restored.

In the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective acts like a moral surgeon examining the entire body for malignancy, which is to be found only in 'trifles' for, as he observes with his unique eye, "There is nothing so unusual as the commonplace." Crucially, this suspicion of the commonplace is only temporary. Identifying of causes is alarming, but when they are named and worked into a story, they are also contained. After the ‘cutting out’ the few trifles upon which the tale hangs, Holmes the surgeon-detective issues ordinary reality a clean bill of health. Relieved, the reader ‘outside’ the text, and the perplexed subjects within it, breathe a sigh of relief and return to a world made ‘newly normal’. Impressed by this show, both characters and readers are assured that, should disorder irrupt again, the incisive mind can once again return it to its natural state of order.

We have such no messiahs, or even reliable maps outside of the world of fiction, as even Holmes himself tells faithful Watson:

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

‘A Case of Identity’ from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993:30)

Our pattern-finding minds mislead us even more frequently than they guide us. They deal with a time-old problem encapsulated in the final line of the Christian gospels. John the Evangelist signs off with the words, “There was much else that Jesus did; if it were written down in detail, I do not suppose the world itself would hold all the books that would be written.” This is not only true for Jesus, but for all of us. Lawrence Sterne’s celebrated novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, was published in 1759, and attempted to satirise the new literary form of the novel. In trying to tell of his own life, our hero realises he needs to include huge quantities of detail about his parents, and grandparents and the various other characters that help the reader understand who he is, so he can begin to tell the story of his life. Famously, this means he does not manage to be born until two thirds of the way through the book. His father tries to write a guide to his upbringing The Tristrapaedia, but in earnestly trying to include everything that one would need to know, Tristram grows up quicker than the book can be written.

We are constantly making such choices - undertaking the task which powers all Sherlock Holmes stories, or each game of Cluedo, or the verse with which St John concludes. This is the task that Tristram Shandy and his father refuse: turning the chaos of reality into the consistency of stories. Such stories have key characters, plot points, beginnings, middles and ends. They help us live meaningful lives but also set up dynamics, which can trip us up, mislead, limit, and confuse us.

As Michael White, founder of narrative therapy wrote,

“It is clear that the sense of meaning and continuity that is achieved through the storying of experience is gained at a price. A narrative can never encompass the full richness of our lived experience.”

Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends White, by Michael, and David Epston
(New York: Norton, 1990)