"It's Behind You!"

In my previous post, “Reason and Rhyme,” (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2022/06/reason-and-rhyme.html) I applauded Shakespeare’s use of rhyme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to lock in the deluded profession of love by Lysander for Helena. 

Today, I wish to go back a little bit earlier in the play. In Act II, Scene 1, Oberon, the King of the Fairies, has spotted Helena pursuing a disdainful Demetrius. He instructs Puck to anoint Demetrius’ eyes with a magic substance that will make him fall in love with Helena:

A sweet Athenian lady is in love

With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;

But do it when the next thing he espies

May be the lady: thou shalt know the man

By the Athenian garments he hath on.

Effect it with some care, that he may prove

More fond on her than she upon her love.

Puck, trying to follow his master’s orders, is, however, at a loss:

Through the forest have I gone.

But Athenian found I none,

On whose eyes I might approve

This flower's force in stirring love.

Until he spots an Athenian male (recognized by his clothes) and a young woman (Hermia) sleeping nearby.

This is he, my master said,

Despised the Athenian maid;

And here the maiden, sleeping sound,

On the dank and dirty ground.

Pretty soul! she durst not lie

Near this lack-love, this kill-courtesy.

Churl, upon thy eyes I throw

All the power this charm doth owe.

When thou wakest, let love forbid

Sleep his seat on thy eyelid.

(Act II, Scene 2)

Puck is genuinely pleased with himself as he bounds off to report to Oberon of his success.

All well and good? Hardly. For the Athenian who was drugged by Puck was not Demetrius but Lysander. And now along comes Helena.

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All has gone wrong—but Puck doesn’t know this; Lysander doesn’t know this; Helena doesn’t know this (and eventually, neither Hermia nor Demetrius will know this).

But we know! We, the audience, sitting in our seats (or, in Shakespeare’s time, standing in the pit) have witnessed the action. And what is our reaction as we watch poor Puck approach sleeping Lysander—and then Helena tiptoe over to Lysander and nudge him awake?

*

One of the classic scenes in British Christmas pantomimes is when a ghost appears behind the main characters and the audience (mainly children) scream out: “It’s behind you!” 

We (the adult audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), like the pantomime audience, can be said to be in a state of greater ironic awareness than Puck, Lysander, Helena, etc. 

Irony depends upon two levels of knowledge. The ironist deliberately over- or under-values what he believes in order to entrap his audience (the victim), to make him appear foolish or despicable. One example (rather harmless) of overvaluing would be the following:

Someone enters a room, tripping over his own feet. The ironist says, “Ah, here comes Fred Astaire.”

The word for this is sarcasm.

Most famous for the ironic stance of undervaluing is Socrates, who maintained that he knew nothing, and interrogated those who claimed to know about piety, justice, etc., eventually destroying their arguments.

*

Back to our play:

With our greater knowledge of the wrong that Puck is about to do as he approaches Lysander—and the wrongness that will occur when Helena stirs Lysander—we, in our superiority, can first experience an expectation of mischief and then laugh at the results of that mischief. 

Here, the playwright allows us to be in cahoots with him, as we have the same knowledge as him. But it is not always the case that (a) the audience knows more than the characters or (b) the author has given us the information in real time (as it were) about the action that he intends to reveal later. The classic example is the whodunnit. Here the audience is completely in the dark until they can figure out by themselves or have the solution revealed to them at the conclusion by the detective or investigator. We may be on the same lower level of awareness of most of the characters (some of whom may be bumped off along the way); the murderer (and, of course, his creator) are on a superior level of ironic awareness; they know who dunnit.

The reverse of the whodunnit could properly be called the Columbo. In the “Columbo” crime series, we, the audience, know who the criminal is and how the crime was committed, as we are shown the act being performed. So we are on the same level of awareness as the miscreant, but on a superior level to that of the detective, Lieutenant Columbo. However, as Columbo works his way through the evidence, he moves closer to our level of awareness. The criminal, meanwhile, who has been on the same knowledge level as us, falls behind as he does not know that Columbo is inching closer to unveiling him. At the conclusion of the story, we and Columbo are now on the same superior level of ironic awareness. And the criminal is finished.

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There are a number of elements that contribute to the success of a play or a novel. Among them are the artist’s invention and development of interesting characters, the fashioning of a gripping narrative, a delightful command of language, etc. Add to the list his ability to exploit different levels of ironic awareness, so that the audience is in on the joke, an object of the joke, complicit with a criminal, or at one with his pursuer. As the artist deems fit.

*

Perhaps the most famous quote emerging from the Nixon Watergate scandal was the line by Senator Howard Baker:

“What did the President know and when did he know it?”  

In many ways, slightly modified, those could be key questions when analyzing a literary work:

“What did the audience know, and when did it know it?”

 

Sinister Doings

I recently watched a half-century-old movie comedy and a much-more-recent TV police procedural drama in both of which the police race their cars onto an airstrip in an attempt to cut off the escape of the criminals by plane. In both cases the police fail, and the criminals fly off unapprehended. 

Lucky escapes? Hardly. The creators* willed it so. In the case of the comedy, the escape allowed for a gloriously goofy conclusion on a tropical island. And in the case of the police drama, it produced for the lead detective, in the following episode, career complications and suspicions about his staff’s loyalty.

Fictional policemen and detectives do not catch criminals--even when they do catch criminals. Their creators structure the works to have the crimes solved and criminals brought to justice (not always the same thing)--or not. As Molly McArdle** points out, sometimes their creators do not allow the greatest of fictional detectives to solve a case: “Like [Sherlock] Holmes, [Hercule] Poirot has one emblematic failure to keep him honest and relatively humble.”*** Each detective may have an “emblematic failure,” but it is not really his doing. Conan Doyle and Christie fashioned it so. But if the failures are not the detectives’, can the successes be theirs? Obviously not. Again, it is the creators who, in the first place, created the crime and criminal and then plotted how the detective by dogged legwork or cool ratiocination (or both) will unravel the mystery.

Like me, Sophie Scott, who reviewed Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova for the Observer****, is a “tiresome person” who “might point out that, as Holmes was not a real person, at least some of his expertise might arise from his creator knowing the answers to the puzzles.” She goes on:

Konnikova, however, says that as amazing feats of insight were achieved by Conan Doyle and some of his contemporaries, we can safely suspend our disbelief. I found this difficult to do.

Neither can I.

Fictional characters have no agency. Like the pieces on a chessboard, their latent powers are only realized when advanced by an outside force. Holmes’ intellectual powers are as impotent as a chess queen’s in an empty room until Conan Doyle sets them into play.

John Dickson Carr was recognized as the master devisor of the locked-room mystery, in which the crime occurs in impossible circumstances and, thus, there is seemingly no way to explain it and solve it. But, of course, there is a solution, which the author has conceived together with the puzzle. The mastermind is the author, who dazzles the reader with his trickery, pulling a logical explanation out of a locked room, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat. The detective is his magic wand. Essentially a prop.

But sometimes the creators falter in their legerdemain, though the audience, having bought the idea of the detective’s super reasoning powers, will most likely not pick up on the flawed performance. One example: In a 1974 episode of Columbo, entitled “An Exercise in Fatality,” the rumpled police lieutenant “solves” the murder by determining that the laces of the victim’s sneakers were tied post mortem by another person (because of the way the loops go). And his reasoning is correct—for a right-handed murderer and a right-handed victim (which is what he demonstrates). However, it all breaks down (if anybody is carefully looking), because the victim was played by Philip Bruns—a left-handed actor. 

(This picture of Bruns is from an episode of Sanford and Son, but even so . . .)

Even a half-sober defense attorney could get an acquittal when that case came to trial.

I don’t know if I can be a mastermind, as Sherlock Holmes is alleged to have been, even if I practiced hard, but I can definitely out-think Columbo!

***

*Since movies and television are collaborative arts, several different people (writers, directors, producers) may have contributed to the outcomes; therefore, I decided to play it safe and just say “creators” when dealing with those media.

**https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/a-time-lapse-detective-25-years-of-agatha-christies-poirot

***P. D. James created a case which Adam Dalgleish “solves” but doesn’t have enough hard evidence to bring about an arrest. And (at least in a French TV series) Georges Simenon‘s Maigret literally walks away from a murderer, allowing him to fish in freedom.

****http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/28/mastermind-think-like-holmes-review