Agatha Christie - philosophical.spacephilosophical.space/303/christie.pdf · Agatha Christie 1890-1976 • The world’s best selling author • 66 detective novels, including And

Agatha ChristieThe Murder of Roger Akroyd

Tuesday, October 17, 17

Agatha Christie

1890-1976

• The world’s best selling author

• 66 detective novels, including And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express

• 14 short story collections• The world’s longest running

play, The Mousetrap


Christie’s Life• Born into a wealthy family

in southwest England• Home-schooled until 12• Went to Miss Guyer's Girls

School, which she hated• At 15 went to finishing

schools in Paris• Never attended college• Disappeared for 11 days

in 1926 when her husband left her for another woman


The Murder of Roger Akroyd

• Published 1926; generally considered her masterpiece

• Voted the greatest crime novel ever by the Crime Writers’ Association

• Caroline Sheppard is a precursor to Miss Marple


• “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the supreme, the ultimate detective novel. It rests upon the most elegant of all twists.… This twist is not merely a function of plot: it puts the whole concept of detective fiction on an armature and sculpts it into a dazzling new shape…. And only she could have pulled it off so completely. Only she had the requisite control, the willingness to absent herself from the authorial scene and let her plot shine clear.”—Laura Thompson, Christie’s biographer


Critical Reactions

• Edmund Wilson: “Who cares who killed Roger Akroyd?”

• Pierre Bayard argues for a different solution—Caroline as the murderer!


Todorov’s Two Narratives


Hercule Poirot


Detective Fiction• The author has to hide certain things in plain sight

• S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright: “The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent—provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face—that all the clues really pointed to the culprit—and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter.”


Detective Fiction• Todorov: Two Narratives

• Surface level: words, actions

• Hidden level: motives revealed by what the characters are hiding

• Dr. Sheppard: hides his role in his journal

• Poirot himself is hiding quite a lot!


Philosophical Themes


Philosophical Themes

Truth

Knowledge

Reason

Progress


Truth

• “The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it.”

• “Tell me the truth—the whole truth.” There was silence. “Will no one speak?”

• “The truth is what we need now.”


Realism

• There is an absolute, mind-independent truth about who committed the murder

• “Guilt is in the eye of the beholder”—NOT!


Perspectives• Dr. Sheppard: “Every new development that arises

is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope—the thing changes entirely in aspect.”

• Dr. Sheppard: “Of facts, I keep nothing to myself. But to everyone his own interpretation of them.”

• All detective fiction depends on the possibility of differing interpretations


Knowledge

• “I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know—in spite of you all.”

• “Mon ami, I do not think, I know.”

• “Me, I know everything.”

• “You call it guessing. I call it knowing, my friend.”


Reason

• “I admit nothing that is not—proved!”

• “Use your little grey cells,” he said. “There is always a reason behind my actions.”


Intuition

• “But it is all wrong that Caroline should arrive at the truth simply by a kind of inspired guesswork.”

• “I believe, James, that in your heart of hearts, you think very much as I do.”

• “You don’t believe in impressions?”


Intuition

• “Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.”


Intuition

• “You can’t know,” I snapped. “I didn’t know myself until I got there, and haven’t mentioned it to a soul yet. If that girl Annie knows, she must be a clairvoyant.”


Testimony

• “It wasn’t Annie who told me. It was the milkman. He had it from the Ferrarses’ cook.”

• “always bearing in mind that the person who speaks may be lying.”

• “You know that it is so—but how am I to know?”


Norms of Assertion• Knowledge?

• Belief?

• Justification?

• “Caroline has constantly asserted, without the least foundation for the assertion, that his wife poisoned him.”


Dishonesty, Secrecy

• “Everyone has something to hide.”

• “Each one of you has something to hide.”

• “I discover all the little secrets. It is my business.”


Cost of the Truth

• “…do you never reflect that you might do a lot of harm with this habit of yours of repeating everything indiscriminately?”

• “People ought to know things. I consider it my duty to tell them.”


Leadership

• NB: Dr. Sheppard!


Weakness of Will

• “You are weak, James.”

• “strain of weakness”—p. 201


Weakness and Moral Luck

• Poirot, “totally unlike his usual manner”:

• “Let us take a man—a very ordinary man. A man with no idea of murder in his heart. There is in him somewhere a strain of weakness—deep down. It has so far never been called into play. Perhaps it never will be—and if so he will go to his grave honored and respected by everyone.”


Weakness and Moral Luck

• “But let us suppose that something occurs. He is in difficulties—or perhaps not that even. He may stumble by accident on a secret—a secret involving life or death to someone. And his first impulse will be to speak out—to do his duty as an honest citizen. And then the strain of weakness tells.”


Social Context• Education

• Wealth

• Social class

• Gender

• Pastoral setting

• Poirot as foreigner


Unreliable Narrator• Note contrast with Dr. Watson!

• The first postmodern novel?

• Decentering

• Descartes: “I think, I am”

• Hume, Buddhism: no self

• You don’t have direct knowledge of anything, even of yourself

• “But for some reason, obscure to myself, I continued to urge him.”


Gricean Maxims• H. P. Grice: Cooperative Principle

• Quantity: Be informative, but not too informative

• Quality: Try to say something true

• don’t say something false;

• don’t say something you don’t have evidence for

• Relation: Be relevant

• Manner: Be perspicuous


Gricean Maxims• H. P. Grice: Cooperative Principle

• Quantity: Is the Dr. informative?

• Quality: Does the Dr. say things that are true

• Does he say something false?

• Does he say something he doesn’t have evidence for?

• Relation: Is he relevant?

• Manner: Is he perspicuous?


Logical Empiricism

• All our concepts come from experience

• All our knowledge comes from experience

• Everything complex is constructed logically from simples relating immediately to experience


Verification

• Criterion of demarcation

• Criterion of meaningfulness

• A sentence has empirical content if and only if it is verifiable


Verification• Criterion of demarcation

• Criterion of meaningfulness

• A sentence has empirical content if and only if it is verifiable

• Problems:

• Addition: A => (A v B)

• Universals


Falsification

• A sentence has empirical content if and only if it is falsifiable

• Popper argued that Marxism and Freudianism failed this


Falsification• A sentence has empirical

content if and only if it is falsifiable

• Popper argued that Marxism and Freudianism failed this

• Problems:

• Conjunctions: A & B

• Existentials


Confirmation

• A sentence has empirical content if and only if it is confirmable or disconfirmable

• And all its components also have empirical content?


Ravens Paradox• All ravens are black

• All nonblack things are nonravens

• These are logically equivalent

• To confirm the first, we look at ravens

• To confirm the second, we look at things that aren’t black


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Agatha Christie - philosophical.spacephilosophical.space/303/christie.pdf · Agatha Christie 1890-1976 • The world’s best selling author • 66 detective novels, including And