Some might think it bad form for me to review a book for which I’ve written the preface. But while a review is expected to be objective and not tainted by personal interests, these fortnightly articles are by definition an expression of my personal interests, curiosity, and preferences. If I’ve written the preface for a book, it means I like it, and so I’m going to talk about it. The book is called Elementare, Wittgenstein! (Elementary, Dear Wittgenstein!) by Renato Giovannoli, which, despite its jaunty title, is both serious and demanding.
Giovannoli has also written one of the most fascinating “scientific” books, La scienza della fantascienza (The Science in Science Fiction), a thorough survey of the many fictional scientific ideas that circulate in mainstream science-fiction stories (the laws of robotics, the nature of aliens and mutants, hyperspace and the fourth dimension, time travel and temporal paradoxes, parallel universes, and so forth). These ideas display unexpected consistency, as though they constituted a system, equal in its uniformity and implications to that of science. This is no surprise: first, because science-fiction writers read each other’s books, and certain themes move from story to story, and various precepts have been created that run parallel to official science; second, because storytellers don’t develop their fictional tales in opposition to the solutions of science, but take science to its furthest conclusions; and finally, because some of the notions aired by science fiction, from Jules Verne onward, have later become scientific realities.
Giovannoli now applies the same criteria to the archipelago of crime literature, and suggests that the methods used by detectives in fictional narratives are similar to those of philosophers and scientists. The idea itself is not new, but the novelty here lies in the extent and rigor with which it is developed, so that we might wonder, in the end, what Giovannoli is doing—whether his book is a philosophy of detective fiction or whether it’s a philosophy manual that uses examples of reasoning found in detective fiction. As I’m not sure whether to recommend it to those wanting to understand crime fiction or those wanting to understand philosophy, I’ll play it safe and recommend it to both.
We can see, therefore, that not only do crime writers know about problems in philosophy and science (see the pages on the relationship between Dashiell Hammett, topology, and the theory of relativity), but also that certain thinkers may not have thought as they did if they hadn’t read detective stories. We can see what benefit Wittgenstein’s later ideas had gained from his reading hard-boiled novels.
I don’t know whether philosophy comes before the detective novel—after all, Oedipus Rex is the story of a crime investigation. But certainly, from the Gothic novel and Edgar Allan Poe onward, crime fiction has perhaps influenced academic thinkers more than we realize. Giovannoli demonstrates with logical formulas and diagrams that the evolution of the crime story from crime investigation to crime action is similar to the evolution from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to his Philosophical Investigations: the transition from a paradigm of deduction (which envisages an ordered world, a Great Chain of Being that can be explained in terms of almost fixed relationships between causes and effects and ruled by a sort of preestablished harmony for which the order and association of ideas in the detective’s mind reflect the order and associations governing reality) to a “pragmatist” paradigm in which the detective, rather than going back to the causes, provokes the effects.
The investigative crime story is certainly a small-scale model of metaphysical research, since both end up with the question “Who did this?,” which is the philosophical version of the whodunit. G. K. Chesterton described the detective story as a symbol of higher mysteries, and Gilles Deleuze maintained that a book on philosophy ought to be a kind of detective story. What are Saint Thomas Aquinas’s five ways to demonstrate the existence of God if not a model of investigation, following the tracks left by Someone? But there’s also an implicit philosophy in the hard-boiled novel. Look at Pascal and his wager: let’s try shuffling the cards, then see what happens. The stuff of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.
I’d like to mention the paragraphs that discuss the possible relationships between Agatha Christie and Heidegger. Giovannoli is not suggesting that And Then There Were None (1939) had influenced Being and Time (1927), even though Agatha Christie’s earlier use of time paradoxes could have inclined him in that direction. But I certainly think the suggestion that Christie’s writing contains an idea of “being-toward-death,” drawn from medieval sources, is a masterstroke. A final recommendation: read the pages on Hammett and corkscrew-shaped space.
2007