Poe, Eudora Welty and Sherlock Holmes?
ratiocination
At online Signum University we looked at Edgar Allan Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin, and his tales of ratiocination. These are tales combining observation with imagination, the scientist and poet in one expression working toward understanding from evidence. We also read The Moonstone, a mystery by Wilkie Collins. And —of course—tales of the “consulting detective,” Sherlock Holmes. We were given good background on these works’ contemporary scenes. Paying and formalizing of a police force, the rise of detailed analysis, sensational press and novels, and scientific standards in crime-solving and case-building—all were part of 19th-century progress toward what we have today.
The narrator of Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” proclaims that “the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.” The first assignment was to connect the dots between rational analysis and imagination. In light of that quotation, Dr. Amy Sturgis asked students, “How do imagination and analysis relate to the larger project that tales of ratiocination reflect ...?” As an auditor of the master’s level course, I am not required or even invited to write a paper. As a creative writer, this leaves me free to think via induction as opposed to deduction. Detectives or students, it’s said, must deduce if they hope to solve crimes or write academic papers. Creative writers may find the inductive a better approach.
Or do academics write better deductively? Signum University founder Prof. Olsen champions the induction over deduction method of writing papers because of induction’s exploratory possibilities. This has been my approach in writing (informal) essays. It is especially useful in crafting queries for publication after the details of your work are secure. The definitions:
In deductive reasoning, a conclusion is reached from general statements, but in inductive reasoning the conclusion is reached from specific examples. (Wikipedia)
Accordingly, the role of induction is more concrete, less abstract.
As you read—sometimes—words leap up, individual words. A word. You ponder it. That happened to me with “imagine.” The first time was on coming across it at the beginning of the second Psalm in the KJV Old Testament.
“Why do the ... people imagine a vain thing?”
I found that striking. And have pondered it since. I don’t think it means imagination is a vain gift. Surely it has to do with our (currently unalterable) condition? Yet in scripture, out of thirty-six references, only once do I find mention of the imagination as a possible good. Otherwise, in both new and old testaments, imagination is claimed virtually evil. Isn’t imagination itself abstract, or abstraction? And what of imagination’s use in sub-creation? Is that a “vain” imagining? I don’t think so. There, its use would be impersonal. What if politicians were to use it responsibly to craft vital legislation, instead of imagining themselves being the only one who “alone can fix” a nation?
There was for me another surprise encounter with the word. I was startled to read Eudora Welty’s take on one of her invented or well-imagined characters in Losing Battles. I have the Conversations With Eudora Welty, and I’ve read some but not all of her novels and short stories. (For instance, I’ve read Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter.) I have not finished Losing Battles. But I read one short story recently which, in Conversations, she calls a mere ghost story, expressing the wish that it had not been written. Critics, the interviewer enquired, had puzzled over “The Purple Hat,” as something of a mystery. However she laughed: It was no great mystery.
A reader of “Purple Hat” is mystified because the author does not define the narrative. This quality of the speculative does not preclude its being well-written, or its being well-worth the reading. Reading Sherlock Holmes eliminating the ghostly through analysis—as part of the plot—we see how he shows the difference between the actual and the merely imaginary in the “Hound of the Baskervilles.” But his sub-creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, spent time experimenting with “ghosts” and investigating, experiencing, enjoying, and finally believing in spiritualism. We wonder, would Holmes have approved?
Back to my startling find, that leaping word, from the Welty interviews where she says that a particular character in Losing Battles completely lacks imagination. I read this part of the novel as a short story decades ago. Gloria married Jack thinking she was going to change him—? That was the comic part both Gloria and her imagination played in the story.
In other words Jack’s wife Gloria did not use her imagination to understand what her spouse, her marriage, her life with him would be like. She did not use ratiocination—her reasoning imagination—to question her assumptions that she was going to extricate him from his family. Gloria had ample observational opportunity to study the situation. She came into the community, a stranger, a one-room school teacher; Jack was one of her students.
—A teacher? seeing a small community with new eyes? a plethora of interacting human figures and particulars? Plenty of scope for ratiocination here. But will Gloria use it?
Miss Welty herself was wedded to imagination. She gave it surpassing honor as the tool of the writer. Seemingly even more-so than the prose. You can tell stories without prose—orally or in verse. But you can’t tell them without imagination. It is the source of sub-creation. My editor shared an idea from Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, “… the first information technology developed by humans, is the story.”
My thought—in brief—on seeing the word imagination in Losing Battles was this: Could it be so? Could it be that a lack of imagination prevented Gloria sifting backward through what was known before marriage? Wasn’t it, rather, imagination helping her as Jack’s wife to the idea she could change him? This authorial insight on imagination threw me for a paradoxical flip. Reading Eudora Welty’s comment on this character was, consciously, when I saw that imagination (outside artistic crafting) might not be vain, that if so used it might reveal instead of obfuscate truth. And this would involve Edgar Allan Poe’s ratiocination.
© S. Dorman 2024