Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Suspense and the Scientific Method Caroline Levine  June 24, 2013 UP889  cc >> This morning, I want to introduce our first speaker. In fact, I get the honor of introducing all of our speakers for this seminar. Our first speaker is Caroline Levine. She received her PhD in Victorian Literature from the University of London. She has been teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2002. She's written three books; "The Serious Pleasures of Suspense," 2003; "Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts," 2007; and "A Theory of Form," forthcoming later this year. She also writes about television and contemporary art, and is the 19th century editor of the "Norton Anthology of World Literature." Will you join me please in welcoming our colleague, Caroline Levine. [applause]  >> Thank you, Terry, and welcome everybody. It's so wonderful to have you here this morning. I'm going to start with a confession, which is that I've always loved the experience of reading suspenseful stories and watching suspenseful movies. 

Now, I don't expect any of you to join me in confessing the same thing, but you might have had the experience at some point in your life of perching on the edge of your seat, dying to know what's going to happen in a movie theater, or staying up late at night with the light dimmed, trying to find out what happens at the end of a novel. When I got to college, I learned that this was considered a very low brow kind of taste. [laughter] It was something I was supposed to grow out of, and be embarrassed about. My professors in literature classes often just gave away the ending, because no serious reader of literature would ever just read for the plot. [laughter] I also learned in college that suspense was a cheap marketing strategy that was intended to attract and keep the attention of mass audiences. So it was really low brow. Literally low brow, for the masses. It was associated with cheap genres like comic books, early radio, and B movies. By the time I went off to study Victoria literature in graduate school I was cured of my interest in low brow, suspenseful plots. I was, in a way. 

I wrote a dissertation on Victorian realism, and I read a lot of philosophy and theory and all the serious stuff I was supposed to read. But something surprising happened along the way. I learned something about suspense that I wasn't looking for. It was a discovery that made me go back and rethink everything that my teachers had always told me about suspense. It was discovery that connected popular suspense literature to the scientific method. That's what I want to talk to you about today, is that discovery. I'm going to start by defining suspense and giving a couple of examples. Then I want to talk really briefly about the history of suspense, focusing particularly on the 19th century. I'll tell you why. I'm going to use Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as my main example. 

It doesn't matter if you haven't read it. I think the examples will still make sense. Then I'll connect 19th century fiction to 19th century science. I'll end by arguing that my professors were wrong to dismiss suspense and that we should still be taking it seriously now, today. First of all, defining suspense. What is suspense? Suspense happens when a story makes it clear that it is not telling you something. That it's withholding information, keeping something back. You don't experience suspense if you just don't know that there's a mystery, but if the novel or the movie points out to you that there's something secret, that's when you feel suspense. That desire to know what's going on. Letting you know that there's something you don't know, it peaks your curiosity. 

It wants you to keep going. It provokes you to keep going. I'm going to play you a quick clip from a, I guess a B movie, actually, form the 1960's called The Third Secret. It's just to show you how suspense works. This is a trailer for a movie that's supposed to get you to want to watch the movie. But as it unfolds, this trailer, you'll see how it uses suspense.  >> It starts quietly, like any other day here. [gasp] But suddenly the quiet is shattered. >> Dr. Whitset, whatever's happened? >> A man lies dying. Why? >> Why should he do something that contradicts everything he stood for? >> Why? Why --? Why!?! >> Why should such a man kill himself? >> Liar. 

>> A man betrayed, a woman driven to the edge of despair. We trusted this man with our lives, our piece of mind, our secrets, but who shared their last secret with Dr. Whitset. >> My father was murdered! >> This is the story of man searching for a killer who might even be.... myself. As the finger of suspicion points in many directions... [metallic bang, bang, bang, bang] in The Third Secret. § §  >> Okay, so you can see how the movie is trying to draw us in. First we have a dead body and we have the expectation or the assumption that it's a suicide. The first set of questions is why? Why would this man kill himself? It's kind of relentless. Why, why, why? Then there's a second mystery introduced which is, if it's not suicide it's murder. Then a kind of classic suspense question, who done it? And "the finger of suspicion points in many directions." We know there's a secret. 

A man is dead but we don't know why. We know that he's been killed but we don't know who. Suspense works by making us want to know what the answer is to those questions. They don't have to be about murder. Detective fiction is one of the classic versions of suspense fiction, but suspense can be provoked by all kinds of mysteries and secrets. Chase scenes are suspenseful in the sense that we are-- we don't know who's going to get whom, whether the guy who's escaping will get caught or not, whether there'll be crash. We have a sense that something dramatic will happen, but we don't know what it is. Love stories, will the boy get the girl? Those also can be suspenseful. Hitchcock's classic scene of suspense was one where you're expecting disaster to happen but you're clenched waiting for it, hoping that it wouldn't happen. The ticking bomb is his classic example of suspense. 

In all of these cases what suspense does is to draw our attention to the fact that there something that we don't know, and to heighten our expectation for what's going to happen. I want to say a little bit about the history of suspense. Really, not very much, but there's some misconceptions about it that I think are important to dispel. One of the things that I discovered in my research was that the rise of suspenseful plots happens in a really big way in the middle of the 19th century. One of the things people often say about suspense is that it's always been there and it's always been part of storytelling. We might think of Scheherazade who literally keeps herself alive by telling stories which have to be spun out from night to night so that she'll stay alive. We might think about Homer who tells very thrilling stories of battles and Sirens and monsters. But if we think back over the history of storytelling, if we think about Homer, Virgil or Aeschylus, or the tellers of the Arabian Nights, or most Renaissance poets and writers, most of them would have expected their audiences to know the stories already. Mostly, the story of stories is one of re-tellings. That means that it's not suspense in our modern sense of genuinely not knowing the outcome, really not knowing what's going to happen. 

You do see it sometimes, but it's not a staple of storytelling before the 19th century much. Even in the 18th century where suspense starts to crop up in a lot of different places, mostly the newly invented novel genre is episodic. It's series of adventures rather than organized around a central, kind of, organizing mystery or secret. More like Lord of the Rings than like John Grisham, shall we say. But in the 1840's, 1850's and 1860's lots of major novelists in England and France and in the US suddenly started experimenting with organizing whole novels around the experience of a suspenseful mystery. This is, in fact, when the detective novel gets invented. I'll toss out a few examples. Some you'll know, and some maybe you won't know. Great Expectations, suspense happens when Pip is told that he's absolutely forbidden to know the name of his benefactor. Pip doesn't feel suspense because he assumes he knows the answer, but we feel suspense because we know something's being withheld from us. 

Suspense happens in George Eliot's Adam Bebe when Hetty is on trial for murder. We don't know what will happen there. Suspense happens in Wuthering Heights when you first start the novel and there's a stranger who's new in the neighborhood. He comes into this house, Wuthering Heights, and it's filled with confusing relationships and violent conversations. We don't know what's going on. He makes a series of assumptions, this stranger, all of which are wrong. So we know that there's some kind of mystery or secret. What I discovered, or learned, as I was studying the Victorian novel is that suspense was part of just about every major Victorian novel by the most canonical, serious novelists. I'm going to focus most on Charlotte Bronte here because she seems like one of the most inventive and innovative writers around the question of suspense. One of the first writers really to put suspense as the organizing principle of a whole novel. 

In fact, her first big success, Jane Eyre, was a runaway bestseller. People were really surprised by it. They didn't expect it to be a bestseller. And it was partly because there was this great desire to keep reading.  Jane Eyre has been popular not only in its own time, but on into our time, translated many times, made into a movie almost every single decade since movies started, most of them bad versions of Jane Eyre. But very much a popular story. I'll show you another little, tiny clip, because if you remember the novel, if you've read it in recent memory, you may remember Grace Poole who's the mysterious servant woman. She, I think, is the first and one of the best red herrings in the history of fiction.  This is from a 1973 movie version.  >> Who's there? [faint hysterical laughter]  Was that Grace Poole? Was she's possessed with the devil?  >> The question is, it's a little quiet, "was that Grace Poole? Was she possessed with the devil?" There's that inhuman laughter that comes from upstairs. 

Rochester is also a constant source of suspense. Soon after we first meet him he starts to talk about his house, Thornfield. He starts to describe his relationship with to his house. He said, "'I like this day. I like that sky of steel. I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost. I like Thornfield, its antiquity, its retirement, its old crow-trees and thorn-trees, its gray facade, lines of dark windows reflecting that metal welkin and yet how long have I abhorred the very thought of it, shunned it, like a great plague-house! How I do still abhor-' He ground his teeth and was silent, he arrested his step and struck his boot against the hard ground. Some hated thought seemed to have him in its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he could not advance." Here we have Rochester on the brink of saying something and then holding back. Literally, stopping himself in his tracks. He grinds his boot into the ground and arrests his speech, stops himself from saying more. 

We have this hint that there's something going on, and then a withholding. That hinting and withholding is the pattern of suspense. A few pages later, and this is the scene right after Jane has saved him from a mysterious fire in his bed. He's about to say something to Jane and then he checks himself again. "'You have saved my life. I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a debt. I cannot say more, nothing else that has being would have been tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an obligation, but you it is different- I feel your benefits no burden, Jane.' He paused, gazed at me, words almost visible trembled on his lips- but his voice was checked." He's on the brink of saying something meaningful but stops himself. At Thornfield in the long Thornfield section of Jane Eyre, it's actually organized around two overlapping but different mysteries. The first is the mystery of what's happening on the third floor, that mysterious laughter, the mysterious attacks. We have the suspense of that kind of mystery. 

Then we also see in the second quotation that we have the suspense of Rochester's feelings for Jane. What is it that he feels or intends? That also is kept suspended. Since suspense is all about hinting and withholding, I think you can see from this example that flirtation is actually a perfect example of suspense. It's all about hinting but not committing yourself to anything absolute. Right? You can always get out a flirtation by saying that you never said anything forthright. It's all about the hints, but also the refusals to commit. We know something's going on upstairs on the third story, and we know that Rochester has some feeling for Jane, but the novel makes us wait. It doesn't give us the answers right away. It defers the answers for a 100 pages. Having noticed this pattern in the 19th century novel, my question was, why? Why does suspense become important at this particular moment in the history of the novel? The most common answer that scholars have really given, since pretty much the 19th century, is that suspense got important to novelists because they were looking for success in a new commercial mass market. 

This is the moment when literacy expands very dramatically. By the end of the 19th century, just about everybody in Britain, France and the US knows how to read. There's a new mass market for books. And books are cheaper and cheaper over the course of the 19th century. Ordinary people could get their hands on books. It's the era of serialized fiction when lots of literature comes out in monthly or weekly installments over maybe a year and a half. It's also the era of the triple decker novel. That is, the long novel published in a standard three volume format. Most critics have assumed that suspense was tied to these publishing formats and the new mass audience. If you want to keep your readers' attention over many months, maybe a year, two years, in serialized installments or over 900 pages of a triple decker novel you figure out pretty fast how to write cliff hangers. 

Here's a literal cliff hanger in the form of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty, his nemesis. Most critics go a step further and they make a politically changed argument about the uses of suspense. They say suspense not only attracts mass audiences, but also lulls them into a kind of passivity, a stupefaction about literature. Suspense hooks you on the plot, and then it just keeps you focused on what's going to happen next. And it prevents you from thinking about all kind of other serious things. Especially when it gives you a tidy, predictable ending where it kind of weaves all the pieces together. It just makes you feel as though everything comes out right in the end. We get these images of readers completely absorbed but not thinking very hard. Suspenseful fictions are a problem according to this tradition in criticism because they're too comforting. They're too soothing. 

They encourage you not to lift a finger to change the world. Because the young woman gets married, the criminal gets captured, everything is right with the world. But what I started to see in my research was a totally different answer, and that has to do with the spread of science and the scientific method in the 19th century. Most critics have assumed that suspense produces and reinforces a passive reader. I want to suggest the exact opposite, that Victorian uses of suspense, and on into our time, are intended to generate skeptical, questioning, active readers. I'm going to go back to Jane Eyre for a minute and look at another scene. This is, again, right after Jane has saved Rochester from the fire in his bed. She's said to him, it must be that Grace Poole. And he says, yes, I'll go talk to her, and disappears. Jane doesn't know what's going on. 

Rochester won't tell her anything. She knows there's a mystery, but she doesn't know what it is. What does she do in this situation? She makes guesses, she starts to put forward conjectures. For example, she's pretty sure that the mystery had something to do with Grace Poole. She goes to find her to see what she can figure out. She puts her hypothesis, her conjectures to work. Here's how Bronte describes the encounter between Jane and Grace. "There she sat," that's Grace Poole, "staid and taciturn looking as usual. On her hard forehead and in her commonplace features was nothing either of the paleness or desperation one would have expected to see marking the countenance of a woman who had attempted murder. And whose intended victim had followed her last night to her lair, and as I believed, charged her with the crime she was to perpetrate. 

I was amazed, confounded. She looked up while I still gazed at her. No start, no increase or failure of color betrayed emotion, consciousness of guilt or fear of detection. She said,'Good morning, Miss' in her usual phlegmatic and brief manner, and taking up another ring and more tape, went on with her sewing. 'I will put her to some test,' thought I,'such absolute impenetrability is past comprehension.' 'Good morning Grace,' I said, 'Has anything happened here? I thought I heard the servants all talking together a while ago.' 'Only master had been reading in his bed last night. He fell asleep with his candle lit and the curtains got on fire, but fortunately he awoke before the bedclothes or the woodwork caught, and contrived to quench the flames with water in the ewer.' 'A strange affair,' I said in a low voice. Then looking at her fixedly, 'Did Mr. Rochester wake nobody? Did not one hear him move?' She again raised her eyes to me, and this time there was something of consciousness in their expression. She seemed to examine me warily." Here we see Jane has this assumption that it's Grace Poole. She has this guess that it's Grace Poole. But somehow how Grace is responding doesn't fit the guess. 

Right? She doesn't look like a murderer. She's not guilty. She's not upset, she looks totally calm as usual. There's something strange here that doesn't fit. So what does Jane do? "I will put her to some test." Right? "I will put her to some test." Jane is acting remarkably like a scientist here. Faced with a mystery she comes up with a hypothesis. She thinks, surely it's that strange woman, Grace Poole. But Grace doesn't seem to be acting like a murderer, so Jane tests her hypothesis. She continues to ask questions, and as she asks questions she evaluates the response and says, does it fit? Does it help me piece together more of the answer? Jane is a lot like a lot of other 19th century characters in this. This is not the only example of a character performing a test. 

When she faces a mystery she knows that she doesn't know, and then she comes up with questions. She generates working hypotheses, and then she tests out her best guesses against the evidence. This brings me to the third part of my talk which is why Jane uses words like test. Why is she hypothesizing? Is there a connection between suspense fiction and 19th century science? And if so, what is that connection? At around exactly the same time that Bronte and Dickens and Eliot are writing their novels the sciences are turning into the disciplines that we know them today. They're much closer to what we know today in the sense that they're becoming a recognized set of disciplines with rigorous rules and methods and training. In the 1840's and 1850's lots of people are trying especially hard to make it clear to broad audiences what the rules of science are. What these rigorous rules that you have to follow in order to produce good science? There's a lot of encouragement to readers to recognize that it only counts as knowledge if you've followed the right methods. You can't just say anything is scientific knowledge. You have to have followed methods. What scientists and philosophers of of science emphasize all the time in this period is the scientists need to be pulled back by their methods. 

Not to rush to their conclusions but to have a proper set of steps to follow that will guarantee real knowledge. They constantly say, you can have hypotheses, you can hypothesize as much as you like, you can guess anything you want. But then you have to have a rigorous way of testing that hypothesis against the truth of the world. That will tell you whether your hypothesis is wrong or right. For example, here's the philosopher of science George Henry Lewes, who happened also to be George Eliot's lover. He is going to insist that most of us are carried away by our prejudices. If we're going to get real knowledge we have to approach knowledge differently from just whatever we want to be true, assuming is true. "Who has not observed, even in himself, the eagerness with which some argument is snatched at, and some statement credited, when these seem to confirm his own view of the case? To submit our own conclusions to the rigorous test of evidence, and to seek the truth irrespective of our preconceptions is the rarest and most difficult of intellectual virtues." He'll go on to say this is why we need experiments. We love to rush to just assume that our own views are right. We don't stop and put ourselves aside and hear or wait for the world to give back the evidence. 

The important thing here is that you can't just assume your own guesses are right. You have to have ways to make sure that your evidence really fits the world, it really works. Over and over again what scientists and philosophers of science in the 19th century say is that you have to learn how to suspend judgement. I'm going to give you an example, one of many, from one Michael Faraday who, among other things, he was a famous scientist in the period. He discovered electromagnetic induction. He writes the following in the middle of an experiment that he's doing. "I have formed no decided notion, but am constrained by ignorance and the contrast of facts to hold my judgement as yet in suspense."  So there's something interesting going on between experimental science and suspenseful storytelling. One of the first things that grabbed me and that I wanted to pursue was that they share a narrative structure, a storytelling structure. They start with guesses, hypotheses. There's some knowledge that they know is missing. 

Then they delay giving answers. You have to wait in both cases, both wait for the evidence to give back, from the world if you're a scientist, and in the novel you have to keep reading to find out the answer. I'm not the only one to make this connection. George Eliot, in her notebooks, offered the chemistry experiment as the best model for storytelling in the novel.  She writes, "Indirect ways of arriving at knowledge are always the most stirring even in relation to impersonal subjects. To see a chemical experiment gives an attractiveness to a definition of chemistry, and fills it with a significance which it would never have had without the pleasant shock of an unusual sequence, such as the transformation of a solid into gas, and vice versa. Curiosity becomes the more eager from the incompleteness of the first information." What peaks our curiosity most effectively is incomplete information to start with. And then what gives us the most pleasure, what we enjoy most is the surprise of the shock of the unexpected sequence that comes afterwards. The chemistry experiment is the best model for that, George Eliot says, when she's thinking about the novel. To come back to our definition of suspense, what I'd argue is that every time there's this hinting and withholding, suspenseful techniques are teaching us a certain relationship-- [inaudible] Suspense is teaching us to wait for answers, not to jump to conclusions, not to rush to think that we know. 

It's not there to lull us into a kind of passivity, instead it teaches us to suspend judgement. Suspenseful novels teach you exactly the same lessons that Victorian scientists and philosophers of science were so concerned about. When your faced with a mystery you can't just assume that you know the truth. You have to start making guesses and then you have to wait for answers. In the novel, often characters' hypotheses and readers' hypotheses turn out to be completely wrong. So the novel is constantly teaching you that you have to make another, different guess each time your hypothesis is wrong. Actually, I'd like to think for a couple of minutes here about the fact that Jane's, and other characters' guesses, in the novel are often wrong. Lots of 19th century readers guessed what was going to happen. You can imagine if you're reading the serialized novel over a year and a half or two years. People are writing in to the editor saying, please don't kill of little Nell, all those kinds of things. 

We can see that readers are generating lots of guesses, and they're almost always wrong. The characters too, are almost always wrong. Why does the novel teach us to expect to be wrong? Again, I think the answer has to do with the scientific method. I'd like to answer this question, to turn to another example, which is Wilkie Collins's enormously popular novel from 1860, The Woman in White. How many of you have read The Woman in White? Oh, great. It's a fabulous read, so I really, really recommend it. It was first published in 1860. It sold tens of thousands of copies right away in England, France and the US. It had an international readership. Readers where completely hooked. 

It was actually the first novel to have tie-in products. There were Woman in White playing cards, Woman in White perfume, Woman in White umbrellas. Here's Woman in White sheet music here on the left. And here's a cartoon that just kind of goes to show how much it's in the popular consciousness. Mrs.T upset to T who's been reading the popular novel, "Pray Mr. T, are you never coming upstairs? How much longer are you going to sit up with that Woman in White?" [laughter] This is a great case where suspense really works in the mass market. It does capture new audiences who can't put the book down and who want more. This is one of those novels that has always been thought to be a part of this commercial, new landscape. There are literally dozens of mysteries woven together in The Woman in White, and a lot of readers confessed to being completely astonished when they discover the resolution to many of these mysteries. One of the main secrets is why a poor young woman, and this is the woman in white, has been locked up by a suspicious seeming aristocrat named Sir Percival Glyde. Sir Percival Glyde wants to marry the heroine, and so does one of our main characters, Walter Hartright. 

He's also in love with her. He has a gut feeling that Sir Percival is guilty of something awful, but he knows he can't just accuse him of guilt. He has to actually built up a case based on evidence that something is wrong with Sir Percival Glyde. One of the things Walter does is to constantly produce hypotheses and to go out and test them against evidence. That's what most of the novel is given to. All of his hypotheses turn out to be wrong. I won't give away the secret, for those of you who haven't read it or who have forgotten it. But here are Walter's thoughts looking back. This is when he does discover the secret. "At one time I thought," that's Sir Percival Glyde, "he might be Anne Catherick's father- at another time I had thought he might have been Anne Catherick's husband- the offence of which he was really guilty had been, from first to last, beyond the widest reach of my imagination." You might notice that Walter's guesses both have to do with sexual indiscretions, either a secret marriage or an illegitimate child. 

But the truth really surprises him. It is not a sexual indiscretion. Why does Collins go to so much trouble to emphasize that Walter's guesses, like Jane's, are completely wrong? Again, the question for me was, why does the novel teach us to expect to be wrong? I want to suggest two answers. This first is that suspense fiction teaches us to enjoy our ignorance. To take pleasure in not knowing, but also wanting to know. Suspense is the literary form best, most likely, to prompt us to long for knowledge. My second answer is something that you see everywhere in Victorian fiction and science, which is the humbling idea that the truth is surprising. It doesn't fit out expectations. We can't impose our own preconceptions on the world, because we're often just plain wrong. Suspense encourages us to recognize this humbling fact that the truth doesn't often fit our assumptions and preconceptions about it. 

 If scientists are right and we need a method that keeps us from leaping to conclusions, prevents us from trusting to our own first impulses, it seems like kind of a dower enterprise. Don't trust your judgement. Don't trust your assumptions. But what the suspense novel does is to make that pleasurable, to make us enjoy that desire, that recognition that we don't know and that desire to know more. Let me get back to the fact that literary critics have been dismissive of suspense for so long. I'd like to spend my last few minutes suggesting that the link between suspense fiction and the scientific method has some important implications that last into our own time. Why does the connection between science and suspense matter? First of all, if you're thinking in terms of literary criticism as a discipline, and all those other people who dismiss suspense, I think we can see that suspense fiction is doing the opposite of what critics usually assume it does. It's not teaching us to rest easy or to feel complacent. It's teaching us to ask questions, to recognize the limits of our knowledge, to wait for answers rather than to rush to impose our own views on the world. Suspense always asks, what don't we know? How will knowledge come to us? What's the right approach to gathering knowledge? What counts as knowledge? How can you be sure that what you have is knowledge? I'd argue that this remains true into our own time even in the trashiest pop culture. 

All suspense fiction always asks, what is knowledge? How do we get it? What's the right method for getting it? It's not surprising that there's a long and close relationship between science and suspense fiction that lasts into our own time. I want to show you a short clip from one of the many CSI TV shows, CSI New York. Most of you probably know of it even if you don't watch it. It's a detective show all about fining out criminals. But it's also about science, and particularly about how cutting-edge technology can help find a criminal. This clip is going to go by kind of fast, but I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to give you a quiz after this clip is over. I just want you to notice how many different kinds of knowledge are going by in this clip. See if you can keep track of a bunch of different kinds of knowledge, different disciplines of knowledge, different approaches to knowledge, all in about two minutes.  >> I just got a match to Ashley Braden, 26, had a juvie record for a meth bust about eight years ago, been clean ever since. 

She's a part-time student at Chelsea U. No next of kin. >> No signs of pulmonary edema. >> Then she was dead before she went in the water. >> COD is subdural hematoma caused by massive blunt force trauma. >> Analysis of the traces you recovered from the wounds suggest that the weapon was a -- metamorphic deposit containing quartz, mica, feldspar and biotite. >> She was killed with a rock. >> Specifically, Manhattan Schist, which doesn't help us because the city's full of it. >> Time of death? >> Well, given the water temperature and extensive skin slippage, I'd say she's been underwater approximately 60 hours when you found her. >> How long before that was she killed? >> Lividity is exclusively along her right side. 

>> Consistent with her position in the boat. >> So she was probably pushed out into the water within minutes of death. >> Which would suggest she was killed in the park quite close to the find. >> 60 hours puts it at Saturday night around midnight. >> Stomach contents reveal traces of -- hispudis, also known as puffer fish. >> Very expensive sushi. >> Delicious. Her last meal was to die for. >> A fancy meal, fancy dress, fancy party. That begs the question, where was Ashley before she was at the park? >> And who was she with? I may have discovered evidence of the struggle. 

I took subdermal photos. >> Very light discoloration. >> Yep, and I found burst capillaries, and in a circular pattern around her wrist.  >> Somebody grabbed her. >> And she resisted. Ashley didn't go down without a fight. >> All right. A lot. So for example, what did you notice? >> Geology. >> Geology! That was the one that struck me most, right? >> Manhattan Schist. 

>> Manhattan Schist. It doesn't help us because it's everywhere, but there is the rock. What else? >> Local geography. >> Local geography, definitely, always so important. >> Medical. >> Medical, right? So forensic medicine is all over this. The time of death, the bruise to the head, the grabbing of the wrist. We have all those kinds of signs. >> Zoological with the fish. >> With the fish, that's right. 

We get the actual genus and species, and then we get the poplar name, puffer fish. Which then leads to social knowledge, that it's sushi and that's expensive, and that leads to something also that we know about her that comes from that. Right at the beginning there's also her juvenile record, so we have archives in that sense. Lots of different kinds of knowledge being piled on top of each other.  One of the things that I often like to talk to students about is that what the detectives are also doing here, and we see it in these flashback pictures, is they're trying to reconstruct the past. They're acting like historians, and they're thinking like historians. So we history, geology, forensic medicine. We get zoology. We get all these things in this piece of trashy, trashy pop culture, the least dignified of popular forms. This suggests that suspense really is serious business. 

It's not just cheap entertainment. It gets us at questions about evidence and knowledge. As I like to mention to students, those are the questions at the very heart of the university. It's particularly ironic for the university to go sideline suspense when suspense may be our best way of getting us involved in the questions that we most care about. The first reason that the connections between science and suspense matters is that it allows us to see suspense as a serious epistemological venture, that is, having to do with knowledge. The second reason that the connection matters comes from this fact that the mid-19th century is a moment when science is becoming a model for all knowledge. Before the 19th century it was more likely to be religion or philosophy that were the most common paradigms for what knowledge should look like. Science didn't used to have the authority of clout that it has now. In the 19th century we see science become the model for all rigorous pursuits of truth. What seems really important is that suspense fiction seems to have played a really important part in the story of the rise of scientific knowledge. 

Suspense, because it's a hugely popular entertaining form, actually helps to democratize the scientific method. That is, it helps to spread the scientific method to lots of people who aren't scientists, who aren't going to study science, but are just reading for pleasure. And who in the process, get in the habit of not assuming that they know everything before hand, of knowing that there are paths or practices to get knowledge, and learning how to suspend judgement. Suspenseful techniques in the novel help to disseminate the sense that we should all be thinking like scientists. Now that's the argument of my book, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense. It also led me to another project that I'm just going to talk really briefly about this by way of ending. I've spent these last years studying storytelling in the sub-field of literary studies we know as narrative theory. One habit that narrative theorists have is to focus a lot of attention on beginnings and endings as the really important parts of narrative, where all the important stuff happens. If you're a scholar of the Victorian novel like me, and you spend a lot of time reading 800 and 900 page novels, the beginnings and the ends are not the most important parts of the story. You're spending so much time in the middle. 

Another Victorianist colleague here at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and I put together a collection of essays about the middle of narrative. We thought that people should be spending more time and attention thinking about what happens in the middle of stories. We wanted to argue that the middle does theoretical, structural work for narrative. It was while I was working on this book that I came to one last conclusion about suspense that I wanted to share with you. The focus on endings is just practically obsessive around suspense fiction. People think that that's all that matters is the end. I started thinking the ending matters a lot less than we've come to expect. The experience of suspense, if you think about what it feels like to be in suspense, doubt anxiety, eagerness to know, curiosity. Those experiences only happen if there's genuinely more than one possible solution to the mystery. You don't feel anxiety if there can only be one answer. 

You feel anxiety because it could be Grace Poole or it could not be Grace Poole. Sir Percival Glyde could have been Anne Catherick's father of her husband or either of those. Right? We have to be able to imagine multiple, plausible outcomes. Suspense doesn't work unless the story could genuinely end in more than one way. That means the end is always just one of a number of competing possibilities, and that while we read we take pleasure in the fact that there are competing possibilities. The middle suggests this range of possible endings which could happen, the novel suggests, even if it doesn't happen in this particular case. From this perspective, and if we join the earlier idea that I had that the middle is this crucial space of hypothesizing and suspending judgment, we can see how suspense is not a soothing or unthinking form. Instead, into our own time, it's suspense fiction that teaches us to hesitate in our convictions, to wait and to wonder how we might best come to knowledge of the world. Thank you. [applause]