In the Woods, Copenhagen, and Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper

Maybe you, too, read the short story “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Frank Stockton, in middle or high school. If you didn’t, read it now, because I’m going to spoil it in the next paragraph.

In case you ignored the link and don’t care about the spoiler warning, it’s about this guy who’s having an affair with a princess, and his punishment is having to choose between two doors. Behind one is a tiger, which will maul him. Behind the other is a lady, not the princess, whom he will have to marry. The princess, who knows which door is which, signals to him to choose the one on the right. The guy does, and the story ends with the question: what was behind the door? The lady or the tiger?

When you read the first page or watch the first five minutes of a story, the author or artist usually raises some questions. An Agatha Christie mystery usually asks, “Who is the murderer?”; romantic comedies often ask, “Will the hero/heroine get together and find true love?”. In the case of “The Lady or the Tiger”, the question is “What will happen to the princess’s lover?”

By raising these questions, the storyteller implicitly promises that they will be answered, and most of the time, they are. But sometimes stories – like “The Lady or the Tiger” – attempt something different by leaving one or more of these important questions unanswered. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, the House, M.D. episode “Simple Explanation”, and Edward B. Hanna’s The Whitechapel Horrors all avoid answering important questions the reader or viewer expects to be resolved. They do so for various reasons and with varying effectiveness. (Needless to say, spoilers for each follow.)

Copenhagen opens with historical questions: why did the German physicist Werner Heisenberg pay a visit to his mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark during the Second World War? What did they discuss there? How did it destroy their friendship? By the end of the play, we’ve gone through three or four possible scenarios, but we still don’t know. And that’s the point: Frayn is remarking on the uncertainty of history and memory.

Similarly, House’s inability to figure out why Kutner killed himself in the episode “Simple Explanation” is partly meant to reflect the tragedy of real suicides and to highlight the limits of reason; in The Whitechapel Horrors, Holmes’s refusal to divulge the identity of Jack the Ripper to either Watson or the reader comments on how sometimes one has a duty to conceal to truth and on how the romanticized legend of Saucy Jack has grown from his anonymity.

Your mileage may vary, but the ambiguity around Kutner’s motives and Jack the Ripper’s identity left me dissatisfied in a way the ending of Copenhagen didn’t. At first, I thought that was because one was based on real historical events and the other two were more solidly fictional, but then last weekend, I read Tana French’s wonderful novel In the Woods, and I had to revise my understanding.

In the Woods is a heart-pounding thriller about the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in rural Ireland. That part’s pretty straightforward murder-mystery fare; what complicates matters is the fact that years before, the two childhood best friends of Rob Ryan, the detective in charge, went missing in the exact place under very unusual circumstances. Ryan was with them at the time, but when searchers found him, he’d lost his memory of what happened.

As Ryan investigates the present case, various sights and sounds trigger new memories and impressions. Could the death of the girl be related to his own trauma? If it is, will he be able to handle the truth when he uncovers it?

Without giving too much away, one of the book’s major mystery plotlines remains unresolved at the end – the reader still has no idea whodunnit or why or how. But it still feels satisfying because the author fulfills all her other promises: the book isn’t so much about the nitty-gritty of who committed the crime and why as it is about how the investigation affects Ryan and his colleagues. Some readers didn’t like this: if you read the reviews on Amazon.com, you’ll see that they’re distributed about equally between the five possible ratings, and most of the one- and two-star reviews complain about the predictability of the solved case and the frustration of the unsolved one.

Which got me thinking again. Maybe now I’ve got a better handle on why “Simple Explanation” and The Whitechapel Horrors felt like cop-outs to me: I don’t believe the writers know their story’s history. We like to think of the real world as being objective somehow: if you could rewind history like a movie and focus the camera on Jimmy Hoffa or Amelia Earheart, you would be able to find out exactly what happened to them and why. We expect stories to reflect this understanding of the world – if you could somehow jump into the House, M. D. universe and slip into characters’ minds, there would be reasons why Kutner killed himself, and you could find out what they were.

More to the point, when an event in a story seems to happen for no reason, I need to trust that the writers have constructed the story with the idea that there is a reason, even if we and they and the characters don’t know it. Otherwise, instead of looking for explanations in the world of the story, I start to try to find them in the world of its creators.

It’s difficult to think, “Gosh, now why did Kutner commit suicide? I guess it’s just like real life, and we can never really know” when there is a perfectly simple explanation, one House and Wilson could never uncover but which comes easily to you and me: Kal Penn, the actor who played him, got a job with the Obama administration, and the writers had to get him off the show fast. Similarly, Edward B. Hanna may have had the most brilliant reasons in the world for not revealing the Ripper’s identity, but the way he did it felt like he didn’t want to have to deal with pointing a finger at a historical figure.

Those two stories don’t give me the impression the writers said to themselves, “Well, X is the murderer and Kutner killed himself because of A, B, and C, but it’d be better for the story not to let the reader/audience know that.” They don’t even give me the impression the writers said to themselves, “OK, I don’t know what X or A, B, and C are, but in the world of this story, Jack the Ripper is a specific individual, and Kutner did kill himself for a reason.” They make me feel like the writers said, “You know what would be cool? If the story was about trying to figure out who the murderer is or why Kutner did it, but in the end, you still don’t know. Because that’s how the world is!”

In Copenhagen, the whole point of the play is that there are no A, B, and C reasons. Or, if there are, then they exist all at once, and only our motives in seeking out the memories suddenly bring one to the forefront. In In the Woods, although the author never reveals what actually happened in one of the plotlines, the reader has no doubt that in the world of the story, one and only one set of events occurred. Does the author know what they are? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn’t matter, because I believe they happened, somewhere out there where neither the main characters nor I can know about them.

It’s like the abduction of Mulder’s sister on The X Files. The fact that she was taken when Mulder was a kid made the show run: it gave Mulder a motivation and a Deep Dark Secret Tragedy (TM). It gave him a quest: find out what happened to her. But it was obvious that the stuff that happened in and around his quest – working with Scully, dealing with Monsters of the Week, and uncovering elements of the sinister conspiracy of which his sister’s disappearance was just a minor manifestation – were way, way more important than the quest itself. So important, as a matter of a fact, that the audience was forced to take that long-ago abduction as established fact in order to get to the meatier stuff happening in present-day. If you didn’t trust that Chris Carter and co. knew what happened that fateful evening, then you couldn’t properly enjoy the current plot that hinged on that event and probably went off to watch something else.

Don’t want to tell me where Samantha went? Then make me stop really wondering by giving me an overwhelming, taking-over-the-world Consortium of Nasty Dudes instead. Or pick a real historical event like Copenhagen does, and satisfy me emotionally by resolving gripping personal and political conflicts while you’re giving me that fascinating historiography that ties in with the philosophy of quantum physics. Or do what In the Woods does and interest me more in the psychological study of the main character: will Ryan crack? Will he survive with his life and relationships intact?

I guess what it boils down to is this: if you don’t want to answer the questions you posed at the beginning, fine, but you’d better offer me something bigger in return to show me that you really do know what you’re doing with this story, and your lack of answers is a choice based on the world of the characters. Post-modern commentary or profound themes are okay, but they’re world-of-writers things. They don’t keep my attention on the story or make me trust you unless they come with something else.

In other words: the tiger, dammit!