Explanation Unravels

Dark-haired man holding a lit cigarette

There are lots of stories in various media that follow this pattern:

1. Something spooky happens.

2. Someone (the story's rationalist) explains it, perhaps with the help of a surprising twist. The spooky thing has a natural explanation.

3. Finally, the twist is retwisted, the explanation comes unraveled. We are left with the initial spookiness.

This was a common template in the old Rod Serling Twilight Zones.

Here is a single example of which I have a memory both indelible and vague. A notorious bad-guy cowboy comes into town, and goes to a cemetery on a dare. He dies standing on a gravesite. It is the plot, we soon learn, of a man whom this newly departed hombre had murdered years before. Ah, spooky ... could the dead person have reached out from beyond the grave and killed him? Looks like it: but ...

The town rationalist has an explanation. Lots of townspeople are standing around the scene of the suspicious/spooky heart attack while the rationalist explains what really happened, how the newly departed had caught his boot spurs on such and such an obstruction, must of thought he was being grabbed supernaturally (silly bad guy), and had the natural-world heart seizure out of fear.

Just when we think we've absorbed that, nice wrap-up, show's over, we get the REAL surprise. Which I've blocked out and I'm too lazy to look up. But someone, only a bit character until now, comes forward to observe that the death couldn't have happened the way the rationalist says because ... something topographical.

Anyway, we're left with the reinforced spookiness as the credits roll.

No lesson here folks, just a question. Does this sort of story pattern have a name? Is it sufficiently frequent to need one? Any suggestions?

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog