Abstract:
This thesis reads three novels of the genre called "metacognitive mystery tale". These novels are The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, and The Serialist by David Gordon. This thesis aims to explore the hermeneutics of the genre and offer its distinguishing generic features through this investigation. It discusses the politics and ideology implied by the hermeneutics of the metacognitive mystery explored, and shows how the genre promotes and represents an emancipatory and anti-totalitarian hermeneutics. The thesis discusses and depicts that a totalitarian hermeneutics characteristic of detective fiction transforms everything into state apparatuses, depicting them as purely instrumental. Detective fiction does so by transforming things into fixed meanings that join each other and constitute and confirm a larger whole. Referring to a larger whole, things become symbols. And in detective fiction, they symbolize omniscience and omnipotence of the authority that translates them into clues -- things that point beyond themselves -- and then seals them together. In contrast, the hermeneutics of metacognitive mystery is liberating in that it frees things from the political and ideological mechanisms, in which detective fiction assumes and renders them to function. The thesis argues that metacognitive mystery achieves such a liberation by portraying things indeterminate. Following the imagery of instrumentality, if things are instruments, according to detective fiction, that join each other and thusly constitute a larger whole, metacognitive mystery sets them out of joint. This thesis investigates the ways in which metacognitive mystery does so. It argues that metacognitive mystery demonstrates that things resist being translated into clues, into sound and fixed meanings. I call the text that represents a lack of identification, an inability to define things, a hermeneutic pandemonium. And the thesis discusses that metacognitive mystery portrays a hermeneutic pandemonium. The liberation of things in metacognitive mystery parallels how the school of philosophy Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) democratizes them. Therefore, the thesis argues that the hermeneutic pandemonium is a threshold to OOO; and displays how the novels this thesis reads represent such a threshold.
