The Mysteries of Postmodern Epistemology: Stratemeyer, Stine, and Contemporary Mystery for Children

Abstract

In the early 1930s, Edward Stratemeyer conceived of a heroine who would quickly become a cultural icon. Smart, sure-footed, and virtu-ous, Nancy Drew combated the evils of her time with flawless grace. With the occasional and often superfluous help of her father and friends, the young detective made River Heights and the rest of America feel confident in the competence of its youth, and reinforced a general faith in the sufficiencies of human reason to challenge and ultimately triumph over the irrational evils of war and economic crisis. But to paraphrase Dorothy from The Wizard o(Oz, we are not in River Heights anymore. Postmodernism in many ways challenges the supremacy of the rational, opening new questions regarding the limits of our reason in the face of the irrational. That which is abject, excluded from rational inquiry and discourse, reasserts itself. Resolution, such as we find in those tidy endings in Nancy Drew mys-teries, is displaced by the opening up of new networks of complexity. Hence today's mystery series fiction for youth responds to different cultural preoccupations. R. L. Stine's Goosebumps and Ghosts of Fear Street series, for instance, continually breach the borders of the world as we know it. The works of Australian writer Gary Crew elide the mys-terious with the mundane making the mundane mysterious, and vice versa. Contemporary mysteries for children challenge their readers to explore new paradigms of the normal, and, concomitantly, a new para-digm of the mysterious. Mystery is that which defines the boundaries of the known. As new knowledge comes to light, the territory of the known enlarges, and the mysterious terrain where such beasts as dragons lurk becomes smaller and smaller. Indeed, if one presumes a universe that is ultimately 184 The Mysteries of Postmodem Epistemology 185 knowable, subject to rational laws and motivated action, then the mys-terious is merely something hidden, territory not yet mapped. Knowledge is perceived as a coherent, totalizing system that is simply incomplete. Such is the modernist view of the universe, originating in the Enlightenment tendency to privilege scientific knowledge over knowledge gained through legends, myths, and other cultural narra-tives. Hence it is a profoundly human knowledge as well -not con-cerned with where we are in relation to our gods, as in mythological knowledge, but with where we are in relation to each other and to the natural world. In such a world, the hero is he or she who thinks ra-tionally, keeps her head, pursues his clues until the mystery is solved. The solution is then integrated into the larger store of knowledge to enlarge the boundaries of the known, to reduce the territory taken up by the mysterious. For knowledge in modernism almost always results in action: it has effects, spurs progress, and imposes order on chaotic systems. The teleological, progressive hope in modernism is that, if we all keep our wits about us and believe in the strength of our bodies and the sufficiency of our reason, we may yet sift the mysteries of the universe around us. It is therefore no accident that, as R. Gordon Kelly points out, the detective story genre emerged in a context of historical and ideological modernity, and, according to Michael Holquist, achieved dominance as the principal form of mystery fiction with the advent of literary modernism. According to Brian McHale, modernist fiction is dominated by questions of epistemology, of what can be known and by whom, of how we are to interpret the world in which we find our-selves. He calls the detective story 'the epistemological genre par excel-lence' (McHale 9), mirroring as it does the rational search for sure and certain knowledge of the truth. In the early decades of this century, Edward Stratemeyer made it his business to bring this genre to young readers, creating characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys who epitomize the subject on its way to knowing, competent and sure-footed in the quest to uncover truth, dauntless when faced with threats, locked doors, violent storms and equally violent miscreants, and ultimately successful in clearing up the mystery and restoring order to chaos, fortunes to the deserving, and punishment to the vil-lains. Several critics (and most avid readers) have identified the basic plot structure of a Nancy Drew mystery: Nancy becomes acquainted with a poor soul who has in some way been swindled out of her fortune, she agrees to work on the case, she performs 'a slew of amazing feats' (Siegel 166), is threatened by the villains for meddling