Many philosophers, mathematicians and other learned professionals dislike contradictions in theory and real life. Move the same paradoxical idea to a fictional story, and the scoffing quickly turns to undisguised interest.
A paradox is a statement or a group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation that (if true) defies logic or reason. An easy example of this is seen in the age-old question of the chicken or the egg – which came first? For there to be a chicken, there first must have been an egg for it to hatch out of … but then who laid the first egg? There had to be a chicken before there was a first egg. So, we have either an infinite regress or no chicken nor egg at all. The best answer to a paradox often is not either of the two choices presented, but a third option that takes into account a much larger world view to render the best explanation, such as evolution in this instance. But what about when the riddle is much more complex?
The definition of paradox suggests that often paradoxical statements do not imply a real contradiction and the puzzling results can be rectified by demonstrating that one or more of the assumptions are not really true, a play on words, or in some way or other are faulty. This often happens in fiction. Chief among the genres that use paradox extensively is the genre of mystery novels. Almost everyone can remember a book they have read where the heart of the plot was a mysterious paradox. Take, for example, the famous story of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Sherlock Holmes spends most of the book trying to find out if the dog is real, or if a ghost is responsible for the deaths of several people. From the evidence given, it appears on paper that the dog is both a ghost and somehow real enough to kill people. But when Sherlock digs deep enough, he discovers that the dog is real and has been trained to kill on command, and its whereabouts had just been kept secret. As Sherlock was quoted to say ‘examine the facts, and look at all possible conclusions. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever you are left with, no matter how improbable, is the truth’.
Another good example of paradox in mystery is the case of the locked room. This has appeared with many different twists, from Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue to episodes of The Mentalist to short stories such as Encyclopaedia Brown's case involving the turning of ice cubes into ginger ale. In all of them, the paradoxical premise is the same: the room was locked, no one entered or left, and yet something in the room happened that indicates someone had accessed the room. Always, in these stories, some part of the information initially given proves later to be false. Usually, it is because the room was accessed secretly, either with a skeleton key, a false lock or lock that did not engage, a window (Poe's story), a secret trapdoor, a heating vent or a manipulation of the lock in some other fashion. But sometimes the false information is something else, as in the case of the beverage switching. In that case, the cubes were made of ginger ale to begin with, so no one had to enter the room to switch anything; the cubes had only to melt within the room to create the illusion of someone having entered to switch the glasses.
Other genres also take advantage of the paradox, but in other ways. Take, for example, classic romance books. In any given classic romance, there is a hero and heroine, and usually a supporting cast. Often, we are given initial information about each character to base our allegiances on. Often, the woman is given a choice between two men, one who is made out to be good by a list of given evidence – he is rich, kind, caring, handsome, etc. –, and the other who is made out to be either evil, or substantially lacking in some way – unkind, conniving, thieving, etc. The choice seems to be easy – the heroine should choose the ‘good guy’ over the ‘bad guy’. But usually as the story unfolds, the reader is given opportunity to see new information that proves that the ‘good guy’ is doing evil things himself, setting him on par with the ‘bad guy’. The reader is left with a paradox: if both choices are ‘bad guys’, who is the heroine to end up with? A romance novel must have a happily ever after; An “HEA” is a standard requirement of the genre. The heroine can only choose one man to marry, and more importantly, he must be ‘the right one’, by far. To rectify this puzzle, information is then given to the reader about one of the men in the last chapter; this particular ‘bad guy’ was misunderstood/framed/socially inept/victim of circumstance. With this new information negating the ‘evil’ doings of one of the men, the choice is now clear, and the novel ends with the woman in the arms of the ‘true good guy’.
Perhaps the most ingenious use of paradox in fiction is the way it is used in horror novels. Paradox is central to the genre in several ways, and also one of the most used plot twists. It never ceases to terrify an audience, if used correctly, and its versatility is close to endless. Human reasoning demands answers to why evil events happened. When confronted by paradox, the sense of horror at the evil multiplies, escalating quickly into sheer fear. What is more terrifying than a true contradiction that can kill you?
The first place paradoxes are mentioned in horror is when giving history or background setting for a horror novel. Everyone has heard of haunted houses, hotels or other objects, from the ‘real’ ones found in non-fiction books and many others in fiction and film. While some hauntings are said to be the cause of terrible acts or murders (The Shining, The Haunting of Hill House and House on Haunted Hill) or other phenomenon such as ley lines (The Amityville Horror and Curfew) or even evil architects (Siddon's The House Next Door), some hauntings are not so easily written off in terms of how or even when they began. Take, for example, the haunted Hubrey mansion in Stephen King's Salem's Lot. For the latter, the refrain of the book that is mentioned several times prominently is that ‘An evil house draws evil men’. Information is given that Hubrey, the man who built the house, was an evil man, killing a number of children. Later, the vampire Mr. Barlow takes up residence there and infects the town with his evil. But with the refrain, the reader is presented with the paradox of whether Hubrey was the evil that infected the house, leading to later evil, or if the spot he chose to build was evil, which corrupted him, the house and any later inhabitants. Both cannot be true, and not knowing lends a sense of added terror to the story.
Take the further extreme of evil begun with no cause at all. An example is the evil car in Stephen King's Christine. Before she is even out of the factory, Christine has claimed her first victim, a shift supervisor. Christine goes on to corrupt her owners, leading them to kill and be killed in turn. Why this particular car is evil, out of the thousands of Plymouth 57's produced, is never said explicitly. Or take the little girl in The Exorcist who is possessed. She was not evil, and yet she is tortured terribly by the devil throughout the movie before finally being saved at the end. Why this little girl, out of the millions in the world? The given answer is because they just were predisposed to evil – born bad, like the child in the movies The Bad Seed and The Good Son. Yet if nothing made them bad, it makes no sense that they would be bad. Yet they are bad, and spectacularly so, a true contradiction that is both puzzling and frightening.
The most significant way paradox is used in horror plots is to create a true contradiction whose consequences make possible murder and mayhem. This is seen in many horror franchises that involve the walking (or at least active) dead that cannot be killed. Take, for example, the Friday the 13th movie series. Jason was a little boy left to drown while his camp counsellors were busy making out. When the camp is reopened years later, the camp counsellors meet grisly deaths in inventive ways, from sharp farm implements to large weapons like machetes. By the second installment, it is revealed that Jason's mother is behind the killings, getting revenge for her dead son. But when she is killed by a resourceful counsellor, Jason himself comes back from the grave to avenge her. This lasts throughout the rest of the series, with Jason being stabbed, skewered, etc. to no effect. He is already dead and rotting, a zombie of sorts. The same can be said of Freddy Kruegar, A Nightmare on Elm Street's villain. He is also dead from the beginning, having been burnt alive by a mob of parents for molesting their children. He is able to come back in dreams to kill the children of the people who burnt him. And no matter how many times he is stabbed with his own finger blades, burnt or inventively banished by drugs that make dreams impossible, he will not die. This was also true of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Mummy, and other fictional characters: neither alive nor dead, but members of the ‘undead’.
Another use of paradox in plot is the creation of monsters. Take the vampire and the werewolf, creatures of circular logic if ever there were some. In traditional vampire stories, a victim is infected (either bitten/infected with vampire blood or infected in some other inventive way, such as with spores of vampire mushrooms in Brian Lumely's The Necroscope series) and becomes a vampire. For that to occur, first there had to be a vampire to infect the victim. That vampire in turn had to be infected themselves at some point. So, who made Dracula, Nosferatu or other famous origin vampires into a vampire in the first place? The answer given is usually that they were evil to begin with or unbaptised, and that somehow translated into being a vampire when they died or were murdered. There are also other inventive vampire origin tales such as being cursed by gypsies (TV series Angel), born vampire alluded to in the Blade movie series) or infected in the womb before birth by a vampiric tentacle (Lumely's Necroscope series). Barring Lumley's answer – which hinges on vampire essence being infectious and thus makes some sense – magic – which by its nature is belief-based, not logic-based – and the idea that a species would be able to mate and produce its own kind – also sound logic – the other origin explanation does not really make sense. For an infection to take place, there must be a receptive host and an infectious agent. And if an infection only can be spread through bodily fluids, such as blood, why would some other act that did not allow this to happen result in vampirism? Werewolves are very similar to vampires, being also created by bites/scratches, and origin stories are similar, especially the gypsy curse, though inventive stories such as Infection via Flowers (Johnstone's Wolfsbane and Stephen King's Silver Bullet) also offer explanations.
Finally, the most effective tool of a horror writer or director is the true contradiction that can kill you. Take, for example, the ghosts of House on Haunted Hill, Stir of Echoes or the ghosts in any horror story (my own Origin of Fear, for example). Ghosts, by definition, are spirits, unable to touch the living world. They are described as echoes, remnants of people: scary, but harmless. But when these spirits are able to breach the veil, either to right some wrong or to wreak havoc, what was merely terrifying becomes life threatening. And what is so horrific is that these ghosts' ability to hurt us is a true contradiction, where all the evidence is accurate. It cannot be possible, and yet somehow, it is. The ghost is passing through the wall, but the knife it wields is real enough. The door is locked and windows barred, but the monster appears right behind you, fingers reaching for your throat. Do not look for classical logic to save you, because it is too late. Reach for your paraconsistent logic instead – just be prepared to give up your principles of rationality. It is a small price to pay for your life.
So, if we keep our paradoxes in the realm of fiction, we like them. But, to mirror a theme in a lot of modern horror stories, what if we find a real paradox in the real world? That is what this issue of JETAI is about.