Simenon’s Criminals and Collaborators: Anchoring and the Task of Assigning Guilt

Abstract

Rather than grant readers the catharsis of identifying culprits, Georges Simenon’s denouements frequently leave them unsure of which characters to condemn. While scholars often note this lingering uncertainty, they have yet to explain how Simenon generates it or how it contributes to readers’ enjoyment. I contend that Simenon exploits anchoring—people’s tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—to lead readers to misjudge characters. As an analysis of “Les Mains pleines” (1945) illustrates, he employs this tactic to produce a sensation of disorientation that prompts readers to scrutinize the processes by which they form judgments.

Keywords:

• Cognitive bias
• crime fiction
• detective stories
• Simenon
• narrative
• surprise

Notes

Notes

1 See Bernard Alavoine, Georges Simenon et le monde sensible: De la perception à l’écriture, Amiens, Encrage Édition, 2017, p. 131; Jehlen, p. 4; and Patrick Marnham, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, pp. 100, 144.

2 Caillois (pp. 24–25) and Holquist (p. 167) characterize early detective narratives this way. See Le Roman policier (Buenos Aires, Éditions des lettres françaises, 1941) and “Whodunnit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” (The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, edited by Glen W. Most and William W. Stowe, Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1983, pp. 149–174), respectively.

3 See Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, vol. 185, no. 4157, 1974, pp. 1124–1131 (p. 1128).

4 See Solomon Asch, “Forming Impressions of Personality,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 41, no. 3, 1946, pp. 258–290 (p. 270).

5 See Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich, “The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic: Why the Adjustments are Insufficient,” Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 4, 2006, pp. 311–318 (p. 311).

6 All quotations of Simenon are my translations.

7 See Keith Oatley, “Meetings of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy, and Identification in Reading Fiction,” Poetics, vol. 26, no. 5, 1999, pp. 439–454 (p. 445).

8 See Marnham, p. 200.

9 See Pierre Assouline, Simenon: A Biography. Knopf, 1997, p. 167.

10 See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard UP, 1991, p. 9.

11 This question is prominent in discussions of World War II (Dan McMillan, How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust. Basic Books, 2014, p. 14).

12 See Holquist, pp. 172–173, and Ian Rankin, “Why Crime Fiction is Good for You,” Edinburgh Review, vol. 102, 1999, pp. 9–6 (pp. 11–12).

13 Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine, May 1948, pp. 406–412 (p. 412).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Darci Gardner

Darci Gardner is Associate Professor of French at Appalachian State University and the author of publications on Proust, Marie Krysinska, Mallarmé, and Bonnefoy. The present article is an abridged excerpt from a book on how literary writers exploit readers’ cognitive biases. Another selection from this project is forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature.