Is Dirk Gently a con man?
Mar. 25th, 2011 02:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI mentioned Douglas Adams's character of Dirk Gently in passing in a previous post, and my characterization of him as a con man attracted a comment voicing the other view. The commenter admitted only being familiar with the TV version, which I'm not familiar with, but this isn't the first time I've voiced my interpretation of the character and had someone disagree. Since I'm awake (again) I wanted to take a few minutes to spell out my reasoning.
To be specific, the way I describe Dirk is as a con man whose scams routinely fail, insofar as they fail to be scams. This happens so consistently across the two finished books that I believe it to be an unstated premise of them. It seems like few readers I've encountered agree with me, though. I think part of that is that it is unstated. There is a lot of subtle stuff in Douglas Adams's writing, but it's not all subtle and the surface is entertaining enough that you can forget there's a brilliantly multilayered mind at work. And then there's the fact that for all that "show, don't tell" is the rallying cry of writing instructors and editors everywhere, the state of the art is that you're at the very least expected to show in a way that is telling, or show and then tell the reader what you've shown them.
Nobody at any point in the series goes "Aha! I see what's happening. You keep pretending to be psychic and then your predictions come true." Dirk never curses the bad luck that keeps him from making a dishonest living as a huckster and instead lands him in the less well paying position of a heroic savior of the human race from extinction, and the fact that he does save the human race from extinction and preserve the multiversal order of things perhaps predisposes the reader to believe he's on the level.
But you know what? The question in my subject line isn't even a question. There is no question that Dirk is a con man because we see him engaged in confidence schemes in both books. There can be a question about whether his main line (the holistic detective agency) is meant to be a scam or not, but there's no doubt that he's a scammer in general.
In our introduction to Svlad Cjelli (alias Dirk Gently) we're told that while he was at university he deliberately engineered rumors that he was psychic while protesting that he was not, in order to create an environment in which people would pay him for what his best guess of what the exam answers would be, with the keys he sells being nothing more than a bunch of educated guesswork based on freely available information. We're led by the nose through the whole scheme. And then it falls apart because his best guesses end up being spot on, and with perfectly reproduced answer keys his plausible deniability flies out the window.
Now, a reader could infer from him that this experience led him to realize he has some intuitive understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and that led him to decide to be a holistic detective, using his abilities to help mankind blah de blah blah blah.
Does that at all sound like how Dirk is portrayed in the book? As someone whose brush with prison prompted him to go on the straight and narrow? As someone who had a revelation? Given how quickly he accepts ghosts, time machines, gods, and everything else he encounters I can agree that he probably does believe in "the fundamental interconnectedness of things", but the main thing he seems to believe about it is that it allows him to charge credulous clients for expensive holidays and claim that they relate to the client's case. Because everything's related, he can charge for anything. I'm sure he believes that much. As Winston Zeddemore said, "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."
Further, we see in book 2 that Dirk is still engaging in confidence schemes apart from the detective agency. He's doing a medium/spiritualism racket near the start of the book. We know it's a racket and not a legitimate extension of his stated belief that he can unravel mysteries through the fundamental interconnectedness of all things because he dress up in disguise and makes a load of shit up on the spot to tell some woman. It's a scam.
The fact that the load of shit later turns out to be bang-on accurate (after having first seemed to be completely at odds with reality) is just the unstated premise turning up again.
There's room for interpretation on whether Dirk actually is psychic (despite his protestations and his cynical attempts to fake it) or if the universe he lives in just has a perverse sense of humor (this is my theory, given that the universe in question is the mind of Douglas Adams), but it's not really left ambiguous that he is trying to fake it.
To make a long story short*, both books have at least one example of Dirk Gently, Phony Psychic. Do we as readers believe that he is a man who occasionally pretends to be a psychic in order to bilk people out of money while wholeheartedly believing he is a holistic detective who can solve mysteries involving unfaithful spouses and missing pets by interrogating the vibrational frequencies of a table leg (preferably a table leg somewhere sunny and warm) who sort of incidentally bilks people out of money while doing so?
Or do we believe the whole thing is a put-on from top to bottom, that the "holistic detective" gig falls into the same spectrum of pretending to have unique intuitive abilities as the "Really I'm Not Clairvoyant!"-Student-Scam and the Dress-Up-In-Fortune-Teller-Drag-And-Tell-Fortunes-Scam?
The latter seems more likely to me.
To be specific, the way I describe Dirk is as a con man whose scams routinely fail, insofar as they fail to be scams. This happens so consistently across the two finished books that I believe it to be an unstated premise of them. It seems like few readers I've encountered agree with me, though. I think part of that is that it is unstated. There is a lot of subtle stuff in Douglas Adams's writing, but it's not all subtle and the surface is entertaining enough that you can forget there's a brilliantly multilayered mind at work. And then there's the fact that for all that "show, don't tell" is the rallying cry of writing instructors and editors everywhere, the state of the art is that you're at the very least expected to show in a way that is telling, or show and then tell the reader what you've shown them.
Nobody at any point in the series goes "Aha! I see what's happening. You keep pretending to be psychic and then your predictions come true." Dirk never curses the bad luck that keeps him from making a dishonest living as a huckster and instead lands him in the less well paying position of a heroic savior of the human race from extinction, and the fact that he does save the human race from extinction and preserve the multiversal order of things perhaps predisposes the reader to believe he's on the level.
But you know what? The question in my subject line isn't even a question. There is no question that Dirk is a con man because we see him engaged in confidence schemes in both books. There can be a question about whether his main line (the holistic detective agency) is meant to be a scam or not, but there's no doubt that he's a scammer in general.
In our introduction to Svlad Cjelli (alias Dirk Gently) we're told that while he was at university he deliberately engineered rumors that he was psychic while protesting that he was not, in order to create an environment in which people would pay him for what his best guess of what the exam answers would be, with the keys he sells being nothing more than a bunch of educated guesswork based on freely available information. We're led by the nose through the whole scheme. And then it falls apart because his best guesses end up being spot on, and with perfectly reproduced answer keys his plausible deniability flies out the window.
Now, a reader could infer from him that this experience led him to realize he has some intuitive understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and that led him to decide to be a holistic detective, using his abilities to help mankind blah de blah blah blah.
Does that at all sound like how Dirk is portrayed in the book? As someone whose brush with prison prompted him to go on the straight and narrow? As someone who had a revelation? Given how quickly he accepts ghosts, time machines, gods, and everything else he encounters I can agree that he probably does believe in "the fundamental interconnectedness of things", but the main thing he seems to believe about it is that it allows him to charge credulous clients for expensive holidays and claim that they relate to the client's case. Because everything's related, he can charge for anything. I'm sure he believes that much. As Winston Zeddemore said, "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."
Further, we see in book 2 that Dirk is still engaging in confidence schemes apart from the detective agency. He's doing a medium/spiritualism racket near the start of the book. We know it's a racket and not a legitimate extension of his stated belief that he can unravel mysteries through the fundamental interconnectedness of all things because he dress up in disguise and makes a load of shit up on the spot to tell some woman. It's a scam.
The fact that the load of shit later turns out to be bang-on accurate (after having first seemed to be completely at odds with reality) is just the unstated premise turning up again.
There's room for interpretation on whether Dirk actually is psychic (despite his protestations and his cynical attempts to fake it) or if the universe he lives in just has a perverse sense of humor (this is my theory, given that the universe in question is the mind of Douglas Adams), but it's not really left ambiguous that he is trying to fake it.
To make a long story short*, both books have at least one example of Dirk Gently, Phony Psychic. Do we as readers believe that he is a man who occasionally pretends to be a psychic in order to bilk people out of money while wholeheartedly believing he is a holistic detective who can solve mysteries involving unfaithful spouses and missing pets by interrogating the vibrational frequencies of a table leg (preferably a table leg somewhere sunny and warm) who sort of incidentally bilks people out of money while doing so?
Or do we believe the whole thing is a put-on from top to bottom, that the "holistic detective" gig falls into the same spectrum of pretending to have unique intuitive abilities as the "Really I'm Not Clairvoyant!"-Student-Scam and the Dress-Up-In-Fortune-Teller-Drag-And-Tell-Fortunes-Scam?
The latter seems more likely to me.
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on 2011-03-25 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-25 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-26 06:40 am (UTC)