Natural Complexity

From Language to Text to Tradition

Abstract

The major thrust of this article is to demonstrate the extremely complex nature of even the apparently simplest communicative events such as polite conversation at a railway station and illustrates how and why communication is complex. The text selected to elucidate the complex mental processing involved in producing and comprehending messages enables a second objective to be achieved, namely a reconsideration of the ‘meaning’ of the work of Agatha Christie, especially with regard to the socio-political analysis that might be carried out using the crime story as a vehicle and the ideological stance she takes in the light of recent research questioning the traditional view of Christie as a ‘solid’ representative of the Golden Age of crime fiction. Such a reconsideration involves examining factors such as context in its widest sense, genre, tradition and calls up the question of the nature and value of a work of ‘literature’, starting from the premise that all communication is complex.