Logic and porridge

When I teach ancient works, I like to point out that logical coherence is not always the point. For instance: if it’s the tenth year of the war, why is King Priam only now asking Helen to identify the various Achaeans laying siege to Troy? I think there’s only one good answer to such a question: “It’s a story.” For the purposes of the story, it makes sense to have Priam ask about these things, tenth year or no tenth year: his questions and comments let us understand his attitude toward “the enemy” (quite different from those that hold in our world). And in Iliad 3, it really is as if the war is just beginning, tenth year or no tenth year: single combat between Menelaus and Paris — now they think of it? — might settle the Helen question, until Athena breaks the armies’ truce and battle begins in 4.

When I raise or respond to this kind of logical question, I invoke the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. How can one bowl of porridge be too hot, one too cold, and one just right? Well, it’s a story. I am now happy (I think) to see that I am not the first person to have wondered about the temperature differences. Physicist Chad Orzel addressed the question in a 2009 blog post: The Faulty Thermodynamics of Children’s Stories (Uncertain Principles: Physics, Politics, Pop Culture). And there’s a 2007 novel that investigates the question (and many more questions), Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear.

[Reader, have you read Jasper Fforde?]