Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

Yet despite his invention of the genre, Poe’s mysteries are not traditional tales of detection. As their lengthy philosophical digressions make clear, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem ‘mysterious’ in the first place. For all their obvious interest in the mechanics of problem solving, the tales themselves scarcely offer solutions. By withholding evidence, Poe makes second-guessing impossible. In none of the tales is the reader permitted to solve the mystery along with the detective. Nor do the tales concern crimes in any narrowly legal sense. Only in the first Dupin tale is there even an identifiable murderer. Most important, the tales’ solutions lack the moral dimension by which mysteries customarily celebrate the detective’s ability to right wrongs or restructure a disordered society. These are not tales of chivalric retribution. The stolen goods of ‘The Gold-Bug’ are never returned to their rightful owners. In the first two Dupin tales all misdeeds go unpunished, while in the third Dupin’s response to the villainous but hardly illegal theft of a love-letter is merely to repeat the original crime in a morally ambiguous way.

Readers were wrong to focus on the cleverness of the stones. ‘Where’, Poe wondered, ‘is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself [the author] have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?’ Far from an unambiguous elucidation of Truth, detection was for Poe merely a specialized way of thinking, and one somewhat at odds with the epistemologies of the other tales. Implicitly ratiocination announces the total explicability of what remains unintelligible everywhere else in Poe. For this very reason it seems unsatisfactory and incomplete. The linguistic literalism Legrand uses to solve the cryptogram in ‘The Gold-Bug’ marks his intellect as second-rate, no more admirable than his greed. Even Dupin’s more imaginative logic clarifies reality by oversimplifying it. In interpreting the Rue Morgue murders, Dupin blithely explains away the very strangeness that the
Gothic tales celebrate. And ‘The Purloined Letter’, the most sophisticated and non-linear of the detective stories, represses Dupin’s support for the kind of aristocratic libertinism and monarchial politics which Poe and his middle-class readership customarily opposed.

The limitations of detection as a way of knowing the world are clearest in what appears the weakest of the detective tales, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Trying to explain in fiction the real-life death of shopgirl Mary Rogers, Dupin (and Poe behind him) trade on the right to knowledge afforded them by their culturally privileged position. The comparative failure of their explanations not only challenges that right to know others, it exposes the discriminatory ideologies that make the event inaccessible to them and so gives voice to the very minority identities that privilege seeks to repress. The tale records without comment how the media’s manufacture of a culturally acceptable meaning makes class and gender into ‘mysteries’. Yet by the most successful of Poe’s ironic effects, the implausibility of the ‘romantic’ explanation of Mary’s death makes the realities of class prejudice, sexual harassment, and reproductive politics all the more visible. Marie Rogêt becomes, in her resistance to Dupin, Poe’s only gendered character, her narrative his most fully realized world, her murder his sole sexualized event. And in its inability to say the word, the tale stands as our first piece of abortion fiction.

These least known tales show us Poe best. In ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin argued that even madmen ‘are of some nation’. So too with Poe himself. The extravagance of his narratives encouraged readers to divorce Poe from intellectual and social issues and to imagine that he lived with his characters in some ‘ultimate dim Thule’, a dream-land ‘out of SPACE—out of TIME’. Cut off from his thoughts, Poe not only has no chance of finding a place in our cultural histories. He is robbed of the power to say anything significant to those of us who continue to live within culture. Beyond space and time he is also beyond reach, able to thrill but not to touch us. In this respect our first adolescent reading of Poe may have also been our most courageous. Innocent of subjectivity and unimpressed by symbolism, youths find in Poe’s universe the same strangeness that astonishes them in their own. We later teach ourselves to see Poe as otherworldly for fear that what he says about the world might actually be true. Until we can learn once more to read the world back into Poe, we cannot read him seriously at all.

D
ESPITE
the many printings of Poe’s tales, there are few major controversies concerning his texts. This edition reprints from the standard (at present the only) complete edition of Poe: the ‘Virginia’ edition of
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902). I have checked these texts against the magisterial edition of the tales by Thomas Ollive Mabbott,
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
, ii:
Tales and Sketches, 1831
–
1842
, and iii:
Tales and Sketches, 1843
–
1849
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). I have also consulted Patrick Quinn’s edition for the Library of America,
Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales
(New York: Library of America, 1984), which—with its companion,
Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews
, ed. G. R. Thompson—constitutes the most complete readily available edition. Since this edition is intended as a reading text, I have silently corrected errors in Poe’s spelling and punctuation of foreign languages, which previous editors left unchanged. All footnotes within the text are Poe’s own.

The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
, ed. James A. Harrison, the ‘Virginia’ edition, 17 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902).

Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ii:
Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842
, and iii:
Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales
, ed. Patrick Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984).

Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews
, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984).

Quinn, Arthur Hobson,
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography
(New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941).

Silverman, Kenneth,
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance
(New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

Budd, Louis J., and Cady, Edwin H. (eds.),
On Poe: The Best from
American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Carlson, Eric W. (ed.),
The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970).

Muller, John P., and Richardson, William J. (eds.),
The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading
(Baltimoreg and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

Rosenheim, Shawn, and Rachman, Stephen (eds.),
The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Silverman, Kenneth (ed.),
New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Benjamin, Walter, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in
Illuminations
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 155–200.

Byer, Robert, ‘Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe’s “Man in the Crowd”’ in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.),
Ideology and Classic American Literature
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221–46.

Cavell, Stanley,
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); repr. in Rosenheim and Rachman,
The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe
, 3–36.

Davidson, Edward H.,
Poe: A Critical Study
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).

Dayan, Joan,
Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

——‘Romance and Race’ in Emory Elliot (ed.),
The Columbia Literary History of the American Novel
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109.

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Le Facteur dc la Vérité’, in
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96; repr. in Muller and Richardson,
The Purloined Poe
, 173–212.

Foucault, Michel,
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
(New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

Hungerford, Edward, ‘Poe and Phrenology’,
American Literature
, 2 (1930), 209–31.

Irwin, John T.
, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

——
The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Story
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Jacobs, Robert,
Poe: Journalist and Critic
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).

Johnson, Barbara, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in
The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–46; repr. in Muller and Richardson,
The Purloined Poe
, 213–51.

Kaplan, Sidney, Introduction to Poe,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), pp. vii–xxv.

Kennedy, J. Gerald,
Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Lacan, Jacques, ‘Le Séminairesur “La Lettre voiée”’, in
Écrits I
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 7–75; abridged trans, in Muller and Richardson,
The Purloined Poe
, 28–54.

Lind, Sidney, ‘Poe and Mesmerism’,
PMLA
62 (1947), 1077–94.

Pease, Donald,
Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

Quinn, Patrick,
The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957).

Schueller, Malini Johar, ‘Harems, Orientalist Subversions, and the Crisis of Nationalism: The Case of Edgar Allan Poe and “Ligeia”’,
Criticism
, 37 (1995), 601–23.

Thompson, G. R.,
Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973).

Van Leer, David, ‘Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales’, in Silverman (ed.),
New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales
, 65–91.

Wilbur, Richard,
Responses: Prose Pieces 1953–1976
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

Walsh, John,
Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances behind ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
’ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1968).