Observing, Guessing, Drifting: Para-Noetic Methods in Detective Fiction

Literary detectives are commonly characterized by their logical skills. At least, this is the pretension many of them want us to believe, ever since Chevalier Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe’s narratives. According to their self-descriptions, detectives resolve and disentangle the hidden causes of mysterious events by using their analytical faculties in a methodical, highly controlled and self-reflexive manner. However ostentatiously their logical capability is presented, it does not stand closer scrutiny. Quite contrary to the detective’s self-characterization, many mystery stories describe the actual detective work as an interplay of half-conscious observations, random guesses, and the ability to allow one’s mind and body to drift. These techniques–observing, guessing, and drifting–are not mere deviations from the general model of the cunning investigator. Instead, as I would like to argue, detective fiction makes manifest a paradoxical relation between logic and the actual art of resolving problems: the detective figures as a key agent both inside and outside the framework of rational thought. In so doing, detective fiction opens up towards a problem-solving strategy that could be termed para-noetic.

In the first part of my paper I will consider the classical Dupin-Sherlock Holmes-model. Here, the detective is portrayed by a semi-detached first-person narrator who, though somehow occupied with the investigation, does not really have a share in it. Since this model has so far provoked the most attention in literary theory, the specific role of observation that results from this very difference is worth a close examination. Moreover, citing Eco’s and Sebeok’s classic The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, I will stress the aspect of guessing, which is already quite well established in semiotic approaches to detective fiction. In the second part I will turn to another narrative model in which the detective’s mind (or mindlessness) is represented more closely, without the intermediate ‘Dr Watson’-type figure. This has led to an array of interesting and intricate narrative arrangements. Using examples from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler and the contemporary German and Austrian authors Georg Klein and Wolf Haas, I will explore the role of mental and physical drifting in detective fiction.

1

The first clues to a para-noetic methodology of detection can be found already in Edgar Allan Poe. In his famous first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), the “acumen” of Auguste Dupin is not exactly, or at least not purely, founded in a strictly logical rationality. His analytical method as such resides first and foremost in the ‘lower’ faculties of the soul as a way of enjoying oneself. The introduction to the story claims that “the analyst [glories] in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talents into play” (Poe 528).

In fact, it is in gaming that these talents appear in their most essential form. The introduction to Rue Morgue features several games that call up such analytical powers. Particularly while playing draughts and whist, “the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods…by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation” (529). As Poe has it, the opponent follows a “spirit,” whereas the analyst uses some kind of impersonation to “throw himself into” that spirit, and then watches the opponent’s mental movements to “see…at a glance” where to attack and to overcome him. This method of observing/impersonating an antagonistic mind is also featured in a famous passage where Dupin takes one of his beloved nightly strolls down the streets of Paris, accompanied by an unnamed admirer, intimate friend and fellow-lodger, who is at the same time the first-person narrator:

Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words: “He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the Théâtre des Variétés.” “There can be...