Poe's Dupin as Professional, The Dupin Stories as Serial Text
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Notes
A much shorter version of this paper was delivered at the Pennsylvania College English Association meeting, Pittsburgh, April 16, 1994.
1. Susan Beegel, review of T. J. Binyon, Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction, Poe Society of America Newsletter, 18 (1990), 2; Jacques Lacan, "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. and ed. Jeffrey Mehlman, YFS, 48 (1971), 67.
2. Terence Whalen, "Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy," AQ, 44 (1992), 405.
3. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 191. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
4. Jacques Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," trans. Willis Domingo et al., YFS 52 (1975), 101, 105.
5. Richard Wilbur, "The Poe Mystery Case," NYRB, July 13, 1967, 24.
6. George Grella, "Poe's Tangled Web," ArmD, 21 (1988), 268-75; see also Mark Keller, "Dupin in the Rue 'Morgue.' Another Form of Madness?" ArQ 33 (1977), 249-55.
7. The "Dr. Watson" figure does have occasional champions like Terry J. Martin, who takes him as the "real" detective in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" because he has the ability to have feelings about the case. "Detection, Imagination, and the Introduction to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'" MLS, 20 (1989), 38-41.
8. John T. Irwin, "Reading Poe's Mind: Politics, Mathematics, and the Association of Ideas in 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,'" AmLH, 4 (1992), 201-4.
9. Shawn Rosenheim, "The King of 'Secret Readers': Edgar Poe, Cryptography, and the Origins of the Detective Story," ELH 56 (1989), 386-87.
10. See Nikita Nankov, Edgar Allen [sic] Poe as an American Romantic (Des Moines: Occasional Papers in Language, Literature, and Linguistics, 1990), p. 3, and Dana Brand, "Reconstructing the 'Flanêur': Poe's Invention of the Detective Story," Genre 18 (1985), 49-54.
11. Whalen, p. 402; Christopher Rollason, "The Detective Myth in Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin Trilogy," American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, ed. Brian Docherty (Houndsmills: MacMillan, 1988), p. 12. Derrida's model of the stories' "drift and disorientation" (p. 101) emphasizes their indebtedness to a numbing variety of literary models, symbolized by the opiate atmosphere of Dupin's library, and reflected by the overt intertextual references between the three tales.
12. Lacan, p. 67.
13. Burton R. Pollin, "Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue': The Ingenious Web Unravelled," SAR (1977), 239. Like Grella, though on different grounds, Pollin thinks Poe expects "Murders in the Rue Morgue" to be read as a spoof.
14. Shulman, "Poe and the Powers of Mind," ELH 37 (1970), 255.
15. Brigid Brophy, "Detective Fiction: A Modern Myth of Violence?" HudR 18 (1965), 25.
16. Quoted and discussed in John A. Hodgson, "Decoding Poe? Poe, W.B. Tyler, and Cryptography," JEGP 92 (1993), 524.
17. Rollason, p. 6; Sevanne Woodward, "Lacan and Derrida on 'The Purloined Letter,'" CLS 26 (1989), 42. Woodward's remarks are based on the conjecture that "Dupin" may be a pun on French "du pain." Brophy suggests that Dupin's style of aristocracy is a "fantasy" that society after the French Revolution "wished could he true: he offers a way of returning to the aristocratic principle without violating [democratic] reason" ("Detective Fiction," 25).
18. Woodward plays, as do all writing in Lacan's shadow, on the dual meaning of "letter" as epistle and character of the alphabet. Thus Dupin exchanges language for financial figures in giving up the letter for money.
19. For the detective tale in relation to the supernatural, see Peter J. Brenner. "Die Geburt des Detektivromans aus dem Geist des Unheimlichen," LWU 11 (1978), esp. 5-8, and Benjamin Franklin Fisher, IV, "Poe, Blackwood's, and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'" ANQ 12 (1974), 110. Syndy Conger's remarks are from "Another Secret of the Rue Morgue: Poe's Transformation of the Geisterseher Motif," SSF, 24 (1987), 9.
20. J. Brander Matthews made an early case for overmodesty in "Poe and the Detective Story" (1907; repr. in The Recognition of Edgar Allan...
