Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” COURTNEY NOVOSAT “De nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) E dgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first of his selftermed “ratiocinative tales,” has long been credited with originating the genre of detective fiction. Like many sui generis works and perhaps with particular occasion because of Poe’s preoccupation with the method of fiction writing, “Rue Morgue” begins with a self-reflexive discussion of its own method. Rather than opening by delving into a crime in medias res or exploring the remains of a crime scene like its contemporary descendants, “Rue Morgue” begins with a meditation on the method of analysis that will become a significant feature of the genre.1 Poe’s insistence that we discourse with him about analytic method as well as the slippage between authorial and narratorial voice he writes into the tale’s beginning, I suggest, is pivotal to a more significant and overlooked feature of the work—that is, how its production of mystery, largely dependent on an interpellated participatory reader,2 denies the tale a stable resolution. Despite the offered resolution of both crime and narrative, the central terror for the shrewd reader of “Rue Morgue” is that the text remains unresolved or, perhaps, unsettled. Juxtaposing narrative to counternarrative and even pitting clue against clew, for the participatory reader the narrative is indeterminate despite its resolution. As the tale alternately aligns the analyses by reader, writer, narrator, and Dupin with or against each other, indeterminacy becomes the tale’s raison d’être, its manner of producing mystery and evoking terror. Even Poe’s resolution of his opening discourse on analysis— that “it will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic”—gives primacy to fancy and imagination as a condition of analytic thought (PT, 400). In this way, from the tale’s outset, Poe’s focus on the analytic process draws the reader’s attention not to the crime, not to the resolution, but to the act of analysis—to the reader’s C  2012 Washington State University 78 P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 O U T S I D E D U P I N ’ S C L O S E T own assessment of the crime, of the narrator, and even of Dupin (PT, 398).3 This attention to analysis is reinforced by the tale’s conclusion, from which I draw the above epigraph. When translated from the French to mean “denying what exists and expounding on what does not,” it offers a rather oblique conclusion, one that raises questions of what has been denied, what expounded upon, and perhaps even of who has denied and expounded (PT, 431).4 Further, the reader’s analytic faculties are reawakened by a text demanding translation; the participatory reader must analyze or remain ignorant. In this manner, the reader is symbolically re-turned to the tale’s outset and to Poe’s poignant epigraphic suggestion that nothing, perhaps even his own tale, is “beyond all conjecture” (PT, 397). Entreated to conjecture by the tale’s epigraph, implicated by the narrative “we,” positioned now as interloper and now as interlocutor by the narrator ’s confessional mode, and forced either to participate in the tale’s final act of translation or to continue conjecturing about its meaning, the reader is interpellated , perhaps unwittingly, as the fourth in a metaphorical game of whist with the narrator, Dupin, and, ultimately, Poe himself. Viewing the reader as participatory and the story as unresolved, as I am suggesting, underscores the tale’s, and perhaps Poe’s, preoccupation with perpetual conjecture as a generic convention. For conjecture not only drives the plot of the locked-room genre but fuels a reader’s questioning of the dubious solution to the murders, of the contradictions between the narrator’s and Dupin’s observations, and of the process by which some clues are privileged...