In his 1836 essay “Maelzel’s Chess Player” Edgar Allan Poe attempted to expose the hoax of a machine which, according to its owner, Johann Mälzel, could play chess against a human opponent without any kind of human intervention. A simple Wikipedia search would tell us that, since the 1770s, the alleged automaton had sparked quite a furor on both sides of the Atlantic, defeating—among others—Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Reading Poe’s text is another story, however, and a less straightforward one. At first, carried along by the narrator’s exact description, we witness Mälzel performing the strange ceremony of opening all the compartments of the machine (every time in the same order) to convince us that there could be no one hidden inside. And yet, at a certain point, the narrator grabs our hand and shows us where exactly the human player is hidden at every stage of Mälzel’s demonstration of the machine.“It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else”(1982, 424), the narrator tells us, articulating his persuasive argument. But there seems to be more at stake in Mälzel’s machine than the narrator recognizes. In an age where chess-playing machines are hardly remarkable, and published as it is among Poe’s literary works,“Maelzel’s Chess Player” almost invites an allegorical reading. What is really implicated in the silent struggle between Mälzel and the narrator, in their contrasting attempts at “laying bare the device”—to use the phrase popularized by Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1991)? I cannot resist viewing this text as telling us something about our engagement with literature in general, and with fictional characters in particular. ¹ Couldn’t the debate between Mälzel and the narrator hinge on whether fictional characters are to be thought of as machines, or as human beings? Today, machines can play chess; what they still cannot do is have subjective experience. They can respond to stimuli, but without being conscious of those stimuli. For—it is generally assumed—only sentient living creatures can have consciousness, can experience the world. In John Searle’s words, consciousness is “an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon”; it “refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become ‘unconscious’”(1997, 5). It also involves having subjective experience, since you cannot have an experience without being conscious of it. In