The most significant contribution Poe's detective
stories make to the development of the short story consists of their basing a
story's central theme and structure on the very process by which the reader
perceives that unifying structure and pattern.
They are Poe's most explicit examples of works in which questions of
interpretation are not outside the story but are involved in every stage of the
narrative development. Poe was
self-consciously aware that he was embodying both the creator and the explicator
in his so-called stories of ratiocination, for the stories are indeed about
creating patterns. It is all a matter of accepting a mystery as a text, a
contextual pattern made up of motifs or clues, which have meaning precisely
because of the role they play within the pattern.
According to Shawn Rosenheim, Poe's detectives work
with abstract symbols alone, which they obtain by converting the material world
into a surface of discrete signs in which nothing is hidden. This method is also related to gothic fiction,
says Rosenheim, for it transforms representations of three-dimensional space
into binary codings. In this transformation of the world into an intertextual
network, it is the detective, as G. K. Chesterton has one of his own characters
say, who is the critic, while the criminal is the creative artist who creates
the plot the detective must perceive as pattern. Truly, as Chesterton suggests, the detective
is the master of the "romance of detail"; and the transformation of
ordinary detail, previously mere verisimilitude, into contextually meaningful
motifs is a key factor in the creation of not only the detective story but the
short story as a genre.
The story which takes the credit for being the first
detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), begins under
the guise of an essay, much as many of Poe's other stories do, taking its
generic cue from the eighteenth-century essay form characteristic of Addison
and Steele. The subject of this opening
essay, presented objectively by a writer who has not yet identified or
dramatically located himself, is, as it is in "The Imp of the
Perverse," a particular mental state.
Although analysis is in some ways just the opposite of perverseness (for
whereas one creates mysteries, the other resolves them), like perverseness, it
is not susceptible of analysis itself.
Like the perverse, the analytical faculties reveal themselves in their
effects only.
There is no way to determine their cause; the
process of analysis is simultaneous with its effects. Furthermore, what characterizes the
analytical is that even though it is the "soul and essence of
method," to the ordinary perception it appears intuitive; even though it
is the result of acumen, it appears to be
"preternatural." These are
also key terms for understanding Poe's contribution to the short story, for, as
Poe shows, although the form requires careful control and method, it results in
a work with a shadow of the "mystic" or the seeming preternatural
about it.
The narrator notes that he is not writing a
treatise, but rather prefacing a "somewhat peculiar narrative'; however,
at the point when the actual narrative begins he says the narrative to follow
"will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the
propositions just advanced." If one
asks which is primary, the narration or the exposition, the answer of course is
that neither is, for when Dupin begins his own exposition and illustration of
the analytical method, narrative becomes exposition.
The "re-solution" of the mystery is the
presentation of the hidden narrative itself, laid bare by the
"disentangling" method of the analyst. The narrator observes in Dupin what he calls
the "Bi-Part Soul," seeing a "double Dupin--the creative and the
resolvent." And indeed, for Poe the creative is the resolvent, for to
create is to re-solve, to engage in a re-solution--the discovery of the hidden
pattern which made the mystery a mystery.
Dupin notes that the problem with the French police is that they often
hold things up too close, and thus lose sight of the matter as a whole. Dupin's point here is that what must be
perceived is indeed the overall pattern--how the objects fit together. Moreover, he notes that to stare too intently
at the object directly and straight on is to make it disappear, that one must
look at mysteries in a "side-long way," that is, indirectly, the way
one must often look at a literary text.
Another element of the crime story that contributes
to Poe's development of the short story genre is that what most confounds the
police is the fact that the crime, like Poe's notion of the perverse, seems
completely unmotivated. Although the
lack of a motive is what makes the mystery so seemingly insoluble for the
police, for Dupin, it is precisely its lack of a motive, precisely its outré
features, that makes it so easy to solve.
Dupin says that it is by these very deviations from the ordinary that
reason feels its way toward truth.
Whereas the police are looking for precedents for
the crime in the past and for some realistic or logical motive for its
severity, Dupin succeeds precisely by throwing himself out of the ordinary and
accepting the extraordinary nature of the event. By making the animal the source of the crime,
Poe illustrates one of the key factors of the detective story--that to try to
solve the mystery by postulating the usual is futile, for crime itself is a
breakup of the ordinary and the everyday.
The fact that there is no motive for the crime is a typical Poe device,
for it forces one to abandon so-called realistic motivation and concentrate on
the purely contextual or aesthetic motivation.
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