SOURCE: Merivale, Patricia. “Gumshoe Gothics: ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and His Followers.” In Narrative Ironies, edited by Raymond A. Prier and Gerald Gillespie, pp. 163-79. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1997.

We, reading the detective novel, are an invention of Edgar Allan Poe.

Borges, “The Detective Story,” 21

“An excellent idea, I think, to start from a dead body” said Kobo Abe (Inter Ice Age 4, 47) and Hubert Aquin, similarly, “l'investigation délirante de Sherlock Holmes débute immanquablement à partir d'un cadavre” (“Sherlock Holmes's dizzying investigation unfailingly starts off from a corpse” [Trou de mémoire, 82]). About how the classical detective story starts they were both right. But of course quite often there isn't a corpse in the postmodern library: “There is no body in the house at all,” said Sylvia Plath, in an inscrutable poem called “The Detective” (1962; 209), which I suspect is, like most of the texts I am discussing, about Missing Persons, rather than Dead Bodies. There is, however, always a book there, or rather a corpus of many books, for the “metaphysical” (otherwise known as the “anti-” or the “postmodern”) detective story is inherently the most intertextual of genres (Sweeney, 14). And one book invariably found in that library is Tales of Mystery and the Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. “Poe projected multiple shadows,” said Jorge Luis Borges, one of his most notable followers. “How many things begin with Poe?” he asked, rhetorically (16).¹ I would like to add a couple of “things” to an already long and familiar list.

One work of detective story criticism, Priestman's The Detective Story and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet,² plays punningly in its subtitle with the hermeneutics of the (Henry) Jamesian title “The Figure in the Carpet,” that inaccessible pattern which, if only it could be discovered, would explain everything about a work of art by catching its radiant essence. The figure on the carpet is of course that very “body in the library” that stands, by synecdoche, for the classical detective story, especially in its “softboiled” variant (Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen).

The Body is to be found in the Library, where the closed world of the country house limits the number of suspects; the classical detective will reason, ingeniously, from the clues to the solution, revealing the criminal from among the pool of available suspects. Logical deduction (or perhaps, courtesy of Charles S. Peirce and Umberto Eco, “abduction”),³ leads to a solution, which equals the restoring, through the power of reasoning, of a criminally disrupted but inherently viable Order, which equals Narrative Closure. “Closure” is, to simplify, the sort of conclusion by which the preceding narrative comes, in hindsight, to “make sense,” and thus, reciprocally, to make the conclusion itself seem inevitable.

You can imagine how unattractive—and yet tempting—that scenario is to your average postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, for instance, who asks, even more rhetorically: “Where is the figure in the carpet? Or is it just … carpet?” (Snow White, 129).⁴ Being a parodist, a filching underminer of traditional forms, an eviscerator of the formulaic to its very marrow, said postmodernist will write a story looking very like a softboiled classical detective story or its “hardboiled” variant, as written by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or Ross Macdonald. It could also be a crime story, or spy story, or conspiracy novel, or, to use the umbrella term, “mystery story”—but it will, in all these modes, suffer from a surfeit of clues, a shortage of solutions, and thus a distinct lack of narrative closure.

The current use of the term “metaphysical” for such stories takes a lot of explaining. In one sense, the term, like many other critical designations, is used because it has been used; it would be more trouble than obtaining some inexact precision is worth to try to replace a term already so familiar. In another sense, it is explicable in terms of its origins. It was first used by Howard Haycraft, speaking of the theological detective stories that G. K. Chesterton wrote about that eminently rational, yet splendidly visionary perceiver of the miraculous in the mundane, the priest-detective, Father Brown. He is a detective who finds solutions, but ones that happen to be allegories of God's own theologically necessary solutions, perceived, however dimly, mysteriously, and paradoxically, by the God-given reasoning powers of Man. Chesterton himself said, in “How to Write a Detective Story,” “The secret must be simple; and in this also it is a symbol of higher mysteries … [It is] the belated realisation that two and two make four” (113). And, in the Father Brown story, “The Head of Caesar,” “What we all dread most … is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare” (235).⁵ The term “metaphysical” thus seems to retain, in the case of Chesterton at least, some vestige of its normative philosophical meaning.

Then, by Holquist and Merivale among others, the term “metaphysical detective story” is used to describe the detective stories of Borges, Nabokov, and the early Robbe-Grillet, where, since the allegory is by now a secular and largely aesthetic one, what I have called “the flaunting of artifice”⁶ yields, among other things, self-reflexive postmodern artist-parables. While the solutions are surprising and paradoxical, there is still, emphatically, closure (though it may be, as often in Borges, only the “closure” of an apparently infinitely recursive Moebius strip). The cases are solved. But, especially in the early Robbe-Grillet, ambiguity and indeterminacy enter: the closed cases are beginning to turn into Open Texts. The secular allegory becomes negatively hermeneutic: the lack of solutions stands for the lack of answers to any question of essence, knowledge, or meaning. What the world “really” is, or who “I” really am, are questions not only unanswerable, but essentially not even formulable. And the story of the detective trying to follow “clues” until he reaches the “solution” of a “mystery” is the perfect postmodern vehicle for such an allegory, as John Irwin's title, The Mystery to a Solution,⁷ makes brilliantly clear. The postmodern detective story makes its first order of business to restore that very “nightmare” of the centerless maze that Chesterton was so eager to dispel. Epiphanies (solutions) become “antiepiphanies”; detectives now find that their inquiries have become “epistemological” and their tangled case reports “metafictional,” causing the inherent “voyeurism of the detective … to boomerang into self-inspection” (Saltzman, 63). “In a very Poesque way,” says Stefano Tani, “the confrontation [in the metaphysical detective story] is no longer between a detective and a murderer, but between … the detective's mind and his sense of identity, which is falling apart, between the detective and the ‘murderer’ in his own self” (76).⁸ A model liminal case is Beckett's Molloy, where detective Moran shadows Molloy until his own identity breaks down, until, indeed, the detective becomes essentially indistinguishable from the man he was sent in search of (Saltzman, 59); Beckett's High Modernism begins, by the same token, to become essentially indistinguishable from postmodernism.

When this by now negatively hermeneutic allegory joins up with the postmodern rejection of closure, what results is the “postmodern” detective story, i.e. the contemporary inheritor of the Chestertonian metaphysical detective story, as secularized by Borges. A formal subversion or undermining of the highly formulaic patterns of the detective story is its modus operandi; thus the term “anti-detective story” (coined by Tani) becomes appropriate whenever the subversive relationship of the postmodern detective story to its classical model is emphasized. Hence the attractiveness of that model to the postmodern writer: it is obvious when the rules are being broken, because every reader knows, at least subliminally, what the rules of the detective story are.

If I may provide a speedy genealogy, to accompany this sketchy taxonomy, the metaphysical detective story, like the classical detective story, though by a slightly different route, derives from Poe's three great originating detective stories, “The Purloined Letter” (1845), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” (1842-3). “The Purloined Letter” is, notoriously, a key text for the psycho-deconstructive branch of contemporary critical theory (Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, Irwin, to mention just the major players), where casebook after casebook is being built up on the interlocking interpretations of the theoretical implications of the story. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” serves a similar, though less brain-twisting, function in the critical history of the classical softboiled detective story, contributing such elements as the locked room, the least likely suspect, ‘traces’ of the criminal left in tiny material clues, and the virtually “arm-chair” detective. Even the ugly stepsister of the trio, “Marie Rôget,” is at last beginning to be appreciated (e.g. by Priestman, 51) as a proto-postmodern detective story made up only of the inevitably inconclusive interpretations of variant texts, the newspaper accounts that Dupin collates and mulls over en route to his uncharacteristically tentative hypothesis, one never-to-be-confirmed within the text of the story itself.

At least one other Poe story, however, one not usually considered to be a detective story at all, has analogous affinities with the hardboiled or “gumshoe” detective story, and thus also with its metaphysical descendant, which I call the “metaphysical Gumshoe story,” or “Gumshoe Gothic,” for short.

“The Man of the Crowd” (1840)⁹ has been side-lined, partly because (although not without a detective surrogate), it lacks Dupin, but, more fundamentally, because, postmodern avant la lettre, it enacts a definitively insoluble mystery. Poe “never,” Borges, for one, complains, “invoked the help of the sedentary French gentleman Auguste Dupin to determine the precise crime of ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (“Chesterton,” 89),¹⁰ in whose heart lurked, as we shall see, a text of such horror that “es lässt sich nicht lesen” (it does not allow itself to be read).

Parts of my argument have been anticipated and confirmed by Quinn, who, as early as 1954, saw the title character, the Man of the Crowd, as the future double of the narrator: “Dr. Jekyll foresees the Mr. Hyde he will become” (229); by Lehman, who sees the narrator, usefully, as a “gumshoe” detective interpreting clues (119); by Auerbach, who, through the window (which is also a mirror, 30), connects the Crowd and the Man sections of the story into a coherent reading (whereas most critics choose one or the other); and especially by Kennedy (1975), who sees the structural details implicit in the Man of the Crowd's “mirror[ing of] the narrator's compulsive behavior” (191), in his attempts to escape his pursuer. Quinn, Auerbach, and Kennedy rebut, in different ways, the majority of commentators (e.g. Priestman, Lambert, Lehman)¹¹ who seek, unsuccessfully, to figure out the “precise crime” of the Man of the Crowd.

The other substantial group of critics, those who, like Brand, Byer, and Elbert, follow the line of thought originated by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, see the Baudelairean flâneur in the narrator and the problem of urban modernity—the City of Dreadful Night—in the Crowd.¹² This quasi-sociological view is undoubtedly the major contribution of “The Man of the Crowd” to contemporary critical theory, one analogous, on a smaller scale, to the contribution of “The Purloined Letter.”

We, clued in to the “unreliability” of Poe's narrators, may be left to wonder, on the other hand, if the supposed criminal can be shown to have committed any crime at all. But if he hasn't, then what sort of a detective story can it be? In all probability, a metaphysical one.

Rather than dealing with a Body on the Carpet and another (clearly “other”) character who put it there, a metaphysical detective story is likelier to deal with a Missing Person, a person sought for, glimpsed, and shadowed, gumshoe style, through endless, labyrinthine city streets, but never really Found, because he was never really There, because he was, and remains, missing. One was, as postmodern detective after postmodern detective discovers, only following one's own self. In Kobo Abe's earthier formulation, “No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside” (Secret Rendezvous, 37).¹³ Perhaps “The Man of the Crowd” can be read as a prototype or paradigm of such a story, not only of Gumshoe Gothics in general, but also, as we shall see, as an explicit source for several specific stories, the textual “followers” of “The Man of the Crowd.”

Poe's story opens with the first-person narrator's reflections on the hideous, untellable mysteries of the human heart, a proposition which the story that follows seems designed to illustrate, through the eponymous persona, the title character, of the Man of the Crowd. The narrator's observations “through the smoky panes” of a London coffee house, “into the [crowded] street” (108), begin with Dupinesque deductions about the general social groupings of the members of the crowds which pass his vantage-point. The gamblers, for instance, are recognizable from their “guarded lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of the thumb …” (neither of which are likely to be perceptible through a closed window). “Descending in the scale … I found darker and deeper themes for speculation … feeble and ghastly invalids … women of the town … putting one in mind of the statue … with the surface of Parian marble, and the interior filled with filth … the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den” (109-110).

Unlike the sociological critics, who tend to stop at this point, the literary imitators of the story tend to start here, largely omitting the Crowd in favor of the “I, Him, and Me” pattern of the rest of the story. “Suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age).” Then, forming the hinge between the Crowd story and the Man story, “came a craving desire to keep the man in view—to know more of him” (112). So the narrator turns from observation and rumination to obsessive action. He begins to follow the Man of the Crowd, who “having made the circuit of the square … turned and retraced his steps … [and] rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged, and which put me to much trouble in pursuit” (113). And so on.

In this short story, for perhaps the first time in fiction, a man shod in “caoutchouc over-shoes” (114; i.e. rubber galoshes, ca. 1840) and “tying a handkerchief about [his] mouth” (113), inaudibly and obsessively pursues another man, seemingly the “type and genius of deep crime” (116), whose secret he detective-like, wishes to discover, through the “mean streets” of a labyrinthine modern city. The primacy of this story among Gumshoe Gothics has been little noted, however, for the narrator catches up to the Man of the Crowd only to realize that his utterly guilty secret, perhaps mercifully, “lässt sich nicht lesen” (it does not allow itself to be read). He turns away, having failed in his quest (i.e., in both senses, come to no conclusion), and tells us, Poe's characteristic implied auditors, his story, one seemingly without point or closure. If we read “beyond the ending,” however, it becomes apparent that the narrator has projected his sense of his own (literally) unutterable wickedness upon the Man of the Crowd, who, for any evidence we are given about him, may be no more than the quite innocent and wholly terrified victim of the narrator's sinisterly silent, masked, seemingly motiveless pursuit. If we are to “refract the detective's investigation from the mystery outside to the mystery inside his own person,” as Tani invites us to do (77), we must indeed read beyond the ending, to take over on behalf of the narrator the function of supplying the very point “that does not allow itself to be read” at and as the ending.

In the narrative structure of “The Man of the Crowd,” “my” (i.e. the detective-narrator's) silent pursuit of the Other, who turns out to be “Me,” exemplifies the reductionist form of the metaphysical detective story, in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a solipsist unity. From the narrator's point of view, I, the detective, am following the criminal, to discover more about him. From the Man of the Crowd's point of view, I, the victim, am being followed by a masked and sinisterly silent criminal. In this situation, it is hardly to be wondered at if he seeks out safety in the places where the crowd of relatively ordinary humanity is still lingering. The narrator mimics the Man's obsessive search for crowds; the very title of the story can be read ambiguously, for in the “elegiac romance” structure (I'm telling you a story about him which is really a story about Me), it is the narrator who is “really” the Man of the Crowd.¹⁴ From the reader's point of view, I am following (as I read), and mirroring as I follow, the movement of a man who is detective, criminal and victim in one. Poe invented not only detective fiction, but also the “reader of detective fiction,” Borges declared (16). The exercise of following oneself following Poe's narrator, while one reads “The Man of the Crowd,” tends to confirm his observation. As Umberto Eco puts it, in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, “Any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party” (81).¹⁵

But now the contemporary metaphysical (or postmodern) detective story flaunts its lack of closure, the failure of the detecting process, and makes explicit that synonymity of detective, criminal, and even victim, which is always at least potential in the hardboiled detective story, if not in the detective story as a whole. Perhaps it is time to elevate Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” to join his three far better-known detective stories (the Dupin series) among the ancestral texts of metaphysical detective fiction.

In Borges, the early Robbe-Grillet, Leonardo Sciascia, Peter Ackroyd, Patrick Modiano, Umberto Eco, Hubert Aquin, Ariel Dorfman, and many others,¹⁶ such patterns (in more general terms) are of course familiar, indeed so much so that Tani declares, with some justification, that “Good contemporary fiction and anti-detective fiction are for the most part the same thing” (148).

But I shall illustrate these propositions in terms of some explicit adaptations of “The Man of the Crowd.” It has been closely imitated in stories by Chesterton and by that other mildly heretical Catholic, Graham Greene. It has been brilliantly “postmodernized” in the service of a hermeneutic at once gloomier and more playful, in metaphysical detective novels by Kobo Abe and Paul Auster.

G. K. Chesterton, in his magnificent metaphysical conspiracy novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, narrates the hero's, Thursday's, eerie pursuit, through snowy London streets, of the crippled old Anarchist, who turns out not to be an aged and unutterably wicked enemy (like the Man of the Crowd) but a youthful friend and ally. There are some scenes of gumshoe pursuit in the Father Brown stories: e.g. in “The Blue Cross” and in “The Pursuit of Mr. Blue.”¹⁷ The latter hinges upon a characteristic Chestertonian paradox: an observer inside a sealed but transparent container, e.g. an old-style telephone booth, around which one person is chasing another, may well mistake the pursued for the pursuer. But most explicitly based on Poe is the relatively light-hearted story, “Fall of a Great Reputation,” in The Club of Queer Trades (1905),¹⁸ which anticipates, although in a lighter key, Sunday's, or Father Brown's, paradox (like the “Hound of Heaven”), of God's loving pursuit of the human soul. What at first suggests evil and terror turns out to be not unlike Sunday's godgame jokes on his much-loved children.

In this story the narrator and his friend come across “The wickedest man in London … [who is] passing quickly among the quickly passing crowd.” His hair is “largely gray,” and he seems to have “adopted some imposture” (58-59), or deceitful disguise. The friend, who “never saw [this old man] before in [his] life” (60), nevertheless insists on jumping from a tram car to follow him. The man, in an odd part of London to begin with, takes an odd turning; the two friends follow him “through a labyrinth of London lanes” from gaslight to gaslight through the intervening darkness. When they almost run into him, be, like the Man of the Crowd, “did not [seem to] realize that we were there” (64). As this “criminal” finally shakes off his pursuers, by entering, to their shocked astonishment, “the house of a very good man” (65), Chesterton's narrator at last defies his friend. He speaks also, perhaps, for the reader of “The Man of the Crowd,” who might well wish to address Poe's narrator thus: “You see a total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about [the wickedness of] his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit … it” (67). Chesterton's solution, however, unlike Poe's non-solution, is that of a rather anticlimactic quasi-godgame, designed to bring “adventure” into the characters' lives with the (paradoxical) aid of the “queer trade” of an artificial, imaginative, and collusive imposture.

Graham Greene, in his 1935 short story, “A Day Saved,”¹⁹ on the other hand, writes in what is, for him, an uncharacteristically Poe-like Gumshoe Gothic mode. His narrator, a certain “Robinson,” tells the curious little story of his following, “like a shadow,” a randomly ordinary man, unnamed, but “I [Robinson] might guess at his name, calling him … Wales, Canby, Fotheringay” (528)—in order to get possession of something, he doesn't know what, that the other is carrying, perhaps “even closer to his heart than the outer skin” (528). Something like, it may be, the dagger and the diamond which Poe's narrator glimpses in the bosom of the Man of the Crowd (112). Robinson is prepared to kill the stranger to find out what it is: “All I want in the world is to know,” he tells us, stressing the detective's epistemological quest. Then he adds, ambiguously, “I should have to kill him before I knew all” (530, italics mine). But, as in Poe, and later in Auster, the impassioned, apparently pointless quest for an unspecified, but certainly unattainable certainty, fades into an identification of the pursuer with the pursued, by way of Robinson's anti-climactic (and syntactically ambiguous) curse upon him. Someday

when he is following another as I followed him, closely as people say like a shadow, so that he has to stop, as I have had to stop, to reassure himself [as, it is implied by the syntactical pattern, “I have had to reassure myself”]: You can smell me, you can touch me, you can hear me, I am not a shadow: I am Fotheringay, Wales, Canby, I am Robinson.

(533)

The curse is self-reflexive; the two men are, by the end, interchangeable, at least from the narrator's shattered perspective. “Like a shadow”: as with our other shadowers, the process of shadowing—detective story terminology, reified and taken literally—takes the form of repeating the movements and actions of the man pursued, thus turning the detective into a shadow, or mirror image, of him. And, I would add, putting the reader into the same place in the sequence as Poe does, making him into a “follower” of the detective, who is “following …,” etc. Robinson (like the others) is an unobserved observer, who can only infer the name and nature of the man he is shadowing, even though at times he is led to feel a sympathy, an affinity, bordering upon identity with him, by way of a blending of affection and curiosity. As a thwarted “outsider,” a “voyeur,” watching “the impenetrable solidity of the Other,” Robinson has himself become, more literally than he expected, “a shadow—a mere reflection” of the (substantial) being (Colburn, 384),²⁰ of Canby, Wales, Fotheringay, etc. Greene, whose narrator becomes merely the anxious shadow of the pursued, seems to be inverting Poe's schema, in which the pursued becomes merely the emanation, the psychological projection, of the fluidly hysterical consciousness of the narrator.

Although the metaphysical detective story at large has overlapped with conspiracy fiction from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and beyond (in Don de Lillo, for instance), a somewhat Kafkan sense of amorphous conspiracy sets the terms of the contemporary narrator-investigator's inquiry, including its failure, and presides over the detective-criminal's re-identification of himself as victim.

The contemporary Japanese novelist, Kobo Abe, who is sometimes called “the Japanese Kafka,” is, nevertheless, notably eclectic in his deployment of Western influences. The “Man of the Crowd” pattern is fascinatingly and with great originality grafted onto a science-fiction plot of thwarted apocalypse in Inter Ice Age 4 (1970) and onto an amalgam of mask stories, from both East and West, in The Face of Another (1964).²¹ In these two stories, minor episodes provide remarkably explicit Poe-like inner duplications of the more generally Poe-like main action. In Inter Ice Age 4, an utterly typical and ordinary person must be chosen as the subject of the preliminary trials of a science-fictional “forecasting machine.” The search for such an experimental subject involves the scientists in choosing and shadowing through city streets a superlatively ordinary man whose fate nevertheless, in the end, forms a predictive and sinister microcosm of the narrator's own fate (chapters 6-10 [pp. 22-41], especially chapters 8-9 [pp. 31-35]). In The Face of Another (58-83), a similar sifting through the innumerable possibilities of the crowd takes place to select a man whose face can be “borrowed” to serve as a model for the narrator's mask. Both pursuers are Poe-like in their surreptitiousness, in their weaving through crowds to keep the subjects in view, and in the gumshoe silence of their rubber jump shoes. And in both cases, as in Poe, the eventual doubling of the subject chosen and the narrator constitutes the significance of the episodes, just as, in Abe's macroplots, Abe's detective inevitably becomes the missing man for whom he, like all his fellow-gumshoes, is searching.²²

The penultimate line of The Face of Another, “The footsteps are coming closer” (237), is, anywhere in Abe, as in Poe (and the Gothic generally), a signal for the murderous reduction of identities. The husband/narrator in another Abe novel, Secret Rendezvous, is, by trade, a salesman for rubber “jump shoes [which] make almost no noise” (34).²³ They supply only the most conspicuous examples of the Abe-an obsession with the echoing, rhythmic sound of footsteps as synecdochal for the progress of the pursuer or the arrival of the killer/victim, or its converse, the non-sound of footsteps negated, concealed, by the rubber soles. Inter Ice Age 4 likewise ends with the words, “Outside the door the footsteps stopped” (225), and we are left, once again (as in “The Man of the Crowd”) to read beyond the endings. We remember that in Poe “caoutchouc overshoes” silenced the tread of the pursuing narrator; thus “The Man of the Crowd” can be seen as the first metaphysical gumshoe story.

The private eye, who is the contemporary follower of “The Man of the Crowd,” could be described, in terms equally applicable to Greene's, Beckett's, Abe's, or Auster's protagonists, thus:

Possessing all of the marginality, but none of the self-confidence of the classic detective, he spends much of his time walking in circles through streets that look alike, adopting roles for himself to boost his confidence or stepping into roles suggested for him by others, acting a suspect before he is one, excusing his guilt before he becomes guilty.

(Jeanne Ewert, 168, writing on Patrick Modiano's investigators.)²⁴

The most complex and profound re-working of Poe along these lines is found in Paul Auster's brilliant metaphysical detective story sequence, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, published collectively as The New York Trilogy. In these books, indeed, all the ghosts of the American Renaissance—Thoreau, Alcott, Melville, Whitman, as well as Poe—come back to haunt his detective-authors and their self-reflexive texts. Auster's protagonists find the stories that they themselves write interesting “not [for] their relation to the world, but [for] their relation to other stories” [8]).²⁵ Hawthorne's “Wakefield,” for instance, that paradigmatically metaphysical Missing Persons story, is as notable an intertext for Auster as it was earlier for Kobo Abe. It is explicitly cited and re-told (209-10), lest one miss the paralleling of its story-line in each volume of the trilogy. It is even truer of The New York Trilogy than of Abe's novels that “The Man of the Crowd” episodes are a mise en abyme of the main action (re-cast, like the “Wakefield” analogues, on a smaller scale in each successive book of the trilogy). I shall concentrate on the most extended and explicit Poe-like episode, which is professional detective-story writer and amateur detective Daniel Quinn's²⁶ stalking of the old man (Peter Stillman) in the first volume of the trilogy, City of Glass (chapters 7-9, pp. 66-88).

Auster refers explicitly to Poe with the “strange hieroglyphs” in “the concluding pages of A. Gordon Pym” (85); and with “Riverside Park … at 84th Street [from which] in … 1843 and 1844, Edgar Allan Poe gaz[ed] out at the Hudson,” as both Quinn and Stillman are doing now (City of Glass 100). More obliquely, the identification of detective Dupin's reasoning intellect with that of his (criminal) opponent (48), foreshadows the identification, on very different terms, of Quinn, supposedly the pursuer, with Stillman, supposedly the pursued. In The Locked Room, it is Fanshawe who pursues this same Quinn. Fanshawe declares, “[Quinn] thought he was following me, but in fact I was following him … I led him along [like Shelley's Monster leading on Frankenstein], leaving clues for him everywhere … watching him the whole time” (362). The reader is continually invited, in this way, to read back the later works in the trilogy onto the earlier ones: the trilogy thus constitutes a kind of double palimpsest.

Quinn first picks up Stillman's trail in the “rush-hour crowd” at Grand Central (61), a crowd in which “each [person, unlike those in Poe's “crowd”] is irreducibly himself” (66). He follows Stillman, careful not to be seen—“even if he stood directly in front of him, he doubted that Stillman would be able to see him” (69). Yet the “broken down and disconnected” shabby old man, “moving with effort,” forces Quinn into “slowing his pace to match the old man's” (67).

The writing process is explicitly thematized throughout the trilogy, just as it is in Abe's novels. Auster's protagonists are, like Abe's, author-investigators, keeping records, in colored notebooks, of their largely ineffectual, even counter-productive, search among a surfeit of clues leading to a shortage of solutions. Quinn found quite early on in his “tailing” that “walking and writing were not easily compatible” (76). He fails to draw the moral from this miniature artist parable, however, and turns the maps he has made of Stillman's labyrinthine daily path among the streets of New York into as many letters, spelling out his version of Stillman's monomania,——O W E R O F B A B——. Though the message could be “a hoax [a key word in Poe] he had perpetrated on himself,” he still, at the end of the book, wonders what word the map of all the walking of his own life would spell out (155).

“He had lived Stillman's life, walked at his pace, seen what he had seen, and the only thing he felt now was the man's impenetrability. … [H]e had seen the old man slip away from him, even as he remained before his eyes” (80). Stillman, formerly, and now again, the “missing person” of this dis-embodied story, “had become part of the city … a brick in an endless wall of bricks. [Quinn] had followed the old man for two weeks. What, then, could be conclude? Not much” (109). “Tied by an invisible thread to the old man” (110). Quinn appropriates his wandering, his note-taking, his avoidance of people; he takes up Beckettian residence in an ash can, doing a futile stake-out on characters long since departed. Quinn becomes, in short, the same sort of “disconnected” bag-man-as-Missing Person as Stillman, and, indeed, like Stillman, he, too, finally “melted into the walls of the city” (139). As the darkness grows and the empty pages in his notebook dwindle, this seems to be the end, also, of Quinn's fragile textual life.²⁷

A finely crafted fugue on Missing Persons, written in a lucidly self-deconstructing style with Beckettian sub-tones (370), this episode constitutes a deliberate critique-cum-interpretation of “The Man of the Crowd.” And the moral of this adapted parable is a re-casting, as I see it, of the “lässt sich nicht lesen” of Poe's story. As Auster puts it, near the end of the Trilogy, “No one can cross the boundary into another—for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself” (292); his Trilogy is a fugue on the collapsing of personalities into identities, of identities into a single uncertain, shifting identity-base, and of that, in turn, into the game or play of the postmodern text, a process first adumbrated a century and a half ago in Poe's always-already postmodern hermeneutic allegory of the inaccessibility of the dark secrets in our hearts.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Detective Story,” trans. Alberto Manguel, Descant 16.4 (Winter, 1985): 15-24. Kobo Abe, Inter Ice Age 4, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Dai yon Kampyo-ki, 1968; New York: Knopf, 1970). Hubert Aquin, Trou de mémoire (Montreal: Cercle du livre de France, 1968). Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London and Boston: Faber, 1981). S. E. Sweeney, “Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity” (hereafter cited as Sweeney), The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, eds. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1990), 1-14. Hereafter cited as Walker and Frazer.

2. Martin Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Hereafter cited as Priestman.

3. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., Dupin, Holmes, Peirce: The Sign of Three (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983).

4. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

5. G. K. Chesterton, “How to Write a Detective Story” [1925], Chesterton Review 10.2 (1984): 111-118. “The Head of Caesar” [1913], The Complete Father Brown (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988) 232-44.

6. Patricia Merivale, “The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges,” Nobokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1967), 209-224. Repr. in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Jaime Alazraki (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 141-53. Hereafter cited as Merivale, 1967. Michael Holquist, “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” [1971-72], repr. in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction & Literary Theory, eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 149-174.

7. John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994). Hereafter cited as Irwin.

8. Arthur Saltzman, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990). Hereafter cited as Saltzman. Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984). Hereafter cited as Tani.

9. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” Tales of Mystery and the imagination (1840; London: Dent, 1984), 107-16.

10. “Modes of G. K. Chesterton,” Borges: A Reader, eds. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: Dutton, 1981), 87-91.

11. Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford UP, 1989). David Lehman, The Perfect Murder (New York: Free P, 1989). J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Limits of Reason: Poe's Deluded Detectives,” American Literature 47 (1975), 184-96; hereafter cited as Kennedy (1975); and Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987). Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975). Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (1954; Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1957).

12. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Schocken, 1988), 155-200. Dana Brand, “From the flâneur to the Detective: Interpreting the City of Poe,” Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading, ed. Tony Bennett (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 220-37. Robert H. Byer, “Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe's ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” Ideology and Classic American Literature, eds. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 221-46. Monika M. Elbert, “‘The Man of the Crowd’ and The Man Outside the Crowd: Poe's Narrator and the Democratic Reader,” Modern Language Studies 21:4 (Fall 1991), 16-30. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Ecrits ésthetiques, ed. Jean-Christophe Bailly (Paris: Ed. 10/18, 1986), 360-404. Ross Macdonald, with help from Conan Doyle and T. S. Eliot (but not from Poe), finds the “inferno” of the Baudelairean city to be part of the matrix for the “mean streets” of the hardboiled detective story (115-16). “The Writer as Detective Hero” Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past (Santa Barbara: Capra P, 1981), 113-122.

13. Secret Rendezvous, trans. Juliet W. Carpenter (Mikkai, 1977; New York: Knopf, 1979).

14. Such Poe stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (“my story about him”) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (“my story about me”) approach this narrative structure, but “The Man of the Crowd” is, in my view, the earliest successful example of it. (A nearly flawless successor is Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener.”) Compare the narrative structure of The Locked Room, the third volume of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. The narrator's “biography” of his friendship with Fanshawe, could be, as the wife he inherits from the Wakefield-like Fanshawe puts it, “as much about you as about him” (290), and thus a type of elegiac romance. See Kenneth Bruffee, Elegiac Romance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), for a fuller explanation of this term, which he originated. Kennedy (1975) makes similar points about such matters as the victimization of the Old Man and the ambiguity of the title, while Arnold Weinstein, in “Nobody's Home”: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), has written eloquently about Hawthorne's story, which I see as yet another ancestor of the metaphysical detective story to be found among the parables of the American Renaissance.

15. Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985). Compare Sweeney's interpretations of Poe's “locked room” stories, which elucidate the parallels between their architectural enclosures and their narrative structures.

16. See Detecting Texts: Postmodernism and the Metaphysical Detective Story, eds. S. E. Sweeney and Patricia Merivale (forthcoming), for a collection of critical essays discussing these and other authors in terms of the metaphysical detective story tradition which I have been briefly sketching out here. Hereafter cited as Sweeney and Merivale.

17. I am unable to account for this chromatic coincidence.

18. “Fall of a Great Reputation.” The Club of Queer Trades (New York: Harpers, 1905), 59-67.

19. Graham Greene, “A Day Saved,” Collected Stories (1935; New York: Viking, 1973), 528-33.

20. Steven E. Colburn, “Graham Greene's ‘A Day Saved’: A Modern Fable of Time and Identity,” Studies in Short Fiction 293 (1992), 377-84.

21. Kobo Abe, The Face of Another, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Tanin no koo, 1964; New York: Knopf, 1966).

22. For a fuller account of the Poe-like elements (as well as the “Wakefield” series) in Abe's four major metaphysical detective novels (the three discussed briefly here, plus The Ruined Map (1967; 1980), see my paper, “Gumshoes: Kobo Abe and Poe,” Powers of Narration, eds. Gerald Gillespie and André Lorant (Tokyo: Tokyo University, 1995), 100-106.

23. Kobo Abe, Secret Rendezvous, trans. Juliet W. Carpenter (Mikkai, 1977; New York: Knopf, 1979).

24. Jeanne C. Ewert, “Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse,” Walker and Frazer, 166-73.

25. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass 1985, Ghosts 1986, The Locked Room 1986; New York: Penguin, 1990). Hereafter cited as Auster, or by the individual titles of the three parts.

26. There seems to be an actual (or perhaps pseudonymous) “Daniel Quinn” whose books can sometimes be found on the pulpier airport detective story shelves, in addition to (or the same as?) Daniel Quinn, the author of the novel Ishmael (1993), in addition to (or the same as?) the “Mr. Quinn” whom Auster cites in his Carnet rouge (trans. Christine Le Boeuf, [Paris]: Actes Sud, 1993), 61. So overdetermined is this name already that “Daniel Quinn,” the narrator-hero of William Kennedy's Quinn's Book (1988), can be left out of account entirely. I would not dare to hazard a guess as to the relevance of this observation. But it suggests that Austerian “levels of artifice,” like the books in Borges' “Tlōn Uqbar Orbis Tertius,” can make an imprint upon the “real world.”

27. Here the Gothic-Romantic motif seems to be that of Balzac's fatal chiasmus in “Le Peau de chagrin,” where to “live” is to shrink the possibility of life. Auster deploys it again in the story of the iced-in explorer who diminishes his supply of air each time he exhales, for the condensation of his breath freezes on the inside of his igloo (300-301). See Stephen Bernstein, “‘The Question Is the Story Itself’: Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster's New York Trilogy,” in Sweeney and Merivale (forthcoming), for a pathbreaking analysis of the links between Auster's Trilogy and Beckett's.