[In the following essay, Whalen traces the development of Poe's detective fiction.]

Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains. … I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

(Charles Darwin)¹

Despite all disagreements over art and ideology, most critics of detective fiction display a remarkable uniformity of purpose. Their mission, implicitly or explicitly proclaimed, is not so much to interpret a particular work, but rather to examine the flaws inherent in the form itself. Frequently this approach portrays the genre as a kind of literary vice that must be reformed or at least excused. Ernest Mandel begins Delightful Murder by “confessing” his craving for crime fiction, and then, as if to cure himself of an unseemly addiction, he rises to repudiate the form: “the common ideology of the original and classical detective story … remains quintessentially bourgeois. … The criminal is always caught. Justice is always done. Crime never pays. Bourgeois legality, bourgeois values, bourgeois society, always triumph in the end.”² In another classic denunciation of detective fiction, Edmund Wilson just says no to “a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking.”³ Even a critic such as Fredric Jameson, who avoids the ranking of genres and who views the detective story as “a form without ideological content,” nevertheless laments the genre's chronic banality. In a discussion of the commodification of contemporary fiction, Jameson invokes the detective story as something “you read ‘for the ending’—the bulk of the pages becoming sheer devalued means to an end—in this case, the ‘solution’—which is itself utterly insignificant insofar as we are not thereby in the real world and by the latter's practical standards the identity of an imaginary murderer is supremely trivial.”⁴

In the detective story form therefore appears as a deficiency or limitation that must be acknowledged before all else. Other genres seem empowered by their stock of conventions and expectations, but for the detective story form is destiny: like a family curse, it arrests free development and condemns the victim to eke out an existence in the ghettos of mass culture. It is certainly possible to defend the genre—one might characterize a novel by Hammett or Chandler as a credit to the form; one might even point to Twain's Puddn'head Wilson and Pynchon's V. as works that overcame formal handicaps to achieve success as respectable literature. Despite all that might be said in apology, however, the form nevertheless seems guilty of something beyond the ideology or occasional incompetence of its practitioners. As Poe himself asked, “where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?” (Letters, 2:328). In the hands of a shrewd prosecutor, of course, such comments could be used to link the detective story to Poe's other literary swindles, ranging from the scientific hoaxes to the falsified circulation figures to the broken promises of such uncompleted works as “MS. Found in a Bottle” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But instead of rushing to Poe's defense, I propose to return to the scene of the crime in order to investigate the trajectory of the detective story in the hands of its inventor. The investigation commences with Poe's minor crime stories, proceeds to general theories of literary evolution, and then moves on to consider the origin and history of the Dupin tales themselves. These three tales, written between 1841 and 1844, show Poe's growing premonition of a world where all truth would be transferred from the metaphysical depths to the material surfaces of culture.⁵ By considering the Dupin tales as a genre in miniature, I hope to clarify the relation between emergent forms of culture and the general conditions of production in antebellum America. This relation is nowhere more significant than in the detective story, for here can be found the most profound engagement between Poe's material imagination and the developing capitalist economy.

I. MINOR MURDERS

Although “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely acknowledged to be the first detective story, I shall begin with a simpler tale by Poe called “Thou Art the Man.”⁶ It does not fit the pattern of Poe's more famous tales of ratiocination, but as Howard Haycraft observes, it affords “a startling prognostication of the mechanics of the present-day detective story.”⁷ The narrative opens with the mysterious disappearance of the richest man in Rattleborough. Barnabas Shuttleworthy—no doubt the owner of a textile mill in this New England town—left home on horseback several days earlier and has not been heard from since. A crowd of anxious citizens turns to Charlie Goodfellow, a newcomer in town who has nevertheless become Shuttleworthy's dearest companion and Rattleborough's most beloved citizen. Following Goodfellow's counsel, the whole borough forms a search party. Pennifeather, the unsociable nephew of the missing man, tries to convince the people to disperse throughout the adjacent countryside to make their search more efficient, but Goodfellow convinces them to stay together so they can seek out and interpret clues collectively.

They soon discover the bloody scene of the crime. They also find a number of clues, all of which indicate that Pennifeather has committed the murder, no doubt to expedite the inheritance of his uncle's wealth. Everybody accepts this solution except the narrator, who secretly plots to expose the real murderer—none other than Charlie Goodfellow—at a party hosted by Goodfellow for all the residents of the town. The narrator retrieves the corpse, stuffs a whalebone down its throat, and folds it over in a wine crate so that the body will spring upward upon removal of the lid. When the crate is opened at the party, the corpse rises up, and the narrator, who is also a skilled ventriloquist, has the resurrected body accuse Goodfellow with the words, “Thou art the man.” Goodfellow, completely overcome, admits his guilt and falls dead on the spot. For the people of Rattleborough, the party is over. Pennifeather is released from jail and inherits his uncle's fortune.

This primitive tale reveals the general tendency of detective fiction to reduce social questions of justice to scientific questions of fact: that is why the cases never go to court. As the image of a crowd searching for clues demonstrates, however, the detective story resists not only the asking of social questions but more specifically the collective production of answers. This rejection of popular judgment seems inherent in the very structure of the tale. When Poe's narrator solves the crime, he shows that the crowd must rely on a source outside itself—namely an independent intellectual—for a correct interpretation of available information. In addition, the narrator's solution prevents the diversion or redistribution of wealth, for Goodfellow surely would have spread his money liberally among the townspeople. Seen in this light, Poe seems to have invented the detective story as a kind of ideological intervention in a new and threatening social environment. In the same year that he composed “Thou Art the Man” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe in fact announced that popular fiction could help control the behavior of the urban masses:

[I]t is the fashion to decry the “fashionable” novels. These works have their demerits; but a vast influence which they exert for an undeniable good, has never yet been duly considered. … Now, the fashionable novels are just the books which most do circulate among the unfashionable class; and their effect in softening the worst callosities—in smoothing the most disgusting asperities of vulgarism, is prodigious. With the herd, to admire and to attempt imitation are the same thing. What if, in this case, the manners imitated are frippery; better frippery than brutality.

(ER, 1337)

Always wary of groups—whether editorial cliques or Tsalal natives—Poe in the 1840s grew increasingly concerned with urban crowds. For him the congregation of people in cities threatened not only order and decorum but reason itself. After demonstrating the incompetence of the search party in “Thou Art the Man,” Poe later developed a more precise articulation of the contradiction between reason and collective action. Writing for the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, he distinguishes between a people and a mob: “we shall find that a people aroused to action are a mob; and that a mob, trying to think, subside into a people” (ER, 1456). The link between control of the mob and ratiocination is further demonstrated by the actions of French attorney André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin, one of the likely sources for Poe's detective. According to Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, which Poe favorably reviewed, the French attorney had little trouble pacifying the Parisian masses:

When the working classes appeared upon the public place, and sought to put their hands on the car of state, Dupin signified to them, without the least reserve, that they understood nothing about the matter, and sent them back to their shops.⁸

In light of such statements, it is no wonder that Ernest Mandel characterizes the majority of detective writers as “ultra-conservative upholders of the established order” (Delightful Murder, 121).

As we have seen, however, the project of classifying Poe's politics is fraught with difficulty, especially if we consider his penchant for duplicity and deceit. Indeed, Poe's celebrated detective—C. Auguste Dupin—sometimes displays a shocking disregard for “the established order.” The major Dupin tales are “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” but I shall conclude this phase of the investigation by considering one last minor murder, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The story is based directly on the sensational case of Mary Cecilia Rogers, who was murdered on or about July 25, 1841.⁹ Capitalizing on the widespread interest in the case, Poe used reports from the New York newspapers to construct “a series of nearly exact coincidences occurring in Paris” (Letters, 1:200). Though his ostensible object was to provide “an analysis of the true principles which should direct inquiry in similar cases,” he of course hoped that his investigation of the celebrated mystery would “excite attention” and, presumably, sell magazines.

Though it failed to attain the notoriety of the other two Dupin tales, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” nevertheless affords some valuable insights into the development of the genre. The detective story, after all, cannot properly be identified as a form until at least the second instantiation, for only then is it possible to identify common or generic traits. In other words, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” could have served as the prototype of any number of narrative patterns, some of which might have completely dropped the theme of solving crimes, especially since Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter were not murdered by a human perpetrator but (merely) killed by an escaped orangutan. Thus the second Dupin tale could have dealt with two chums who track down escaped animals, or with an American in Paris who supports fallen aristocrats, or with a fallen aristocrat who reclaims his social standing by proving that there is nothing criminal in the violent death of property owners. The narrator of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in fact seems put off by the very idea of a sequel, believing that he had completely fulfilled his design in the first Dupin story by faithfully depicting the “mental character” of his friend. “It did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject,” says the reluctant narrator, but “late events … have startled me into some farther details, which will carry with them the air of extorted confession” (PT, [Poetry and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe] 507).

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” provides further insights into the form because of its basis in actual events. When Poe was trying to sell the story in 1842, he emphasized fact over fiction, just as he had done at the beginning of “Pym”: “Under pretence of showing how Dupin unravelled the mystery of Marie's assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York” (Letters, 1:201). By 1845, however, Poe was engaged in a subtle retreat from the facts, perhaps because he feared that a real solution to the case would make his pretentious speculations appear ridiculous.¹⁰ In a footnote to a June 1845 republication of the tale, Poe tries to indemnify himself against a break in the case, pointing out that the story “was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded.” Nevertheless, he cannot resist making claims on reality: “all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object” (PT, 506). In his anonymous review of himself (October 1845), Poe again tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, he credits himself as the only person to have shed any light on a crime otherwise “shrouded in complete mystery.” On the other hand, he suggests that the tale is most important as an example of the ratiocinative method: “‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’—although in this, the author appears to have been hampered by facts—reveals the whole secret of their mode of construction. It is true that there the facts were before him—so that it is not fully a parallel—but the rationale of the process is revealed by it” (ER, 872). What stands out here is Poe's emphasis on “the mode of construction.” He singles out the tale for revealing the secret—not of Mary Rogers's death, but of how stories about such mysteries can be fabricated out familiar materials.

In its capacity as a sequel, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” begins the process of selecting the thematic and structural elements that will ultimately characterize the genre. As in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin is called upon to solve a violent crime which baffles everyone, and in both cases the crime has somehow agitated the public and threatened the social order. Crime and politics seem nearly interchangeable in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”; as the narrator indicates, during “the discussion of this one momentous theme, even the momentous political topics of the day were forgotten” (PT, 509). As in the first story, Dupin makes sense out of a conflicting mass of information and thereby leads the city out of confusion and impending chaos. In both stories, the narrator also plays a mediating role between common intelligence—whether of the police or of the public—and the extreme brilliance of Dupin. This in turn fosters a structural identification between reader and narrator, who are both presumably subordinate to Dupin in everything except wonder.

In addition to repeating aspects of the first story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” refines the characterization of urban life and intellectual labor. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” conjures up an unreal urban space where anything seems possible. “Enamored of the Night for her own sake,” Dupin and the narrator block out the light from their desolate chambers; reveling in their seclusion, the two indulge “wild whims with a perfect abandon” (PT, 401). When darkness falls, they cruise the city in search of anonymous delights: “Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford” (PT, 401). In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” on the other hand, Dupin and the narrator seem far less smitten with the charms of urban life. Before undertaking the case, the two men had completely secluded themselves in their house for nearly a month. The narrator explains that they had been “engaged in researches” which “absorbed our whole attention” (PT, 510), but the story suggests other motivations for remaining indoors. The city is first of all a place of violence, and the narrator refers casually to the presence of criminal gangs and “the great frequency, in large cities, of such atrocities” as the murder of Marie Rogêt (PT, 510). The city is also woefully lacking in solitude and natural beauty:

Those who know anything of the vicinity of Paris, know the extreme difficulty of finding seclusion. … Let anyone who, being at heart a lover of nature, is yet chained by duty to the dust and heat of this great metropolis—let any such one attempt, even during the weekdays, to slake his thirst for solitude amid the scenes of natural loveliness which immediately surround us. At every second step, he will find the growing charm dispelled by the voice and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound—here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution.

(PT, 541-42)

In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe represents Paris as a sophisticated and anonymous European metropolis, but in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” he abandons this favorable depiction because Paris must “coincide” with New York, the city where Mary Rogers died and where Poe endured the most crushing poverty of his career. Paris accordingly becomes a place of violence and overcrowding, a polluted haven for criminal gangs which offers few gratifications to Dupin's refined taste. It has often been argued that Poe avoids American settings and themes, but the transformation of “Paris” from metropolitan playground to urban nightmare should help dispel the myth that Poe was “a man without a country.”¹¹

Most importantly, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” subtly reconstructs the scene of intellectual production originally presented in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Whereas Dupin had solved his first mystery to amuse himself and (secondarily) to exonerate an innocent man, he now works as a paid consultant to the police. Nothing in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” suggests that ratiocination might become a regular form of paid labor; Dupin earns no reward, and in the denouement the chagrined Prefect of Police affirms “the propriety of every person minding his own business” (PT, 431). Only in the second story does Dupin emerge as a paid “cynosure of policial eyes” (PT, 508), that is, as a nineteenth-century version of the independent expert or consultant. Dupin's brilliance has become a marketable commodity, and as the narrator indicates, “the cases were not few in which attempt was made to engage his services at the Prefecture.” When the reward in the case of Marie Rogêt reaches 30,000 francs and still brings no result, the frustrated Prefect makes Dupin “a direct, and certainly a liberal proposition, the precise nature of which I do not feel myself at liberty to disclose” (PT, 511). The method of investigation has also changed. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin stumbles upon the newspaper report of the murders and then spontaneously decides to visit the scene of the crime. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” his investigative labor is more systematic and more dependent on previously accumulated information. Dupin even relies on the narrator to gather his raw materials: “I procured, at the Prefecture, a full report of all the evidence elicited, and, at the various newspaper offices, a copy of every paper in which, from first to last, had been published any decisive information in regard to this sad affair” (PT, 511). In order to solve the crime, Dupin must approach the past through the mediation of a great “mass of information” (PT, 511) created by the organized labor of police officers and newspaper reporters.¹² But instead of representing these intellectual workers as competitors, the story suggests that their accumulated information must remain “raw” or meaningless until it is processed by Dupin.

In other words, Poe's detective operates in the privileged and perhaps utopian niche between capital and labor, between the accumulated mass of information and the working masses accumulating in American cities. On the one hand, then, there would seem to be some basis to the ideological assault on detective fiction, for even the earliest examples of the genre betray a dim view of city dwellers: ruffians, rakes, impostors, bungling bureaucrats, gullible mobs, ambitious commoners, and of course slow-witted American expatriates. On the other hand, however, Poe's detective fiction confronts and challenges the emergence of information as the form taken by capital in the signifying environment. This confrontation does not have to be inferred from the detective tale alone, for on numerous occasions Poe identified capital as an enemy of literature and literary producers. As an editor, Poe chafed at the control exercised by capital—personified as “fat” proprietors—over all aspects of the publishing industry.¹³ As a commercial writer, Poe extended his criticism from the owners of capital to physical capital itself. In his article on anastatic printing, for example, he explicitly advocated the elevation of “literary value” over “physical or mechanical value” because with this reversal “the wealthy gentleman of elegant leisure … will be forced to tilt on terms of equality with the poordevil author” (Works 14:158). Finally, as a writer of detective stories, Poe continued his endeavor to subdue or challenge the apparently independent power of information capital, chiefly by demonstrating how it was utterly worthless until “finished” by specialized intellectual labor.¹⁴ The literary implications of this struggle will be explored below, but the ideological lesson is straightforward: an enemy of the masses is not necessarily a friend to capital.

II. THE ORIGIN OF A FORM

Whence do new literary forms arise? Are they the serendipitous creations of literary genius? Or are they the predictable consequences of evolving social conditions? Such questions are seldom innocent, for in topics ranging from “nation” to “language” to “people,” the debate over origins generally occurs in the distorting shadow of some contemporary struggle. Literature is no exception. One should therefore be suspicious of all aggrandizing references to the originator of a literary tradition, especially when such a founder serves as the norm which justifies the relegation or exclusion of minor writers.¹⁵ But should the origin of a form be discounted altogether, or can it, if only in retrospect, tell us something meaningful about the social conditions that bend us to our destiny? In what follows I affirm the latter position, first by disputing a general (Darwinian) theory of literary evolution, and then by considering the detective story as a test case in the history of literary forms.

One of the boldest recent attempts to downplay the significance of literary origins comes from Franco Moretti, who develops a Darwinian theory of literary history that distinguishes between the random generation of new forms and the socially determined selection of “survivors.”¹⁶ Appropriately, Moretti begins his Darwinian argument with an attack on a new Lamarckian view of human history formulated by Stephen Jay Gould. In the following passage, cited by Moretti (“On Literary Evolution,” 262), Gould uses Lamarck to distinguish between cultural and biological history:

Human cultural evolution, in strong opposition to our biological history, is Lamarckian in character. What we learn in one generation we transmit directly by teaching and writing.

Moretti admits that, in regard to acquired traits, “human history is indeed Lamarckian,” but he disagrees with Gould over the relationship between variations and evolution. As Moretti explains, Lamarckian theory treats variations as being oriented toward some environmental condition and therefore “preferentially inclined toward adaptation,” whereas Darwin treats variations as “wholly random attempts among which nature later selects those with greater potentialities for adaptation” (“On Literary Evolution,” 262-63). In Gould's refashioning of Lamarck, Moretti detects vestiges of a Hegelian dream in which human history is “an undivided development where problems only arise when solutions are already at hand.” Finding this view implausible, Moretti follows Darwin and divides literary history into two distinct stages: “Chance alone will be active in the first stage, in which rhetorical variations are generated; social necessity will preside over the second stage, in which variations are historically selected” (“On Literary Evolution,” 263).

Now it would seem absurd for a critic writing “in the interest of materialism” to claim that the movie western, or the sonnet, or tragic drama originated by “chance,” especially in light of Marx's famous distinction between animal and human production.¹⁷ Nevertheless, Moretti offers the Darwinian distinction between origin and selection as a strict scientific theory of culture, and to this extent his argument is fraught with logical and empirical inconsistencies. Among other things, Moretti's argument tends toward circularity: literary “species” are selected because they are superior, and they are superior because they are selected. The distinction between chance and necessity is also problematic. The fact that social necessity may play a smaller role in literary innovation than in literary selection does not mean that the origin of a form is completely accidental. And even though an originator may not have foreseen the future course of a rhetorical variation, we should still investigate what motivated certain kinds of experimentation rather than others or, better still, what motivated any sort of experimentation in the first place.

The detective tale offers a perfect opportunity to assess the relation between a specific publishing environment and a specific innovation in literary form. Three aspects of Poe's publishing environment merit investigation: the nature of intellectual labor, the new conditions for literary production, and the new relations between the writer and the mass audience.

Wherever science and the systematic accumulation of knowledge had abetted a bourgeois revolution, the intellectual ceased to be a repository of wisdom and became instead a storehouse of information. Poe was aware of this as a general cultural phenomenon, but he also drew from several specific examples when he devised his own model of the new intellectual. The Reverend John Bransby, master of the boarding school Poe attended in London, was noted for possessing a “fund of miscellaneous information.” Arthur Hobson Quinn speculates that Poe, “noticing how effective ‘miscellaneous information’ may be when given offhand, took Mr. Bransby as his model later in the acquiring of all kinds of valuable odds and ends of literary and scientific knowledge” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 72). André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin possessed a similar reputation. According to Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, the French attorney was a consummate polymath:

To judge from his writings, Dupin must be a perfect living encyclopædia. From Homer to Rousseau, from the Bible to the civil code, from the laws of the twelve tables to the Koran, he has read every thing, retained every thing; he knows so many and such different things, that it is not astonishing he only half digests what he knows.

(224)

Poe expands upon this when he portrays the superior intellectual as a “helluo librorum” or devourer of books. Whereas the human encyclopedia might “half digest” what he knows, the helluo librorum consumes information and then transforms it into productive capital: “It is true that, in general, we retain, we remember to available purpose, scarcely one-hundredth part of what we read; yet there are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest forever” (ER, 1318).

As one might expect, however, this ideal of the helluo librorum merely served to compensate for a publishing environment that was in many ways hostile to intellectual labor. Tales such as “The Gold-Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” for example, commence with reclusive aristocrats who pursue knowledge with a bitter and vengeful intensity. Instead of producing profit or enlightenment, they use their talents to wreak revenge upon the social order that had cast them out. Legrand accordingly uses the gold bug to “punish” the narrator, and Dupin cannot help gloating about having “defeated [the Prefect of Police] in his own castle” (PT, 595, 431). For Poe, the prospect of defeating or humiliating an intellectual rival was a recurrent fantasy. He decried false erudition as “the most sickening” vanity of the unlettered pedant, and he once proposed writing a magazine story about a young man who exposes a “flippant pretender to universal acquirement” by confronting him with an armful of books (ER, 102, 1440). What matters about Poe, however, is that he engaged in a similar confrontation with the publishing environment itself. If he had felt resentment only toward other writers, he scarcely would have conducted so intense an investigation into literary form and literary value. Since he sometimes perceived the entire publishing industry as a kind of enemy, he occasionally put aside his differences with other writers in order to mount broader attacks. In fact, Poe invoked the unity of writers as a class precisely when he denounced systemic or structural problems. He adopted this strategy, for example, when he lobbied for a new magazine to be controlled by a “coalition of writers” (Letters, 1:247), and when he decried democracy itself for neglecting “the right of property in a literary work.” According to Poe, “the autorial body is the most autocratic on the face of the earth. How, then, can those institutions even hope to be safe which systematically persist in trampling it underfoot?” (ER, 1375). Though “autorial body” seems to be a synonym for the literary elite, Poe consistently viewed solidarity among writers as a prerequisite to radical change in the republic of letters.

Such a strategy might appear to be an endorsement of Jacksonian Democracy or collective action per se, but Poe avoided identification with the American masses by using foreign models. And when Poe reached back into the past for ideological weapons, he generally ignored the practical implications of class struggle and instead offered vague, rhapsodic paraphrases of revolutionary slogans. In an 1836 review of the British author Henry Chorley, for example, Poe portentously alludes to “the wide atmosphere of Revolution encircling us” and then issues his first battle cry against all those forces which compel writers to “succumb to the grossest materiality” (ER, 164). These examples suggest that the place to investigate Poe's politics is not in his scattered pronouncements about Andrew Jackson or the Whigs or even abolitionists, but instead at the point of production itself, where he acknowledged his material ties to other writers and where he felt most intensely the pressures of economic necessity.

New forms are created in the crucible of this necessity. [Poe] felt that he lived in an era characterized by a superabundance of “thinking material,” an era “forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous” (ER, 1377). He also knew that the surplus of thinking material would have dire consequences for commercial writers: “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge, is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information.”¹⁸ The detective story responds to this predicament by creating a general climate of mystery where information is scarce and where the truth arises less from some “well-digested” quantity of thinking material than from the rare and unalienable skill of a thinking being. More than a simple reflection of bourgeois subjectivity, Poe's tales of ratiocination confront a signifying environment where knowledge is not only a commodity, but more precisely a commodity whose value is imperiled by overproduction. In the United States the tendency toward overproduction in the publishing industry was more pronounced because of lax copyright laws, a widespread ideological commitment to the dissemination of “useful knowledge,” and a massive public and corporate investment in the national communications infrastructure. It is therefore inadequate to characterize Dupin as “the essential romantic hero” or to explain away Poe's emphasis on the unknown by noting that “for romanticism, mystery is the condition of the world.”¹⁹ Poe's romanticism must itself be seen against the background of its dialectical opposite, namely a historical situation that systematically extirpates mystery from the workplace and from the very texture of everyday life.

The emergence of the detective story is therefore more complicated than the Darwinian model suggests. To say that forms emerge by chance and are only selected by context ignores the importance of repetition in establishing a literary form. As argued above, the detective story can only be called a form upon its second instantiation; despite numerous efforts to project the entire history of the detective novel back onto “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the tale of ratiocination only became a form when it had been repeated enough times to establish its generic elements. In the case of the detective story, of course, this selective process was somewhat skewed because Poe himself wrote two more Dupin tales, thereby transforming his own creation into the origin of a series, if not of a full-fledged genre. But in a larger sense, the origin of a literary form is always already selected, for the original must be selected for repetition—even if by the same author—before it can be retrospectively classified as the prototype of a new genre.

Even if a single work could represent a form, there would still be problems with Moretti's attempt to conflate natural and literary history. Aside from the fact that the theory of evolution concerns itself with a completely different object of study (biological species rather than cultural forms), Moretti neglects a crucial point in Gould's Lamarckian argument. Moretti cites Gould's statement about cultural transmission from one generation to the next, but he omits what follows:

Acquired characters are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating—or toward the abyss.²⁰

Two facets of Gould's argument are obscured by Moretti's presentation. First, Gould refers to change rather than “Hegelian” progress. He does not believe, as Moretti asserts, that human history is “an undivided development where problems only arise when solutions are already at hand” (“On Literary Evolution,” 263). Instead, Gould merely says that Lamarckian theory explains, “by analogy only,” what the human species has accomplished “for better or worse” (The Panda's Thumb, 83). Second and most importantly, Gould views the social accumulation of information as the distinguishing feature of human history. Marx also traces the central importance of “the general productive forces of the social mind,” and for him as well the key point about knowledge is that it accumulates outside of—and sometimes at the expense of—the individual human subject.²¹

Poe, it should be recalled, held similar views. One of his most interesting references to the frailty of the thinking subject appears in Thomas Wyatt's Synopsis of Natural History, a work collecting (with some emendations) the writings of Lemmonnier and other naturalists. Poe helped Wyatt prepare the volume late in 1838; in his review of the book for Burton's Poe remarks that “the useful spirit of the original [by Lemmonnier] has been preserved—and this we say from personal knowledge, and the closest inspection and collation.”²² It is impossible to say with certainty which portions were written or edited by Poe, but he probably prepared a chapter (derived from Cuvier) on the “Varieties of the Human Race.”²³ This chapter contains the following description of the origin of writing:

By means of this intelligence [man] alone, among all other beings, has been enabled to form for himself a language. Through this, fathers transmit to their children their experience, their ideas; and this heritage, in passing from generation to generation, always increased in its progress from the preceding generation, becomes at length a treasure which memory is no longer capable of preserving. This accumulation upon accumulation of facts gave birth to writing and then again to printing, the province of both of which is, to render language perceptible by the eye in all places and at all times.²⁴

Cuvier describes “language and letters” as an “indefinite source of perfection,” but he says nothing about the origin of writing. The author of the above passage, in contrast, views writing as the result of the inadequacy of individual memory when confronted with a vast and expanding accumulation of facts.²⁵ Although the intellectual heritage is described as a “treasure,” writing and especially printing appear as symptoms of a signifying environment in which the individual has forever lost the capacity to grasp the totality of knowledge.

We might add, then, that the “accumulation upon accumulation of facts” which gave birth to printing also inspired the creation of the detective story. The new form responded not merely to “society” in a general sense but specifically to an emerging tendency that imperiled literary labor and signification itself, namely the tendency toward overproduction, which left many observers “astonished that human thought or human industry could have produced such an accumulation.”²⁶ The detective story therefore challenges notions of an autonomous realm for art because it registers the crisis of accumulation in its form as well as its content. Far from being a chance event, the emergence of a literary form constitutes the zero degree of mediation between culture and society.

For this reason the detective story registers—almost against Poe's critical principles—the evolving relationship between writer and mass audience. Raymond Williams has observed that during the crucial years of British Romanticism, the bond between writers and readers was undergoing fundamental changes, and “a different habitual attitude toward the ‘public’ was establishing itself.” Keats accordingly proclaimed that he lacked the “slightest feel of humility toward the Public”; Shelley refused to accept any “counsel from the simple-minded”; and Wordsworth denounced the “small though loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the PUBLIC, passes itself upon the unthinking, for the PEOPLE.”²⁷ As we have seen, Poe displays a similar habitual attitude in his disparagement of the mob, in his attacks on the practice of “puffing” inferior authors, and in his general skepticism toward popularity as a measure of literary value. The detective story, however, is expressly designed to be popular among those readers whom Poe least respects. In his review of himself, Poe notes that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is especially favored “among literary people—though with the mass, the ‘Gold-Bug,’ and ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ are more popular, because of their unbroken interest, novelty of the combination of ordinary incident, and faithful minuteness of detail” (ER, 871). Rufus Griswold would later concur with this assessment of the popularity of the tales of ratiocination. Writing in 1847, he remarked that “the analytical subtlety and the singular skill shown in the management of revolting and terrible circumstances in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ produced a deep impression, and made this story perhaps the most popular that Mr. Poe has written.”²⁸

In his quest for popularity through ratiocination, Poe sometimes modified or abandoned his professed mistrust of public opinion. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Dupin even goes so far as to celebrate the collective wisdom of the multitude:

Now, the popular opinion, under certain conditions, is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself—when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner—we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius. In ninety-nine cases from the hundred I would abide by its decision. But it is important that we find no palpable traces of suggestion. The opinion must be rigorously the public's own. …

(PT, 539)

In this case, of course, Dupin is free to disregard the popular opinion because it has been shaped by misleading newspaper reports. It is also important to note that the public can only be trusted where there is no possibility of deception or false suggestion—in short, where there is no need for ratiocination. The compliment therefore turns out to be rather backhanded, and in his personal correspondence, Poe admits that the detective story itself manipulates popular opinion. Writing to Philip Pendleton Cooke in 1846, Poe describes how the public has been duped by Dupin: “You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend:—that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (Letters, 2:328). In other words, Poe expected that most readers would be mystified by the detective tales. As with “The Gold-Bug,” these tales refuse the sympathetic bond between reader and writer which Poe believed to be the basis for all genuine aesthetic experience. A form purporting to dispel all mystery ends up concealing from the mass audience “the more delicate pulses of the heart's passion” (ER, 581). As we shall see in the next section, Poe's major detective tales refuse not only sympathy but also the obligation to convey some useful information. In so doing the tales combine—if only to violate more efficiently—the inner laws of aesthetic appreciation and the horrid laws of political economy.

III. MUCH MADE OF NOTHING

Early in March 1841, printers Barrett & Thrasher were busy in their shop at No. 33 Carter's Alley, Philadelphia. After setting an article called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” into type for the upcoming April issue of Graham's, they threw the original manuscript into the wastebasket. A young apprentice printer named W. J. Johnston later retrieved it from the trash and carried it home with him that evening (Poe Log, 319). As he examined the manuscript in his lodgings, he may have noticed that it was in a rather untidy condition, which perhaps explains why Barrett & Thrasher disposed of it so unceremoniously. Three years later, Poe produced another disorderly manuscript. In a letter to Edward L. Carey, publisher of the Gift, he asked to examine the proof copy of “The Purloined Letter.” “I am not,” he explained, “usually, solicitous about proofs; but in this instance, the MS. had many interlineations and erasures, which may render my seeing one, necessary” (Letters, 2:706). It was extraordinary for Poe, who viewed chirography as an indication of character,²⁹ to submit text in such poor shape. According to Mabbott, “most of his printer's copy was carefully prepared and unusually clean”; the poor condition of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” he observes, can be found in “no other surviving manuscript of a Poe story.”³⁰ Without delving into Poe's theory of autography, it is possible to draw some provisional conclusions from this. First, he probably wrote the tales very quickly, indicating that he knew how they would end from the start (this is what he really meant by writing a story backwards). Second, the fact that he did not recopy them implies a certain habitual attitude toward this form of literature. Perhaps he felt that they did not warrant improvement, or perhaps he felt compelled to rush them to market, but whatever the reason he was anxious to dispose of the tales as quickly as possible.³¹ Finally, we may read in the hurried and automatic acts of the laborer something more profound—not about the laborer himself but about the productive process that summons him into existence.

“Murders in the Rue Morgue” has long been touted as the first detective story, and as such it has been subjected to extensive critical analysis. Although much criticism has centered on Dupin as a bourgeois individualist and on the police as a bungling bureaucracy,³² there has been comparatively little investigation of the social significance of the two necessary components of any crime: victim and perpetrator. John Cawelti and other mass cultural theorists have discussed the necessity for detective fiction to minimize reader identification with the victim, and Judith Fetterley has emphasized the prevalence of murdered women in Poe's fiction.³³ But something more about Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter emerges from the details that Poe carefully selects from the crime reports. To begin with, many residents of the Rue Morgue believe that Madame L'Espanaye was a fortune teller. Aside from its resemblance to the economic puns of “The Gold-Bug,” fortune telling is a mysterious art which in Poe's time was being displaced by such “scientific” practices as autography and phrenology. One of the witnesses disputes the rumors about fortune telling, but Madame L'Espanaye certainly did not earn any money from rent. Although her house was large and in good condition, she “became dissatisfied with the abuse of the premises by her tenant, and moved into them herself, refusing to let any portion.” Madame L'Espanaye therefore lived alone on the fourth floor of the house, leaving the first three floors completely vacant. Finally, we must consider the money. One of the clues designed to disprove robbery as a motive is the wealth accumulated in the apartment. When the police arrived, they found old coins, jewels, and most importantly, 4000 francs in gold, which Madame L'Espanaye had withdrawn from her bank three days before her murder. Like the house, the money is potential capital that the idiosyncratic Madame L'Espanaye refused to put into productive circulation. This estrangement from productive society makes it possible to reconsider the status of the two women. There is an old woman who believes in magic but not in capitalism, and a young woman who has failed to enter the sexual economy through marriage. In other words, the house defines a space that is oppositional to both capitalism and patriarchy, and if the women who inhabit the space make unsympathetic victims, it is partly due to their distance from the dominant social order. As one of the witnesses observes, “the two lived an exceedingly retired life” (PT, 407).

When the victims are described in these terms, the logical perpetrator would be some agent of capitalism, and in fact the police arrest Adolphe Le Bon, clerk at the bank from which Madame L'Espanaye withdrew the 4000 francs.³⁴ The arrest of Le Bon draws added significance when Dupin explains his own motives for wanting to solve the crime. As he tells the narrator, he will unravel the mystery, first because it will afford him amusement, and secondly because the bank clerk has rendered Dupin an unidentified service for which he is still grateful.

If the victim and suspect encode larger political or economic conflicts, it only fair to inquire about Dupin's social position. In establishing Poe rather than Voltaire or E. T. A. Hoffmann as the originator of the detective story, critics often point to the relatively recent emergence of detection as a line of work. As Howard Haycraft puts it, “Clearly, there could be no detective stories until there were detectives. … The first systematic experiments in professional crime-detection were naturally made in the largest centers of population, where the need was greatest. And so the early 1800s saw the growth of criminal investigation departments in the police systems of great metropolises, such as Paris and London.”³⁵ Clive Bloom extends this notion of the detective as paid professional, depicting Dupin as someone who uses his intellect as capital and who “always works only for money.”³⁶ Like Haycraft, Bloom explores the link between the emergence of a literary form and some phenomenon of economic history, though for him what matters is not the birth of a new profession, which can be dated quite precisely, but instead a broader ensemble of social practices grouped loosely together under the rubric of capitalism.

Yet both Haycraft and Bloom erroneously project the events of later Dupin stories back on to the first, for in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin does not work for money and cannot be classified as a professional detective. He takes his first case as a lark, seeking only amusement and (secondarily) the exoneration of the bank clerk Le Bon. After forming a hypothesis about the deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, Dupin commences a spirited quest for truth rather than a calculated search for wealth. At the end of the story, the owner of the orangutan offers him a financial reward, but Dupin is after something else: “My reward shall be this. You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders in the Rue Morgue” (PT, 427). In other words, Dupin uses his “means of information about this matter” (PT, 428) to accumulate yet more information, a strategy that accords perfectly with the analogy Poe elsewhere draws between the semi-autonomous realms of capital and thought: “knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold” (ER, 1318). Only in Poe's later detective tales do the discrete realms of capital and thought blend into one. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Dupin refuses to work without a contract, and in “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin pursues the letter for its cash value rather than its truth content, so that knowledge breeds gold instead of further knowledge. The new detective therefore stands in a fundamentally different relation to knowledge, state power, and production itself. Like a prototypical data processor, Dupin ultimately ends up as a conduit for information that can bring him no enlightenment.

It is hard to overestimate the literary and social importance of Dupin's transition from free thinker to hired intellectual. To grasp how radical a break Poe makes with the ideology of universal enlightenment, it is useful to turn for contrast to Richard D. Brown's account of information diffusion in antebellum America.³⁷ Among other things, Brown explores “the ideal of universal information in the enlightened republic” through the exemplary life of William Bentley, a Congregational minister who was, with Thomas Jefferson, one of the preeminent polymaths of his age. Unlike such figures as Jefferson and Franklin, however, Bentley neglected original or creative work in order to devote himself almost entirely to the collection and dissemination of already existing knowledge. His compulsion to know “everything about everything” (Knowledge Is Power, 198) fed a complementary compulsion to inform everyone about everything. To acquire his knowledge of the world, Bentley drew from many sources: periodicals, books from many countries (he read twenty languages), and conversations with all manner of people, especially merchants and foreign visitors.³⁸ Bentley distributed this information in correspondence, sermons, social interactions, and perhaps most notably in a biweekly news digest that ran for nearly twenty-five years in the Salem newspapers.

Near the end of his life, Bentley became less optimistic about the possibility of achieving a republic of perfect information. Distressed at newspaper sensationalism, in 1796 he denounced a “licentious press” and vowed to “communicate everything to the public, which has in our judgement the truth, happiness, usefulness, or good government as its object” (Knowledge Is Power, 214). Despite his best efforts, Bentley's goal became increasingly difficult “in an era when the volume and variety of information were expanding dramatically” (217). Though Brown does not recognize the immanent contradiction between information and enlightenment, the ideological foundation of Bentley's project was clearly most imperiled at the very moment when technological conditions should have been most favorable. As Brown observes, “A shadow was falling across his own bright hopes for a free press as the foundation of an informed population. Indeed in an era when information and the media presenting it were increasing at an explosive rate, Bentley was unrealistic to have supposed that multitudes of citizens would have the inclination and ability to inform themselves broadly according to the ideal of the genteel cosmopolitan” (215). In other words, a society characterized by a “superabundance” of information would ultimately render impossible both the enlightened republic and the polymath who best embodied it.

Poe's fiction is nevertheless replete with polymaths. In his gothic tales he depicts his most sublime polymath in the figure of Ligeia; in his satires he ridicules pseudo-polymaths who construct their seeming knowledge out of scissors and paste; his in “Pinakidia” and “Marginalia” Poe himself plays a polymath very much like Bentley when he assembles copious selections of useful and entertaining knowledge. But the greatest polymath of all is Dupin. With the possible exception of Ligeia, Dupin is the character who comes closest to knowing “everything about everything”; from his first appearance in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” we are encouraged to marvel at “the vast extent of his reading” and to view his mind as “a treasure beyond price” (PT, 400). The crucial difference between Dupin and other polymaths—the list would include Jefferson, Franklin, Bentley, and Poe's old schoolmaster Nicholas Bransby—is that Dupin refuses to share his information. Despite the paternalism implicit in the republican visions of Bentley and Jefferson, each believed in the need for an enlightened citizenry. They of course assumed a close connection between enlightenment and productivity, but they did not yet conceive of information as something which re-entered the production process directly. Although Jefferson and other polymaths would often treat educated people as “human capital,” they did so from the perspective of the nation as a whole rather than from the perspective of a capitalist economy. Poe, who studied at Jefferson's university, no doubt recognized the republican tradition behind the ideal and the ideology of “universal information.” More importantly, he was aware of the many new attempts to institutionalize the individual efforts of the great polymaths.³⁹ Aside from the educational societies and circulating libraries that were springing up everywhere, the legacy of the French philosophes was embodied in the many American encyclopedia projects.⁴⁰ But although Poe's Dupin is himself a walking encyclopedia, he utterly lacks the ideological commitment which animated Bentley and Jefferson. When the narrator first encounters Dupin, he notes that the fallen aristocrat has “ceased to bestir himself in the world” (PT, 400). “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” shows the pair in a similar condition of isolation: “Strange as it may appear, the third week from the discovery of the body had passed, and passed without any light being thrown upon the subject, before even a rumor of the events which had so agitated the public mind, reached the ears of Dupin and myself. Engaged in researches which had absorbed our whole attention, it had been nearly a month since either of us had gone abroad, or received a visiter, or more than glanced at the leading political articles in the daily papers” (PT, 510). In short, Dupin is a polymath who has turned his back on the public and who harbors no desire to disseminate his knowledge.

“The Purloined Letter” reveals the material basis for Dupin's reticence. Whereas “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” had at least made a perfunctory nod to “the popular opinion,” “The Purloined Letter” displays an unmistakable disregard for the masses. In this tale, of course, the issue is not the murder of commoners but high level intrigue involving a state minister, a stolen letter, and “a personage of the most exalted station” (PT, 682). The theft of the letter threatens the stability of the state, but unlike the crimes of earlier tales it does not stimulate the formation of a potentially violent urban mob. Strangely, it is Dupin himself who conjures the mob into existence. In order to distract the minister, Dupin hires a man to act the part of a lunatic and to fire a musket (without a ball) into a crowd of women and children. This produces the desired effect, for through the window Dupin and the Minister hear “a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob” (PT, 697). Whereas in the first tale Dupin had exercised his ingenuity to disperse the mob, the hired detective employs his ingenuity to arouse and exploit the crowd, giving little thought to the consequences. Dupin's attitude is most clearly demonstrated when he discounts the popular esteem of mathematical reason with a quotation from Chamfort: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçcue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre” (PT, 691). [You can bet that all popular ideas and received conventions are stupid, because they've been accepted by the masses.] But even if Dupin were devoted to mass enlightenment, the special circumstances of the case would forbid any public disclosure. Whereas both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” conclude with a dissemination of Dupin's findings, “The Purloined Letter” ends with Dupin telling only the narrator, and not even the narrator learns the contents of the letter.

Poe has therefore grasped the value of information, but he has done so from the standpoint of the producer. His evolving attitude toward the value of information can be seen in the difference between “Pinakidia” and the “Marginalia.” In “Pinakidia” Poe is, rather like Bentley and Jefferson, willing to disseminate information useful to other writers, a strategy which aids his competitors and perhaps the nation as a whole, but which gains him little in return. In the “Marginalia” Poe turns this concept of value on its head. The introduction to the series explicitly confounds the prevailing belief in useful information: “the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this is what imparts to them a value” (ER, 1309). The perversion of value attains its fullest realization in the tales of ratiocination, for these embody Poe's longstanding dream of a culture of surfaces where the raw material for literary production (variously dubbed truth or information) may be easily obtained by the writer of genius. As early as 1831 Poe had argued that the greatest truths are found in “palpable places” rather than “huge abysses”⁴¹; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” elevates this preference for “palpable places” into a methodological principle. In the story Dupin criticizes Vidocq—his rival from real life—for the “intensity of his investigations.” By holding the object of study too close, Vidocq “lost sight of the matter as a whole,” and this myopia prompts Dupin to restate the case for a culture of surfaces: “Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial” (PT, 412).

“The Purloined Letter” takes the culture of surfaces one step further. At a basic level, the concept of superficial truth serves to elevate Dupin by depreciating the labor of his intellectual competitors. The Parisian police work hard, but they are limited by the fact that “their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass” (PT, 690). In other words, Dupin contends, their method depends “not at all upon acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers” (PT, 691). This disparagement of “mere care, patience, and determination” must be understood in the context of a political economy that emphasized the broad dissemination of objectified information rather than the education or cultivation of a few intellectuals. Poe, who repeatedly lobbied for better copyright laws and higher pay for authors, was painfully aware that he worked in a signifying environment suffering from a surplus of both information and intellectual workers.⁴² The culture of surfaces elegantly responds to the crisis in the signifying environment, first by devaluing “deep meaning” in favor of a superficial realm of knowledge, and then by making this realm the special province of the writer of genius, whose ability “to seek … and to seize truth upon the surface of things” elevates him above the mass of merely industrious writers.⁴³ If we understand capital as both the industrial base of the publishing industry and the rapidly accumulating supply of thinking material, and if we understand “labor” as both the “poor devil authors” Poe competed with and the anonymous mass audience he so mistrusted, then the culture of surfaces appears not as an attempt to resolve the structural antagonism between capital and labor in favor of one class or another, but instead as a symbolic attempt to abolish capitalist production altogether by establishing a signifying environment where writers assume material dominion over all.⁴⁴ [This] fantasy—dimly adumbrated in the detective story—receives grandiose expression in Poe's angelic dialogues.

In any event, Poe revealed his general disenchantment with the prevailing relations of production on numerous occasions, especially in his calls for an international copyright agreement, in his comments on the magazine business, and in his excessive optimism over the radical potential of new inventions like the daguerreotype or anastatic printing.⁴⁵ It must be emphasized that in all these instances Poe attacks the relations of production, and as such his critique extends beyond politics narrowly so-called to confront more fundamental social practices. This is most clearly demonstrated in “The Purloined Letter.” At the same time that Poe disparages the masses and shores up the dominant political order (in this case a monarchy), he also smuggles into his ratiocination an astonishingly radical critique of value. In an inverted world where truth is most concealed when it is most revealed, Poe offers a tale where, as he slyly insinuates in his review of himself, “there is much made of nothing” (ER, 872). This inversion of production is explicitly noted in the story:

“The present peculiar condition of affairs at court … would render the instant availability of the document—its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's notice—a point of nearly equal importance with its possession.”

“Its susceptibility of being produced?” said I.

“That is to say, of being destroyed,” said Dupin.

Dupin and the narrator mean to say the letter must be nearby so that the Minister could, in a pinch, quickly dispose of the evidence. The two of them instead end up playing upon, or confounding, the difference between production and destruction.

In his account of the letter's value, Poe likewise rejects the democratic faith in universal enlightenment. This is how the narrator links the letter with power:

“It is clear,” said I, “as you observe, that the letter is still in the possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not the employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs.”

(PT, 683)

According to the classic theory of supply and demand, overproduction would affect information in the same way that it would affect any other commodity—it would drive its price down to zero. But in Poe's inverted world, a fall in exchange value is also accompanied by a corresponding decline in use-value or utility. If the contents of the letter were published, if the personal affairs of a certain exalted personage were to become common knowledge, then this information would lose its special utility, namely the political power it confers on its possessor.

If this were also true of information in general, it would imperil all hopes for an enlightened republic. Exponents of the society of perfect information generally assume the possibility of an absolute increase in civility, wisdom, and most especially productivity.⁴⁶ Poe shatters this assumption with two swift retorts from the dismal science. First he depicts a zero-sum society where all gains are offset by relative losses somewhere else, where knowledge affords a competitive advantage only amongst the ignorant. Second, he insists that the possessor of information, like the owner of any other commodity, is legally and morally entitled to sell it only to the highest bidder. From the macroeconomic perspective of the nation, Bentley was an information hero, but from the microeconomic perspective of producers, he was a fool. As indicated by Dupin's anecdote of the rich miser who tries to wheedle free medical advice (PT, 687-88), Poe wants to ensure that intellectuals receive compensation for their labor. He especially wants to combat the tendency of intellectual workers to give away their productions, whether in the form of spoken advice or as literature properly so called. Poe of course was not alone in this. In the same year that “The Purloined Letter” was published, a writer in the Weekly Mirror actually lamented the fact that authors did not treat their texts like other commodities: “What a butcher would think of veal, as a marketable commodity, if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give away, is very near the conclusion that a merely business man would arrive at, in inquiring into the saleableness of fugitive literature.”⁴⁷

Whether out of desperation or perversity, Poe sometimes attacked a social formation regulated by the laws of political economy by making those laws universal. Tales of ratiocination like “The Purloined Letter” accordingly reproduce, at the level of form, the lived contradiction between the society of perfect information and a signifying environment where information functions as a commodity or, more precisely, as capital itself. Aside from banishing all profundity or metaphysical depth, then, the culture of surfaces would ultimately subject all knowledge to market forces. As Marx would say, the culture of surfaces heralds “the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become marketable value, is brought to the marketplace to be assessed at its truest value.”⁴⁸ Though this seems a rather improbable solution to the predicament of the antebellum author, it actually represents Poe's calculated response to the overproduction of information, a fact made clear by his curious yet consistent advocacy of superficial knowledge.⁴⁹ And although the detective tale risks subjecting all signification to the laws of commerce, it also renders everything—from the broken nail in the window casement to the pasteboard card-rack on the mantel piece—an object of extreme fascination, if only because every inconspicuous detail might be the first link in a signifying chain leading to great wealth.

But although he invoked the virtues of commerce in imaginary realms, Poe had little practical faith in the laws of political economy. In “The Philosophy of Furniture,” for example, he rejects the very premise of the culture of surfaces when he complains that “the cost of an article of furniture has at length come to be, with us, nearly the sole test of its merit” (PT, 383). Further doubt emerges from his lifelong view of poetry (rather than the tale) as the highest field of artistic endeavor. For one thing, Poe frequently implied that poetry was inconsistent with a life of money getting, though it should be noted that his position was not entirely consistent.⁵⁰ More important is Poe's intimation of a contradiction between the poetic sentiment and the rights of property. In one of his last and most conciliatory articles on Longfellow's alleged plagiarisms, Poe magnanimously admits that the poetic sentiment “implies a peculiarly, perhaps abnormally keen appreciation of the beautiful, with a longing for its assimilation, or absorption into the poetic identity” (ER, 758). After a poet “assimilates” a poem, “he thoroughly feels it as his own,” and years later this assimilation can give rise to acts of unintentional plagiarism. Poe goes on to draw a direct correlation between the magnitude of poetic sentiment and the susceptibility to “poetic impression,” so that “for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets” (ER, 759). This effectively turns the concept of literary property on its head. If poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty (as Poe argues in “The Rationale of Verse”), and if beauty inherently subverts the proprietary status of literature because of its susceptibility to “assimilation,” then one can only conclude that poetry is theft. As we shall see in the following chapter, the line between theft and poetic inspiration is never clearly drawn, not even in Poe's most sublime creations.

In the tales of ratiocination, however, sublimity is out of the question. Instead of fleeing beyond the space and time of capitalist regulation, the Dupin tales look forward to a culture where emergent economic tendencies have become dominant. It is this very strategy of intensification which plants the seeds of instability and disintegration. That is to say, Poe's attempt to universalize the horrid laws of political economy gives rise to a culture of surfaces, but this is always on the verge of being transformed into its dialectical opposite, namely a culture of collective meaning where the laws of political economy are universally violated. The detective story therefore represents Poe's most profound response to the transformation of the publishing industry and the birth of a vaguely ominous mass audience. Stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” attempt to outwit the crisis of overproduction in the literary market by imagining the reverse situation—a social crisis caused by a scarcity of information. This scarcity of information enables intellectuals like Dupin to overcome the power of capital and to escape artistic annihilation at the hands of the anonymous urban masses. In the first detective story, however, Dupin does not yet sell the product of his intellectual labor to the highest bidder; he instead relies on the patronage of his American sidekick. The lingering reliance on patronage comes to an end in “The Purloined Letter,” a tale which not only denies the triumph of literary over market value, but which also questions whether the mass cultural text can be the bearer of any socially useful meaning whatsoever. Regardless of what it may have meant to a certain exalted personage, the stolen letter retains its power only so long as its contents remain secret. By the inner logic of both the tale and the emerging relations of production, information would lose all value the instant it became common knowledge.

Notes

1. Nora Barlow, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins, 1958), 93-94.

2. Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47.

3. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” rpt. in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 395.

4. The reference to ideology comes from “On Raymond Chandler,” in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 124. Jameson's comment about supreme triviality appears in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (winter 1979): 132.

5. It is important to note, however, that the culture of surfaces can be read or deciphered only by an uncommon few, such as analytical detectives and calculating angels.

6. Originally published in Godey's Lady's Book, November 1844; rpt. in PT, 728-42. Mandel prefers it to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Delightful Murder, 19), and Julian Symons, himself a mystery writer, affirms that “it is also emphatically a tale of detection, including as it does false clues planted by the villain, and the first instance of the marks made by a rifle barrel being used as a clue in solving a crime.” See Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin, 1978), 222.

7. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), 10. For Haycraft “Thou Art the Man” is not, strictly speaking, a detective story, because crucial evidence is withheld from the reader until after the crime is solved.

8. See Robert M. Walsh, trans., Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, by Louis L. de Loménie (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 221. Poe reviewed this volume for the April 1841 Graham's Magazine, the same issue where “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appeared.

9. For information on the case, see Mabbott's introduction to the story in Collected Works 3:715-22. For generous excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts, see William K. Wimsatt, Jr., “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56 (March 1941): 230-48; and John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Circumstances behind the Mystery of Marie Rogêt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967). For an excellent reinterpretation of the significance of the tale, see Laura Saltz, “‘(Horrible to Relate!)’: Recovering the Body of Marie Rogêt,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 237-67.

10. Although the review refers to being “hampered by the facts,” it later praises Poe for clearing up much of the confusion surrounding the case: “To this day, with the exception of the light afforded by the tale of Mr. Poe, in which the faculty of analysis is applied to the facts, the whole matter is shrouded in complete mystery. … At all events, he has dissipated in our mind, all belief that the murder was perpetrated by more than one” (ER, 872).

11. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 67. Ziff argues that Poe's “poems and tales are only rarely set in a recognizable part of America, bear no conscious relation to the habits of abstract speculation that marked much of its literature, bypass explicit moral themes, are unconcerned with social matters, and adhere to a ‘literary’ diction that is confected.” There is some truth to Ziff's description, but as I indicate throughout this study, Poe was never isolated from American contexts and contradictions. If he produced the appearance of isolation, then that is an artistic achievement which must be investigated in its own right.

12. In his 1845 footnote, Poe points out that the tale “was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded” (PT, 506). He nevertheless feels confidence in the correctness of his general conclusions and “hypothetical details.”

13. Poe complained of having “no proprietary interest” in the Southern Literary Messenger, and when describing similar experiences at Graham's Magazine, Poe keenly explained that insofar as “Mr. G[raham] was a man of capital and I had no money … I was continually laboring against myself” (Letters, 1:205).

14. One of the narrator's comments in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” emphasizes this point: “Upon reading these various extracts, they not only seemed to me irrelevant, but I could perceive no mode in which any one of them could be brought to bear upon the matter in hand. I waited for some explanation from Dupin” (PT, 536).

15. Among other things, this process of exclusion denies the collective nature of literary production; as Walter Benjamin warns, cultural treasures “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” “These on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256.

16. “On Literary Evolution,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays on the Sociology of Literary Forms, rev. ed (London: Verso, 1988), 262-78. Moretti advocates an extreme version of literary Darwinism partly because he believes that no one else has yet made the attempt; according to him, only the Russian Formalists came close with their theory of literary change as a “mutation of systems,” and even this had “no lasting impact” (268). Moretti is in error here, because other materialist critics have made strikingly similar uses of Darwin. In the thirties, Sidney Hook argued that there is “an important distinction between the origin of any cultural fact and its acceptance. In art, for example, all sorts of stylistic variations or mutants appear in any period. The social and political environment acts as a selective agency upon them.” See Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (New York: The John Day Company, 1933), 160. (It should be noted that Hook later went on to advocate very different critical and political positions.) Presumably, Moretti also did not know of French critic Ferdinand Brunetière's application of Darwin to literary studies, made some forty years before Hook's. In 1889, Brunetière argued that literary genres evolve like animal species, and he accordingly sought to demonstrate “in virtue of what circumstances of time and place [genres] originate; how they grow after the manner of living beings, adapting or assimilating all that helps their development; how they perish; and how their disintegrated elements enter into the formation of a new genre.” See Brunetière, L'Evolution de la poésie lyrique; quoted in Irving Babbitt, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 325.

17. “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning.” See Marx, Capital, 284.

18. Review of Theodorick Bland's Reports of Cases decided in the High Court of Chancery of Maryland, Southern Literary Messenger 2 (October 1836): 731.

19. For Dupin as Romantic hero, see Stephano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 4-15. For the importance of mystery in romanticism, see Richard Alewyn, “The Origin of the Detective Novel,” in The Poetics of Murder, 74.

20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 84.

21. Collected Works, 29:84.

22. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, July 1839; rpt. Complete Works, 14:27. For the date of the collaboration between Poe and Wyatt, see Poe Log, 259.

23. The chapter is based on Georges Cuvier's Le règne animal (Paris, 1817), which was translated (with supplements) by Edward Griffith et al. as The Animal Kingdom by Baron Georges Cuvier (London, 1827). The relevant passage on language, from the English translation, is as follows: “The results of human experience, transmitted by language, modified by reflection, and applied to our various wants and enjoyments, have originated all the arts of human life, whether useful or ornamental. Language and letters, by affording the means of preserving and communicating all acquired knowledge, form, for our species, an indefinite source of perfection” (92). As indicated in the text, Poe sees the accumulation of facts as the cause of writing, giving the passage a very different sense from the original. Additional evidence for Poe's authorship comes from his 14 February 1847 letter to George Eveleth, where Poe claims that he translated passages from Cuvier for The Conchologist's First Book, the first work on which he and Wyatt collaborated (Letters, 2:343). If Poe translated Cuvier for this book, he probably did it for the Synopsis as well.

24. Thomas Wyatt, A Synopsis of Natural History (Philadelphia, 1839), 21.

25. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally et al., trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). Saussure depicts language (langue) as an impersonal and autonomous system, which is distinct from both human speech (langage) and individual acts of speaking (actes de parole). Because it is a complex social system, “language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity” (14). From a more liberal perspective, Thomas Kuhn argues that “Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.” Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 210. Kuhn seems to miss Saussure's (and Poe's) implication: knowledge that is intrinsically the common property of the group is intrinsically beyond the ken of the individual subject.

26. Lucian Minor, “Selection in Reading,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (February 1836): 19.

27. Cited in Williams, Culture and Society, 35-37.

28. Prefatory essay to The Prose Writers of America, quoted in Poe Log, 694. Interestingly, Griswold praises the new ratiocinative aspects (the “analytical subtlety”) as well as aspects that might be found in a gothic horror tale (“revolting and terrible circumstances”). To reinvoke the discourse of biological evolution, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would represent a sort of missing link between Poe's tales of horror and a “pure” tale of ratiocination like “The Purloined Letter.”

29. See his series on “Autography,” his remarks on N. P. Willis (ER, 1125), and his comments in the November 1844 Marginalia (ER, 1322-23).

30. Collected Works, 3:972.

31. He was in such a hurry to sell “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” that he offered it simultaneously to two different publishers. See Letters, 1:199-203.

32. See, for example, Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 39-66; and Franco Moretti, “Clues,” collected in Signs Taken for Wonders, 130-56.

33. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1976), 91-92; Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 154-58.

34. As to the real perpetrator, it is important to recall the unlikelihood that either Poe or his readers had ever seen an orangutan. The strangeness of the orangutan would allow its contours to be filled out by a political imagination, and in antebellum America such an imagination would perhaps see a similarity between Poe's orangutan and black slaves. See my “Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy,” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 381-417.

35. Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, 5, 7.

36. Clive Bloom, “Capitalizing on Poe's Detective: the Dollars and Sense of Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction,” in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Bloom to Conan Doyle, ed. Bloom et al. (Hampshire, UK: Macmillan, 1988), 24.

37. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

38. Both Poe and Bentley had their appetites for information whetted by their upbringing in merchants' households. According to Brown, Bentley's circle of commercial friends enabled him “to become expert in commercial matters and well-informed regarding the overseas interests of his community without venturing outside his own parish. … Raised as he was in a merchant's household, Bentley respected the knowledge and prowess of men of affairs whose information was often fresher and more direct than what Bentley could glean from print. Moreover what he learned from his merchant friends was not available in any library” (203).

39. Jefferson wrote ten thousand personal letters, many of them designed to instruct or to convey useful knowledge. Although it would be difficult for an individual to duplicate that feat, an institution or a mass-circulation periodical could perform a similar task with relative ease.

40. To get a sense of how these were marketed, it is worthwhile to cite the subtitle of Arnold James Cooley's The Book of Useful Knowledge, a multivolume work that Poe mentioned many times as editor of the Broadway Journal. The title page of each volume proclaimed “A Cyclopedia of Several Thousand Practical Receipts, and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, and Trades,—including Medicine, Pharmacy, and Domestic Economy. Designed as a Compendious Book of Reference for the Manufacturer, Tradesman, Amateur, and Heads of Families.”

41. “Letter to Mr.——,” PT, 13. In this regard it is worthwhile to note Emerson's 1842 journal entry on the “superficial” nature of American urban life: “In New York City lately, as in cities generally, one seems to lose all substance, and become surface in a world of surfaces. Everything is external, and I remember my hat and coat, and all my other surfaces, and nothing else.” Quoted in Robert H. Byer, “Mysteries of the City: A Reading of ‘Poe's Man of the Crowd,’” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221-22.

42. As noted above, this predicament was due to many factors, including technological advancements, the efforts of the state and nongovernmental associations, and lax copyright laws, which enabled American publishers to reprint foreign works at will. Concerning the relative surplus of professional intellectuals, it should be pointed out the phenomenon was first perceived as a problem by the intellectual elite. James Madison, for example, advised his nephew that “the great and increasing number of our universities, colleges, and academies, and other seminaries, are already throwing out crops of educated youth beyond the demand for them in the professions and pursuits requiring such preparations.” Madison to Richard D. Cutts, 12 September 1835. Cited in Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203.

43. ER, 1062. The culture of surfaces was partly a response to feigned brilliance and a false erudition. Cf. Poe's remarks on Robert Southey: “Erudition is only certainly known in its total results. The mere grouping together of mottoes from the greatest multiplicity of the rarest works, or even the apparently natural interweaving into any composition, of the sentiments and manner of these works, are attainments within the reach of any well-informed, ingenious and industrious man having access to the great libraries of London” (ER, 343). Bulwer is more vehemently denounced for trying to “ape the externals of a deep meaning” (ER, 1062). Similar charges, of course, could be leveled against Poe himself.

44. Extending the concept of a “zeroworker,” one might classify Dupin as a kind of zerowriter. The term “zerowork” (the refusal of capitalist labor) comes from the Italian Autonomia movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. For information on Autonomia and the work of Antonio Negri, the theorist closely associated with the movement, see the Introductions by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano to Negri's Marx Beyond Marx (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984). For one version of what Poe may have wished for in a signifying environment, see “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” quoted below.

45. Poe's comments on the daguerreotype originally appeared on 15 January 1840 and are reprinted in Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe's Contributions to “Alexander's Weekly Messenger,” 21-22.

46. Modern-day heralds of the information society share many of the same assumptions. According to Daniel Bell, for example, a post-industrial society is characterized “not by a labor theory of value but by a knowledge theory of value.” Extrapolating from ideological and economic trends of the sixties, Bell wants to chart the ascendancy of a knowledge class that would rationally organize data, scientific research, and society itself. For him, this ascendancy is virtually guaranteed by certain intrinsic differences between information and industrial commodities, differences that make information “a collective good” that can be distributed to all and yet remain with the producer even after it is sold (xiv). See Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1976). This is not the place to offer a critique, but in retrospect Bell would have been more correct to predict the rise of a new information proletariat. Since the 1970s, there has been a dramatic increase in information sector employment, an increase consisting largely of lower paying jobs in telecommunications, computer services, and data processing. See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: The Technological Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 24.

47. New York Weekly Mirror, 12 October 1844, 15. Cited in Bruce I. Weiner, The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship, (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1987), 9.

48. Quoted in Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20.

49. In “The Rationale of Verse” Poe argues that “it is the nature of Truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial” and that “the clearest subject may be overclouded by mere superabundance of talk” (ER, 27).

50. Like the romantics, Poe believed that “the higher order of poetry is, and always will be, in this country, unsaleable” (Letters, 1:216). Unlike the romantics, however, Poe often viewed wealth, especially the wealth which renders one “independent,” as a positive aid to poetic creation. Thus in “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe's happiest poet is also his wealthiest character. See Chapter Nine for a discussion of the tale.