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the form of the book by putting it into endless conflict with itself. (A Theory of
Literary Production, 256)
It’s nearly as if Macherey is concurring with Deleuze on the multiplicities the virtual(ity) represents.
The narrative absence or the unsaid stands for infinite paths the author could have chosen, and these paths represent different possible developments of the text that simply contradict with what the text is like now. That is, whenever an author leaves something unsaid, (s)he is literally creating a repository of virtualities or potentialities, namely, factors that could have helped to shape the text differently.
IV. My Hypothesis in this Dissertation
In Chapter II, I’ve already established the fact that it was Poe who spawned the detective fiction genre. I’ve quoted Lee, “One reason for such influence is that the Dupin stories introduce but do not exhaust the possibilities of detective fiction, offering later writers a generative model open to improvisation.” T. S. Eliot also states that as far as the detective fiction genre is concerned, nearly everything can be traced back to Poe (“From Poe to Valery,” 208). Lee has established Poe as the founding father of the detective fiction genre, as we’ve talked about in Chapter II. And Eliot thinks that Poe set up the basic conventions of the detective fiction genre. If we can go further, we’ll realize that when Lee speaks of the “possibilities,” and when Eliot sees everything traced back to Poe, more or less both of them have discerned the potentialities of the genre. And within a
Machereyan frame of reference, these potentialities are actually the narrative ruptures or the things Poe left unsaid in his Dupin stories. Following the conventions Poe set up, detective stories writers in later generations may have said the unsaid and repaired the narrative ruptures in the Dupin stories, (It doesn’t really matter if they did so intentionally or unintentionally!) in the course of which they tapped these potentialities and gave us an enactment of the case scenario of what Poe’s Dupin stories could have been, or from a broader perspective, the developmental direction of the whole genre. Based on this analysis, I hereby formulate the hypothesis of this dissertation: the narrative ruptures in Poe’s detective stories are a repository of potentialities. At each stage, writers tapped these potentialities differently. Thus, the development of the detective fiction genre was pulled to
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different directions. And I shall dedicate the next three chapters to verifying this hypothesis. This is how I intend to do it: with the Machereyan said/unsaid model consolidated by the other theorists, I will situate the narrative ruptures in Poe’s detective stories. Then I will examine how these ruptures were repaired (Of course, the prerequisite for this hypothesis is the fact that Poe’s Dupin stories are purely the only origin of this genre, just as the quote from Underworld says, “We need(ed) a pure source!” And that’s what my endeavor in Chapter II is all about!)
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Chapter Four: The Setting in the Detective Story
[A good story] establishes not truth but verisimilitude.
J. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, 11, italics mine.
The city of Los Angels is ravaged by crime and immorality!
Escape From L. A. (1997)
I. The First Narrative Rupture in Poe’s Detective Stories:
Poe composed “The Murders in Rue Morgue” in 1841, when Andrew Jackson’s (1767-1845) presidency just came to an end, the first Whig President, William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), just passed away right after elected, and John Tyler became the 10th American president. Meanwhile, the U.S. just weathered the Panic of 1837, when “all signs indicated that the country was in a serious depression. Hundreds of banks and other businesses failed. Land and commodity prices collapsed. Unemployment spread and wages fell” (Klose and Jones, United States History, 165-73).
Even so, ordinary American people then were still under such an impression:
The men and women who came to live in America had a special dream, a special hope…a new republic, a safe place for liberty…The new nation became
independent. It prospered and it grew larger…Americans were proud of their freedom, their prosperity and their democratic government. (Crothers, American
History, 81)
It is noteworthy that here American people’s liberty or freedom also included their wish to pursue more materialistic wealth, which to some extent, had compromised their individualism. At that time, there was a
wholesale loss of Yankee individualism as both men and women deserted wornout farms for factories, where many began to feel what Emerson called “the
disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them.” Far too often, the search for a better life had degenerated into a desire to possess factory-made objects.
(Norton Anthology, 925)
In a way, American people’s greed ensued from American society’s prosperity because American
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society then had become a joint-stock company where each member strove for a better securing of his or her bread (925). On the other hand, with America’s prosperity, a great deal of capital was amassed and concentrated, which, according to Henri Lefebvre, would be accompanied by urban development (Writings on Cities, 69). “Urban space gathers crowds, products in the markets, acts and symbols. It concentrates all these, and accumulates them” (101).F26F Indeed,
the sheer magnitude of these new cities radically affected the lives of city dwellers.
The metropolises were after all five to ten times as large as the leading cities of half a century before…no important facet of urban life was left untouched by the rapid change in scale. (Warner, The Urban Wilderness, 72-3)
As the major American cities expanded, they changed dramatically. One of the major urban developments then was the multiplication of their public and private amenities, in which
contemporaries took justifiable pride (Fitch, American Buildings, 108). One the other hand, these ever-growing cities also had their own problems, such as the sky-high crime rates, overpopulation, etc. Above all, they became a large capitalistic market:
The new markets relentlessly favored a different kind of businessman, called in those
Urban capitalization doubtless has its severe, inhumane downsides. Take Boston for instance. Some urban capitalists in Boston were garment manufacturers; in their factories they reorganized their
26 Speaking of urban space, Lefebvre associates it with production, stating that “the city constitutes a means of production.” Paul Walker Clarke is even more specific, “Capitalist cities are cities of constant flux of capital…By mid-nineteenth century, the dominant economic character of cities shifted from centers of commerce to centers of production.” Edward W. Soja proposes a “materialist interpretation of spatiality,” “…social relations of production and class can be reconfigured and possibly transformed through the evolving spatiality which makes them concrete…Social and spatial structures are dialectically intertwined in social life…” See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,. Trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith. (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p88. Paul Walker Clarke, “The Economic Currency of Architectural Aesthetics,” Designing Cities: Critical Readings in Urban Design, ed by.
Alexander R. Cuthbert. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p30. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p127.
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labor, lengthened the workers’ hours, abolished the holidays, and oriented their businesses towards ever spiraling production and sales (Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 75-7).
All in all, in Poe’s society, the major American cities became the centers of capital and industry; on the other hand, urban capitalization and industrialization, though emblematic of progress and prosperity of the U.S., invited various social problems, such as the exploitation of labor. Faced with these dark social realities, American people then were still ideologically
programmed to pursue wealth and embrace whatever urban capitalization had brought them. This is what Eagleton terms the “GI” of the Americans then:
A dominant ideological formation is constituted by a relatively coherent set of ‘discourse’ of values, representations and beliefs which…reflect the experiential relations of individual subjects to their social conditions as to guarantee those misperceptions of the ‘real’ which contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations. (Criticism and Ideology, 54)
For Eagleton, the function of GI is to stabilize individuals’ relations to the productive apparatuses, and above all, GI is composed of relatively coherent discourses. It perfectly echoes Macherey’s point, “…this ideology is emphatically not internally contradictory, for that would presuppose that it gave a complete description of reality, that it ceased to be an ideology” (A Theory of Literary
Production, 237). And the only way to perceive its “insufficiencies, its incompleteness” or “its
flawed coherence” (238) is to put it in the narrative, as the latter “is not mechanically constructed as a simple reflection or description of reality” (278). Namely, just because such a reflection is absent from the narrative, the narrative ends up with ruptures, through which we can see how contradictory ideology truly is. In this case, we shall examine how Poe depicts the urban setting in his detective stories.As we know, the setting of Poe’s three detective stories is Paris, as A. E. Murch points out:
Poe never selected a background for any work without careful thought, and chose for each of his tales a setting to accord closely with its subject and atmosphere…It seems clear that in Poe’s opinion there was some close affinity between France and the application of inductive reasoning to the detection of crime…the ideas which
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inspired him to plan this new type of story were associated in his mind with France because they had reached him from French sources. (The Development of the
Detective Novel, 68)
Murch’s so-called “French sources” definitely refers to Vidocq, an actual French detective on whom the characterization of Dupin is based, and the French police. Paris in 1841 was “the city with reformed, professional police” (Moore, 8). On the other hand, Lewis D. Moore observes the disconnection between the depictions of Paris and its characters:
Poe introduces the city as a place of darkness…The public and private detective are thus bound together from the beginning of the detective story in an urban
environment. The cities expand with people, trade, and crime…In Poe, Paris is a dimly lit city but no one in which Dupin and his narrator friend fear to walk at night.
Poe does not equate the physical darkness with a moral one (Cracking the
Hard-Boiled Detective, 8).
According to Moore, Poe created Paris to be a dark place. However, not only does this darkness have no bearing on the characters’ action but also it is irrelevant to the morals of the detective stories if there are any. Indeed, Poe’s urban depictions are mostly given in “The Murders in Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” In the “The Murders in Rue Morgue”, the narrator and C. Auguste Dupin live in “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through
superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain” (Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, 51). Then:
It was a freak of fancy in my friend…to be enamored of the night for her own sake;
and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which,
strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays (Tales , 51).
They live in a ghastly house located in a desolate area of Paris; their life is also dimly lighted. Here, though Poe doesn’t give a panoramic description of Paris’ ambience, suffice it to say that readers can get a feel for the dark aura of the city. However, such an aura seems to have little bearing on
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their daily activities:
By the aid of these [the ghastliest and feeblest of rays] we then busied our souls in dreams － reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. 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. (Tales, 51, italics mine)
The quoted passages can best confirm Moore’s viewpoint: darkness prevails in Dupin’s surroundings as well as Paris. However, at its very best, it is merely responsible for Dupin’s personal eccentricities. Hardly related to either the main characters’ action or the happening of the murder, it only adds more color to the story every now and then:
As the sailor looked in…the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair…and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady…had the effect of changing the probably pacifc purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. (Tales, 88)
As the truth comes out in “The Murders in Rue Morgue,” the two diabolical murders turn out to be an animal’s crime of passion. Certainly, it has very little to do with the dark city of Paris. That is, Poe’s urban depiction in the story is as good as an embellishment at best.
It is even more evident in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt:”
Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound － here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of the heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution…It is now especially that, released from the claims of labor, or deprived of the customary opportunities of crime, the town blackguard seeks the precincts of the town, not through love of the rural…but by way of escape from the restraints and
conventionalities of society. He desires less the fresh air and the green trees, than the utter license of the country. (Tales, 136-7)
In the quoted passage above, Paris and its vicinity are negatively portrayed: Paris is a “sink of
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pollution,” rife with “the restraints and conventionalities of society,” and its suburbs seem more odious because of the “claims of labor,” or “the customary opportunities of crime;” they are such a licentious place where “the unwashed most abound.” Be that as it may, the filth of Paris is not intimidating for the Parisians. “Now at nine o’clock of every morning in the week, with the exception of Sunday, the streets of the city are, it is true, thronged with people” (Tales, 124).
What’s more, Poe explicitly states that Paris and its suburbs have ended up stifling and dirty
because of “the intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards” (Tales, 136). However, the murderer of Marie Rogêt is “a seaman” with a “swarthy complexion” (Tales, 147), not these thugs. That is, the unpleasant environment of Paris is not a crucial factor at all in the case of Marie Rogêt’s death.
Now, I’ve felt the need to recapitulate what has been discussed so far. First, I shall briefly delineate the ideology of Poe’s times: by Althusser’s definition, ideology is an imaginary, lived relationship between men and their world, and it defines individuals’ subjectivities. As I’ve stated previously, American people in Poe’s times were highly motivated to pursue material gains, and they were led to believe that only by doing so could they contribute to their country’s prosperity.27F On the other hand, America’s progressing economy had naturally resulted in urbanization. So one of the contradictions of this seemly flawless ideology apparently lies in the occurrence of the social problems following America’s urbanization. According to Macherey, this contradiction doesn’t exist within the ideology. It can only be rendered revealing when ideology is “put into contradiction.”
On the other hand, as Macherey comments on Verne, “…there is a dislocation between the ensemble of the historical contradictions and the defect proper to his work” (195), “the novel is not constructed as a simple reflection or description of reality” (278); its relationship “to reality is not a mechanical association…rather…the development of a process of conflict within the reality itself”
27 In “Ethics, Politics and the Potential of Dialogism,” Craig Brandist, in elaborating on Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, states that the “ruling strata” of our society are “oppressive due to their inability to perceive the schism between their limited perspectives and those in the wider community.” And from a Marxist standpoint, their oppression materializes by the agency of ideology. On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, points out that ideology critique aims to show how power relations blurs the distinction between contexts of meaning and contexts of reality, namely, individuals’ perception of reality. See Craig Brandist, “Ethics, Politics and the Potential of Dialogism,” Historical Materialism. Vol. 5 Issue 1 (1999), 243. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), p116.
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(“The Problem of Reflection,” 15). This is where the narrative rupture or the unsaid can be located.
In the case of Poe’s two detective stories, the narrative rupture originates precisely from the inconsistency between Poe’s urban representation and the ideological contradiction: in “The
Murders in Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” these murders take place in a modern city, of which Poe has given a gloomy or decaying portrayal. However, this portrayal doesn’t impinge directly on the storylines, or to be more specific, the happenings of these murders. That is, the urban setting in Poe’s detective stories ought to have set the stage for the thrilling, horrific murders, as it is lightless and contaminated. However, it turns out to be that the former is actually irrelevant, or at least, only distantly relevant to the latter. That is, the urban settings in Poe’s detective stories are in fact unhorrific. Obviously, this is what Poe has left unsaid: as a detective story thematicizes a case, or a murder mostly, the setting of a detective story should bear more thematic significance.
To supplement this argument, two more factors must be taken into account: the follow-up of Poe’s selection of Paris as the setting and Poe’s stance on the phenomenon of urbanization. As I’ve mentioned, Poe set the two detective stories in Paris mainly for the sake of “the French sources.”
On the other hand, though some critics, such as Haycraft, think Poe’s detective stories “display a remarkable knowledge of” Paris (163), Murch, drawing on the opinions of Régis Messac, François, and Somerset Maugham, concludes that the details of Paris Poe offers in his two detective stories are actually fallacious. For instance, it is out of the question that French women then would have been ready to go to bed at three in the morning with an open window, as Poe describes in “The Murders in Rue Morgue” (82).
In the two detective stories Poe has given an inexact portrayal of Paris, or in J Bruner’s words,
“a verisimilitude.” It is probably because Poe had never been to Paris, or at least there has been no substantial evidence indicating so. Above all, Poe has evidently woven into his detective stories his personal experiences with the American cities. “In the decades before the Civil War, Poe lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City, witnessing firsthand the related
“a verisimilitude.” It is probably because Poe had never been to Paris, or at least there has been no substantial evidence indicating so. Above all, Poe has evidently woven into his detective stories his personal experiences with the American cities. “In the decades before the Civil War, Poe lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City, witnessing firsthand the related