The Functionalist Poe and His Place in the Canon

Reading Edgar Allan Poe when I was about twelve, I wondered why the critics and academics were so mesmerised by a writer who today should be considered a hack (or so I thought as a child). With his reputation grinding at my back as one of America’s premier nineteenth-century writers beatified as part of the American canon, even my adolescent mind wasn’t credulous enough to accept beating hearts and the ape did it as paradigms of American literature. In college I found Poe’s poems, with their uniform stanzas and standard rhymes, to be foppish; treacly imitations in form, greeting cards of an American romantic sent to his English cousins. These Gothic tales can only be satisfying as diversions for teenage boys.

What embeds Poe as part of the American canon isn’t the inherent merit in the stories, what the critics see and won’t quite acknowledge is the functionalist value of Poe on American literature. Poe and other literary progenitors brought us some of the first short stories, and Poe brought us possibly the first detective story with his urbane and intellectual Dupin.

The language of Poe isn’t lacking, sparse or delimiting for his stories; the voice is intellectual, character delineation is fine-grained. The most writerly aspect of Poe is that individual hubris brings men to folly and dissolution. Extremely agitated mental states and derangement are the devices Poe employs to stretch realism and make the unbelievable and fantastic palatable. The reader is told several times that the narrator couldn’t believe his eyes or thought he was going insane. In Poe’s tales of terror, the psychological component is embedded in the narrative, the reader is told the revellers are scared of the Red Death (the reason for their debauch), entwining the psychological element in the narrative and in first-person character development. I shuddered at discovering the Red Death in the castle after the revellers tried to sequester themselves, but my twelve-year-old reader’s mind shrugged instead of shrinking back in horror at the disembodied Reaper.

My adult self let out a shriek of objection when, in “The Black Cat”, the creature’s eye was cut out, but found the hubris of the narrator that leads to his arrest too easy of a plot device. Would anyone have the gall to tap on the entombing wall, which crumbles and leads to the narrator’s apprehension? Poe’s imagery is capriciously Gothic, imagery which a twelve-year-old would thrill at, not examine for believability, like the white fur of the cat’s chest that shapes itself into a GALLOWS (written so in the story), the reality-ignoring cries from the tomb (the cat, too, should be dead) and the cat’s single eye of fire. All the detail in the story is vividly realistic and none is believable in the context of terror because its very description defies what it is describing.

These aren’t the terrors of the Second World War, where a family’s farm is being used for a battleground, but the terror conjured by the imagination limned in realistic detail, which destroys the credibility of the object or phenomenon described. The stories of terror don’t work as Poe wished them to, and Poe defenders might turn to none other than Mark Twain to show off another writer who created non-realist fiction. These partisans will point to “When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree” from Roughing It, but this is a tall tale and Twain is chucking you in the ribs, get it? get it? Poe wants desperately to be believed (the Balloon Hoax notwithstanding), or why else would he write the stories? There is a false, that is to say, misplaced seriousness in how Poe regarded his terror and tales of the macabre and the falsely lofty valence given to these stories by critics and college professors. Poe said his stories were terrors of the soul and asserted that terror was a legitimate subject for literature, but Poe disproves his own theory. Terror cannot be depicted with realistic methods; if terror can be described and explained rationally then it is no longer holds its dread.

But in “The Purloined Letter” the psychological element inheres in the character, which makes for a superior story. Dupin is both intellectual and wily, but he is not idealised, he’s shown to have a grudge against the Minister, and leaves a nasty note in the facsimile letter for the Minister to find. Dupin is also an intriguer, for his motivation is not to solve the theft for its own sake, but to get back at the Minister, who is a political enemy and had done him an “evil turn” in Vienna. Yet what is most interesting about Dupin, and masterful in Poe, is how the author brings in mathematics and philosophy, the algebraic principles of logic and the schoolboy’s psychological logic of “even or odd” to steal the letter and force the Prefect to pay him 50,000 francs.

It also seems that Poe is having sport with the reader, parodying the criminological methods of the Prefect reminiscent of Swift’s depiction of political suitors who do all kinds of irrelevant stunts, like walking a tightrope, to prove their fitness for office. The last line of “The Purloined Letter” is comical vengeance (and a magnificent irony) when Dupin quotes his note as saying that the Minister is not worthy of Atreus, who committed adultery with his brother’s wife and seduced his sister, but is worthy of his brother, Thyestes, who fed Atreus’s children to him. This works on several levels. Besides the obvious insult, it gives only a hint of who it was that outwitted the Minister and demonstrates Dupin’s conviction that victory was won by the superior intellect.

Another of Poe’s three stories of ratiocination, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, is moronically absurd. The reader cannot suspend disbelief because Poe has shattered the reader’s credibility and can never retrieve the trust. Anyone who has studied primatology will tell you that orangutans do not behave in the violent manner described, and I guffawed when the ape parodied shaving, which the ape is described as having seen through a keyhole, a contingency that’s a device to push the story along, and which mirrors the way the old lady’s head was cut off. Indeed, every detail seems like an obvious contingency convenient to making the story work, including the manner of ingress and egress, as Poe stiffly puts it, of the fourth-floor apartment that only an animal could accomplish, the shank of grey hair, the body stuffed up the chimney. It’s not likely that an orangutan would possess what amounts to a stricken Christian conscience that, understanding it deserves punishment, wants to conceal his crime, rips up the place and stuffs a body up the chimney. Poe gives orangutans a level of intellection they do not possess. The reader is also supposed to believe that the sash would open from the outside without the spring and that once inside the chambers, the ape could manipulate the broken nail and activate the spring.

This scenario might suffice in a Pasquinade (as Poe would say), but not for a writer whom the critics consider one of the premier artists of his time and attribute to him both literary mastery and profundity. Poe’s literary devices stick out like objects that are meant for concealment. The modern reader might be tempted to excuse Poe’s ignorance concerning orangutan behaviour, yet the entire reason for the story’s existence is the orangutan’s violent nature.

The reader understands where Conan Doyle got Holmes’s spurious power of observation after reading Dupin. Sherlock Holmes could (in)famously observe a man’s dress, facial expression and manner of movement, and tell Dr Watson every salient detail of that individual. Poe has Dupin reading the mind of the nameless narrator when he mentions Théâtre des Variétés. Chantilly has changed his name to a variant of Orion and the narrator is astonished at the amateur detective’s superhuman powers as Dupin free-associates from Chantilly to the art of cutting stone into shapes (sterotomy), thus to the atomies and the theories of Epicurus, which compels the narrator to think of cosmogony and to look up to Orion (or maybe he had a piece of Paris smut in his eye), all of which Dupin surmises when the fruiterer runs up against the narrator. Poe wishes the reader to be amazed at the circuitous route of Dupin’s inductive reasoning, but we can only shake our twelve-year-old heads at the capriciousness of the transparent ploy.

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” is the most difficult and least successful of Poe’s stories of ratiocination. It suffers the major literary sin of being static, owing to the density of rhetoric, the turn and counter-turn of postulation and answer, the acuity of the psychological inductions and Dupin’s philosophical bent. There’s no physical movement of the characters, it is practically Dupin’s soliloquy and the unnamed narrator’s leading questions, necessary for Dupin to remark on another item or detail. References back to newspaper articles about the death also make for a static story. Yet Dupin’s gleeful refutations of the presumptions of the newspapers are part of the fun; the reader experiences the folly of the human mind and its snap judgments and presumptions.

The reader can make an inductive inference of his own and surmise Poe’s contempt for journalists; they are producers of sensationalism instead of seekers after truth, are sloppy with their facts and logic and include in their articles preconceived notions that they are too shallow to understand as prejudgments. Almost every Paris paper has adopted the notion that a corpse takes six to ten days for decomposition before it rises again to the surface of water and thus this could not be Marie Roget’s body because of the insufficient time span in the water. Unswervingly sure of himself, the premise of the journalist at L’Etoile forces him to absurd conclusions. Dupin rips L’Etoile’s fallacious misinformation that dead bodies sink. Dupin explains the science of how a corpse actually floats because of displacement, and notes the distinction the journalist made between drowned bodies and bodies thrown into the water. Here, a quibble is to be made. Dupin complains the journalist makes the distinction between the two manners of death but then puts drowned bodies and bodies thrown into the water in the same category. Yet Dupin shows that the two modes of death are differences without distinction; either way, the body will float unless the person was struggling in the water, and Dupin knows this not true because the girl was already dead. Dupin reasons that the body is possibly that of Marie Roget.

The journalist attempts to foreshorten the time span between when Marie Roget was last seen and the discovery of the body in the water to preclude the possibility of the corpse being Marie Roget. Two assumptions come with the journalist’s premise; that the body could not be left on shore, where it would suffer rapid decomposition (and thus presumably float once in the water) and the body ashore would provoke discovery of the murderer(s), the last part disparaged by Dupin because the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. The body might sink and then float in twenty-four hours if the body was drowned, but no one claims the body was drowned, thus Dupin adduces she could have been floating any time after she was thrown into the water. Dupin makes ironic sport when he encapsulates the journalist’s argument in the fallaciously comical syllogism:

The corpse immersed in water is without weight attached

Murderers, casting the body in, would not have failed to attach a weight

Therefore, it was not thrown in by murderers.

Further, Dupin notes the partisan argument that Marie Roget was not seen after nine o’clock on Sunday as merely collaborative circumstantial evidence that directs the argument the way the journalist wishes, to foreshorten the time between last being seen and death to prove the corpse is not that of Marie Roget. With the necessary and sufficient condition satisfied that the corpse in the water could be Marie Roget, Dupin remarks upon what the journalist refuses—the obvious—and points out that any one of the features of the woman and her clothing could be a coincidence, but having every detail matching that of Marie Roget is proof multiplied by hundreds of thousands, that the corpse is indeed Marie Roget.

After Dupin dismisses Beauvais’s behaviour as only that of a prospective lover to Marie Roget, he expresses the thought that Le Commerciel is more rigorous in thought but its premises are founded on imperfect observation. It is a presumption on the paper’s part that Marie Roget would walk a regular route, thus people would recognise her, but Dupin adduces she walked an irregular route because of a possible rendezvous with her lover where residents wouldn’t know her. And since it was Sunday morning, past empirical evidence suggests that few would have seen or recognised her because most residents were dressing for church. The newspaper also mischaracterises the reason for the petticoat around Marie Roget’s neck as a gag for her screaming. Dupin counters that these are exactly the kind of ruffians that would carry pocket kerchiefs for gags and later reveals his surmise; the petticoat was a handle to carry her and the fence was knocked down because the lone perpetrator couldn’t lift her over the barrier. The sling and the fence tell Dupin there was only one man. Dupin then turns to the identity of that man. Dupin intuits that it is probable (the chances are ten to one) that the swarthy naval officer is the one who took her away the second time after the first broken romance.

Dupin makes a set of inferences as he concentrates on the bower again. If there was a gang, why, Dupin asks, would there be a trampled area because Marie Roget could not put up that kind of resistance, and why would they remove the body, but not the obvious evidence of murder? Dupin then tests his hypothesis. A lone murderer, alone with the body, might become terrified at what he’s done at his discovery and flee the scene intending to come back for the items in the bower, but he does not because fear overcomes him and his one thought is of escape. A gang might inspire confidence in the individuals and would forestall any anxiety and as a gang they wouldn’t forget to carry all of the items out of the thicket. Dupin surmises that, just as the trampling bower wasn’t done by a gang, so too it is not consistent to think that a gang would forget evidence like the Marie Roget handkerchief, but an individual in a panic would. Dupin also adduces that it was a single man, not a gang, who out of necessity made the bandage to carry the body and the strip around the neck was for dragging the body to the river.

Dupin points out that there are many gangs in the vicinity, and deems Madame Deluc’s evidence suspicious and tardy because she attempts to pin the murder on the gang of ruffians who ate and drank at her inn without payment and then followed a man and a woman. Madame Deluc heard the screams at night, which was after the ruffians had left (and yet no journalist or policeman made the connection, another of Poe’s slaps at intellectual sloppiness). Dupin dismisses this as coincidence. Madame Deluc imagines them leaving hurriedly, for she is still upset about the non-payment and wants her revenge. When Poe’s Dupin calls her sober, it must be read as an irony.

Dupin then makes his last argument against a gang as the murderers by saying that they are quick to betray each other before they themselves are betrayed. As true as the statement is of man’s lowest instinct for self-preservation, it is unneeded. Like every item of Marie Roget’s body and clothing adding up to a probable identification, so too has Dupin demonstrated over and over that there should be little doubt left that it was a lone perpetrator. The fact that she was seen with the swarthy naval officer, the knot around Marie Roget that only a sailor would tie and knowing where to retrieve the boat all identify the naval officer as the murderer. Yet, after the newspaper accounts are refuted and Dupin deduces the circumstances around the murder of Marie Roget through a string of inferences and the evidence is laid out, the reader is deprived of the murderer’s apprehension. What follows is the editors’ note in brackets, by the slight clew obtained from Dupin the result desired was brought to pass and Dupin was paid for his troubles, indicating the killer was caught.

We read a murder mystery for the cathartic moment of the criminal’s capture. Here, the reader is not given that moment of release; the murderer is not identified, though hinted at, and the apprehension is not done in front of the reader’s eyes. There is also some confusion created when the editors state that Mr Poe’s article concludes … Hey, wait a minute! That would mean that the unnamed narrator is actually Poe himself, and calling the writing an article instead of fiction takes it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. And here is where the conspiracy/fantasy comes in.

There is a hypothesis on the internet that it was actually Poe who killed Mary Rogers, dumped her body into the Hudson and then wrote the story whose decedent’s name was as close to the real victim’s as Poe could come as a concealed confession/expiation. This interpretation would make the last few paragraphs intelligible for inclusion. Poe/Dupin admonishes the reader not to mistake one victim in New York for the other in Paris, which would serve as a snarky spite (like Dupin’s note to the Minister in “The Purloined Letter”) to the journalists and policemen to whom Poe alluded. Further, if the motive for Poe writing the story was a hidden confession, much of Poe’s/Dupin’s attitude towards journalists and police as incompetent and little more than intellectual peasants could be attributed to the fact that Poe was altogether overlooked as a suspect. Unfortunately, the conspiracy that Poe killed Mary Cecilia Rogers is as believable as the cat’s single eye of fire in “The Black Cat”. Someone has become ensnared in what is probably Poe’s put-on, self-mocking, intended just as the conspiracist accuses but without the criminal liability. Perhaps the hoax was to display an early example of metafiction, where the construction comments on its artifice, as “The Mystery of Marie Roget” does when Poe is accessed in the editors’ note and Poe is writer/subject of a mirror murder of the fictional Marie Roget and the real-life Mary Rogers.

So what are the qualities critics see that compel them to place Poe’s bust in the niche of the American canon? Poe’s writing style is superlative applied to inferior material. It is as though Poe never transcended his hack work in journalism. His judgment was faulty because imagined terror is not credible if described in realistic terms. Poe’s stories don’t work as stories, but it is Poe’s talent with language that critics former, present and probably future posit as the premise for Poe being a major literary figure. This signifies that Poe is part of the canon not because of the inherent quality of the stories but for aesthetics, precision and a high literary style. Like superstitionists, the critics celebrate the spirit while ignoring the body. Yet, the reader has to sympathise with the hapless critic. What can the besieged critic do, when Poe, the master of irony, who has the voice and style of a major writer, obsesses over terror, the macabre and the Gothic, and this critic wants to place Poe in the centre of nineteenth-century literature? Does the critic wish that Poe would have searched farther afield—or, perhaps closer to home—for realistic and naturalistic subject matter? But then Poe wouldn’t be Poe.

Poe’s output was between sixty-nine and eighty pieces of fiction, including one novel. He extended the European tradition of the Gothic into America and he created the modern detective story. If this is the premise for Poe’s bust in the niche, each of these items points not to the stories and richness of character, but to the function of Poe as a key evolutionary element in American literature. If functionalism is an equitable metric for Poe’s inclusion in the American canon, it is a measure that is not monumental and absolute, it is style over substance. Or, to employ a Dupin trope: an error in addition may be inappreciable in and of itself, but multiplied many times over produces a result enormously at variance with the truth.

Mark W. Jones hitchhiked to Colorado in 1976 and has since made fictional Mountain Gulch the locus of his fiction