Reason in Edgar Allan Poe and ‘The Purloined Letter’
Some Smalltalk
Though I’m not a Poe scholar of any sort, I recently had the happy chance to reread some of Poe’s stories and think about them anew. And though the focus here is on his famous story, ‘The Purloined Letter’, I hope to enlist examples and illustrations from only some of his other stories in order to further support the kinds of observations and insights I’m hoping will be well-received regarding Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter.’ As ‘The Purloined Letter’ is an early instance of a ‘mystery story’, I think the choice of angle of approach of my talk, regarding the various facets of ‘reason’ and ‘reasoning’ in Poe’s stor(ies) is apt – for reasons, in turn, I hope to illuminate.
But that last verb used, as it happens, might be a gift to get us started; because a ‘mystery’ is a kind of darkness begging to be lit-up by the working mind. Perhaps, then, it’s no accident that near the beginning of ‘The Purloined Letter’, Poe’s demure hero, ‘Dupin’ opts for ‘darkness’ in order to reflect: thereby in a way symbolically aligning himself with the ‘mystery’ that he himself, alone, will solve.[1] Indeed, in the complementary mystery story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, also starring Dupin, Dupin’s friend, the narrator, again speaks near the beginning of Dupin’s fondness for reflection by ‘night’ (401). And to name just two other famed Poe stories, his ‘The Man of the Crowd’ starts in darkness, as does, say, his ‘The Pit and The Pendulum’ (388 & 491). The first of these is a tale about observation and the failures of observation to illuminate truth, or, if you like, the way that truth hides even when you tail it obsessively; and the second is the story of the infernal trial of a man, the narrator, in near-total dark, being tested in torturously-tailored and adaptive ways (498-501); the physical darkness in this latter story is only an image of spiritual darkness, morbidity and fear in the human condition – bound as it is by its own mortality. It’s a nice structural dichotomy in Poe, showing how ratiocinative his sensibility was: in the one story the narrator tails his target, in the second, the narrator-hero is tailed by tailor-made tortures. In any case, while occasionally alluding to other Poe stories, I want to focus for a short while on ‘The Purloined Letter.’
So, let’s resume the note of ‘darkness.’ A mystery is as mentioned a darkness for the mind. But as it works-out for this story it also represents I think oddness, uniqueness and perversity as opposed to evenness, generality and symmetry. The major theme in this chosen story (at least in regard to the hero, Dupin’s successful reasoning) is about how ‘instrumental’ reasoning can fall short of the searched-for truth, as opposed to the potential successes of ‘substantive’ reasoning. These two terms (instrumental versus substantive) I take from Max Horkheimer’s work, The Eclipse of Reason. To gloss the difference briefly: ‘instrumental reason’ occurs where, given an ‘A’ to ‘B’ journey, one’s priority is to find the quickest, most efficient or parsimonious way between ‘A’ and ‘B’. Substantive reasoning, which Horkheimer viewed in early twentieth century capitalism as being or having been eclipse(d), is more concerned with what we want ‘B’ to be in the first place! Just as it is observed by Dupin in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ that the question is to know, not ‘how to observe’ but ‘what to observe’ (399), so in ‘The Purloined Letter’ there is a pivotal distinction between the systemic and exhaustive execution of a physical search made by the failing Prefect of Police, and Dupin’s ability to see round such a limited vision. The mystery in ‘The Purloined Letter’ is viewed, we learn, to baffle because of its being so ‘simple.’ The Prefect of Police, asking now for Dupin’s aid in illuminating the ‘mystery’, knows many of the features of the crime and blatantly so. The overt simplicity of the circumstances proves boggling, at least in so far as the Police only try to use what Dupin will see as an equally facile method of investigation. The Minister D has stolen a letter compromising the Queen. She, the Queen, knows he’s stolen it from her, having seen him in the act, and both know that each knows, but the fact remains that for fear of being compromised, The Queen cannot alert anyone overtly (681). So, who did it, when and that they did it, and the fact that we know that Minister D still has the ‘purloined letter’ in his possession are simply known; but, as known, these facts prove, also, to be telling. We know that Minister D still has the purloined letter, because the whole point of his robbery is to wield power over the royal member now so compromised.
[Interestingly, when basing a seminar on this story, the famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made a point about how the Queen, compromised, is actually mirrored by the Minister D – also compromised by this event or act. How? It seems contradictory, in so far as Minister D is the perpetrator of the crime and the Queen is the victim. But sometimes opposites are mirrors of each other, when seen at one level of abstraction further on. Just as the Queen can’t do anything overt without risking alerting the King to the existence of this compromising letter, so, Minister D’s power is limited by his not being able to use the letter. Why? Well, because the power over the Queen is in the ‘threat’ of its use; using it, the ‘power’ is extinguished.[2] And while Lacan doesn’t make the overt connection here, this is a perfect example of what Hegel called the ‘master-slave’ dialectic. At one level, the power resides with a master over his slave (paralleling Minister D over the Queen); but dig deeper and you will realize that the ‘master’ is a slave to the ‘slave’ in so far as he is in dire need of the ‘slave’ in order to be ‘the master’. So, even if it seems Minister D has the upper hand, he only has it and retains it in so far as the Queen is not fully compromised; in the event of the letter actually being used (which it never is of course), all Minister’s D’s upper hand proves a broken hand. Such suspense (or suspension) seems to be an essential feature of Poe’s storytelling; for example, in ‘The Pit and The Pendulum’ the physical torture is nothing compared to the mental torture, the ‘moral horror’ (493 & 496); and these latter result from ‘hope’ paradoxically (501). Indeed, to attest to this last point, the man being tortured thinks of ‘death’ as ‘sweet’ by comparison with the psychological fear of death (503).]
But I want to continue here with the nature of Dupin, and thereby Poe’s, reflections on the best uses of the same: reflection. Dupin regards the Prefect of Police to be wrong when he avows that as a ‘poet’ the criminal Minister D must be a ‘fool’ (684). Indeed, later Dupin will dub the criminal an ‘unprincipled man of genius’ (697). Both these observations feed into what Dupin considers and proves to be the best use of reason, in terms of illuminating the mystery at hand. Dupin notes that Minister D is both a ‘mathematician’ and ‘a poet’ (691) – poetry being a type of ingenuity, and mathematics seen as rule-guided, or rigorously principled. And Dupin further avows that had the criminal been only a mathematician, then the exhaustive physical search of Minister D’s premises (684-686) undertaken by the police, which is systematic to the point of light comedy, might have served. (There is a similar systematic exhaustion, regarding newspaper reports in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, 533-536; or indeed, in the litany-like depositions recorded in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, 406-411. These narrative gestures are telltale in my view as peripatetic foils enlisted – before Poe shows his winning hand.) But to return to ‘The Purloined Letter.’ The schematic police investigation fails because, Dupin notes, the criminal is a poet as well, and so generalizing judgment will fail in his pursuit. Mathematical thinking in Dupin’s (thus Poe’s, we assume) way of seeing things is purely relational, but not real. Once you’ve the parameters, the givens, he seems to be implying, then mathematics is effective. But it is only a tool-like capacity of thinking. For Dupin, the truer use of reason is not generalizing or abstractive ways of thinking, but a thinking that applies to the concrete or ‘individual case of the man’ in question (689). While the Police’s methods apply to the ‘mass’, they have no ‘variation of principle’ (690). A truer ‘acumen’, as in Dupin’s anecdote with the admired schoolboy, is the ability to account for sheer individuality or idiosyncrasy – the exception that proves (or doesn’t) the rule. And this is done in part via being able, not to judge the individual case from the top down, determinately, with a ready-made method of investigation, but to reflect from the ground up, by, as it happens here, putting yourself ‘in the shoes’ of the particular man one is investigating (689-690). In ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ this kind of detecting capacity for vicarious experience, solving by imaginary identification or empathy is a prominent method (538, 543, 546 & 552). Indeed, ‘the type and genius of deep crime’ is the type who cannot be abstractly or readily fathomed, as we learn at the end of Poe’s ‘The Man in The Crowd’ (396), where the narrator is ‘at a loss to comprehend the waywardness of’ his target’s actions (395). The note of the perverse, ‘wayward’, outré or unique is prevalent in many Poe stories, and in many of them that foreground the different processes of reasoning – those that fail, and those that succeed.
In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ what seems like an ‘insoluble mystery’ (411) is solved by what Dupin attributes acumen to: ‘analysis’ – which is different to ‘calculation’ (397). And Dupin, we are told by the narrator, his friend, has ‘a peculiar analytic ability’ (401). And analytic ability is associated elsewhere in this story with ‘imagination’ (400) – thereby perhaps, again aligning Poe, the literary artist with his detecting hero. And, as with his exemplary ‘schoolboy’ in ‘The Purloined Letter’, as an imaginative analyst, Dupin solves what he solves in this story, by throwing ‘himself into the spirit of his opponent’ and identifying ‘himself therewith’ (398). This, as opposed to the ‘insensitivity’ of the Police (412). The analyst reasons in ways ‘beyond the limits of mere rule’, and that’s where his ‘skill’ lies (399). So, returning to ‘The Purloined Letter’, we realize that one of the morals of the story is that thinking outside the box is a boon for reasoning, or even: is partly constitutive of true reasoning; which is to say, an ‘imaginative’ capacity like that is not opposed to thinking or reasoning well or truthfully; rather it is implicit in the latter. Only blind mathematics, as it were, a blind and purely instrumental method, occludes the individuality or the tailor-made nature of the truth in question or at hand.
In his spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton speaks about madness or what the Edwardians called ‘monomania’ as follows. He avers, rightly I think, and with much pertaining insight to a writer like Poe, that the madman is in a limited sense just as rational as the sane man. Both are as rational as each other in the way, he argues, that two circles, one smaller, one larger, are equally and infinitely round. Except the healthy man, whose circle is larger, is healthier because with his larger circle he lets more of ‘life’ in. What Chesterton meant was that madness is not loss of reason. Madness for him is to possess reason and nothing else. A paranoid or delusional person might say that he is ‘King of England’. And when informed by the sane, who may have consulted Parliament, let’s say, that he is not, he might reply, theorizing, reasoning ‘but that’s what they would say if they wanted to get rid of me.’ Or he might say, ‘I’m Jesus Christ’. And when, equally, contradicted, told that he’s not, he might reply, reasoning, theorizing, ‘yes, but that what’s they said the first time.’ While both answers or reasonings are false, they are (instrumentally) rational. A madman for Chesterton always has or will duly find a reason, a theory, waiting. The healthy man reasons too, but is saner in so far as he allows for a certain amount of, if you like, ‘mystery’ as well; in so far, that is, as he allows for a certain amount of his life experience to be beyond his mental control or comprehension.[3] After all, much of the most significant parts of an individual’s life experience are based on contingencies and are, rather un-mathematically, unpredictable. Indeed, in a much later book, Chesterton criticizes his friend and fellow-writer George Bernard Shaw, in a way that is also pertinent to some of the foregone considerations regarding Poe, and his hero, Dupin’s optimal conception of reasoning. As an ‘unromantic writer’ Chesterton states, Shaw ‘cannot imagine the motives of human life from the inside;’ and yet, for Chesterton, ‘the mental attitude of romance… is the only key to real human conduct’:
The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.[4]
Chesterton, as it happens, also wrote mystery stories, and in a way that can be seen to be in the tradition of Poe. In his ‘Father Brown’ stories, the detective is a priest. And he solves the crimes in a similar way to Poe’s Dupin, through empathy or the ability to think himself into the specific or particular shoes of the criminal. Father Brown understands the criminal better than the police because, equipped from the confessional, knowing of the heart’s deep sins, he can imagine the way criminality works –in a similar way to the note we started with: Dupin’s liking to think in the ‘dark’. The other interesting feature of Chesterton’s mystery stories is that all the other characters, when faced with what Poe calls (as per above) an ‘insoluble mystery’ can end up believing anything, turning irrational. However, Chesterton’s guiding ideological irony is that it is the supposedly ‘superstitious’ ‘priest’ who solves the crime in the most commonsensical and materialistic ways. He shares Dupin’s ability to think outside the box; to tailor his thinking-through a problem, his speculation, to the case at hand in its individuality, rather than applying the more formulaic or paint-by-numbers approach of the others scrambling to solve the mystery.
We are meant to be ‘homo sapiens’ or the only (known) ‘rational animal.’ But Poe ironically inverts this in a story like ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ The humanity of the police fails them while they continue to consider the crime from within the frame of their humanity. Dupin solves the human crime by stepping outside the box of his humanity. It was a non-human beast who committed the murders in that case. This is like a symbol of the success or flourishing of Poe’s Dupin: we become more human and illuminative when we strike-off our self-regarding tunnel-visioned-ness. Reasoning is and must be eminently creative, not a mere function or tool; so, it’s no wonder, we can surmise, the face of Poe, the literary, the imaginative artist, the poet, peeks through the surface of his stories; and in the particular context of my small reading, by way of the muted heroism of Dupin.
[1] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Poetry and Tales, The Library of America, 1984, p. 680-698 (p. 680). From henceforth page references to this volume will be inserted in parentheses in the main text above.
[2] Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., p. 6-48 (p. 22-23).
[3] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, New York: Dover Publications, 2004, p. 11.
[4] GK Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, London: House of Stratus, 200, p. 45, 78 & 43.
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last decade and a half, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf, among many others. His first collection and his fourth collection are, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His 5th collection, But It Was An Important Failure, was published with Cinnamon Press near the start of 2020. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and he has published much short fiction, some of it prize-winning. A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition in 2022. His Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019. Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, was published with Cinnamon Press in early 2022. His book of Lebanese verse narratives, The Cedar Never Dies, is published with Northside Press in early 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, is to be published with Liquorice Fish in autumn of 2023. His forthcoming poetry collection, For Echo, will be published with Cinnamon Press in Spring of 2024. Currently, he teaches at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he is Associate Professor of English.
Indelible 