The paradoxes of Roland Barthes’s fait-divers murders and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Things external to the game’

ABSTRACT

Characters in works of detective fiction often declare that the events in which they are caught up are more like detective fiction than reality. As a result, detective fiction is tensely present and absent in itself. In other words, this genre whose meaning corresponds so exactly with its detective solution is simultaneously one that strains against the textual parameters of that same solution. This paradox is here mapped onto Roland Barthes’s description of the structure of the fait divers, an unclassifiable event that always intends towards classification, and thus towards its own disappearance. Barthes’s analysis focuses on the way in which the fait divers loses its identity when external, taxonomical explanations are brought to bear on it. The same interplay of inside and outside is exposed in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. By revealing how that famous text both coincides with and lies outside its story of detection, this article will debunk Poe’s orangutan solution and demonstrate the way in which, through its own failure, Dupin’s investigation inoculates the entire genre that follows it, ensuring that no fictional solution can ever be definitive and no text with a crime ever neatly and comprehensively classified as ‘detective fiction’.

KEYWORDS:

• Roland Barthes
• classification
• detective fiction
• end-orientation
• fait divers; Edgar Allan Poe

There is a moment that frequently arrives in works of detective fiction and that ought to stop readers in their tracks. It is that moment when one of the characters takes stock of the events of the narrative and exclaims that they resemble the stuff of detective fiction and not that of the everyday world. This is a paradox, and it is, I argue, the defining paradox of the genre, and this not because such reflexivity is a necessary part of the light-heartedness of detective fiction, by which it opposes itself to the seriousness of the literary canon; rather, this paradox is in deadly earnest. This stock reflexive element of detective fiction’s does not simply announce and confirm the latter’s status as detective fiction ironically, by declaring that it is real and not a work of fiction; instead, it performs what, following Derrida, I consider to be the genre’s inherent différance, that is, its way of presenting itself as a plurality, as an opening onto alternative iterations of self (as other), even in its most ardent declaration of (its solution as) singular truth. Of course, such declarations offer a certain resistance to the end-oriented haste with which the narrative otherwise moves towards its final resolution, but this appears to be a resistance in form only, and as such it delays, but only delays, the detective’s inevitable revelation of the truth of the crime, at which point the genre coincides once more with its own ostensible logics. And yet, however easily forgotten they are when the detective sets out the ‘great reveal’, these reflections mark the novel’s, and by extension the genre’s, inherent refusal to coincide with these same logics. To this extent, these moments of reflexivity, which uncrown the detective before the solution is even discovered, might be expected to cause readers to experience what Estelle Jardon calls ‘un frisson métaphysique [a metaphysical shudder]’,¹ a feeling of an uncanny double presence, as the novel to which they are present reveals that it is also, and at the same time, elsewhere, that is, never quite, never entirely where, and therefore what, it appears to be. What is clear, and all the more troubling, is that they do not shudder. In fact, so inured are readers to this device that they likely no longer even find it funny.

My argument here is that these moments of paradoxical reflexivity are traces of an original moment of inoculation. For, at the moment of its creation, the modern detective story signalled its fundamental non-self-coincidence.² This simultaneous doing and undoing is what we might consider Edgar Allan Poe’s own ‘master stroke of cant’, a feat that, in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, is attributed by the detective Auguste Dupin to the Prefect of Police, whom Dupin considers to be too objective, or ‘all head and no body’: ‘I like him’, he says, ‘especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has “de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas”’.³ There are a few points to make about this description of the Prefect’s tendency, which can be translated as ‘to deny what is and to explain what is not’. The first is that it doubles as a description of Dupin himself;⁴ indeed, it is logical to assume that if the Prefect fails as a result of cephalocentrism, then Dupin succeeds by being more body than head. And yet, this seems like an odd description of the prototype of the analytic detective. What seems more likely is that there is a displacement here, onto the Prefect, of an admission, by Dupin, that abstract analysis is not all there is. The position of the quotation is also telling, for it serves as the perfect cadence of a conclusion that is itself appended to the end of the story. This reflection on the Prefect therefore extends the original model of the detective story, whose solution has already been given. Logically, the story’s end-orientation has run its course just before the paragraph, which begins ‘I have scarcely anything to add’.⁵ The narrator’s scarce addition runs nonetheless to two paragraphs. The most obvious opposite of ‘head’, or tête, in French is ‘tail’, or queue.⁶ What we have here is an extension of the tale in the form of a lengthened tail, or, to return to Dupin’s description of the Prefect, an (over)extension of the body of the tale, or a textual body that (pace Harold Bloom, for whom the sole meaning of a work of detective fiction lies in its solution, the text being entirely self-founding, self-coincidental⁷) is larger than the detective story, whose exercise in ratiocination is already finished.

Furthermore, the final criticism of the Prefect seems to constitute a double reflection on the textual body of the tale. First, it corresponds curiously to Dupin’s solution to the murders, which pays no heed to multiple witness accounts of hearing a human being speaking in a foreign language and, instead, explains things, including the evidence of the foreign-speaking voice, by positing the existence of an orangutan, which is never actually presented in the text (and which is not therefore). Second, in textual terms, this tendency attributed to the Prefect is also a foreign body. Not only is it given in French, but it is also a quotation, its source being Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse. The double use of italics and quotation marks around ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas’ screams foreignness, almost literally so, as if it is echoing the two voices that were heard by the witnesses at the scene of the crime, one of which was described as ‘gruff’ (and ‘that of a Frenchman’) and the other as both ‘louder’ and ‘shrill’.⁸ The paradox here, of course, is that the emphasis of the italics and quotation marks serves to shout out words that are, in this instance, clearly in French, whereas the words used by French speakers throughout the text (which is, after all, set in Paris), including to describe other French speakers, have elsewhere been given in English. This foreignisation of French, or hyper-Frenchness, stands as a reminder that French is the original language of this story, which is otherwise entirely translated.⁹ This inversion of original and translation also parallels, and again overemphasises, the reflexive signposting in the text of a citation whose origin lies outside the body of the text. It is an example of a ‘genuine’ French text’s gaining entry into the body of Poe’s story, just as the foreign, exotic body of the orangutan has, we are told, made its way into the victims’ apartments. Both are present and absent, discussed or cited, but not seen in their actual, original form. Here, the quotation about denying what is and explaining what is not embodies its (paradoxical) content in its (paradoxical) form as intertext: it is problematically both in and of the story, and not in and of the story.

At this point in the discussion of absence–presence in Poe’s tale, I wish briefly to recall Uri Eisenzweig’s reading of the divergent French and Anglo-Saxon models of the ‘mysterious origins of crime’. What I have dubbed here the paradox of the detective fiction narrative, that is, the way in which its events appear to those inside it to lie outside it, may be considered to flow from the genre’s logical internal contradictions, which Eisenzweig describes as follows:

That authentic detective stories are textually impossible should be quite obvious. Indeed, hinging on the assumption that a real mystery can be solved in a purely analytical way by the very narrative that creates it in the first place, the definition of classical detective fiction is self-contradictory. On the one hand, if some events referred to by a story are to be shrouded in mystery, various details relating to these events must be missing from the text; yet, on the other hand, if an acceptable solution is to be found through the sole power of reasoning (the ‘deductive power’ of the detective), these very details have to appear in the text all the same, without any further narrative development having to occur for that purpose. In other words, for pure detection to be possible in a real story, the most significant narrative elements (the ‘clues’) would have to be both absent from and present in the text.¹⁰

It is perhaps unsurprising that Eisenzweig quickly turns his attention to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for, if a real, physically present criminal is discovered, the mystery in which the murder is shrouded cannot exist (and not just no longer, but from the outset). The ideal solution and murderer, in terms of bridging the gaps in logic, should therefore, for Eisenzweig, be unclearly defined:

Indeed, wouldn’t logical consistency demand that the hero of an absent story (that of the crime) be himself a non-presence of sorts? […] The fact is, at any rate, that a certain number of detective stories do present us with such an unusual outcome: a criminal whose identity, once uncovered, proves to be less positive, les nameable, than is generally the case.¹¹

Where Eisenzweig’s reading diverges from the present discussion of detective fiction’s self-alterity is in its choice to remain inside the story en abyme, or the mystery inside the broader story. Within the story of Dupin’s investigation, the orangutan plays the role of the present to that of the absent as played by the madman that the narrator claims must have been responsible for the murders:

[That is to say,] the ape by itself provides us with only the massive, contingent presence required for the two gruesome murders in the rue Morgue to have been committed, and it is madness, and madness alone, that can account for the elusive absence called for by the (narrative) terms of the mystery.¹²

It is the combination of these opposed terms, and the substitution of the one for the other, that allows what Eisenzweig, with a telling but understated oxymoron, calls that ‘narrative’s coherent unraveling’: ‘it is only as a shadow silhouetted behind human identity, both as its origin and as its negation, that Poe’s ape can provide the story with a (relatively) rigorous solution to a (relatively) real mystery’.¹³

The coherence enabled by letting the shadow of the orangutan into the story – its/the coherence in the story – also speaks to the incoherence of the whole story. The gap between the outside and the inside of the L’Espanayes’ apartments, which Eisenzweig describes as a ‘no man’s land’, points to the impossibility of a man entering by those means.¹⁴ This is, of course, an impossibility that the facts of the case just as readily deny: the orangutan’s owner turns out to be a sailor, and thus likely a man skilled in climbing narrow masts and manoeuvring at great heights. Further, the sailor appears at the end of the story carrying ‘a huge oaken cudgel’, which is a clear echo of the report given earlier in the story, according to which the force used to inflict the injuries sustained by the two women might have been generated by a ‘heavy club of wood’.¹⁵ Another advantage of the orangutan solution is that it admits inside the perimeter of the story a colonial presence, or a threat at and to the imperial centre from the furthest limits of empire, which Eisenzweig calls the ‘periphery’.¹⁶ To pursue the ‘madman reading’ would have been to align the story with what Eisenzweig argues is a distinctly French tradition of the locked-room mystery (of Gaston Leroux and Honoré de Balzac), in which the room is not penetrated and the victim is attacked by their own unconscious self, against which the English tradition (he cites Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle) sees the locked room entered by the colonial Other. My argument here is that ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, by dint of the continuous movement across the borders of the inside and outside that it showcases, and its existence in a markedly double textual space (both here and there), lies at the origins of, and thereby problematises, both ‘national’ traditions. As textual presence, the orangutan is, as Eisenzweig comments, both massive and shadowy. I should emphasise only that it is also as absent as it is present. The madman is still on the loose, and that he is Dupin himself remains a distinct possibility.¹⁷

As we have seen, the story of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ over-extends itself, prolonging, even doubling, its ending. We shall now look at how it is also deferred at the beginning. Appropriately, what plays head to the ending’s tail is a discussion of analysis, which is itself preceded by an epigraph speaking of the possibility of guessing what song the Syrens sang and ‘what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women’.¹⁸ This citation, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia,¹⁹ is suitably paradoxical: on the one hand, it offers the possibility of finding solutions to what appears unknowable, and in particular it gives credence to legend; on the other hand, it undermines, as essentially impossible, even futile, the solutions that one might put forward. Suitably prefaced therefore, the narrator’s discussion of the analytical begins, only to stall half-way through its lengthy opening paragraph: ‘I am not now’, the narrator announces in mid-flow, ‘writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random’.²⁰ The narrative to come will, the reader may well suppose, in addition to being peculiar, also be random. When the three-page preface has concluded, the narrator pauses again, but this time he appears to have had a change of heart: now, we learn that ‘[t]he narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced’.²¹ What this means is itself somewhat unclear, but the analysis on display in the case that is soon to follow is certainly as compromised as it is established.

Amid the foregoing discussion of the ways in which the game of draughts is superior, because less complex, to the game of chess, we read this passage:

[The skilful analyst] makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences […] and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game.²²

Mapped onto the game as played by a detective, which will soon be but is still not quite afoot, there is a suggestion of a genre in meltdown even as its rules are being established: here, we see celebrated solutions based on clues found outside the space of the game, by which we understand the narrative of the detective story. This explanation of the validity of external proofs being brought to bear inside the text is, of course, made in a preface that is becoming too long to be considered a mere preface and that has moved from being ‘random’ to something approaching a commentary on the story to come. And this movement – from the periphery to inside the story itself – continues with a final discussion of these analytical skills, as displayed this time by the detective-protagonist. Dupin proves himself able to break into the narrator’s internal monologue, having guessed every chain in the thought processes that have just taken place in the latter’s head. In this way, Dupin does the very opposite of the narrator’s initial positioning of his preface; that is to say, he demonstrates how a peculiar statement can be conjectured, like the song of the Syrens, by bringing to the fore, or into the centre, a series of observations that are causally linked, and thus not random. (What he also does, interestingly, is to prove how he can break, orangutan-like, into the inner workings of the narrator, which puts him, and his literally outlandish solutions, very much at the centre of the text.) When we finally arrive at the (almost) titular tale itself, which we may now consider a narrative en abyme, we are predisposed to finding solutions to the impossible and to being satisfied with clues conjured from spheres external to the case at hand. Thus, knowing ourselves to have been outmanoeuvred, to have taken the seat of the analyst’s hapless opponent, we are prepared to accept a fanciful solution, despite the text’s underscoring of our adversary’s preparedness to break the famous rules that Ronald Knox and S.S. Van Dine were yet to write.²³

The way that the extraordinary is framed by a discussion of analysis that appears wilfully problematic leads me to Roland Barthes’s essay on the structure of the fait divers, which is the French term for a piece of news that resists categorisation (hence the literal meaning of ‘a diverse fact’). For Barthes, a fait divers inhabits an interestingly liminal space: ‘il ne commencerait d’exister que là où le monde cesse d’être nommé [it can only exist at that point where the world ceases to be named]’.²⁴ As we have seen, Poe’s system of analysis admits explanations of events that introduce into its logics elements otherwise ‘external to the game’. The fait divers, for its part, can only be divers if its facts remain external to the system in which the reader is operating. As soon as those facts are brought into the game, they can be understood within the system and qualified with more specific adjectives. The example that Barthes gives is, precisely, murder: if a murder can be linked to the reader’s system, then it is political; if it cannot, then it remains unqualified, and thus a fait divers.²⁵ There is a will to classification here, however, for without it, there would be no story, no placing of the facts within our sphere of reference. In other words, the fait divers always tends towards qualification, and therefore towards its own disappearance. As Barthes puts it, its logic is that of ‘un classement de l’inclassable [a classification of the unclassifiable]’,²⁶ or in other words, a paradox. There is another word for this paradoxical relationship of the unanalysable elements of our sphere of knowledge, and it is one that recalls Dupin’s designated murderer: ‘en un mot, ce serait une information monstrueuse [put simply, it would be a monstrous pieces of information]’.²⁷

The word monstrueux here has all the various meanings of the English adjective ‘monstrous’, and the leap from the extraordinary to the non-human is no great one. Indeed, my argument here hinges on the fact that this leap is made all too easily in the story, in which a murder that is extraordinary for its violence is attributed, in the face of multiple witness statements that human voices were heard at the scene, to an animal. I suggest further that the murders committed by Poe’s monster are arguably less important than the means by which the latter gains access to the inner sphere of the L’Espanayes’ apartments. The monster, which is never presented in the text, is an embodiment within it of movement from outside to inside. In this way, the story of the murders is very much related to the treatise on analysis that precedes it, precisely because both are predicated on a model of analysis that seeks answers outside the rules of the game. Only through the abandonment of the rules of fair play, in this case those governing any kind of systematic consideration of evidence in the form of witness statements, can six separate accounts of two human voices speaking what are recognised as languages, even if the exact language is unclear in the case of the shrill voice, be considered proof of the presence on the scene of an orangutan.²⁸ Here, it is as a direct result of the public appetite for faits divers that the extraordinary becomes monstrous, and vice versa. As Barthes writes, it is not enough to understand the fait divers in terms of the impossibility of assimilating it in usual systems of classification: ‘Cette definition taxinomique n’est évidemment pas satisfaisante: elle ne rend pas compte de l’extraordinaire promotion du fait divers dans la presse d’aujourd’hui [This taxonomical definition is clearly not enough: it does not explain the extraordinary promotion of the fait divers in the press today]’.²⁹ It is precisely this word ‘extraordinary’ that ushers in the quasi-titular story en abyme, which is stricto sensu a fait divers: the first newspaper account is headed ‘EXTRAORDINARY MURDERS’, the second ‘The Tragedy of the Rue Morgue’.³⁰ Taken together, these two titles almost form ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Certainly, their combination of capital letters and italics recalls the shrill screams of the story’s concluding quotation.

If these headlines burst off the page with all the shock factor of a fait divers, how might we consider Dupin’s exercise of logic to affect the structure of the crime? Barthes explains that the structure of detective fiction involves solving one or more mysterious murders over time. In this way, time is one of the key features differentiating a murder in a popular novel from a fait divers in the popular press, whose fate is necessarily to fade quickly from view. Barthes describes the narrative bridge between the revelation and the solution of the crime in detective fiction in terms of ‘une causalité différée [a deferred causality]’.³¹ His differentiation of fictional crime and the faits divers is worth quoting at length:

Dans la presse, sans doute, les crimes mystérieux sont rares, le policier est peu personnalisé, l’énigme logique noyée dans le pathétique des acteurs; d’autre part, l’ignorance réelle de la cause oblige ici le fait divers à s’étirer sur plusieurs jours, à perdre ce caractère éphémère si conforme à sa nature immanente; c’est pourquoi, en fait divers, contrairement au roman, un crime sans cause est plus inexpliqué qu’inexplicable: le ‘retard’ causal n’y exaspère pas le crime, il le défait … [In the press, mysterious murders are probably rare. The detective is not a key player, and the enigma and its logics are drowned out by the personal circumstances of the victims. On the other hand, the genuine lack of knowledge as to the cause in this case leads the fait divers to remain in the public domain for several days and to lose that ephemeral aspect that is so vital to its immanent nature. That is why, in the case of the fait divers, unlike in the case of detective fiction, a murder without a cause is more unexplained than inexplicable: the causal ‘delay’ does not intensify the murder; rather, it undoes it …]³²

Both newspaper accounts of the rue Morgue murders close down the investigation, effectively cutting it off before its status as fait divers can be lost to time: the first ends by stating that ‘[t]o this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew’; the second notes in conclusion that ‘[t]here is not, however, the shadow of a clew apparent’.³³ There is a will here, on the part of this fait divers, not to be explained, and thus to remain a fait divers. Hence the refusal to analyse the evidence, as presented by witnesses, on the part of both the journalists and Dupin. The victims are known to have money; their house was previously let to a jeweller who appears to have abused the property; and while the women themselves were reclusive, only being seen by the witness Pierre Moreau ‘five or six times during the six years’ that they had been living there, the house was also visited by a porter and a physician; indeed, the latter was seen by the same witness entering the house ‘some eight or ten times’, which is to say, more often than the women themselves.³⁴ It seems certain that Sherlock Holmes, whose skill lay precisely in explaining the inexplicable by breaking the extraordinary down into its basic, and typically quite ordinary, elements,³⁵ would have had plenty to go on here. Perhaps the physician was one of the women in disguise, or the mysterious jeweller; or perhaps the jeweller, too, was one of the women in disguise; or perhaps the physician was actually an expert safe-cracker come to open a safe left behind by the jeweller. Of course, if such speculation seems idle, it is nonetheless more closely tethered to the evidence than the orangutan of Dupin’s solution. Furthermore, it is likely that Holmes would not have taken on the case, which, the newspapers concede later in a postscript (as if hesitant to explain, and thus destroy, the fait divers qua fait divers),³⁶ has already been attributed to Adolphe Le Bon, who had previously taken two large bags of money to the women. If such a case were brought before Holmes, the reader might expect a friend or relative to plead Le Bon’s innocence, even to present some proof of it. In this case, Dupin, somewhat to the narrator’s surprise, decides of his own volition to take on the case, on the one hand, in order to derive from it some ‘amusement’ (which is perhaps reminiscent of Holmes) and, on the other, because Le Bon ‘once rendered [him] a service’.³⁷ The detective, who has access to the inner reaches of the narrator’s mind,³⁸ is ideally placed to exculpate those implicated in the crimes by introducing evidence (that is, placing at the scene clues that were previously not there). For reasons that remain unexplained, Dupin acts as Le Bon’s man on the inside. For Caroline Julliot, it seems clear that Dupin is indebted to Le Bon, whom he knows to be guilty, and sees in the case a means of clearing this debt and making a name for himself.³⁹

To return to Barthes’s structural analysis of the fait divers, the difference between the newspaper accounts and Dupin’s investigation is not one of time: he does not simply resolve the causal link over the course of a lengthy consideration of the case. In terms of the model of analysis that is of interest to the narrator, the most interesting element here is Dupin’s refusal to play the game by its own (generic) rules (not to mention rules with which he himself will in time become associated). If ‘nothing appeared to criminate [Le Bon], beyond the facts already detailed’,⁴⁰ then Dupin must reveal his brilliance by looking beyond those facts. By going outside the facts as given, he makes the now ordinary crime extraordinary once more. What was inexplicable and has now been explained, must once again be unexplained, and in this case pushed to the limits of the inconceivable.

Barthes concludes his essay by revealing what he considers the irony, or ‘le comble’, at the heart of the fait divers.⁴¹ The nature of causality in the case of the fait divers is to be forever under tension:

On a vu que la causalité explicite du fait divers était en définitive une causalité truquée, du moins suspecte, douteuse, dérisoire, puisque d’une certaine manière l’effet y déçoit la cause; on pourrait dire que la causalité du fait divers est sans cesse soumise à la tentation de la coïncidence, et qu’inversement, la coïncidence y est sans cesse fascinée par l’ordre de la causalité. Causalité aléatoire, coïncidence ordonnée, c’est à la jonction de ces deux mouvements que se constitue le fait divers: tous deux finissent en effet par recouvrir une zone ambiguë où l’événement est pleinement vécu comme un signe dont le contenu est cependant incertain [We have seen that the explicit causality of the fait divers was ultimately fake, or at least suspect, doubtful or derisory, since, in a way, its effect is rendered disappointing when its cause is revealed. One might say that the causality of the fait divers is continuously subjected to the temptation of coincidence and that, conversely, its coincidences are continuously fascinated by the order of causality. Random causality, ordered coincidence: the fait divers resides at the juncture of these two movements; indeed, both end up covering an ambiguous zone where the event is fully experienced as a sign whose content is nonetheless uncertain].⁴²

Unsurprisingly, Barthes highlights the section of the above-cited passage that has to do with signs. It is also typical of Barthes’s own sense of irony that he moves from a position where the fait divers is opposed to literature (or at least to the genre of crime fiction) to one where it is precisely one with it, insofar as all that we can expect is signification, a will to meaning that must always fail to be fully realised, or, as he puts it, a space in which meaning is ‘à la fois posé et déçu [simultaneously given and disappointed]’.⁴³ In the case of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, it is the ambiguity of narrative space that is highlighted. The nature of the orangutan solution is certainly to provide an extraordinary coincidence (there happens to be a primate on the loose in Paris just at the time when the two L’Espanayes are moving considerable amounts of money with a certain degree of secrecy⁴⁴), as if not to disappoint the extraordinariness of the violence committed and the supposed impenetrability of the crime scene. But it is the fact that explanations have to be brought into the case, and into the narrative, from the outside that, in the clear parallel that it presents to the ingress of the orangutan solution, connects the case to the double movements of the fait divers. On the one hand, this Urtext of the modern detective story is a treatise on analysis that is exemplified by, and moves towards, a fait divers; on the other hand, it is a case of violence and gore that can, perhaps disappointingly, be, and indeed is, solved by routine policework, but that hankers after a more extraordinarily analytical solution. Appropriately, the double space that seeks to contain these movements almost, but not quite, bears the name of the fait divers that lies at its centre. The text, in other words, both is and is not the story of the extraordinary murders, or tragedy, of the rue Morgue. Hence, too, perhaps the ‘in’ in the story’s title, which makes room for textual meaning beyond the almost eponymous Rue Morgue Murders: the fait divers lies in the story, but the story is not only that of the fait divers.

Ultimately, it is by not being a fait divers, or rather by not only being a fait divers, or by not coinciding fully with the events that are, or are at least in, its titular focus, that ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ can be said to obey the logics of the fait divers. More simply put, it is by not being a fait divers that the text is a fait divers. Let us recall Barthes’s discussion of the temporal deferral of crime fiction causality: ‘en fait divers, contrairement au roman, un crime sans cause est plus inexpliqué qu’inexplicable [in the case of the fait divers, unlike in the case of crime fiction, a murder without a cause is more unexplained than inexplicable]’.⁴⁵ In the framework of detective fiction, a murder without a cause is inexplicable, and thus the murder must have a cause, which must be explicable and which is explained, hence Eisenzweig’s charge of ‘textual impossibility’. According to the logics of the fait divers, on the other hand, a murder without a cause is one that has not (as yet) been explained. Dupin’s investigation seeks to prolong the fait divers, to make it a detective story, but not because it has not been explained; instead, he rejects the explanation that has brought it to an end too quickly, in order to replace it with an ending more befitting the irony of the fait divers. The story thus contains two solutions, neither of which the reader may consider satisfactory. The definition of literature on which Barthes settles at the end of his essay reconciles it with the fait divers. His constant use of murder as his example of the classic fait divers extends this definition, which privileges signification over meaning, failed resolution over solution and, ultimately, double movement and double space over the containment of narrative and the hermetic closure of crime scenes. The detective story does not coincide with the necessary cause of its crime; rather, from the outset, it embodies the double space of causality and coincidence. The shock of the character whose lived reality appears closer in kind to the stuff of detective fiction is not trapped within the necessary mechanics of the genre. Such reflexivity in fact recalls the double space of what passes for the real world, with all its coincidence and inexplicability, overlaid with the end-orientation of the investigation text. All solutions must disappoint, for they are all only ever partial readings of a textual world of signification. To nod again to Derrida, the deferral of the investigation, which occupies such pride of place and time in the detective story, is also a space of difference.

To return to my initial suggestion of inoculation and the failure to shudder on the part of the reader of detective fiction when confronted with the text’s claim not to be a work of such a genre, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, with its heavily signposted use of mise en abyme, is about bringing the outside in. This, we have seen, includes putting the detective inside the head of the narrator, suggesting that it is always he who is writing the text for the narrator to put in front of the reader. This fracturing of the text in two at the very centre of the narrative act itself makes Dupin the ghost in the machine, or a little voice that is always thereafter present – subliminally, homeopathically – in detective fiction. Reflexive statements made by detective fiction’s characters are therefore met by readers who are quite immune to them. The little voice in their head is a reminder of, and paradoxical resistance to, otherness. Importantly, to use Barthes’s subtle shift from genre fiction to literature, detective fiction can be seen to inherit from Poe’s original deployment of the fait divers a tense relationship to the taxonomical practices that have dominated so much scholarly work in the field.⁴⁶ Far from having no meaning, no mystery beyond the solution given by the detective in the form of the great reveal, works of detective fiction are as open to the reader’s interpretation as any work of literature; indeed, in order to be detective fiction, they must reveal their locked rooms to have been nothing of the sort.⁴⁷ Explanation kills the fait divers, but we are supposed to believe that it is the guarantor of detective fiction. I argue, on the contrary, that, at the most fundamental level, a refusal to coincide with the rules of the genre inhabits detective fiction. All is signification, not Meaning. Like that of the fait divers, this is an identity always in motion: detective fiction always tends towards the literary in its proliferation of meanings and thus defies containment; yet at the same time, this mobility is always reined in by paratextual markers and stock motifs. Detective fiction is unmissable, therefore; it’s just never quite where, or what, you think it is.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Channelling Umberto Eco, Jardon takes this idea of the metaphysical shudder, as I am doing here, as the generic marker of detective fiction, rather than that of the subgenre of the metaphysical, or analytic, detective story. See, for example, her editor’s introduction to Estelle Jardon (ed.), Le Frisson métaphysique du roman policier. The Metaphysical Shudder of the Detective Novel (Nancy: Éditions de l’Université de Lorraine, 2023), pp. 9–24 (pp. 9-11). All translations from the French in this article are my own.

2 I do not wish to enter into a debate here as to whether or not Poe invented the genre. It is sufficient to state that his role is crucial in its development. Horsley, for example, writes that Poe ‘is the writer most often credited with “inventing” the classic detective story’. Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 14. Platten concurs: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is ‘widely accepted as the first detective fiction’; he notes further that ‘whether or not it constitutes the source of the genre, [it] is undoubtedly its most significant milestone’. David Platten, ‘Origins and Beginnings: The Emergence of Detective Fiction in France’, in Claire Gorrara (ed.), French Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 14–35 (p. 20). More recently, Shampa Roy has labelled the story ‘the first generic formulation of crime fiction’. Shampa Roy, ‘Coloniality and Decoloniality’, in Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper (eds), The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 120–28 (p. 120).

3 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 189–224 (p. 224). Interestingly, the word ‘cant’ appears to be chosen for its obfuscation of transparent meaning in the original English; certainly, it is left in that language, and in italics, in Charles Baudelaire’s famous French translation. Edgar Allan Poe, Histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1965 [2010]), p. 94.

4 See, for example, Leo J. A. Lemay, ‘The Psychology of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’, American Literature, 54.2 (1982), pp. 165-88. See also Caroline Julliot’s article ‘Double(t)s dans la rue Morgue : (Don’t) Follow the Money’, published on the Intercripol website (2020): http://intercripol.org/fr/thematiques/critique-policiere/qui-est-l-assassin-de-la-rue-morgue/doublets-dans-la-rue-morgue.html (accessed 20 September 2022). Julliot notes that Poe distanced himself from the plot of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, claiming it to be the work of Dupin rather than himself. Just as the ‘master stroke of cant’ describes the mechanics of the text while referring explicitly to the Prefect of Police, it is perhaps more appropriate to consider it Dupin’s, rather than Poe’s, master stroke.

5 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 224.

6 The importance of heads and tails in Poe’s story is echoed in Baudelaire’s preface to his own collection of prose poems. For a detailed reading along these lines, see Alistair Rolls, ‘Heads and Tails: Apocope, Decollation and Detective Fiction’s Inherent Self-Alterity’, The Journal of Alterity Studies and World Literature, 1.1 (2018), pp. 1–15.

7 Bloom is quite adamant that the works of Agatha Christie contain no mystery because her detectives solve their puzzles and thus leave no elbow room for the reader. See Harold Bloom (ed.), Agatha Christie (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002), p. 1. Narratologists are often drawn to detective fiction because of its clear linear path towards its solution. The most famous study of this kind is Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 42–52. Brooks, for his part, is more cautious. While he accepts that some works of literature are more radical in terms of their narrative sequencing, he suggests that even straightforward texts, including detective fiction, can present challenges. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), especially, pp. 12–13. For an alternative narratological model of detective fiction, which sees plurality, and alternative fabulae, even in what appear to be the most rigorously linear examples of the genre, see Alistair Rolls, Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction: Narratology and Detective Criticism (Oxford: Routledge, 2022), especially pp. 7–18.

8 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 201.

9 Gulddal and King include Poe’s story among what they describe as ‘sites of complex literary exchanges between the United States and France’. Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King, ‘What is World Crime Fiction?’, in Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls (eds), The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 1–24 (pp. 1–2).

10 Uri Eisenzweig, ‘Madness and the Colonies: French and Anglo-Saxon Versions of the Mysterious Origins of Crime’, L’Esprit Créateur, 26.2 (1986), pp. 3–14 (p. 3). Eisenzweig is quick to note (p. 3n) that he is not interested in the dichotomy of absence-presence set up in the narratological framework of story/histoire versus discourse/récit. I am not interested in that difference either, preferring in my case to compare one overtly present or (primarily) actual story to another that is covertly present or (primarily) virtual.

11 Ibid., p. 5, emphasis original.

12 Ibid., p. 7, emphasis original.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 6.

15 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 219 and 203, respectively. For a persuasive account of the sailor’s guilt, see Loisa Nygaard, ‘Inductive Reasoning in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”’, Studies in Romanticism, 33.2 (1994), pp. 223–54.

16 Eisenzweig, “Madness and the Colonies”, p. 9. The ‘imperialist contexts and racist knowledge systems’ of nineteenth-century Western literature are also picked up by Shampa Roy, who sees a ‘racial allegory’ in the attribution of the crime in the story to a Bornean orangutan. ‘Coloniality and Decoloniality’, p. 120.

17 While Eisenzweig stops short of pointing the finger directly at Dupin, as Julliot does, he nonetheless notes in a later article that it appears certain that the orangutan could not have killed the two women. Uri Eisenzweig, ‘For a reopening of the Rue Morgue affair’, Intercripol – Revue de critique policière, 1 (2019): http://intercripol.org/en/topics/critique-policiere/double-investigation-in-the-rue-morgue.html?search-keywords=Eisenzweig (accessed 20 September 2022).

18 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 189.

19 On the cover page of the digitised version of the text made available online by the University of Chicago, it is noted that Hydriotaphia (1658) is a ‘heavily annotated work’ of which ‘Browne’s notes are an integral part’. See https://penelope.uchicago.edu/hydrionoframes/hydrion.html (accessed 3 November 2022). In the framework of the present reading, which seeks to explore the boundaries of the inside and outside of Poe’s text, and his own reflexive exploration of them, this description opens up an interesting explanation for Poe’s choice of epigraph.

20 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 189.

21 Ibid., p. 192.

22 Ibid., p. 191.

23 The rules of writing detective fiction, ostensibly so as to give the reader a fair chance of solving the case, were first codified by Ronald Knox, who produced his ‘Ten Commandments of Detection’ in 1928, and subsequently by S. S. Van Dine, whose ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ were published in 1936 (although some sources suggest that Van Dine’s rules were also in circulation as early as 1928). For further details, see Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 40.

24 Roland Barthes, ‘Structure du fait divers’, in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 188–97 (p. 188).

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., emphasis original.

28 As Julliot puts it, ‘si aucun des témoins n’a envisagé qu’il s’agisse de cris d’animaux, c’est vraisemblablement que ce n’était pas le cas [if none of the witnesses envisages that these were animal sounds, then in all likelihood it’s because that isn’t what they were]’.

29 Barthes, “Structure du fait divers”, p. 188, my emphasis.

30 Ibid., p. 197 and 198, respectively.

31 Ibid., p. 192.

32 Ibid.

33 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 203.

34 Ibid., p. 199.

35 Highmore frames this tendency of Holmes’s to disappoint those who witness his marvels of inductive reasoning in terms of a demystification or disenchantment. See Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 3.

36 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 204.

37 Ibid., p. 205.

38 The narrative reversal presented by this relationship is striking and clearly destabilises what we might consider the role of omniscience in the text.

39 Julliot’s analysis is worth reading at length on this point. She argues that Dupin plants evidence (including the tuft of orange hair) and arranges for the presence on the scene of the crime of so many conveniently foreign-language-speaking witnesses.

40 Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 204.

41 Barthes, ‘Structure du fait divers’, p. 195, emphasis original.

42 Ibid., pp. 196–7, emphasis original.

43 Ibid., p. 197.

44 One might also usefully reiterate the coincidence (noted by Julliot) of so many witnesses speaking so many different languages being found at the same time in a small street in Paris at 3.00 in the morning, which is stressed by Burton R. Pollin in his seminal article, ‘Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”: The Ingenious Web Unravelled’, Studies in the American Renaissance (1977), pp. 235–59 (p. 243).

45 Ibid., p. 192.

46 For a discussion of the way in which taxonomical scholarship serves, a posteriori, to close down detective fiction’s meaningfulness, see Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls, ‘Criminal Moves: Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction Mobility’, in Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls (eds), Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), pp. 1–24. As noted above, Jardon, too, argues against separating the ‘metaphysical detective story’ from the unmarked generic centre.

47 For new solutions to a number of Agatha Christie’s most famous cases, which are based on this narrative openness, see Rolls, Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction.