In ‗The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ (1841) Dupin notes that it is the ‗outré‘ nature of the case which is confounding the government agents. Because the case deviates from ‗the ordinary‘ the police are bewildered. They are overanalysing the peculiar aspects of the mystery and, consequently, the merely unusual has been mistaken for the
impossible. However, Dupin claims that this is when reason functions best in the pursuit of truth. The solution lies in asking the question ‗what has occurred that has never occurred before?‘ (‗Murders‘: 159). The very features of the case which perplex the police are precisely the opposite for the analyst; they illuminate the truth. The detective divulges that it was in focusing on the peculiar elements of the case, the unusual nature of the shrill voice overheard in Madame L‘Espanaye‘s chambers, that he was able to decipher the events which led to the crime. When reason eliminates all the possibilities what is left are the impossibilities and Dupin posits that these ‗apparent
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impossibilities must be proved to be not such in reality‘ (‗Murders‘: 162). This famous ‗dictum-by-inference‘, vocalised succinctly by Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes, has since become a mantra for the genre that ‗when you have eliminated all the possibilities then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth‘ (Haycraft, 1941). The detective dispels the idea of coincidence, asserting that it contradicts the authority of the superior theory of probability. In the second tale in Poe‘s trilogy, ‗The Mystery of Marie Rogêt‘ (1842), Dupin introduces the ‗doctrine of chance‘ whereby chance is made a ‗matter of absolute calculation‘ (‗Mystery‘: 141). This principle is an extension of the notion of the ‗Bi-Part Soul‘ and it relies upon the rational use of the imagination to predict the ‗aesthetic necessity of design and pre-conceived effect‘ thus establishing a ‗reciprocity‘ between the opposing principles of ‗chance and calculation‘ (Joswick, 2005: 242).
The evidence suggests, however improbably, that an ‗Ourang-Outang‘ from India, owned by a French sailor, was responsible for the murders. This literary representation of the criminal as an animal from colonial India can be examined using two critical perspectives; firstly the animal half of the criminal body could be symbolic of the beast within the divided self, reflecting the dual nature of humanity, both good and
monstrous. This is a trope which is explored consistently throughout not only detective fiction but in fiction in its entirety. For example, this motif is examined with profound effect in Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (1886). Secondly, representing the criminal as an Indian beast could be construed,
in a political reading, as a Western author‘s problematic representation of the colonial other. The close association between the ‗foreign body with the criminal body‘ in nineteenth-century literature reflects the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century (Thomas, 2004: 208). This ‗culturally bound way of conceiving of the East as exotic,
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cruel, sensual and barbaric‘ was symptomatic of the time and attempted to legitimise the Western subjugation of their Eastern colonies (Thompson, 1993: 69). These disparate readings of the portrayal of the criminal as a colonial animal may not be entirely mutually exclusive; at the time the West urgently needed to contain the supposedly more animalistic, barbaric other and, as a result, nineteenth-century fiction served as a vehicle to assuage these ‗imperial anxieties‘ by constructing the Western self as rational and particularly ‗human‘ (McLaughlin, 2000: 29). The colonial discourse deployed in ‗The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ reinforces the notion of detective fiction as a
reflection of the socio-historical context in which it was written.
5.5 Dénouement
Dupin discloses that he has set a trap for the sailor by placing an advert in the newspaper stating that he has found the ‗Ourang- Outang‘. The dénouement, takes place when the sailor appears at Dupin‘s residence and corroborates the detective‘s deductions. The case is solved and Dupin has ‗defeated‘ the ‗blundering‘ Parisian police (‗Murders‘: 166). The end of the tale comes full circle bringing us back to the analogy of game playing which was examined during the first part of the narrative. Dupin reproaches the Prefect of the Parisian police for being ‗too cunning to be profound‘, which mirrors the game of chess where ‗what is complex is mistaken for what is profound‘ (‗Murders‘: 176 & 142). The detective, also, rebukes the Prefect‘s ‗wisdom‘ for being ‗all head and no body‘ which relates to the detective‘s earlier supposition that ‗the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic‘ (‗Murders‘: 176 & 144). The Prefect‘s reasoning is too ‗fanciful‘ to be successful. It is through the combined use of both aspects of the ‗Bi- Part Soul‘, the ‗head‘ and the ‗body‘ and their associated faculties of the imagination and reason, that the detective was able to outwit his opponent.
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Dupin holds that truth is ‗superficial‘; it lies in what physically exists, but the Prefect‘s ‗fanciful‘ mind has overcomplicated the case, consequently, rejecting the explicit evidence (‗Murders‘: 156). The tale ends with a French phrase, ‗de nier ce qui est, et
d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas‘, which describes the Prefect‘s flawed desire to ‗deny what
is and explain what is not‘ (‗Murders‘: 176). The conclusion of ‗The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ (1841) represents the culmination of the ideas Poe has discussed
throughout his tale. The tale contrasts the creative reasoning of Dupin‘s ‗Bi-Part Soul‘, which is open to all possibilities, with the constrained and rigidly formulaic mind of the Prefect. Like Dupin, dénouement is achieved for Poe, when his theory is corroborated. Poe‘s intention was to demonstrate that successful reasoning relies on the unified use of the faculties associated with his divergent philosophical beliefs. In his detective fiction and through Dupin, Poe, therefore, was able to demonstrate how the dichotomy of Idealism and Materialism could reach an accomplished resolution in the form of his ‗Bi- Part‘ detective.
Duality is implicit in the structure and characterisation of ‗The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ (1841). It is visible in the tale‘s twin plot, the divided self which is the narrator and Dupin, the doubling of the criminals, victims and detective and most prominently the detective‘s ‗creative and resolvent‘ ‗Bi-Part Soul‘. Dupin‘s dual psychology is associated with moral ambiguity and a blurring of boundaries which, consequently, has shaped a compelling psychosomatic template for a genre of
multifaceted and complex detective protagonists. The following Chapter will examine the significance of the ‗Bi-Part Soul‘ and duality in the British, nineteenth-century fiction which anticipates a distinct detective genre. The presence of Dupin‘s ‗Bi-Part‘ mould will be illustrated by examining Charles Dickens‘ Mr Bucket and Wilkie Collins‘
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Sergeant Cuff, along with Robert Louis Stevenson‘s explication of the motif of the double in his Gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
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