Masaryk UniversityFaculty of Arts

Department of Englishand American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Marika Buršíková

Elements of the Metaphysical Detective Story Genre in the Work of Melville,

Hawthorne and PoeMaster’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Bonita Rhoads, Ph. D.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..Author’s signature

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my supervisor, Bonita Rhoads, Ph.D., for her kind help, valuable advice and support while I was working on the thesis.

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1

1. The Metaphysical Detective Story ...........................................................................4

1.1 Classical Detective Story Conventions .......................................................................5

1.2 From Popular Literature Towards Art........................................................................8

1.3 The Classical Detective Lost in the Postmodern World ........................................12

1.4 Metaphysical Detective Story Themes......................................................................14

2. Melville's Confidence-Man: Questioning the Notion of Evidence ...................... 16

3. Hawthorne's “Wakefield”: The Missing Person Paradigm ..................................25

3.1 Postmodern Wakefields ..............................................................................................31

4. Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”.............................................................................36

4.1 The Labyrinth Motif ...................................................................................................38

4.2 The Motif of Doubling .............................................................................................40

5. Poe's Tales of Ratiocination..................................................................................45

5.1 Borges's “Death and the Compass”: A Parody of Dupin .....................................48

5.2 The Motif of Doubling in Poe and Borges.............................................................50

6. In Search of the Closure ........................................................................................53

Conclusion .................................................................................................................55

Bibliography...............................................................................................................58

English Résumé.........................................................................................................62

Czech Résumé ...........................................................................................................63

1

Introduction

In the field of literary studies, links are established between various literatures

across both space and time. The focus is no longer only on how contemporary authors are

influenced by their precursors and how tradition is reflected in their work. In the same way,

we may be interested in how our reading of modern authors influences or even enriches

our reading of the canonical ones. As Jorge Luis Borges quite fittingly put it: “The debt is

mutual; a great writer creates his precursors. He creates and somehow justifies them”

(“Nathaniel” 52).

What this thesis aims to explore is this mutual debt, a reciprocal relationship

between the works of 19th century American writers – Herman Melville, Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe – and contemporary ones such as Paul Auster, Thomas

Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Writers like these are indebted to their literary predecessors in

many of their motifs and themes. However, their work also changes our experience of the

past authors and provides their work with new meanings. This is not to say that these

meanings were not contained within the texts themselves before. The readers' perception

only becomes more open to them once they are foregrounded through present-day

literature. This means that the author's contemporary audience probably would not have

read these books in the same way as we do today. To borrow another quote from Borges:

“Our literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the

text as for the manner in which it is read” (“For Bernard Shaw” 164).

For instance, Oedipus can be seen by some as the first detective (Holquist 154).

However, it is only because the motif of detection is already deeply rooted within our

literary tradition. We recognize the pattern because it has been made familiar through the

genre's conventions. Moreover, we can see this story as foreshadowing the metaphysical

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detective story as well because Oedipus's search ultimately leads to the discovery that he

himself is the guilty one (Sweeney 248-9). Again, such an understanding of this story is

reinforced through countless revision of this motif by postmodern authors such as

Umberto Eco, who in the Postscript to one of the famous metaphysical detective novels

The Name of the Rose claims that: “Any true detection should prove that we are the guilty

party” (qtd. in Merivale 107).

This study will elaborate upon some of the arguments covered in my bachelor's

thesis entitled The Metaphysical Detective Story in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy and Thomas

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 which deals with the classical detective genre's potential for

subversion and parody, the primary focus of the thesis being on postmodern authors who

employ this genre.

To develop it further, in the master's thesis I would like to shift the focus from

contemporary writers who consciously manipulate the classical detective genre's conventions

towards writers of the American Renaissance (Melville, Hawthorne and Poe) in whose

work we may already find traces of this tendency. Obviously, it cannot be said that these

authors oppose a genre which has not yet been established in their time. Their work cannot

be categorized as metaphysical detective fiction, although in many ways these authors do

confront the reader with similar uncertainties concerning ontological rather than

epistemological problems.

The first chapter of the thesis will provide an introduction to the metaphysical

detective story genre contrasted with the classical detective story. It will present the genre's

dominant themes and motifs and summarize the main points dealt with in the above

mentioned bachelor's thesis.

The following five chapters will discuss how these themes emerge in earlier

literature from which postmodern writers like Paul Auster draw their inspiration. In the

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second chapter, Melville's Confidence-Man will be taken as a starting-point for presenting

these themes in 19th century literature. As will become clear, the novel has very little in

common with traditional detective stories. The reason why it is included is that it resembles

the genre of metaphysical detective fiction in its overall effect. The boat in Melville's novel

provides a setting where no meaning is stable, where we can never be sure of a person's

true identity, where any attempt to attain any sort of proof or evidence is futile.

The third chapter will deal with Hawthorne's “Wakefield” and his role in the

postmodern literary imagination. The story is interesting for postmodern writers in its

exploration of the instability of one's identity, a theme often employed in metaphysical

detective fiction. “The Man of the Crowd” will be presented in the fourth chapter as both

a precursor of Poe's detective story cycle and the metaphysical detective story genre as well.

The fifth chapter will focus on Poe's two classical detective stories “The Murders in Rue

Morgue” and “Purloined Letter” to analyze Dupin's famous method of ratiocination and

the way it puts the notion of a single unified identity into question. The final chapter will

summarize some of the approaches towards closure in these texts and in the metaphysical

detective stories in general.

Although the primary focus will be on Melville, Hawthorne and Poe; throughout

these chapters I will refer to particular texts of 20th century authors such as Auster,

Pynchon, Borges and DeLillo to compare and contrast some important themes, especially

in the last chapter focusing on the lack of closure in the metaphysical detective story. In the

theoretical background to the genre, many of the essays from Merivale and Sweeney's

Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Story from Poe to Postmodernism will be consulted along with

other influential texts written on this subject, most importantly by Michael Holquist,

William Spanos and Stefano Tani.

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1. The Metaphysical Detective Story

The term 'metaphysical detective story' was first used by Howard Haycraft in

Murder for Pleasure (1941), a book delineating the history of detective fiction. Haycraft,

rather than providing a definition for the term as such, introduced it in a cursory manner to

point out a certain quality of Chesterton's Father Brown stories which sets them apart

from other classical detective stories. Chesterton's stories were a departure from the genre

mainly in their focus on “moral and religious aspects of crime” (Haycraft 76), which gave

the detective story a “needed and distinctly more 'literary' turn” (77). In other words,

Chesterton's tales no longer exactly conform to the conventions of the genre, perhaps even

question some of the certainties by which the genre is characterized. Todorov views this as

the prerequisite for crossing the boundary of popular fiction and becoming art: “Detective

fiction has its norms; to 'develop' them is also to disappoint them: to 'improve upon'

detective fiction is to write 'literature'” (Todorov 43).

Since the publication of Murder for Pleasure, the term “metaphysical detective story”

has acquired further meanings. It has become a genre typical for postmodern literature,

used for a much wider range of literary works. It would not be possible, however, to deal

with metaphysical detective fiction without a recourse to the genre whose conventions it

uses and manipulates: the whodunit, or, the classical detective story.

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1.1 Classical Detective Story Conventions

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so – which amounts to the same thing. (…) Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked.

– Paul Auster, City of Glass (8)

Every reader more or less knows what to expect from detective fiction. Peter Hühn

notes how despite the writers' efforts to come up with endless variation, classical detective

stories mostly follow the same structure (455). In fact, the need for constituting the genre

went so far as to devise lists of rules for writing detective stories, most notably by S. S. Van

Dine (1928) and Ronald A. Knox (1929). These lists were written with one particular aim in

mind: the reader's gratification:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for

solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

7. (…) [T]he reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be

rewarded.

15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent —

provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. (…) That the

clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without

saying. (Van Dine)

The underlying message here is that the reader should be presented with a mystery and

simultaneously a key to its solution interwoven in the text in the form of clues. Although

some of the clues may be misleading, a clever reader, just like the detective, is able to

successfully identify the relevant ones.

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Furthermore, a well-made detective story cannot be too simple, it should be able to

constantly postpone the mystery's disclosure. The reader is supposed to be enlightened so

that “each successive portion of the truth comes as a surprise” (Chesterton). This is one of

the ways in which the relationship between the reader and the author parallels that of the

detective and the criminal. Similarly to the criminal who thwarts the detective's attempts to

solve the crime by altering the crime scene and disposing of the evidence, the author tries

to prevent the reader from prematurely solving the crime (Hühn 456). Eliot A. Singer

argues that in a whodunit, just like in a riddle, there is a power relationship between the

author and the reader which is asymmetrical. The author is in total control of the meaning.

Despite the possibility of inventing other possible solutions to the riddle, there is only one

which is accepted as correct: the author's predetermined solution (Singer 158). Naturally, in

order for the story to be a successful one, this solution needs to be “rationally superior to

those alternatives that the reader has conceived” (158). It is implicit in the classical detective

story (given that it follows all the rules) that, no matter how mysterious the case seems,

there will always be one and only one solution. The reader may safely rely on the author to

fulfill this expectation.

Hühn analyzes the classical detective story on the basis of Todorov's identification

of two plot lines in the detective story: “the story of the crime and the story of the

investigation” (Todorov 40). The detective has to read the clues in order to assign

corresponding meanings to them. Using Saussurean terminology, detection is defined as

“selecting and grouping signifiers and assigning various signifieds to them” (Hühn 455).

That is, if we take for granted that each signifier has a matching signified, a claim very

much contested by the post-structuralists, nevertheless a fact that the classical detective

never questions.

At first, the crime is viewed as an uninterpretable sign. It poses a threat to the

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established order, since its traditional agents (the police) are unable to come to terms with

it. This is why the detective has to be called in. The second plot, the story of investigation,

is the detective's re-enactment of the story of the crime. It is the detective's interpretation

which not only includes the detective's reading of the mystery but also the way he was able

to read it, the description of the process that led him to the solution. In this final phase, all

the signifiers are matched up with their signifieds; there is nothing redundant, nothing left

to speculation.

The classical detective is often viewed as a representative of a rational world. He is

“the essential metaphor for order” (Holquist 141), being able to solve any kind of mystery

simply by correct logical reasoning. The detective “alone in the world of credulous men,

holds to the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to

things, the belief that the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. There are

no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (141). The detective is the embodiment of

the belief that everything in the world can be explained rationally.

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1.2 From Popular Literature Towards Art

The need for a well-structured plot with a neat ending where all the loose ends are

finally tied up goes much deeper than just classical detective plots. William Spanos

perceives this genre to be emblematic of Western positivistic mode of thinking as such.

Western consciousness is, according to Spanos, organized in such a way that all the world's

phenomena can be perceived and summed up in terms of specific problems which can be

solved (149). The Western world is obsessed with closures, which Spanos exemplifies by

pointing out the strategies involved in writing newspaper articles where reality is often

manipulated to fit our need to read a story which is linear, logically structured and, above

all, rounded off by a satisfying closure. Even events which seem absurd or lack this kind of

a straightforward conclusion are turned into well-made fictions. Reality is transformed into

a “manageable object, into fulfilled objective, into an accomplishment” (165). This serves

to illustrate the “monolithic certainty that immediate psychic or historical experience is part

of a comforting, even exciting and suspenseful well-made cosmic drama or novel – more

particularly, a detective story” (150). The desire for closures in relation to detective fiction

is similarly discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (19-20). Last but not

least, the amount of conspiracy theories that today's world is teeming with can also be

ascribed to this particular need.

Both Spanos and Holquist compare the classical detective story and the

metaphysical detective story. In contrast to the classical detective story, the anti-detective

story (for which the term metaphysical detective story is now more widely used) is seen by

Spanos as “the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination” (154).

Michael Holquist also compares the classical detective story and the metaphysical detective

story in his essay, besides other things to show the difference between art and kitsch (155).

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Unlike art, kitsch always has to be familiar. The classical detective stories repeat the same

pattern over and over again with an almost narcotizing effect. The metaphysical detective

story fails to fulfill such expectations. It takes these accustomed patterns apart. One of the

most important differences is that it is not end-dominated, it is “not concerned to have a

neat ending in which all the questions are answered, and which can therefore be forgotten”

(Holquist 153).

There is a feeling of satisfaction or catharsis that arises from the final restoration of

order by the classical detective. In this sense, detective stories can be likened to a kind of

literary junk food. They are something that the reader craves, however, they have no real

value in themselves. As Hühn argues, the text of the detective story 'consumes itself' in the

end (459). Once we have read it, there is no reason for reading the same story over again.

There would be no sense in doing so, since the pleasure of reading relies on our not

knowing the solution: “Because the mystery was initially defined as the meaning of the

text, no relevance remains when the meaning becomes extractable and the mystery is

removed (the book then leaves nothing to be desired)” (Hühn 458). As soon as we know

what trick the magician uses to achieve his illusion, the illusion itself ceases to amaze us.

Or, in Borges's words taken from one of his short stories “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in

His Labyrinth”: “the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself ”

(qtd. in Irwin 28). The ending is always anticlimactic, no matter how clever and well-

constructed the mystery was, therefore the necessary question arises: “How does one both

present the analytic solution of a mystery and at the same time conserve the sense of the

mysterious on which analysis thrives?” (Irwin 28). Answers to this question may be found

in the metaphysical detective story.

As was already mentioned, a genre of popular literature can function because it

adheres to certain rules. It is precisely the familiarity of the detective story conventions

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which makes them a convenient target of subversion or parody. Since the conventions of

the detective story are expected to be fulfilled, any slight change in them deflects the

reader's attention away from the plot to the conventions themselves and the way in which

reality is simplified through them to suit our needs.

Linda Hutcheon discusses detective stories in terms of their self-reflectiveness (71-

73). She sees this as one of the reasons why the detective plot is so appealing to the

postmodern writer. Since the detective/criminal relationship mirrors that of the reader and

the writer on a different level, these stories are not only about solving crime but generally

about any kind of interpretation. The classical detective story is dominated by a sense of

overruling order and logic, manifested in its conventions that the reader counts on to be

fulfilled so that he or she may take part in solving the crime along with the detective.

According to Hutcheon, “[i]t is this very store of infinitely reworkable conventions that is

acknowledged and exploited, 're-contextualized,' by metafictionists such as Robbe-Grillet

and Borges” (72). Whereas the classical detective story promises to provide answers within

the text itself, in postmodern fiction the key to understanding is not embedded in the text.

No matter how intensive our scrutiny of the text is, the answer to the frequently posed and

feared question of high school teachers: 'What did the author mean?' can never be found,

simply because it was never there in the first place, the notion of 'authority' being

questioned by the authors themselves.

What both Spanos and Holquist argue in their essays is that metaphysical detective

stories expose the patterns of the classical detective story and lay bare the conventions of

the genre which shape our way of thinking by providing a comforting but sham world of

well-made fiction. They both see it as a necessary development of the genre to give

'strangeness' instead of 'familiarity', to 'disturb' instead of 'reassuring' (Holquist 155).

Metaphysical detective stories are a subversion of the classical detective genre in

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that they “apply the detective process to that genre's own assumptions about detection”

(Merivale and Sweeney 3). This necessarily changes the nature of questions that these texts

pose to the reader. Brian McHale termed the classical detective story the “epistemological

genre par excellence” (9). He argues that the turn from modernist to postmodernist fiction

is signified by a change of the dominant, the dominant being a concept taken from Jakobson

defined as “the focusing component of a work of art [which] rules, determines, and

transforms the remaining components [and] guarantees the integrity of the structure”

(McHale 6). The shift of focus in modernist and postmodernist fiction, according to

McHale, is that from the “problems of knowing” to “problems of modes of being” (10), or in

other words, from epistemological questions to ontological ones.

McHale gives examples of the questions foregrounded by modernist texts: “How

can I interpret the world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? (…) What is there to

be known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?” (9)

and compares them to those engaged by postmodernist texts: “What world is this? What is

to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (10). In metaphysical detective stories, the

initial epistemological questions give rise to an ontological uncertainty which the detective

finds much harder to cope with. This unexpected confrontation with questions of being

can serve as a means of “undermining the detective-like expectations of the positivistic

mind” (Spanos 167). Since the reader is supposed to be identifying with the detective to

solve the case, he or she is confronted with these very same uncertainties.

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1.3 The Classical Detective Lost in the Postmodern World

You’re a detective now son, you’re not allowed to believe in coincidences. – The Dark Knight Rises, dir. Christopher Nolan

The classical detective belongs to the age of reason, to a world which is still

dominated by a belief in grand universal truths which govern all aspects of the world and

unify them. This idea of the world is opposed by postmodern writers, postmodernism

being characterized by an “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (Lyotard xxiv). The figure

of the classical detective, when transplanted into the postmodern world, is liable to fall into

traps because of his or her obsession with finding closures. By trying to apply the same

methods of detection in a world not governed by a structuring principle, the detective is

led astray by clues leading to still more clues. Since there is no unifying device (no author

determines the clues with a particular solution in mind), the detective is frustrated by

different explanations which seem to coexist or cancel each other out. The position of the

detective, already on the margin of society, becomes less and less rooted within the system:

“The detective is unable to impose a meaning, an interpretation of the outside occurrences

he is asked, as a sleuth, to solve and interpret. Reality is so tentacular and full of clues that

the detective risks his sanity as he tries to find a solution” (Tani 76).

The detectives in metaphysical detective stories lose their stable position within

their world. They often identify themselves with the object of their pursuit, almost to the

point of giving up their own identity (such as in Auster's City of Glass, foreshadowed by

Poe's “Man of the Crowd”). In other cases they realize (often too late) that they had been

playing out a part in somebody else's carefully constructed fiction designed to exploit or

destroy them (such as in Borges's “Death and the Compass,” Auster's Ghosts). Just like

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Daniel Quinn in the City of Glass, these detectives think that their world is governed by the

rules of classical detective fiction. It is the detective's faith in a reality which is structured

like a classical detective story that is the cause of their doom. According to Allison Russel,

the crime that has to be solved in The New York Trilogy (but ultimately in all metaphysical

detective fiction) is that of logocentrism:

Logocentrism (…) is the “crime” that Auster investigates in The New

York Trilogy. In each volume, the detective searches for “presence”: an

ultimate referent of foundation outside the play of language itself.

The quest for correspondence between signifier and signified is

inextricably related to each protagonist’s quest for origin and identity,

for the self only exists insofar as language grants existence to it. (72)

The detectives don't believe in coincidences, they believe that everything that surrounds

them is filled with potential meaning. Without the structuring principle, however, meaning

truly is everywhere, it becomes superfluous. Anything may be connected to anything else if

the detective chooses to see it that way.

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1.4 Metaphysical Detective Story Themes

Merivale and Sweeney in their introduction to Detecting Texts offer a clear and

concise list of themes and structures characteristic for the metaphysical detective story.

They are:

1. the defeated sleuth, whether he be an armchair detective or a

private eye;

2. the world, city, or text as labyrinth;

3. the purloined letter, embedded text, mise en abyme, textual

constraint, or text as object;

4. the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer

meaninglessness of clues and evidence;

5. the missing person, the “man of the crowd,” the double, and the

lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; and

6. the absence, falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of any

kind of closure to the investigation. (8)

The texts on which this thesis will focus in the following chapters cannot be

categorized as full-fledged metaphysical detective fiction. However, they precede the genre

in many of its themes. The works of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville which will be discussed

each employ at least one of the themes mentioned by Merivale and Sweeney in their list.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Wakefield,” its eponymous protagonist is the original

missing person. Wakefield inhabits a similarly marginal position as detectives do. The

narrator's claim that a person may easily abandon his or her position within the system,

which he takes for granted, and become the “Outcast of the Universe” (91) is taken up and

developed by postmodern writers such as Don DeLillo in The Names or Paul Auster in The

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New York Trilogy (the latter alluding to “Wakefield” explicitly).

Edgar Allan Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” features a character who decides to

follow a man whom he spots among the crowd, believing him to posses some horrible

secret. This detective-like quest through the labyrinth of the city's streets proves to be

unsuccessful. The story lacks a closure and the man of the crowd, as well as the character

of the narrator who decides to pursue him remain highly ambiguous. The concept of the

double is crucial in Poe's “William Wilson,” however, it is present in all the analyzed texts.

Of course, all metaphysical detective fiction is naturally indebted to the first

fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin and his method of ratiocination. One of Poe's

classical detective stories, “The Purloined Letter,” will be analyzed to provide insight into

this method and its significance for later parodies of Dupin such as “Death and the

Compass” by Jorge Luis Borges.

Herman Melville's Confidence-Man is a novel which seems to fit in with the detective

story theme the least. There is no detective featuring as a character within the novel. Yet,

there are many suspects. One of the most important aspects of the novel which can be

linked to the metaphysical detective story is “the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness,

or sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidence” (Merivale and Sweeney 8) and the open-

endedness of the text. Whereas the reader, similarly to a detective can question the identity

of the various characters, the novel itself does not provide any clear answers, denying the

possibility of any kind of real evidence.

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2. Melville's Confidence-Man: Questioning the Notion of Evidence

The metaphysical detective story is a genre which is postmodern in all its aspects. It

is characterized by “[f]ragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or

'totalizing' discourses (…) [which] are the hallmark of postmodernist thought” (Harvey 9).

The detective in the postmodern era has a hard time sifting through various contradicting

clues without any chance of getting to the solution simply because there is not any such

simple, unified truth to be found. It is only the perfectly constructed world of the classical

detective story that offers such solutions.

Clasifying Melville's Confidence-Man as a detective story would be stretching it

rather too far. There is no figure of a detective of any kind, no murder, no investigation.

According to a contemporary reviewer it is hardly even a novel, since he wrote in 1857: “A

novel it is not, unless a novel means forty-five conversations held on board a steamer,

conducted by passengers who might pass for the errata of creation” (qtd. in Tanner,

“Melville” 90). Nevertheless, there are several aspects which link the book to the genre of

the metaphysical detective story such as shifting identities, ambiguity, open-endedness of

the text, no readily identifiable solution. Due to the enigmatic nature of the main character,

it is the novel itself which becomes a mystery to be solved by a detective/the reader. The

fact that there is no agreement between the critics as to its meaning/solution serves to

illustrate this point. It is only natural that words like “conflicting clues” and “evidence”

appear in such criticism (see Cawelti).

While Melville may not have been consciously expressing these notions, there are

certainly many of them to be found in his works. The attempts of several critics at

providing a clear structure to the novel, trying to project unity onto it, necessarily came up

against obstacles (Seltzer 15). The most obvious one being that it is not as simple to unify

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all the seeming confidence-men under one persona as it would seem at first. As the

chapters follow one another there appears to be a line of avatars of the same 'confidence-

man,' part of whose success lies in creating a kind of network of alter-egos, each character

mentioning the name of another who appears in a later chapter and therewith vouching for

their integrity. This neatly woven network is torn apart once there appear two different

confidence-men at the same time. The disruption of the pattern makes the reader question

the identity of the previous avatars.

The narrator himself does not give any evidence of these characters being the same

person, it is the reader who takes this for granted. Based on the title of the book

(confidence-man singular, not confidence-men) and based on common narrative

conventions we are led to assume that everything will fit together in the end. There appears

to be a similar pattern as in the metaphysical detective story where everything seems to go

according to plan at first: the detective finds various clues which lead him to more clues

and so forth, only to be finally lead completely astray. The reader then has to reconsider the

previously made assumptions, approach the text more critically.

The simple notion that all characters who have faith in the confidence-man are

fools and only the wise are able to resist him is also contested by critics (Drew 418-9). The

reader is tempted to apply these binary opposites (foolish/wise, moral/immoral) to the

characters, however, once applied, there arise facts which contradict these simple labels.

John G. Cawelti termed this the “incomplete reversal”:

[S]omething is presented, a character, an incident, an idea, anything

which might give the reader some clue to the interpretation of the

represented reality; then a counter incident or idea appears,

powerful enough to destroy the usefulness of the first clue, but

insufficient to provide a foundation for a new interpretation of

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what has been presented. We are left in the air with no way of

resolving two mutually exclusive possibilities. (282-3)

Leon Seltzer finds in The Confidence-Man resonances with Camus's notion of the

absurd. These ideas could be successfully applied to the metaphysical detective story as

well. Both are related to the realization that there is no unity, no governing principle of the

universe and the resulting frustration/dread. The detectives of metaphysical detective

stories become entangled in the web of contradicting clues, the absurd man is faced with

the meaninglessness of the universe. According to Camus, there are only two possible

solutions: either abandoning reason in favor of faith or acceptance of the fact that universe

is meaningless, viewing it as absurd. Camus defines this reaction to the absurd as “lucid

reason noting its limits” or coming to terms with the incapability of fathoming the

meaninglessness of the universe (qtd. in Seltzer 15).

The first chapter seems to portray clear distinctions, it juxtaposes the two main

themes of the text: confidence and suspicion. There are two characters who represent each

of these notions, both expressing them in the form of a written sign. The first one is the

deaf-mute (by most of the critics believed to be the first incarnation of the confidence-

man, according to others he represents Christ, while the other confidence-men are meant

to be the embodiments of Satan) showing his slate with citations from the book of

Corinthians regarding charity, the second is the barber displaying the sign “No Trust” on

his shop window. Both these mutually exclusive views are shown to the passengers of the

boat so that everyone can see them. While the deaf-mute is received with scorn and pushed

aside, the barber's sign is regarded as only natural:

An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than the

contrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke any

corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still

19

less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of

being a simpleton. (4)

The prevailing attitude of the crowd aboard the ship is clearly presented in this passage.

One of the examples of Cawelti's incomplete reversal can be seen in Melville's use

of the dramatic unities. The unities of time and space are introduced in the first chapter.

Although they are followed, each of them produces a certain conflict. The setting is a boat,

satirically called Fidèle (faithful). Melville uses the traditional motif of the journey. The

narrator evokes Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, making a comprehensive list of the various

nationalities, professions, characters “all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man” (8-

9). This kind of setting makes it possible for characters of various stances from various

parts of the country to meet and interact. The boat serves as a microcosm of society, with

all its diversities. Yet, the fixity of a single setting is only seeming and superficial since the

boat is in constant motion. The fact that there is no stable ground serves as a reflection of

“the idea of trust as essentially baseless” (Seltzer 18).

Tanner also perceives Fidèle as a microcosm of America and in his introduction he

provides a social background to the novel. He sees the continent as characterized by

perpetual movement, emergence of still new strangers, freed of their past and of previous

class division. From this there arise problems of identity, communication, and of course

trust. It is therefore natural that out of such a society, where everyone is a stranger to one

another, various 'confidence men' are easily born (Tanner, “Introduction” xvi-ii).

The unity of time is also respected, the plot encompasses one day – April 1st, the

April Fool's Day. This date provides a further complication. It is a day when it is not

advisable to trust anybody, a day when deception is allowed, even celebrated. As Seltzer

suggests, the text does not give us an opportunity to compare with the preceding or the

following day, there is “no norm with which to test the integrity of what is presented to us”

20

(18). The atmosphere created through such mis/use of the unities is of great uncertainty,

without much to hold on to, which is perhaps exactly the atmosphere that Melville wanted

to create. Given this temporal and spatial background, it does make sense that the deaf

mute with his innocent and naïve notions of charity is seen as “inappropriate to the time

and place” (Melville 3).

As regarding the unity of action, Seltzer does not view the action as unified, only in

the sense that most of the plot deals with swindling of some sort (18). It is, however, too

varied to be unified. Here, he finds a striking resemblance between the actions of the

confidence-man and the absurd man as Camus describes him: “The absurd man

multiplies...what he cannot unify” (qtd. in Seltzer 19). He points out that not only can it be

applied to the confidence-man but also Melville as author (Ibid.).

Each of the characters with whom the confidence-man engages in a dialog need to

be persuaded to have confidence in him. One of the things that makes them submit to him

is printed proof. The authority of the written word is very strong here. When the

clergyman asks John Ringman “Of course you have papers?” (44), he produces a

memorandum book in which he takes down his name. If he did not have such a prop, it

would probably arouse the clergyman's suspicion. The deaf mute is not taken seriously by

anybody because he does not have any “badge of authority about him” (2). The Black

Guinea is asked for some “documentary proof ” (14) proving that he is crippled. Since he

does not have any, he is asked if there is anybody present on the boat who would vouch for

him. The Black Guinea produces a list of people, most of them matching the following

incarnations of the confidence-man, none of them, of course, present at the time.

The sophomore also relies on the authority of the printed word. When seeing the

transfer agent's book with the gilt inscription, he decides to buy some shares of the Black

Rapids Coal Company. He demands a “statement of the condition of [the] company” (62),

21

believing himself not to be easily deceived by appearances. The small printed pamphlet that

the transfer agent gives him, however, is enough for him to cast away all his doubts.

When Mr. Roberts sees the book of which he had been informed by the man with

the weed, he also addresses the transfer agent, ready to purchase shares. Being offered to

examine the transfer-book and to judge whether it is not forged, he responds:

Doubts, may be, it might suggest, but not knowledge; for how, by

examining the book, should I think I knew any more than I now

think I do; since, if it be the true book, I think it so already; and

since if it be otherwise, then I have never seen the true one, and

don't know what that ought to look like. (73)

Unlike the sophomore, he is aware of the fact that there is no way of knowing

whether the transfer-book is real. He realizes that he simply has to choose whether to have

faith in it or not. And he does have faith, for he does not believe that trusting Mr.

Goodman might result in the loss of his investment. There is an obvious parallel to

religion, also depending on people's faith in its scriptures.

Through Mr. Roberts's words, Melville formulates the view of the impossibility of

attaining the truth. There is simply no evidence, however real it looks, that can be truly

proclaimed as infallible. All evidence is “potentially suspect, synthetic, improvised” (Tanner,

“Introduction” xxviii). Even if there is proof that the document is not forged, there is a

need of a person who vouches for its authenticity, whose own authenticity needs to be

further verified. This chain can go on endlessly, creating multiple layers of forged identities.

The confidence-man makes use of this technique with his many disguises. While he is in

one disguise, he mentions one or more of his other incarnations, making it more and more

difficult for the other characters to realize that any of these different people is a fraud, let

alone all of them. The very term “counterfeit detector,” an aid to finding out whether a

22

bank note is real which appears in the final scene, is paradoxical in itself since even the

detector itself could be a counterfeit (Tanner, “Introduction” xxxii).

The confidence-man can be seen as a kind of authorial figure in the novel. He is

the author of others' points of view, even of their own experience. We can see this happen

in chapter IV, where he manipulates Mr. Roberts into believing that he is an old

acquaintance of his, only Mr. Roberts forgot they had met due to his brain fever. That

“mind is ductile” (24) is both his argument and the reason why he is believed by Mr.

Roberts. The possibility of easy manipulation of one's mind even to the point of

questioning their own identity is an important theme of the metaphysical detective story,

where the detective may end up somebody else, losing his own sense of self during the

process of investigation even discovering that he himself is the murderer in some cases

(Ewert 185). Melville slightly points to such a possibility in the scene where John Ringman

asks Mr. Roberts to look at one of his own business cards to make sure that he is the

person for whom he takes him. Mr. Roberts, puzzled, responds:

'I hope I know myself'

'And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who

knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for

somebody else? Stranger things have happened.' (22)

At other times the confidence-man plants an idea in a person while in one disguise

and in another he watches how it takes root. When the man with the weed approaches the

sophomore, he comments on his reading Tacitus, criticizing the gloomy nature of his

philosophy. In chapter IX, the sophomore is already eagerly supporting this very same

opinion, not knowing he is talking to the same man, only now in the guise of the transfer

agent.

Many critics have pointed out that there is no evidence in the book of the various

23

confidence-men sharing a single identity. Some have taken it even further in suggesting that

there is nothing in the book that would prove that any act of swindling actually takes place

and all of the events are not completely innocent in their nature:

We may search in vain for the episode which establishes that any

of the confidence-men is a swindler. Every incident narrated is

innocent in itself and innocent to a trusting eye, but filled with

dubious circumstance to the reader who is himself without

confidence. (Drew 441)

Most of the critics agree that the readers would most probably think that there is a

trickster present on board (Drew suggests that it is the reader himself who is guilty of

having no confidence). It is the interpretation that suggests itself most readily: “suspicion

has its origin not in the book but in the reader” (440). Admittedly the narrator does not

give away anything other than is apparent. There is no comment on the motivation of the

confidence-man nor are any of his thoughts revealed. Walter Dubler highlights the absence

of any comments or moralization on the part of the narrator as one of the dramatic

conventions that are characteristic of Melville's style (308).

There are, however, three chapters (XIV, XXXIII, XLIV) where the author

suddenly steps into the foreground. These chapters deal with the problem of

characterization in the novel. Melville comments on the difficulties in creating original

characters in fiction. In the first chapter he deals with the inconsistency in the portrayal of

one of the characters. He justifies this discrepancy by saying that what is expected of

fiction is consistency yet at the same time the characters are required to be true to life,

which is incompatible with the first demand. It is only for the sake of fiction that a

character can be made to appear as consistent. The unity in the characters' actions, similarly

as the unity of the whole novel, is only artificial:

24

[H]e, who in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the

same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that

it is past finding out (…) evinces a better appreciation of it than he

who, by always representing t in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred

that he clearly knows all about it. (91)

The author claims that although inconsistent, the character is more true to life, while at the

same time, by speaking of his role in the process of writing the novel, he reminds us of the

fact that what we are reading is nothing but the work of his imagination, “the process of

story is in itself a confidence game requiring acts of faith from both author and reader”

(Hauck 120). Melville is saying here that the inconsistency in the characters is deliberate

which suggests that there might be more such problems when considering the whole novel,

since Melville is talking about human nature in general, which could include the notions of

confidence and trust as well. The character of the “confidence-man,” if there is such a

single character, is far from consistent, not only his appearance, but also his motivations.

While some of his avatars want to rob the victims of their money, in other cases money

does not seem to be of that much importance; he is trying to swindle them for the pleasure

of exposing them as vulnerable, easily manipulable, all through the use of language. Cecelia

Tichi talks of Melville's “conviction that language had become the meanest stuff of

swindle because it was severed from its ethical and communicative functions” (640).

The distorting power of language is an important motif of postmodern literature,

including the metaphysical detective story. The character of the confidence-man seems to

have a power over the other characters, changing their opinions, “rewriting” their

experience, turning over the meanings of ethical terms such as charity and confidence. The

book does not allow for an easy interpretation, one of its aims being to show that such

consistency would not be true to life.

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3. Hawthorne's “Wakefield”: The Missing Person Paradigm

Many critics have recognized Wakefield's crucial role for postmodern fiction.

Richard Swope views Wakefield as an “overlooked but equally important literary ancestor

for the metaphysical detective” (209). The story is a “master narrative for the experience of

solitude and darkness surrounding individual subjectivity” (Bernstein 144-5). Patricia

Merivale terms Wakefield the “paradigmatic metaphysical Missing Persons story” (111).

Various postmodern authors such as Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon or Kobo

Abe explore the possibilities of the Wakefield paradigm in their fiction to “question the

unity, cohesion and stability of the subject; to expose identity as a fictional construct”

(Shiloh 54).

The boundary between fiction and reality is blurred in “Wakefield”. The narrator

claims the story is a truthful account found by him in an old magazine or a newspaper.

What he remembers is only the outline: a man who decides to play a joke on his wife by

pretending to go on a journey one day and not coming back. Instead, he takes lodging in a

nearby street and lives there for twenty years while his wife eventually comes to terms with

his death. After the twenty years he enters his house one day and resumes living his life as

before.

The narrator, struck by the story's oddity, attempts to elaborate on it, tries to fill in

its blanks. The appeal of the story for the narrator is its originality, the case of Wakefield,

as he chooses to call him, is unprecedented, the possibilities that it provides for a writer are

therefore endless. In a story lacking a logical explanation, the writer is free to supply his

own. The remarkable incident which appears to be inexplicable is transformed by the

narrator into a story with a moral:

If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation; or if he

26

prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield's

vagary, I bid him welcome; trusting that there will be a pervading

spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done up

neatly, and condensed into the final sentence. (Hawthorne 84)

If we take the article in a newspaper for a fictional story invented by Hawthorne

for the purposes of exploring this subject, there arises another level in the story's structure:

the narrator and his desire to provide the mysterious story with a moral, not unlike a

detective searching for a solution. The main motivation for the narrator is the desire to find

a key to Wakefield's mystery that would provide the story with a sense of a closure and a

deeper meaning. It is through fiction that he tries to make sense of reality.

The narrator attributes to Wakefield certain qualities. He is a constant husband,

unimaginative, unoriginal, ordinary, calm. He chooses these qualities precisely because they

make Wakefield's actions even more striking. After the description of his character, the

narrator chooses to tell the story as if from the position of a spy or a detective. We follow

Wakefield as he walks through the streets very closely, so that we do not lose sight of him:

“We must hurry after him along the street, ere he lose his individuality, and melt into the

great mass of London life” (86). The possibility of disappearing in the city is linked with

the loss of one's individuality. It is possible to simply vanish among the crowd, become

part of the nameless mass. The labyrinthine quality of the city is suggested by the

“superfluous turns and doublings” (86). After this ostensibly complicated pursuit, we

discover that Wakefield's journey ends, paradoxically, in the street next to his own. What is

suggested by this is that our location within the established system is what makes us who

we are more than our actual geographical location: Wakefield can be lost despite the fact

that he inhabits the same city, almost the same street as before. He becomes double, in

metaphorical terms he is both the missing person and the detective who is supposed to

27

track him down, under the threat of losing his individuality in the process.

By crossing the threshold, Wakefield loses track of what he believed was his

identity. He can no longer be the person he was, his identity being defined by the context:

the house he lives in, the woman he is married to. There is no continuity between the two

selves on either side of the threshold, there is a gap, or rather a gulf: “The new system

being now established, a retrograde movement to the old would be almost as difficult as

the step that placed him in his unparalleled position” (88). There is nobody who is hired to

follow in his footsteps, regardless of what his paranoia tells him (“there were footsteps that

seemed to tread behind his own” (86)). He is pronounced dead, no link is provided

between his former life and his new one, therefore he has to become the detective himself.

What he is trying to solve is the mystery he has himself created.

The mystery is of an ontological nature, rather than epistemological as is the case in

the classical detective story. As Swope suggests, the questions Wakefield has to ask himself

are no longer only concerned with how to know his place in the world. They lead him to

more complex questions such as: “what is the nature of this world? And what is the nature

of my place, or lack of place in this world” (Swope 209). Similarly to the metaphysical

detective he is nowhere, situated on the margin of society. His actual coordinates seem to

be of no consequence. The narrator is aware of this paradox: “'It is but in the next street!'

he sometimes says. Fool! it is in another world” (Hawthorne 89).

However, while abandoning the warm hearth of his home and leaving his wife to

make of his absence what she will, Wakefield is still curious about what goes on during the

time when he is not there. Like a voyeur, he peeks into the windows of his house and spies

on his wife, distancing himself from his former way of life, viewing his former self, or

rather its absence, from without. The common fantasy of being able to watch one's own

funeral, to see what happens after one is dead, comes true for Wakefield. He cannot help

28

but keep watching even as his wife starts gradually wasting away:

Towards nightfall comes the chariot of a physician, and deposits

its big-wigged and solemn burden at Wakefield's door, whence,

after a quarter of an hour's visit, he emerges, perchance the herald

of a funeral. Dear woman! Will she die? (88)

In a sense, he even derives pleasure from watching her, he experiences “something

like energy of feeling” (Ibid.). From the perspective of a voyeur, his life suddenly becomes

endowed with meaning, his importance can be felt in his wife's grief that is caused by his

disappearance. The distance he has established allows him to view the suffering of his wife

almost without feeling responsible, as if he did not have the ability to stop it. He has no

power to stop watching before the story has exhausted itself, before he thinks his wife

managed to have successfully forgotten him: as he watches her shadow dance on the wall

one day, it dances “almost too merrily for the shade of an elderly widow” (91).

The narrator views Wakefield's position somewhere in the gap between life and

death: “The dead have nearly as much chance of revisiting their earthly homes as the self-

banished Wakefield” (89). Even though he is dead to his wife, literally haunting the house

as a ghost, he nevertheless inhabits the textual space of the story, becoming used to this

marginal position:

We must leave him for ten years or so, to haunt around his house,

without once crossing the threshold, and to be faithful to his wife,

with all the affection of which his heart is capable, while he is

slowly fading out of hers. Long since, it must be remarked, he had

lost the perception of singularity in his own conduct. (89)

Wakefield adapts to the new role of a silent observer, walking around his house in

disguise until finally, after twenty years, he manages to cross the threshold again, as if

29

without his own will, when he is passing by his house, it is raining and it seems like the

most natural thing to go back to the warmth of his own home. However, nothing is

explained, only the two split parts of his self merge back again, Wakefield is no longer

missing and resumes his role as a faithful husband.

Unlike the metaphysical detective, when he returns he still finds the world

dominated by order. His place remains vacant, waiting for him to fill it again. As Swope

points out, it is very like the classical detective story: “the rational replaces the irrational,

the mysterious missing person no longer goes missing” (210). In spite of Wakefield's

successful re-entry into his former life, the story ends on a darker note:

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals

are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and

to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes

himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield,

he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe. (91)

The reader is not allowed to see what happens once Wakefield enters his house,

neither do we see the wife's reaction. However, it is more than likely that to his wife, he

would seem as if coming back to life from the dead. The imagery that the narrator uses,

nevertheless, can be viewed as a complete reversal of this. The narrator exclaims: “Stay

Wakefield! Would you go to the sole home that is left you? Then step into your grave!”

(91). Similarly to leaving his fixed position of the center of his former life, Wakefield is

now leaving the central position in the story.

The narrator is reluctant to let Wakefield enter his home. It is at the point of his

second crossing of the threshold that the story must naturally end. The reader is aware of

this since we are acquainted with the outline of the story from its very beginning. This is

why the narrator, on a different level, also plays an important role in the story. The mode

30

of narration he chooses (that of a detective) suggests an investigation of the mysterious

case of Wakefield in the process of writing it. As the story is approaching the end, the

narrator realizes that in fact he has not found many answers to the questions he had posed

at the beginning. The moral he provides, as he says, is only a portion of the “food for

thought” (91) which Wakefield leaves us.

31

3.1 Postmodern Wakefields

The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. (…) By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

– Paul Auster, City of Glass (8)

An important aspect of “Wakefield” that is echoed also in Paul Auster's writing is

the need to make sense of reality through fiction. The narrator makes sense of the

irrational by making it into a fictional account. Making sense of one's identity can also be

achieved by viewing it from the perspective of somebody else. Although Wakefield cannot

watch himself as such, he nevertheless wants to know how “the little sphere of creatures

and circumstances, in which he was a central object, will be affected by his removal”

(Hawthorne 87).

As the reader views Wakefield from the position of a spy or a detective, we spy on

Wakefield while he is spying on himself. There is a trace of what would become a typical

motif of the metaphysical detective story: a detective who is unknowingly being followed

himself. In Paul Auster's Ghosts, Mr. Blue is hired as a detective to watch Mr. Black and

write regular reports of his actions. He accepts the case only to realize he is supposed to be

watching a man who barely does anything but read and write. Despite this, he perseveres,

trying to invent possible endings, getting dangerously close to the verge of insanity as

whole years go by in the meantime. He gradually loses touch with everybody he knows, his

life becomes so dominated by the case that there is nothing else. What he eventually

realizes, much to his dismay, is that it was Mr. Black who hired him to play the role of an

32

observer, to put his life into words and provide them with a meaning.

It is beyond Mr. Blue's imagination that what appears to be just another case is

going to keep him trapped for years, just as Wakefield has “no suspicion of what is before

him” (Hawthorne 85). Wakefield is drawn to stay in the position of a silent observer by the

desire to know what will happen next, a desire common to people reading a book or

watching a film or, more importantly, detectives trying to figure out the solution to a case.

Mr. Blue also experiences this desire: “There is something nice about being in the dark, he

discovers, something thrilling about not knowing what is going to happen next” (Ghosts

154).

Unlike for Wakefield, for the metaphysical detective, crossing the threshold often

equals the impossibility of return to the former order of things (Swope 211). When Mr.

Blue, after completely losing touch with the future Mrs. Blue for the sake of working on his

case, encounters his girlfriend on the street, she makes it clear to him that she despises him

for what he had done to her. Quite unlike Wakefield who reamins a loving spouse until the

rest of his life, Blue is not allowed to return.

Dealing with the different variations on the Wakefield motif, Swope chooses Ghosts

as a starting point for the discussion. All the important motifs are included: “collapsing

selves, dissipating ontological boundaries, and forbidding thresholds – as well as

conventions: a detective, a missing person, the loss of the domestic, an unsolvable case”

(214). However, as he adds, the possibilities of subversion are not fully realized in Ghosts,

since the character is able to stay within the “world,” the threshold he crosses is not of an

ontological nature.

The first part of Auster's trilogy offers a more radical example. City of Glass is a

story of a writer pretending to be a detective who becomes so absorbed by the case that he

not only loses touch with his former identity (taking on a different name and the new

33

identity of the detective that is attached to it) but is not able to stop working on the case

long after the person he is hired to watch disappears and there are no more clues. It is with

the last page of the red notebook in which he records all the information about the case

that Quinn seems to disappear too, leaving only the textual evidence of the red notebook

behind with the last sentence expressing the dread of losing his self completely: “What will

happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?” (132).

Auster's writing is highly intertextual, featuring characters like William Wilson and

Fanshawe, and the fact that Auster uses “Wakefield” as one of the inter-texts is evident. It

comes as no surprise when, in Ghosts, Mr. Black whom Mr. Blue is hired to watch mentions

Hawthorne and retells the story of Wakefield to him. When talking about Hawthorne

spending twelve years just writing stories, Mr. Black describes the writer's job which bears a

striking resemblance to that of the detective: “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over

your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not

really there” (Ghosts 178). Auster comments on his own role of the writer who can be seen

as a kind of a Wakefield figure as well.

Since “Wakefield” was written in this twelve-year period of Hawthorne's isolation

from the rest of the world, it might be viewed as an exploration of his own situation which

made Hawthorne himself feel uneasy. In 1837, at the end of this period of his life, he

writes in a letter to Longfellow: “I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never

meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a

captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself

out” (qtd. in Borges, “Nathaniel” 49). This may be one of the reasons why “Wakefield” has

rather postmodern connotations. Hawthorne's own experience of the “death of the

author,” of losing oneself in the process of writing, is projected into this story.

City of Glass explores the possibility that the narrator of Wakefield only fears: that

34

the missing person will disappear completely. As Daniel Quinn adopts the persona of the

detective, he enters the liminal position similar to that of Wakefield. He is no longer part

of the world he used to inhabit, there is no link back to his former self. Once the red

notebook runs out of pages, he is no longer part of the textual space of the story, the

narrator has no control over him. From the perspective of the reader, Quinn simply ceases

to exist.

Don DeLillo's The Names is another postmodern novel which uses the Wakefield

motif (Swope 216-7). The narrator, James Axton, occupies a similarly liminal position to

Wakefield. As an American working as a risk analyst, he has to travel to different corners of

the world. He feels as a part of a “subculture of business people in transit, growing old in

planes and airports” (7). The novel portrays the modern world as full of conflicting codes,

made more apparent to the main character as plane travel allows him to cross cultural

thresholds without any particular effort. The space in which he feels most at home is this

absence of space, the state in-between. We perceive the world through language which

makes our position in the world more stable. By constant crossing of the threshold, the

world ceases to signify, all meaning seems arbitrary. Unlike Wakefield, Axton does not have

a stable position to which he can safely return. Some sort of provisional stability is

provided by his office in Athens, which is the only place to which he can always return. At

least he thinks so: “It's important for me to have an ordinary job. Paperwork. A desk and

daily tasks. In my curious way I try to cling to people and to work. I try to assert a basic

right or need” (360). Ironically, he is not aware that the whole time he has been working for

the CIA, his idea of a center being just another deception.

Revealing a suppressed desire for stability, dreading the loss of connection between

words and meanings, Axton becomes obsessed by discovering more information about a

strange cult whose set of mysterious murders seems to be connected with language and the

35

act of naming. He does discover the pattern in the murders, nevertheless, knowing the

pattern itself does not bring him any closer to the truth about anything. It only brings him

closer to the group of people who have gone even beyond his borderline position,

completely dissociating themselves from the world. Axton's lack of any stable place that he

can call home manifests itself in his search for some other pattern in which he can find

meaning: “My life is going by and I can't get a grip on it. It eludes me, it defeats me. My

family is on the other side of the world. Nothing adds up. The cult is the only thing I seem

to connect with. It's the only thing I've been right about” (359).

The tale of Wakefield, as Hawthorne saw it, serves to illustrate the instability of our

position in life. Wakefield is able to disconnect himself from his world: “He had contrived,

or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world – to vanish – to give up his

place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead” (90). When

he realizes how easy it is to become free of all that defines him as a person, a question that

immediately follows is: what is identity, is there any such thing? He does not ask himself

such questions but the narrator does. Wakefield himself cannot make sense of this

ontological mystery that he unintentionally fell into but is able to return unharmed.

DeLillo's Names portrays a character who cannot return to his true home because

there is no real home to return to. The reality seems to lack any such points of stability.

Auster's City of Glass offers a more radical version of Wakefield, a character who not only

dissevers himself from reality but from fiction as well. The subsequent two parts of the

trilogy, Ghosts and The Locked Room, represent a gradual coming to terms with the inability

to solve the ontological mystery. This helps the main character not to become engulfed by

it and survive. The narrator in the last novel of the trilogy comes closest to this acceptance:

“I don't claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came

when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened” (Locked 294).

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4. Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”

In Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Man of the Crowd” we can find many resonances

with “Wakefield.” In both of these short stories there is a figure of a narrator reflecting

upon a person who in some way seems mysterious. The role of both of the narrators is

remarkably similar to that of a detective, following the 'suspect' closely through the

labyrinthine streets of London, never once letting them disappear from sight. In both of

the stories there is a sense of absurdity that creates tension. The narrator feels the need to

explain and transform the mystery into a moral, a meaning. The quote, taken from a

“certain German book,” which Poe uses to frame the narrative: “'es läst sich nicht lesen' –

it does not permit itself to be read” (“Man” 154), could as well be applied to “Wakefield.”

It is the fact that the mystery refuses to be explained that arouses the narrator's interest –

the inscrutability of the person or the situation.

The obsession with the mystery causes an almost complete identification of the

narrator with his subject. In Poe's three classical detective stories, the identification with

one's opponent is established as the means of arriving at a solution. This so-called method

of ratiocination provides the detective with the ability to be one step ahead of the criminal

and to solve the case.

Written before the creation of Dupin, “The Man of the Crowd” can be seen as a

precursor to the classical detective stories. Despite the fact that it precedes Poe's

ratiocinative cycle, it can be viewed not only as the beginning of the genre but also as

signaling its end (Kennedy 185), and in many ways preceding the genre of the metaphysical

detective story.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” is sitting in

a coffee house, observing the street from behind a large window. He is recovering from a

37

lengthy illness, the regaining of his “mental vision” is causing a sensation of a “calm but

inquisitive interest in everything” (155). It is the simple enjoyment of being able to think

more clearly which makes him want to test his skills by shifting his focus onto the

individual people of the crowd. After a considerable amount of observation (first making

general conclusions, then turning to details) he becomes fairly confident about his ability to

ascertain a person's social status and profession simply by looking at them. Like an

empiricist, by way of a detailed analysis of the person's attire, gait, facial expression and

other particulars, he is able to neatly categorize them. He is pleased by his own cleverness

as he describes to the reader in detail what led him to these conclusions. It is like a game to

him in which each person represents a puzzle to be solved. Similarly to a scientist he

believes he holds a key to the humankind, having devised a method to explain everything,

up until the crucial moment when he notices a person who seems to escape all these clearly

defined categories.

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4.1 The Labyrinth Motif

The decrepit old man gives rise to a great variety of feelings in the narrator: “there

arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of

caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of

merriment, of excessive terror, of intense – of extreme despair. I felt singularly aroused,

startled, fascinated” (“Man” 158). The 'otherness' of the man opens up a void in the

narrator's logical reasoning that needs to be filled. What the man of the crowd threatens to

undermine is the narrator's ability to interpret. To reassert it, the narrator has to leave his

secure position of an observer in order not to allow the man to escape his scrutiny.

Kristin Veel focuses on this moment of the narrator's transition from being an

observer to entering the labyrinth, in her terms leaving the role of the viewer and

becoming a walker, which presents a shift from a “clear overview” to “embedded

confusion” (158). While the position of the viewer allows the narrator to “transform the

bustling mass into a social pattern” (Ibid.), once outside, he starts experiencing the city in a

completely different way. There is no possibility to apply the same method of detached

observation to the city that he is now part of, being on the same level as the person he is

following due to a desperate attempt to know more about his presumptive dark secrets:

His intentions are those of the detective seeking a solution, but the

experience in the labyrinthine city educates him in the uselessness

of searching for a center – a solution to the enigma. The

traditional notion of the labyrinth as leading to an endpoint thus

undergoes significant changes. (Veel 159)

This transition illustrates the ambiguous nature of the modern city which makes the

narrator feel “the simultaneous wish to master the aerial perspective and represent the city

39

from above, and the feared desire to lose oneself in the masses of the city itself ” (Veel

160).

The mass of people that the narrator enters is likened to a living organism in the

story, the whole of which is constantly shifting and changing shape: “The change of

weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new

commotion, and overshadowed by a world of umbrellas” (“Man” 159). The narrator is no

longer able to consider each individual separately as he was capable of before. The limited

section of the world which was framed by the coffee house window made it possible to

interpret and analyze. However, even such a perspective poses a problem embodied by the

man of the crowd, who does not fit any earlier established social patterns.

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4.2 The Motif of Doubling

Although a story which deals with darker matters, its atmosphere prefiguring the

hard-boiled detective story, “The Man of the Crowd” is not without elements of irony.

While the narrator embodies the role of a detached analytical observer, the reader can

marvel at his detective-like skills. Once he begins following the man, however, his self-

assurance regarding his own stealth, the fact that he is certain of being unnoticed by the

man, might raise a smile on the reader's face if he or she contrasts it with the actual pursuit

of the old man as he describes it. Kennedy enumerates the many instances of dramatic

irony where the narrator's concealment can safely be called into question, starting with the

fact that the narrator is able to describe such minute details as the texture of the man's

clothes, the proximity suggested by his walking close at the man's elbow through streets

which become less and less populated as the night approaches, his being so close as to

naturally refer to himself and the man by the plural pronoun “we” (189-90). This near

identification of the narrator with the man is illustrated by his unlikely ability to see what

he cannot possibly see if he is walking behind the man:

That the narrator has actually escaped detection seems unlikely,

particularly in light of numerous references to the stranger's visage

– to the eyes that “rolled wildly from under his knit brows,” to his

“wild and vacant stare,” to the “intense agony of his countenance”

- which indicate that the narrator has been virtually face to face

with his counterpart. (Kennedy 190)

The old man's behavior is certainly suspicious; he suddenly crosses and recrosses the

streets, walks around the city in circles aimlessly. If we view it in the light of the fact that he

is probably aware of a strange feverish-looking man, with a handkerchief tied around his

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mouth, following him for no apparent reason, it becomes more understandable. It is more

than likely that it is a case of “mutual suspicion” (Kennedy 160).

The man of the crowd finally manages to avoid further scrutiny as the narrator

loses the will and energy to follow him and finally resigns, the man forever remaining an

unsolved puzzle to him. The reader can only speculate whether the man is really a criminal

as the narrator believes or just an innocent person frightened by the narrator who is the real

villain from his point of view. The question of who is to be regarded as the real criminal

becomes a matter of perspective.

The narrator is unreliable, given the fact that he never once admits the possibility of

the old man's awareness of being followed despite the man's apparent attempts to shake

off his pursuer. The fact that he still has not fully recovered from his illness and feels the

“lurking of an old fever” (“Man” 159) confirms that he is not in full possession of his

faculties.

By following in the man's footsteps, the narrator, too, becomes a 'man of the

crowd,' almost to the point of becoming one with him. Merivale sees a parallel here with

the metaphysical detective genre which often dramatizes the “impassioned, apparently

pointless quest for an unspecified but certainly unattainable certainty [which] fades into an

identification of the pursuer with the pursued” (109). Sweeney places “The Man of the

Crowd” alongside Poe's other tales of doubling, such as “William Wilson” or even “The

Purloined Letter” where Dupin can be viewed as the minister D—'s double.

If we take into account Poe's Gothic tales such as “William Wilson” where the

notion of the self is problematized, we may encounter a similar pattern in “The Man of

the Crowd.” The fact that the narrator cannot suppress his desire to discover more about

the dangerous-looking man reveals something about the narrator himself. Not only does he

strive to assert his analytical skills, his ability to read a person; what he wants to find out is

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that the man really is a criminal. This obsession reflects the darkness of his own

subconscious fantasies (Kennedy 191). We cannot rely on the narrator's account of the

man, nevertheless, the pursuit itself and the motivation for it do tell us something about

the narrator. Shiloh focuses on the aspect of pleasure derived from pain which the narrator

demonstrates and the nature of his obsession, shifting the attention from the object of the

pursuit to the pursuer:

The narrator's emergence from the isolation of bed ridden

confinement to the public sphere of the coffee house, his perverse

enjoyment of pain and toying with danger, his obsessive and

apparently unmotivated pursuit of a total stranger – all these cast

him, as well as the man of the crowd, in the role of a criminal. (19)

Many critics provide a figurative reading of the story, where the man of the crowd is

interpreted as the embodiment of the narrator's subconscious, the materialization of his

own guilt. The crowd into which he is drawn is a means of escape for him:

Leaving his fixed observation post to haunt the streets in quest of

the old man's significance, the narrator seeks to escape impending

introspection, to flee the torments of self-analysis. The self

metamorphoses into an other, the old man, whose wanderings

permit the narrator to mingle with the masses he had formerly

simply watched. (Auerbach 31)

The window from which the narrator is looking from further supports the idea of the man

of the crowd being the narrator's double, since the glass of the window pane, through

which one can not only view the street but also see the reflection of oneself, functions as a

kind of mirror.

Regardless of reading the story literally or figuratively, the narrator's obsession with

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the man about whom he knows nothing, his persuasion that he is a criminal and the need

to pursue him can be read as the narrator projecting his own guilty conscience on an

innocent man, the story being actually about the narrator who is the real 'man of the

crowd.'

Whether his obsession has to do with the inability to admit defeat (the failure to

rationally explain all the aspects of human nature) or his inquiry into the darker depths of

his own subconscious, his quest is unsuccessful:

Given the pursued object's resistance to signification, however, the

wanderer's circuitous journey may culminate not in self-knowledge

and power but instead turn into a dead end, that is, become an

empty cipher rather than a transcendental spiral. (Auerbach 31)

The story dramatizes “the limits of knowledge and the ambiguities which frustrate

our efforts to penetrate the veil of appearances” (Kennedy 190). “The Man of the Crowd”

and another of Poe's stories “The Oblong Box” both prefigure his ratiocinative tales in that

they feature characters who fail to “grasp the principles of investigation” (Kennedy 187).

Whereas the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” loses his analytical detachment,

approaching his subject too closely, the main character of “The Oblong Box” is too

distanced, embodying “reason dissociated from reality” (Kennedy 194). The balance

between these two failed attempts at investigation is finally established by the figure of

August Dupin. Poe himself, however, saw the classical detective story which he invented as

a “superficial and mechanical exercise in mystification” (Kennedy 195), realizing that the

reader mistakes the writer's ingenuity for the detective's ability to solve the crime.

“The Man of the Crowd” foreshadows the pattern of Poe's detective stories and

simultaneously that of the metaphysical detective story. The classical detective story

provides the detective with the power to successfully solve the mystery, while the

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metaphysical detective story applies the open-endedness of “The Man of the Crowd”

along with the motif of the labyrinth and doubling to further subvert the notion of the

possibility to rationally explain the world. Merivale sees the metaphysical detective as a

contemporary 'man of the crowd' as he “possess[es] all of the marginality, but none of the

self-confidence of the classical detective” (110). The narrative structure of the story also

resembles that of the metaphysical detective story which also reduces the three individual

characters of the detective, the criminal and the victim into “a solipsistic unity” (107). Just

like in “The Man of the Crowd,” in metaphysical detective stories, the crime itself, if there

is any actual crime, is replaced by the mystery which is located within the detective's own

self.

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5. Poe's Tales of Ratiocination

The method of ratiocination lies in being able to identify with one's opponent. To

show how this method works, in “The Purloined Letter” it is likened to the game of even

and odd, in which a person wins if he or she guesses whether the number of marbles in

another person's hand is even or odd. Dupin tells a story of a boy who was able to outwit

anybody at this game by anticipating their strategy based on their cleverness or simple-

mindedness (301-2). This is precisely Dupin's technique demonstrated in the case of the

purloined letter. Unlike the police, he knows that if he wants to find the letter he has to

think like Minister D—. Although the police organize a thorough search of the Minister's

hotel, examining every nook and cranny, they are unsuccessful. Dupin, however, is able to

find the letter without any effort. He recognizes the Prefect's mistake of judging the

minister's character wrongly:

[H]ad the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits

of the Prefect's examination – in other words, had the principle of

its concealment been comprehended within the principles of the

Prefect – its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond

question. (…) [T]he remote source of his defeat lies in the

supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired

renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is

merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all

poets are fools. (“Purloined Letter” 303)

The police expect that the letter is hidden and the Minister expects them to expect this. He

is too intelligent to hide the letter because he knows that their search skills are flawless.

Dupin takes into account the fact that the Minister is both a mathematician and a poet

(which he clearly does not equal with being foolish). It becomes obvious to him that the

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Minister must have done exactly the opposite of what the police would think – he has left

the letter on the surface for everyone to see it.

The game of even and odd is not the only game analogy that Poe employs. In “The

Murders in Rue Morgue,” the narrator explains what he means by analytical skills by

comparing two games: cards and chess (163-4). The game of chess is not interesting for the

narrator in terms of these skills because there is too much variation. The winner is usually

not the one who has better analytical skills but the one who is able to imagine all the

various possible moves and chooses the most effective one of them. There is no room for

bluffing in the game of chess and winning is never achieved by identification with the

opponent. What is required is simply mental concentration. The game of cards, on the

other hand, depends on a careful study of the other person's reactions, facial expressions

and gestures that the person unconsciously makes while looking at specific cards on his

hand. In this game, the winner is the one who is a better interpreter of the opponent, or in

the narrator's words, a better analyst.

As in “The Purloined Letter,” in “Murders,” Dupin solves the mystery which seems

inexplicable to the police. Their persistence on its being an insoluble mystery is what

prevents them from solving it. To Dupin, everything must and does have a logical

explanation: “In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution

of this mystery, is in the direct ration of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police”

(“Murders” 135).

It is clear, however, that ratiocination works only in the carefully constructed

fictional world, where the solution precedes the crime. The author of the mystery is the

writer, creating for the reader a labyrinth of clues, not overly simple or complex,

complicated enough to provide the reader with a satisfying feeling of solving the crime, a

feeling of being just as clever as the detective in the story. Poe himself in a letter to Phillip

P. Cook in 1846 expressed disillusionment with the new genre: “where is the ingenuity of

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unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of

unraveling?” (qtd. in Kennedy 195).

Poe ascribed the popularity of the detective story to being “something in a new

key” (Kennedy 195). Interestingly, in contradiction to his words, the detective story has

never lost its popularity. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Despite the loss of its 'newness,'

the popularity of the classical detective story has been on the increase ever since, not only

within the realm of literature but also television and film. One of the reasons for the

genre's success is that it gives its readers a sense of escape. J. W. Krutch's often cited

suggestion that Poe “invented the detective story that he might not go mad” (qtd. in

Haycraft 9, Holquist 140, Kennedy 185) is an oversimplification but it is true that these

stories do offer an escape from the world of uncertainty and terror which we encounter

elsewhere in his tales: “it is in the very depths to which he experienced, and was able to

capture in words, the chaos of the world, that we must search for the key to the ordered,

ultra-rational world of the detective story” (Holquist 141). The ratiocinative cycle might be

perceived as a distraction, a way to escape the terrors of his imagination (Kennedy 196).

Dupin “not only restores law and order to the world of mundane human affairs; he also

explains the seemingly inexplicable, thereby demonstrating the ultimate comprehensibility

of the world beyond the self ” (Kennedy 185). This is in sharp contrast with the heroes of

his tales of terror who try to come to terms with inexplicable phenomena that pose a

threat to their sanity only to realize that it is not possible to ascertain a rational explanation

(Kennedy 185).

After finishing his third detective story featuring the detective A. Dupin, “The

Purloined Letter” (1844), Poe completely abandoned the genre despite its limitless potential

illustrated by the amount and variety of mystery stories that were later written by other

writers inspired by his cycle. It could be understood as an acknowledgment of the failure

of the detective to answer any “questions of genuine importance” (Kennedy 196).

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5.1 Borges's “Death and the Compass”: A Parody of Dupin

Borges in his story “Death and the Compass” directly refers to and parodies Poe's

detective stories by featuring a character of a detective who holds himself to be a “pure

reasoner, an Auguste Dupin” (129). The detective's attempt at solving the case, however,

leads him to his destruction. Lönnrot's fatal mistake is that he expects the case to be

interesting. What he desires is a mystery strange enough to provide an opportunity for him

to practice his analytical skills which, like Dupin's, are excellent.

The second mistake is his presupposition that the police are wrong. They are wrong

by definition according to the rules of detective fiction where the detective's role is to show

the police where they went wrong as Dupin always does. This is why Inspector Treviranus's

solution to the case (the right one, as it turns out eventually) seems insufficient to Lönnrot.

It is “possible but not interesting” (“Death” 130). It is true that if this was a classical

detective story, such early disclosure of the solution would insult the reader and it would

certainly be insulting to Dupin's intelligence.

The trap into which Lönnrot falls is one that he has made for himself. His rival,

Scharlach, only takes advantage of Lönnrot's “propensity for symmetry and meaning”

(Shiloh 108) and his desire to be one step ahead of the police to fulfill his traditional role.

The first murder in this case is a coincidence as Treviranus rightly suggests. The murder has

nothing to do with the victim's being a rabbi. A robber who is after the sapphires of

another guest of the hotel happens to enter the wrong room. Lönnrot rejects the

hypothesis because it is based on chance: “Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely

rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber” (130). He

cannot accept the randomness of the situation and decides to search for a spiritual

meaning instead. Naturally, he finds evidence in the room pointing to this rabbinical

explanation, all of which is then disclosed in a newspaper article. Scharlach, whose brother

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was imprisoned thanks to Lönnrot, takes advantage of this information to plot a revenge

on his enemy.

Scharlach devises a plot that is worthy of Lönnrot's analytical skills. It is exactly

what Lönnrot has been looking for. It is convoluted in a similar way as the narrator's

thoughts in “Murders” that Dupin so perfectly reconstructs. He does “weave a labyrinth”

(139) around Lönnrot. There has to be symmetry, of course, which only Lönnrot is able to

detect. Scharlach makes it appear so that there are two additional murders linked to the first

one, with symmetrical distances between one another in space and time, forming an

equilateral triangle on a map. Each of the crime scenes carries a mysterious inscription

connected with the unspoken name of God giving the impression of being executed by a

Hasidic sect.

Lönnrot realizes that there will be a fourth murder, the triangle being actually part

of a rhombus. He finds the fourth point on the map using a compass. As Shiloh remarks,

the compass is an instrument of science and this very instrument is eventually the “catalyst

of disorientation, leading to ultimate entrapment” (109). There is a direct link between the

compass and death as the story's title suggests. Lönnrot arrives to the fourth point on the

map on the fourth day of the fourth month only to find Scharlach waiting for him there to

kill him: “The repetition and refraction of the structural elements do not disclose an

underlying metaphysical plan. All they attest to is the mania of their creator. (…) [The]

center offers neither rest nor salvation, but death” (Shiloh 108). The implication of

Borges's story is not that solution cannot be reached by science, but “that any possible

cosmic scheme may be specifically framed not for man's salvation but for his annihilation”

(Bennet 270).

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5.2 The Motif of Doubling in Poe and Borges

Shiloh in her study The Double, the Labyrinth and the Locked Room analyzes the use of

these three motifs in the metaphysical detective story genre. In her view, each of these

elements “encodes a paradox, or an insoluble contradiction” (5). This sub-chapter will deal

with the use of doubles in Poe and Borges's short stories.

Doubling is one of the crucial motifs of Poe's tales of horror, most predominantly

of “William Wilson.” According to Freud, doubling is one of the elements out of which

the feeling of uncanny arises (141-3), a concept very much important for the Gothic.

However, doubles play an important role even in Poe's detective stories.

In Poe's detective story cycle, the paradox is not inherent in the mystery itself but

in the method of reaching its solution. Shiloh claims, based on Ricoeur's notion of identity,

that the only way to identify with the criminal for the detective is to be or become the

criminal:

Identification does not imply shared identity; it pre-supposes an

initial difference. But as the success of the investigation is

contingent on the detective projecting himself, in an imaginative

leap, onto the criminal mind, the difference between the

investigator and the perpetrator is gradually obliterated. (Shiloh 5)

Irwin also deals with the problem of the impossibility of fully identifying oneself with

another: “[O]ur ideas of another's mind are still our ideas, a projection that we make of

another mind's otherness” (36). As Shiloh claims: “The double paradoxically embodies two

concepts that cannot be logically reconciled – sameness and separateness” (5).

Whereas in the “Purloined Letter” the similarity between Dupin and Minister D—

is only hinted at, it is impossible not to see the eerie connection between the narrator and

Dupin in “The Murders in Rue Morgue.” The narrator first encounters Dupin in a library

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where they both search for the same rare book. If we put aside the literal reading of the

two men actually meeting, a second interpretation arises: the narrator finds the character of

Dupin in that very book he is searching for and becomes fascinated by the man's

personality and his “little family history” (165) to the point of making himself believe in

his actual presence.

The passage regarding their incipient friendship and moving together into a “time-

eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions” reads almost like a

textbook example of schizophrenia:

Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Indeed the

locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my

own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin

had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within

ourselves alone. (166)

The following description of their long walks through the city of Paris, as they “sall[y]

through the streets, arm in arm” searching for the “infinity of mental excitement which

quiet observation can afford” (Ibid.) in many ways resembles “The Man of the Crowd.”

This story enables a similar reading by hinting at the possibility of the narrator's disturbed

mental state. As was mentioned before, the narrator and the man of the crowd are also

eventually reduced to a single “we.”

As a matter of fact, the narrator of “Murders” consciously reflects upon the notion

of a “Bi-Part Soul,” seeing Dupin as double, divided into two parts: “the creative and the

resolvent” (166). It can be seen here that on another level the detective Dupin mirrors Poe,

the inventor of the detective story. In order to let a character solve the mystery, the author

has to create the mystery in the first place, he is both the creator and the solver of the

riddle. As Rosenheim notes: “As author, Poe has planted all the clues and devised the code

to be cracked: the secrets can only be ones hidden by the self ” (392).

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Dupin's ability to trace the narrator's unspoken train of thoughts also suggests that

he and the narrator are in fact the same person. The narrator does present the activity of

retracing one's thought processes as something which people find amusing to do on their

own: “The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is

astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-

point and the goal” (“Murders” 168). It is a fascinating activity because the mind solves

something which it has itself created but no longer remembers. The process of linking

associations in our mind is something that we do not pay attention to because of our

concentration on the ideas themselves. Therefore, tracing them back can be a kind of

detective work. This is why the narrator can feel amazed at discovering the links between

his own thoughts, believing them to be retraced by Dupin.

Erik Lönnrot and Red Scharlach's names are linked by the color red (or scarlet) just

like Dupin and Minister D — are linked by the first letter of their name and a striking

similarity of their character. The names suggest that they could be seen as split halves of

the same identity. While in the “Purloined Letter,” this might be left to interpretation,

Borges directly indicates in his comments to “Death and the Compass” that it can be read

as a story of “a man committing a suicide” (qtd. in Merivale 259). The detective and the

criminal are actually one.

Bennet draws on Iser's notion of the implied reader to illustrate the relationship

between Scharlach and Lönnrot as that of the author and the “encoded reader” (273). One

cannot exist without the other, the mystery that Scharlach creates would be meaningless

without Lönnrot's impeccable analytical skills (Ibid.). In a similar fashion, the motif of

doubling in Poe's ratiocinative cycle ultimately points to the fact that the ideal reader is the

writer himself, comprising within a single identity both the creative and the resolvent

element.

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6. In Search of the Closure

I've always believed I could see things other people couldn't. Elements falling into place. A design. A shape in the chaos of things. I suppose I find these moments precious and reassuring because they take place outside me (…). I feel I'm safe from myself as long as there's an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world.

– Don DeLillo, The Names (205)

Although both Poe and Borges problematize the notion of identity as being one

with itself, there is a difference in the final result of the analytical processes of the two

detectives: “Dupin's victory expresses a faith in an ultimately beneficent universe; Lönnrot's

death calls that universe into question” (Bennet 272). Dupin's method of ratiocination does

reach a satisfactory solution because Poe provides the illusion of an ultimate order of the

universe. Dupin belongs to a world in which there always is a direct relationship between

outward appearance and inward meaning. Lönnrot falls into Scharlach's trap because he

wishes there to be such order. The trap would not have been possible had he not decided

to attach a spiritual meaning to a completely arbitrary incident.

In “Death and the Compass” the detective has to admit his defeat in the end,

however, in his last words, he points to the trap's imperfection: “‘In your labyrinth there are

three lines too many,’ he said at last. ‘I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight

line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might

well do so too’” (141). This straight-line labyrinth which Lönnrot adverts to is one of the

philosophical paradoxes in which a single line stretching from point A to point B can be

divided into an infinite number of points by dividing each half in yet another two halves,

rendering its length insurmountable. What Lönnrot wants to suggest by referring to this

paradox is that Scharlach's trap was cleverly devised but the mystery is still rationally

explicable in the end. The straight-line labyrinth, on the other hand, would provide a

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mystery where the solution would co-exists with the non-solution, leaving the detective

without that which he desires the most – a final closure.

The metaphysical detective story offers different variations on this theme. The one

exemplified by “Death and the Compass” shows how the need to find a solution on the

detective's part can be used to manipulate them. The criminal is playing into this need. He

or she is the actual structuring principle providing the symmetry. The detective mistakes the

seeming order staged by the person who manipulates him for the actual order of the world.

However, there might be no structuring principle at all. The inevitable result of this

is that everything has the potential to carry meaning. The detective can find endless

connections between clues that he keeps unearthing, while signifiers point to other

signifiers without any final signified. Such cases “can do nothing but go on forever”

(Auster, Locked 237) without a chance of escape. In other cases, there does happen to be a

pattern to be found in the mystery, such as in DeLillo's Names, but its discovery does not

reveal any ultimate truths about anything.

What most of the metaphysical detective novels point to is that more (or all) of

these explanations are equally possible without any final resolution. In Pynchon's Crying of

Lot 49, Oedipa, the main protagonist, gradually comes to the realization that there are four

coexisting ways to explain the mystery around Trystero. It might be real or it might be her

hallucination, an elaborated joke played on her by her deceased ex-lover or her own

paranoid projection of such a plot (117-8). Despite the inability to resolve this problem,

there is still an apparent attempt at ordering “reality” as she thinks of these options in

terms of two binary oppositions, calling them “the symmetrical four” (118).

55

Conclusion

The main focus of this thesis was on the mutual link between writers of the

American Renaissance (Melville, Hawthorne and Poe) and postmodern authors who

employ the genre of metaphysical detective story in their work.

The selected texts cannot be categorized as metaphysical detective fiction, yet many

of the genre's themes are already present in them. This is of course because these texts are

part of the literary tradition which is an important source of the genre. Authors of

metaphysical detective stories borrow motifs such as the missing person, double identity or

the labyrinth and develop them in their novels. By exploring these motifs, they make us

more aware of their presence in these earlier works.

The metaphysical detective story is naturally indebted to Poe, the founder of the

first literary detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Out of Poe's three detective stories a whole

genre has emerged whose popularity has been increasing ever since. The genre's

assumption that everything in the world can be explained rationally is an illusion which

provides comfort, an escape from the multiplicity and ambiguity of our world. Even Poe

himself was aware of the genre's limitations given by the fact that the detective is only able

to explain the mystery because the author created it so as to be solved. The fact that there

are mysteries which do not offer such easy solutions is thematized in one of Poe's earlier

stories “Man of the Crowd.”

There is a considerable difference between Dupin, the first fictional detective, and

the central characters that appear in metaphysical detective fiction. Dupin represents

rational reason itself, he is able to read and predict the thoughts of the criminal through his

method of ratiocination, by identifying with the criminal. It is precisely this method which

leads the metaphysical detectives to their doom. Their position in the world is unstable,

their identification with the case makes them forfeit their own identity - something that

56

Dupin never has to fear. Moreover, the possibility of truly identifying with somebody and

being able to read their thoughts in such a way is rendered highly questionable by the

metaphysical detective story, often producing fatal consequences.

In terms of this position outside the society, even outside one's own established

identity, the precursor of these postmodern detectives is not Dupin but Wakefield, the

character of an eponymous story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although the story is not

completely devoid of detective fiction elements, Wakefield is not a detective. His situation

nevertheless very strongly resembles that of the metaphysical detective. The story explores

the possibility of abandoning one's stable position in the world, living outside it,

approaching the threshold of vanishing from the world altogether. Unlike Hawthorne, who

makes it possible for Wakefield to return to his assigned place in the society, postmodern

writers take the motif further, showing that a stable position or a stable identity is only an

illusion that can easily be shattered.

We can see a similar pattern in these stories of a single character trying to make

sense of the world around him. Unlike Dupin; Wakefield and the narrator of “The Man of

the Crowd” have trouble deciphering it. The mystery which they are confronted with is

more concerned with their own identity, a theme which is developed in the metaphysical

detective story.

In Melville's Confidence-Man, it is the reader who is in the position of the detective,

trying to make sense of the evidence he or she is given. The novel does not provide any

clear answers as to who is to be trusted. There is no real closure and there seem to be more

different explanations, depending on whether the reader himself or herself has confidence,

showing that even evidence perceived to be real is actually based on faith. The novel

presents a situation typical of the metaphysical mystery in which there is no way of

distinguishing what is true and what is a deception.

The analysis of these texts shows how the refusal to fulfill the reader's expectations

57

(by not providing a simple straightforward cause and effect structure) makes the reader

approach the assumptions of the classical detective story more critically. The motif of

searching for the key to the mystery in these texts is used to uncover paradoxes embedded

in our notion of identity and our belief in a rationally explicable world.

58

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62

Résumé

The thesis entitled Elements of the Metaphysical Detective Genre in the Work of Melville,

Hawthorne and Poe explores a mutual relationship between the works of 19th century

American writers – Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe – and

writers who use the genre of the metaphysical detective story such as Paul Auster, Thomas

Pynchon and Don DeLillo. The metaphysical detective story is a postmodern genre

characterised by its use and manipulations of the conventions of the classical detective

story. Writers of this genre are indebted to their literary predecessors in many of their

motifs and themes. However, their work also changes our experience of the past authors

and provides their work with new meanings. Many of the motifs characteristic for the

metaphysical detective story genre such as the missing person, double identity or the

labyrinth can be found in the work of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. These authors are part

of the literary tradition which is part of the intertextual network of postmodern texts. The

use of these motifs in Poe, Hawthorne and Melville confronts the reader with similar

uncertainties concerning ontological rather than epistemological problems. The theme of

searching for the key to the mystery in these texts is used to uncover paradoxes embedded

in our notion of identity and our belief in a rationally explicable world.

The thesis focuses primarily on Melville's The Confidence-Man, Hawthorne's

“Wakefield” and Poe's “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Purloined Letter” and “Murders in

Rue Morgue,” however, particular texts of 20th century authors such as Auster, Pynchon,

Borges and DeLillo are referred to in order to compare and contrast some important

themes, especially in the last chapter focusing on the lack of closure in the metaphysical

detective story. The theoretical background is based on Merivale and Sweeney's Detecting

Texts: The Metaphysical Story from Poe to Postmodernism along with other influential texts written

on this subject, most importantly by Michael Holquist, William Spanos and Stefano Tani.

63

Resumé

Tato diplomová práce s názvem Prvky metafyzického detektivního příběhu v díle Melvilla,

Hawthorna a Poea zkoumá vzájemný vztah mezi díly autorů tzv. Americké renesance

(Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne a Edgar Allan Poe) a současnými autory, kteří

využívají ve svých dílech žánru metafyzického detektivního příběhu (Paul Auster, Thomas

Pynchon, Don DeLillo).

Metafyzický detektivní příběh je postmoderním žánrem, který bývá charakterizován

využitím a manipulací či zkreslováním konvencí klasického detektivního příběhu. Zmínění

autoři, v jejichž díle se s tímto žánrem můžeme setkat, nacházejí inspiraci u svých literárních

předchůdců. Jejich díla ale naopak také ovlivňují naše vnímání textů, z nichž tyto motivy

čerpají. Tím, že tyto motivy využívají a rozvíjejí, současný čtenář má možnost je vnímat v

nových souvislostech. Typickými motivy metafyzického detektivního příběhu, které

můžeme najít již u autorů, jako je Poe, Hawthorne a Melville, jsou například rozdvojená

identita, pohřešovaná osoba, nebo labyrint. Jak tato práce ukazuje, každý z těchto motivů v

sobě obsahuje určitý paradox, vlivem kterého dochází ke zpochybnění ustáleného vnímání

identity nebo víry v racionálně vysvětlitelný svět (tak, jak je prezentován v klasickém

detektivním příběhu).

Tato práce se primárně soustředí na díla zmíněných autorů konce devatenáctého

století, k textům současných autorů se obrací pouze pro porovnání konkrétních motivů. V

definici žánru metafyzického detektivního příběhu se opírá zejména o sbírku esejí na toto

téma od autorek P. Merivale a S. E. Sweeney a další významné práce teoretiků zabývajících

se tímto tématem (zejména M. Holquist, W. Spanos a S. Tani).