But cynegetic violence does not occur only at the time of the first acquisition, but also later on, as a means of governing. The hunt continues after the capture.
—Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts
Nothing . . . prevents the police system from undergoing in its turn an evolution along the line of the application of scientific principles. . . . Have not hunters in all ages been incited by information connected with natural history, and, inversely, do not naturalists have something of the hunter’s instinct?
—Alphonse Bertillon, Signaletic Instructions
This chapter leaves the open expanses of Cooper’s prairie for the reticular topology of the modern city, and the capacious genre of the romance for the more constrained format of the detective story. While the vast swaths covered by Cooper’s hero demand a long saga, a serialized epic spanning almost a century, Poe’s urban settings formally call for a very different textual space: compact, dense, and jumbled—a topology reflected in Poe’s polysemous and labyrinthine language, in which it seems that there is not enough room for ideas to deploy and characters to develop. What we witness in the shift from prairie to city can be characterized as the transition from territory to milieu—a transition not fully coterminous but complementary with the conversion of territory into land analyzed at the end of the previous chapter. Whereas the land apprehends space as essentially workable, enclosing and standardizing it to maximize economic productivity, the milieu apprehends space as a habitat, as a material environment more or less favorable to the health and stability of a given population. The land supervises laboring bodies and subjects them to disciplinary mechanisms, while the milieu exercises protocols of security over a population.1
Foucault recalls that “milieu” was a biological concept developed by Lamarck (whose momentous influence on the nineteenth-century United States, Kyla Schuller shows, was later eclipsed by the discredit of his theories after Darwin).2 The milieu construes space as the medium through which a government can affect populations; in a milieu, inhabitants are treated not as legal subjects or as a people (as under sovereignty), not as individuated bodies capable of specific tasks (as under discipline), but as “a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live.”3 Tracing the concept to its biological origin, as Foucault does, invites us to take the terms territory and milieu more literally than Foucault did—to return them to the animal figure from which they were derived.4 The previous chapter examined a literal (capitalist, colonialist) case of deterritorialization and the imposition of the new visual logic by which certain phenomena were disappeared. This chapter asks what happens to animals when we move (and move them) from the wilderness to the city. Foucault’s sovereignty (for me, the sovereignty of the hunt) is attached to territory, and security (for me, the logistic of capture) implies a milieu. In a territory, the question was one of navigation and conquest—of how to apprehend what is unpredicted because it is as yet unknown (but knowable); now the question is flipped, becoming one of how to manage the aleatory emergence of something that is assumed (yet unknowable when taken in isolation).
Foucault understands the question of milieu as primarily a problem of circulation: how do we ensure safety without inhibiting the circulation of people and merchandise? Poe, in contrast, often dreams of closed spaces—spaces where nothing circulates between outside and inside—but at the same time shows that no perfect immunity can ever be achieved, especially not from the animal. As in viral immunization, Poe suggests that a foreign agent must be introduced to work as antibody; this antibody is the detective, whom Poe cryptically portrays as a hunter, as we will see. For Walter Benjamin, the hunter and the detective have in common an ability to decipher signs that elude most observers, and he finds in Cooper’s hunter the prototype of Poe’s detective: “Owing to the influence of Cooper,” Benjamin writes, “it becomes possible for the novelist in an urban setting to give scope to the experience of the hunter. This has a bearing on the rise of the detective story.”5 Thus turning to detective fiction offers a conceptual frame for understanding the afterlives of hunting in the material and symbolic economies of urban modernity—for understanding how, in the words of Chamayou, the “hunt continues after the capture.”6 How does the modern city, with its attendant challenges (such as overpopulation, crime, and public health), compel new apparatuses of capture? How do technologies of tracking and surveillance incorporate and sublimate the hunt, and what role is the animal made to play in this new hunt? Capture, I argued in the introduction, assumes fugitivity not as a faculty but as a property of its object. Hence, under capture the animal is conceived as essentially elusive. This chapter reads Poe’s tales of detection, to which scholars of animal studies have frequently turned to theorize the modern animal condition, to examine how capture models a biopolitical mode of racialized management and control.7 It moves from the assimilative logic of settler colonialism to the immunitary logic of the Middle Passage, which aims to subdue nonnative populations who have been forcibly imported and to stave off the specter of their acculturation—to maintain them quite literally “out of place.”8
Heeding Toni Morrison’s claim that “no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe” helps us to understand how ascribing illegibility and illogicity to the animal presented a powerful discursive resource for the policing of black subjects.9 Building on Morrison’s insight, Lindon Barrett analyzes the correlation between detection and racialization in Poe’s crime fiction, reading “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as a “monument to Reason” that sought to delegitimize nonwhite subjects’ “presence” in the United States by portraying them as essentially unreasonable and animated by an uncontrollable form of bestiality.10 Poe’s tale does not merely repeat the stereotype of non-Westerners as lacking reason, however; it also shows that a subterraneous and ambiguous operator is required to do the “purifying” work of Reason. Portrayed as a hunter, the detective is charged with capturing what Reason, in principle, cannot know—what must escape the bounds of Reason for Reason to know and remain itself.
Race, Animality, Criminality
Although the figure of the detective is arguably an American invention, since “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is typically credited with inaugurating the genre of detective fiction, Poe sets his tales of detection in the context of the mid-nineteenth century European city. Detective fiction would only cross the Atlantic a decade after Poe published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) with the publication of George Thompson’s popular City Crimes; or, Life in New York and Boston. Why did Poe choose European cities? It is as if he had to deterritorialize his own fiction in order to reflect on the effects of market-driven urban deterritorialization. The cities he chooses (Paris and London) are paradigmatic sites for the deployment of modern governmentality: the rise of a police force, the bureaucratization of life, and the increasing reliance on statistics and population-level thinking. At the time Poe wrote, both cities were undergoing intensifying urban standardization. As Benjamin observes, since the French Revolution, and especially during Napoléon Bonaparte’s administration, Paris was increasingly submitted to “a multifarious web of registrations—a means of compensating for the elimination of traces that takes place when people disappear into the masses of the big cities.”11 This process would soon be aided by a vast number of biometric technologies like fingerprinting and photography, which equipped law enforcement agents and criminologists with a more precise and mechanically assisted “objective” method of identification.12 This proliferation of surveillance apparatuses laid the foundations for the rise of the detective story, which “came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito [photography] had been accomplished.” “Since that time,” Benjamin asserts, “there has been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech and actions.”13
Capture knows no end because what Benjamin describes as the “conquest of incognito” does not render a person “cognized,” in the sense of making them positively known; rather, it captures the incognito as such by preserving “permanent and unmistakable traces [Spuren] of a human being.”14 Biological details are assumed to be the most personal and inimitable features of a subject’s identity, but they appear as traces, as clues of a person who, in principle, remains irreducible to biometric data. In cities, Benjamin suggests, people disappear as animals. The city privileges a semantic form of understanding over a somatic one; symbolic identificatory markers offset the evanescence of bodily traces; street names do not index physical places but are referential nodes in an abstract network meant to ensure the circulation of goods and persons. Because the modern city is overcoded with textuality, it is easy not to find one’s way and yet almost impossible to lose it: “Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs.”15 Like the hunter heeds in the wild seemingly insignificant clues like the breaking of a twig,16 the detective makes sense of (the animal) signs and sounds that the city has obscured or rendered irrelevant (odors, for instance, are methodically eliminated to avoid offending the nostrils of urban consumers).17 The detective alone can read between the lines of the new “web of registrations” that ensnares the modern subject. An inheritor of an age-old venatic knowledge, the detective is a reassuring character insofar as he “compensates” for the modern erasure of somatic traces. Yet he is also an immunological technology that works to tighten the city’s surveillance network by catching what necessarily escapes the vigilance of the police.18 The detective is a furtive agent who supplements the regulatory apparatus of the police, which in turn relies on an atavistic “cynegetic power,” a power to hunt down and chase away those who do not conform to the standards of modern life.19 Thus the detective is not just another name for the flaneur, that emblem of modernity celebrated for eluding the coercive structure of early commodity culture by strolling aimlessly and losing himself (as opposed to being lost) in the city.20 The detective is a hunter.
As such, the detective can be seen as the American counterpart to the more European figure of the flaneur. Not that hunting is a uniquely American activity, but the hunt for human beings was closely associated with the United States in the nineteenth century, where it was practiced openly and routinely under chattel slavery.21 In the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Frederick Douglass notes that the “power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children” has become “coextensive with the star-spangled banner and American Christianity,” under which man is but “a bird for the sportsman’s gun.”22 Officially abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, legal forms of manhunting perdured after Emancipation, just as slavery remained legal for those convicted of a crime.23 As this chapter examines how the hunter metamorphoses into the detective in Poe’s fiction, it enables us to reflect on what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlives of slavery” and the technologies that accompanied the correlative “metamorphosis of ‘chattel into man.’”24 Overt subjugation belongs to the hunt regime, as it is predicated on physical captivity; the covert forensic subjection of populations belongs to the regime of capture. The infamous scene of Eliza crossing the Ohio River in Uncle Tom’s Cabin epitomizes the former, while the attic space in which Harriet Jacobs is held in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl represents the latter. Eliza crosses a spatial border to shake off her pursuer, who is “after her like a hound after a deer,” but Jacobs manages to escape her captivity by thwarting her captor’s calculations: instead of moving north, she moves up, hiding in a space she calls her “loophole of retreat” that confuses the expected coordinates of flight.25 Stowe’s and Jacobs’s narratives limn two topologies of escape, which correspond to two different conceptions of the slave’s fugitivity: in the former, fugitivity is a faculty of the slave; in the latter, it has been commuted into the slave’s “property,” to borrow from Stephen Best.26 Hidden in the “nonspace” that is her attic, Jacobs is not directly exposed to the violence of her captor, but neither is she fully emancipated from his threat; her loophole literalizes her being caught in a liminal state, between freedom and captivity. It would take a different kind of logic to detect her presence—a different kind of hunter.27 Poe’s detective, I argue, is a harbinger of this new type of hunt. Recovering the detective’s predatory function is thus an invitation to consider what debt the modern societies of control owe to the history of transatlantic slavery and the extent to which modern surveillance technologies were specifically designed to target racialized populations.28
Conceptually, characterizing the detective as a hunter has two immediate implications. First, it reveals how criminality became explicitly aligned with animality as racial science and the new discipline of criminology emerged. Foucault summarizes this transition at the beginning of The Birth of Biopolitics as the moment when the penal system no longer asks the accused “What have you done?” but “Who are you?” The object is no longer to punish the acts of an individual but to capture the hidden “truth” of his being and to reform his conduct. The question “Who are you?” is paradoxically not addressed to a fully volitional, rational subject but to an individual understood as the byproduct of his milieu and instincts. Second, it brings to light the new place and function assigned to animality in the modern imaginary. What the genre of the detective story invents is a new hermeneutic frame that posits the animal as literally ungraspable, as essentially fugitive, which tautologically justifies its continuous surveillance. The problem of the animal—which cannot write, and thus cannot be read—poses the task of detecting it as one of decryption. Borrowing from Benjamin, I call decryption the act of “reading what was never written” (animal traces rather than human writing); but decrypting is also, as Poe helps us see, the subversive act of seeing writing as traces.29 Insofar as it supposes the discovery of something that eludes the grasp of logos, decryption is a form of biopolitical reading. It does not take signs at face value, for what they denote, but observes what they betray about the signatory: a mysterious disposition or drive that can be monitored, tracked, rechanneled, but never positively known. It is the animal’s presumed unintelligibility, Poe shows us, that subjects it to endless capture.
Off the Grid
The antihermeneutic I call decryption is a faculty that Benjamin ascribes to the flaneur, who masters the difficult art of losing himself in an urban setting. Not to find one’s way is the suspension, or rather the indefinite protraction, of a telic movement that envisions an endpoint toward which one is progressing. Losing one’s way, however, is an end in itself (or a pure means). The flaneur must willfully give himself over to the city. This immersion calls for a different kind of attention, which, Benjamin asserts, was “fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story ‘The Man of the Crowd.’”30 In “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), Poe’s narrator prides himself on being able to “read” the history of each anonymous passerby. He describes the movements of the London mob:
The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.31
His scanning gaze is suddenly “arrested and absorbed” by an old man’s countenance because of “the account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression”: “How wild a history,” the narrator says to himself, “is written within that bosom!” He proceeds to shadow the stranger through the crowd but finally gives up after a frenzied day spent following him, recognizing that the old man cannot be read: “It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the ‘Hortulus Animae,’ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst [sic] sich nicht lesen [he will not let himself be read]’” (396). While ordinary men are open books for the narrator, the old man’s idiosyncrasy, his absolute secrecy or privacy (idios), forces him to relinquish his pursuit.
Poe draws the portrait of the chased man as an escape artist, an elusive creature persistently evading the perspicacity of the narrator.32 Not in but wholly of the crowd, the old man pulsates in time with the movements of the masses. He hardly seems human; unable to return the gaze of the narrator (which would reassure the narrator of his humanity), the old man raises the specter of Descartes’s automaton, as Kevin McLaughlin observes.33 But when we recall that the Cartesian animal is but a machine, and when we heed the clues disseminated in Poe’s text (the emphasis placed on the character’s “wildness,” the uncanny “shriek” he emits, his “stalk[ing] backward and forward, without apparent object”), we begin to wonder if the man of the crowd is not, after all, something of an animal.34 The narrator however, too bent on “reading” the man of the crowd, fails to catch him because he is not enough of a hunter—a hunter of men, a detective. For Benjamin, “Poe’s famous tale ‘The Man of the Crowd’ is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd.”35 Nearly all the ingredients for a detective story are here gathered: the busy metropolis, the eerie throng, a breathless pursuit. The only things missing are a crime (although the narrator catches a glimpse of what he believes is a dagger) and a detective.
Poe’s subsequent tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” remedies these absences. In this story, Poe’s unnamed narrator and his friend C. Auguste Dupin roam the streets of Paris until they are suddenly gripped by a headline in the Gazette des tribunaux: “Extraordinary Murders.” The newspaper account describes how a dozen neighbors and two policemen, alarmed by a succession of “terrific shrieks” issuing from the fourth story of a house in the rue Morgue, had broken open the doors of a house to discover Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye’s apartment “in the wildest disorder.” The police find the body of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye forced up the narrow aperture of the chimney, with bruises around her throat indicating that she had been throttled to death. The body of her mother is discovered lying in a small yard in the rear of the building with her head entirely cut off by a razor found in the apartment. While the belongings of the wealthy widow are scattered across the floor, nothing has been taken. The investigation will later note that “if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together” (422; emphasis added). To be sure, financial gain hardly seems a plausible motive for such gruesome deeds.
The neighbors report having heard two voices, one gruff and one shrill. The gruff voice is described without hesitation as that of a Frenchman, while the source of the shrill voice stubbornly evades consensus among the witnesses (the Dutch witness supposes it the voice of a Frenchman, the French that of a Spaniard, the Spaniard that of an Englishman, and so on). What is more, the door of the apartment is locked from the inside with no other possible points of exit, the two windows appearing to be securely fastened by a stout nail. “To this horrible mystery,” the Gazette reads, “there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew” (405–6). Drawing on this seemingly incoherent tangle of evidence, Dupin, an amateur sleuth who takes it upon himself to solve the case, investigates the mysterious killings through a process of elimination—deductive reasoning based on negation. First, he reminds the narrator that the voice of the perpetrator remained positively unassignable despite a gaggle of witnesses representing nationalities from across Europe. With decidedly loose and xenophobic logic, Dupin disregards—without entirely ruling out—the possibility that the voice may be that of a non-European (because “neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris” ) or of a madman (because even madmen “are of some nation” ). Second, assuming that “Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits,” he speculates that the perpetrator must have had near-preternatural agility (417). He asserts that logically, one of the two windows must have served as the means of egress, then displays for his audience the mechanism by which the windows “have the powers of fastening themselves” (418). There “must be something wrong . . . about the nail,” he concludes. And as if his words possessed incantatory powers, the nail reveals itself to be fractured (although “the fissure was invisible”). The nature of the crime is “altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action,” and the fingerprints left behind bear “the mark of no human hand” (422–24). Most of these “clews” (the archaic spelling Poe uses for clues) suggest the work of a nonhuman actor. After reading a passage from Le règne animal (1797) in which Cuvier profiles the animal, Dupin ultimately identifies the perpetrator as an “Ourang-Outang” (Poe’s spelling), recently escaped from the guardianship of a French sailor who brought the animal back from his journey to Borneo. This at last renders the animal legible.36
Poe’s tale raises the question of whether the Ourang-Outang qualifies as a juridical actor, subject to the law and thus a potential “murderer” (a legal rather than a moral category).37 The reader is misled by the title of the short story into expecting a murderer, a human actor endowed with reason and intention; this mirrors the misreading of police, whose perceptions, as Dupin teases, are no less “hermetically sealed” than the crime scene (423). Although Poe situates the ape’s guilt outside of the realm of the reasonable, he does not disculpate the animal; he simply displaces the locus of culpability.38 “Conscious of having deserved punishment” (429), the ape is unambiguously marked as guilty. However, his guilt derives not from malicious intents but from uncontrollable instincts. The creature’s initially “pacific purposes” of shaving Madame L’Espanaye only turned into “wrath,” “anger,” and “frenzy” when the poor woman started screaming. The ape is shown to be deeply “impressionable”—Kyla Schuller’s term for subjects’ variable susceptibility to emotions—but lacks “the sentimental capacity of self-regulation.”39 The ape is literally moved by emotions over which he has but little control.
In its alignment of animality with criminality, the story exposes the racial underpinnings of the new mode of governing that it depicts: the system recognizes culpability while denying intentionality—it enables punishment while denying the rationality (even full humanness) of the actor. This system was prototyped in the criminalization of enslaved subjects, whose intentionality, Hartman observes, came to be “acknowledged only as it assumed the form of criminality.”40 Only by committing a crime—often the crime of “stealing” themselves from their captor by attempting to escape—were slaves recognizable by the law as subjects and not just as properties. For Colin Dayan, this negative access to subjecthood through criminality is one of the “legal fictions” that inspire Poe’s brand of gothic, which relentlessly diagnoses the “redefinition of civil life in the nineteenth-century US,” and specifically how the law could turn people into property by dissociating physical and legal personhood. Slaves, she explains, “can be declared human only insofar as they err. . . . The accretion of positive or human qualities, yoked as it is to the fact of property, outfits slaves for one thing only: crime. Their only possible act, recognized by society, is a negative one.”41
Christopher Peterson’s astute reading of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” argues that Poe’s ape is the evolutionary ancestor of all the criminals in the detective fictions that follow it. In making this claim, Peterson leans on Foucault’s analysis of how punishment evolved when the penal apparatus began to routinely seek assistance from science and medicine; modern law, Peterson argues, focuses less on crimes than on criminals (less on what than who), which suggests that the motivation for crime is a question not of free will but of instinct, of having surrendered to something that is already within one. Ironically, the modern criminal is not “the origin of his or her actions,” Peterson explains. “Rather, human criminals recapitulate the animalistic impulses of their progenitors in a deterministic fashion.”42 Peterson reads Poe’s story against the grain of interpretations that see the ape as an “allegory” for the black subject, for this reading depends on a strict opposition between animality and humanity, with black people placed firmly in the animal category. According to Peterson, animality must instead be construed as a new technology of control that, even as it disproportionally targets racialized people by portraying them as dominated by their impulses, requires that all humans be recognized as animals (if differentially so, some being deemed more animal than others).43 Inherent in this new formation, however, is the risk of dissolving the very accountability that the penal system seeks to enforce. The figure Poe chooses to walk this tightrope—to identify figures subject to criminal impulses yet accountable for punishment—is the detective. Because the detective is external to the legal system, his work gives justice (or punishment) the appearance of objectivity and disinterestedness. The police outsource the labor of decrypting animality to the detective, who alone can (and alone must) “read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events.”44
Indeed, Dupin alone is capable of “reading the entire riddle” that the police could not, despite their methodical examination of the scene (414). It is, in fact, because of their very meticulousness that they cannot fathom what happened: they look too closely and thus (like Dr. Bat of the previous chapter) cannot see the larger story to which the “clews” belong. Dupin derides their efforts as excessively profound, asserting that truth is “invariably superficial” and never “where we seek her”:
The depth lies in the valleys where we seek [truth], and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances—to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly—is to have the best appreciation of its lustre—a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but, in the former, there is the more refined capacity for comprehension. By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct. (412)45
The lie of truth, the detective observes, is the belief that access to it is granted by in-depth scrutiny.46 Truth is visible to those who are able to look sideways, to divert their attention from its object so as to see it with more clarity. In criticizing the police’s shortsightedness, the detective pays tribute to the nebulousness that is indispensable to understanding phenomena as complex and dynamic—an idea Poe goes on to develop extensively in “Eureka,” where he discusses at great length the “nebular theory” of Laplace and its refutation by Dr. Nichol.47
The amateur detective is already in a marginal position, and from this position he does not look directly at the crime but rather at the milieu in which the crime takes place; he apprehends the case through the slant of police reports and newspaper accounts. He reads between the lines, focusing on what is not seen:
The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of the old lady; these considerations with those just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the government agents. They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. . . . In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police. (414; emphasis added)
Ironically, the police are at a loss to find the murderer precisely because they are desperately looking for a murderer. The first hint at the possibility that the crime might be of “another nature” is given by the Gazette des tribunaux:
A murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all its particulars, was never before committed in Paris—if indeed a murder has been committed at all. The police are entirely at fault—an unusual occurrence in affairs of this nature. There is not, however, the shadow of a clew apparent. (411)
The qualification expressed here (“if indeed a murder has been committed at all”) mimics a corrective rereading that is at work in Dupin’s investigation: the solving of the murder requires that its very premises be called into question.48 In Poe’s story, the murderer does not premeditate, indeed does not even precede, the murder; the status “murderer” is retrospectively postulated as its a priori condition. By calling attention to the limitations of the deductive model underpinning the police’s methods, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” can be approached not just as an allegory of black animality but more broadly as an allegory of reading.49 Instead of being “confounded by the seeming absence of motive,” Dupin is able to read in this absence the very signature (though a signature is perhaps never read but only authenticated) of the animal whose murderous “style” is farcically described as “excessively outré” (422).
Dupin is introduced from the outset as a reader. He operates “from his armchair,” first learning of the murders in the Gazette and resolving the case by posting an ad in the newspapers. Crucially, he has access to the same details as any ordinary reader of the sensational press that developed with the rise of metropolises, but he reads these details differently.50 Foucault refers to Dupin’s same Gazette des tribunaux in his explanation of the difference between the gutter press and the detective novel: the faits divers of the former gave readers the impression that delinquents were “everywhere to be feared,” while the detective novel, born around the same time and often printed in the same journals, identified criminals as anomalies that “belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life.”51 The faits divers and the detective novel apparently play opposite roles, but Foucault insists that they are complementary, for in these “crime stories,” “delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.”52 What could be closer and yet more exotic than the ape—that cousin to humanity—who committed the first murder of the first modern crime story? The ape, not indigenous to France, is evidently “out of place” in Paris; he was brought there by the same colonial and capitalist order that connected distant parts of the world and developed the metropolis. This particular animal, we are told, was first captured on the island of Borneo by a French sailor who smuggled him into the country with the intention to sell him. The ape is introduced in Paris as a commodity—a trajectory that evokes the forcible displacement of African subjects and their conversion into chattel during the Middle Passage. While the sailor’s confession at the end of the story provides a rational explanation for the ape’s presence in Paris, the police’s blindness indicates that the animal should not, and thus cannot, be there—that it has no place in the capital. In the ape’s aporetic position, we glimpse the impossible ontology and legal status of the enslaved subject, simultaneously dead and alive (Orlando Patterson), thing and person (Colin Dayan), captive and fugitive (Stephen Best).
Ironically, it is the gridded space of the city and the probabilistic interpretive grid of the police, aimed at surveilling, identifying, and locating its subjects, that make it possible for the animal to “get away with murder.” Because in this anthropic environment its presence is deemed improbable—though, curiously, more probable than the presence of “Asiatics” or “Africans”—the beast evades the purview of the police entirely.53 The ape is untraceable because it is unlooked-for; it cannot be tracked because its presence cannot be fathomed in the first place. Though he will reveal that the supposed hermeticism of the apartment is but a trompe l’oeil, at first Dupin looks like a prestidigitator pulling an orangutan out of his sleeve. Because the animal’s improbability has been hardened into an impossibility, its appearance has been converted into an apparition. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not a gothic tale, but it alludes repeatedly to the “preternatural” character of the events. And after all, the detective story is but an extension of the gothic, the difference being that the supernatural is eventually explained away by the detective.54 In Poe’s more explicitly gothic texts, animals are often equated with spectral presences threatening the peace of domestic spaces (the black cat coming back from the dead, the raven tapping on the poet’s window, the sphinx beetle ominously crawling on a spider thread along the window sash of a Hudson Valley country house, etc.). The appearance of animals in human habitats, it seems, has grown to exceed the bounds of plausibility. Regardless, animals doggedly return to haunt the humans as if they have not been properly killed or banished but simply encrypted, like the titular beast in “The Black Cat,” returning from the dead to be discovered within the liminal space of the cellar wall. The animal in Poe occupies a möbian topology, simultaneously inside and outside (the space of) the human.55
The morgue is, like a crypt, a place for storing dead bodies; the term morgue originally designated a building in Paris where corpses were kept until identified. The unidentified body in Poe’s morgue is not that of the dead victim but that of the fugitive perpetrator. Not only is the identity of the murderer not yet known (the premise of all whodunits), but Poe also suggests that it is ultimately unknowable. He challenges the very notion that there is a fully volitional and rational “who” at all behind the murders. This is less a dehumanization than an animalization of the criminal: uncontained animality is posited as the secret cause of criminality.56 Poe’s tale, Akira Mizuta Lippit observes, “brings to the surface a characteristically modern catastrophe”: “[The] domicile of mankind has been assailed from the outside, indeed by the outside.”57 But this “outside,” Poe suggests, is always with us—even in a bourgeois apartment on the fourth floor of a Parisian building—and indeed, always already within us (hence the need of an immunological agent to contain it). Hermetic seclusion cannot protect against the animal’s invasion, as the L’Espanayes’ lot shows. Yet if the animal is always with us, it is nowhere to be found, neither here nor there, but trapped in an altogether unlocalizable place. It has been encrypted.
Encryption, for Lippit, is the lot of the animal in modernity, this “crucial moment in the consolidation of metaphysics during which the superiority of humanity is achieved from the lowest ranks of being.”58 Lippit writes:
According to the dialectic of humanism, an a priori animality (thesis) is subsumed by a competing humanity (antithesis): as a result, animality ceases to occupy a proper space apart from the humanity that succeeds, appropriates, and enframes it. The animal, according to that historical rendering, no longer remains in the realm of ontology; it has been effaced. . . . In this manner, the animal becomes an active phantom in what might be termed the crypt of modernity.59
The animal for Lippit remains a foreign body lodged in the very foundations of modernity: “Because modern philosophy fails to eliminate entirely the residues of the animal, its texts continue to inscribe the secret history of the animal as phantom.”60 Construed as “undying” by a dominant lineage of Western thinkers from Leibniz to Heidegger—deprived of a life of its own, yet endlessly “destined to survive”—the animal has a troubling tendency to endure without ever being fully present.61 The animal thus poses an insoluble problem to modern thought because, in Lippit’s dialectical rendering, it must be sublated for human subjectivity to be complete, yet it stubbornly resists this sublation.
It is not surprising that Lippit would engage Hegel in his explanation of how animality is configured in Western modernity; as Derrida shows in Glas (which he claims to have written “in the depths of an absolute crypt”), the Hegelian hermeneutic works very much like a digestive tract, aspiring to transubstantiate foreign phenomena into the wholeness of Spirit.62 “Everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system” that is Spirit, Derrida explains, “nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism.”63 Almost nothing, that is. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel notes that zoolatry, the worship of animals, is predicated upon the belief that the animal is, and has always been, “truly Incomprehensible”:
We also, when we contemplate the life and action of brutes, are astonished at their instinct—the adaptation of their movements to the object intended—their restlessness, excitability, and liveliness; for they are exceedingly quick and discerning in pursuing the ends of their existence, while they are at the same time silent and shut up within themselves. We cannot make out what it is that “possesses” these creatures, and cannot rely on them. A black tom-cat, with its glowing eyes and its now gliding, now quick and darting movement, has been deemed the presence of a malignant being—a mysterious reserved specter. . . . The lower animals are the truly Incomprehensible.64
This incomprehensibility is also encountered in Spirit, says Hegel, but Spirit has the capacity to comprehend itself, whereas animals remain utterly unsublatable. The only way to “comprehend”—or better, “apprehend”—animals is to name them. “According to Hegel,” Lippit explains, “the act of naming transforms animals from independent beings into idealized beings: language, in essence, nullifies animal life. In disappearing, the animal leaves only its cry.”65
It is precisely this contrived sublation—this sublimation—that is at work in the discursive economy of a modernity that encrypts that which it cannot overtly process.66 The problem is thus not that the animal cannot speak (like Poe’s ape, whose cry was deemed unintelligible by the witnesses) but rather that it cannot be heard. Because its shrill cry is deemed inarticulate, it becomes utterly inaudible. Instrumentalized as handy philosophical concept and yet resistant to conceptualization, the animal occupies an untenable position: it is simultaneously close at hand and at a safe distance, unknowable yet understood in advance. Within the Hegelian frame, any attempt at imagining or conceiving the nature of animals is seen as fallacious sympathizing or naïve anthropomorphism. In order to prevent the animal from interfering with our human affairs, it must be “framed” or allegorized as “truly Incomprehensible,” locked up in an artificial niche—or, in Derridean terms, buried alive in a crypt.67 To account for the unaccountable incarceration of the animal in modernity, it has been necessary to devise new structures that could accommodate its “undying” nature. Lippit finds these structures mainly in the Freudian theory of the unconscious but also in the cinematic apparatus and in modern genetics (as I elaborate in chapter 5).68 In these unlocalizable recesses of modernity, the animal is kept, to quote Derrida, “alive, but as dead” (a phrase whose self-corrective structure performs the nonlogical topology of the crypt). The edifice of modern thought thus depends upon the adverb “as” that enforces the belief in a hermetic partition between the human (which is both alive and as alive) and the nonhuman. In order for the animal to disappear entirely, the crypt cannot be just another place but must be a nonplace. Hence the shock when animals resurface in a supposedly secured place, hence the impression that one has been attacked not from but by the outside.
In Hegel’s skittish black tomcat, we glimpse a prototype of Poe’s feline protagonist in “The Black Cat” (1843). The narrator recounts this “most wild, yet most homely narrative” from behind the bars of a prison cell. Formerly an avowed “pet lover,” he explains how he repeatedly dreamed of killing, then actually killed, his black cat Pluto (597). After returning home one night, the intoxicated narrator gouges one of the cat’s eyes out of its socket with a penknife before hanging the animal in his garden. Shortly after this macabre event, his house inexplicably burns to the ground except for one wall, on which appears, “as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat” (600). The narrator immediately rationalizes this proto-photographic “apparition,” forgetting Pluto and his guilt, until one night he chances upon another black cat, who is in all respects similar to his old pet except for an indefinite white splotch on its chest.69 The animal follows the narrator to his new house and “domesticate[s] itself at once” (601). Soon, the narrator finds himself resenting his new pet. A “certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of [his] former deed of cruelty,” prevent him from abusing it until one day when the cat makes him stumble on his way to the cellar. Losing his temper, the narrator attempts to kill it; instead, he accidentally buries the axe intended for the cat in his wife’s skull. In order to conceal his deed, he immures the body of his murdered wife in his cellar:
Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. (605)
Just as the police are about to vacate the cellar, leaving the corpse undetected and the deed unpunished, a strange noise is heard, “a voice from within the tomb!” This voice, exclaims the narrator, was “a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek. . . . I had walled up the monster up within the tomb!” (606). The story invites not only a reading about crypts and disappearing/reappearing dead/alive animals but also an economic reading. This reading is elicited because the narrator’s fortune is intimately bound to the cat’s (cats’) pathetic lot and by the question of who or what is invited to circulate in and out of the house (just as for Foucault, the problem of the modern city is who or what is allowed to circulate in or out of it). Whereas the ape in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is never “present” (though it lurks in every aperture), the cat ultimately betrays where it has been hiding/hidden. It was held captive neither in nor out of the house but on its threshold, incorporated into the house’s very walls—we might say “eaten” by the house, sublated within it. If “no eyes could detect anything suspicious,” walls in Poe stories have ears (and a mouth), and the animal returns with a vengeance: “Upon [the head of my wife’s corpse], with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman” (606).
The tale easily—perhaps too easily—lends itself to a psychological reading: the undying creature is the objective correlative of the narrator’s unsuccessfully repressed murderous impulse and guilt. Poe’s stories have often proven hospitable to symbolic interpretations—psychoanalytic hermeneutics in particular—that, under the pretense of illuminating the truth underlying the story, have buried certain details under a critical apparatus at once ingenious and smothering.70 The best example may be Marie Bonaparte’s identification of the black cat with Poe’s mother: “Though a tom and named Pluto, we should not be misled, for the Black Cat, as it were, is a totem of Poe’s mother, conjured up by [Poe’s cat] Catterina’s presence round the house and bed of his consumptive mother-figure, Virginia.”71 One of the (many) problems of this reading is its outright conflation of the empirical figure of the author with the fictional narrator (Bonaparte’s thesis is that Poe’s entire oeuvre becomes intelligible when viewed through the prism of infantile trauma caused by the death of the author’s mother).72 The animal in her interpretation is glossed over, readily purloined, put at a safe distance (pur-loign) to facilitate the conversion of signs into symptoms. Even when Bonaparte underlines Poe’s affection for his pet cat, she immediately converts the animal into a mere “cipher.” She disregards the fact that Catterina’s very name encrypts the animal, thereby disavowing the visual agency to which the cat owes its name (from cattare, “to see”).73
Is it possible, in Poe, to recognize the cat in its own right? Can the animal be seen, and can it see for itself? Can the animal signify without being transfigured into an empty signifier? An earlier story by Poe, “Instinct vs Reason: A Black Cat” (1840), suggests that he was actively preoccupied by these questions. In this essay-like tale, which is yet another story about an animal escaping a space designed by and for humans, the narrator gives a detailed account of the stratagems used by his pet to open the kitchen door, which muddies the “line which demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man—a boundary line far more difficult to settle than even the North-Eastern or the Oregon” (371). The animal appears as an untraceable frontier. The cat in the story is a plausible blueprint for “The Black Cat,” and the minute description of the door’s complex mechanism also anticipates the intricate technical explanations of the self-fastening window that Dupin will elaborate in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” These careful forms of phenomenological attention displayed in “A Black Cat” offer one path that Poe follows in order to consider the animal as animal—one that harks back to Montaigne’s playful interaction with his cat and anticipates Derrida’s insistence that the cat seeing him naked in his bathroom is a “real cat . . . [not] the figure of a cat.”74 But “A Black Cat” does not become “The Black Cat” until Poe incorporates it into his fiction. There is thus another path to seeing the animal—the path that, following Poe’s and Benjamin’s cues, I have called decryption. One does not decrypt an animal sign like one decodes a cipher. Decryption is not about heightened or enhanced attention, and it has little to do with “cryptography,” for cryptography remains at bottom a form of writing (graphein) that can always, in principle, be decoded.75
The crime scene in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not a cipher and thus cannot be decoded; it makes no sense, from a logical point of view, since it seems that nothing has been premeditated. It resists the kind of observation associated with the police, who are portrayed as being excessively methodical, as proceeding too much “by ‘the book’” (398). Yet Dupin claims that this very absence—the lack of signs of premeditation that would allow the police to decode the narrative—are precisely what lead him to unravel the puzzle of the killer’s species. From this perspective, the ape’s attempts at signifying are but a vain and grotesque pantomime, an “empty gesture” that does not point toward a coherent subject or rational actor. The ape means nothing, signifies nothing, as French scholar Bruno Monfort contends: the razor with which it slits Madame L’Espanaye’s throat is but a hollow semiophore because it is not wielded by a human hand—or, as Monfort sees it, by no hand at all (the title of Monfort’s essay is “Sans les mains,” meaning “hands-free” or “without hands”).76 Yet the text indicates that the ape does have hands, only not “human hands.” The Ourang-Outang is thus a senseless, “pure mimetic force,”77 only from a certain anatomical view that chooses to see difference instead of similarity.78 By granting the ape hands, Poe’s text portrays the primate as a rebellious animal unwilling to recognize the place to which it has been consigned (in the Western city and in the taxonomic order).
The ape’s crossing of borders exemplifies a central concern of Poe’s animal tales: debunking the fantasized hermeticism of human spaces and scripts. These stories evidence, invite, and perform different modalities of writing and reading sustained by an altogether different kind of reason. Although Dupin presents himself as a hyperrational figure who approaches the animal as a logical problem—he claims to recover the lost ape because of the animal’s assumed illogicity—he concedes that it takes the skills of a hunter to ferret the animal out of its crypt. Just before inspecting the nail upon which the mystery’s resolution depends, Dupin boasts of his analytical method:
To use a sporting phrase, I had not been once “at fault.” The scent had never for an instant been lost. There was no flaw in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret to its ultimate result,—and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive as it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew. (419; emphasis added)
“At fault,” emphasized here by Poe’s quotes, does not imply that Dupin never committed a logical error, as Baudelaire’s translation of the tale suggests, but that the detective was never thrown off the animal’s scent. The “sporting phrase” in question stems from the French en défaut, which in the elaborate scenography of medieval hunts designated the process by which auxiliaries, often dogs or birds of prey, were misled by the quarry to pursue another animal in its stead.79 Priding himself with never losing the scent of the animal—never allowing himself to be deflected to chasing a human being (understood as a rational creature)—the detective decrypts the signs of the animal escaped from its vault.
Let us follow Dupin one last time, picking up the trail where it went cold for the Parisian police. As I have suggested, Poe’s tale can be approached as an allegory of reading. Many of the clues scattered throughout the story are explicitly intended for the reader and bear little diegetic significance. When the detective insists on the necessity of using a hunter’s ear and nose to decrypt the maze of the modern city, he underlines the fact that the police do not have even “the slightest clew” (406). Sound and spelling matter: first, in this clew one hears the French for nail (le clou), whose invisible fissure Dupin discovers, the key to the locked-room mystery. This pun betrays a line of fracture in the clew/clou, a linguistic transgression in which the clou (the nail) phonetically encroaches upon the semantic clue given to the reader. But the modern spelling, clue, would also perform this punny work, for it, too, is a homophone of the French clou. Poe’s use of the archaic variant thus has another function: it conjures the tale’s indebtedness to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Thus spelled, clew also evokes the ball of thread given by Ariadne to Theseus to mark his way out of the labyrinth.80 This orthographic clue is another hint at the resolution of the story (the final encounter with a semihuman, homicidal creature).81 Attention to the composition of the text at the level of the word (and especially the letter, with its phonetic and archeonymic entanglements with the semantic and semiotic levels of the text) makes this “reading” possible. The clue is literally in the clew.
The tale recounts not one but two of Dupin’s investigations, which illustrate the extraordinary powers of the analytic mind. The first scene of the tale (which is almost as well known as the solving of the murders) depicts Dupin showcasing his deductive faculties. This scene offers suggestive clues about how animal signs may be decrypted in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The narrator provides a “case in point” to illustrate the truth of Dupin’s boast that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms” (401). In this exemplary anecdote, Dupin and the narrator are silently strolling down a Parisian street when suddenly the detective breaks the silence to agree with the narrator’s unspoken thoughts (which center on the mediocre performance of Chantilly, a cobbler recently converted to acting, who he deems unqualified for playing the role of Xerxes in Crébillon’s eponymous tragedy). The narrator is “amazed”: how did the detective read his mind? Dupin retraces the steps of his analysis: “The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer” (403). In these “running links” we can glimpse Dupin’s theory of reading, tracking his trail of thought back to its source by remembering the “primitive” knowledge of the hunter.
Dupin reminds his friend that as they had crossed the street, a fruiterer with a large basket of apples had thrust the narrator upon a pile of paving stones. This stumble, Dupin infers, caused the narrator to reflect on “stereotomy,” the method by which the street is paved. This in turn led him “to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus.” Dupin had recently mentioned to the narrator that “the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony” (of Dr. Nichol, though this link is missing in Dupin’s reconstruction). Upon hearing this, the narrator could not avoid casting his “eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion,” a gesture that corroborated Dupin’s speculations. Finally, the thought of Orion triggered the memory of the line about Chantilly in the newspaper the day before: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.” Dupin explains this rather cryptic mot d’esprit:
I had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion; and, from certain pungencies connected with this explanation, I was aware that you could not have forgotten it. It was clear, therefore, that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly. That you did combine them I saw by the character of the smile which passed over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler’s immolation. So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. (404; emphasis added)
Crucially, every step of the deductive chain had been produced or confirmed by the physical signs that index the narrator’s thoughts: stumbling, stooping, smiling, etc. This episode also reminds us of Dupin’s contention that stars are viewed more distinctly when contemplated “in a side-long way,” for part of the confirmation is the narrator’s glance up to the constellation—a reminder that eyes are never just seeing, but can be seen seeing—and as the observer is captivated by his surrounding, other eyes are upon him.
In this allusion to the nebula lies another clue, whose full luster appears if we look at it sideways. In Greek mythology, Orion is the great hunter, a figure who is at times assimilated to the giant Nimrod, “the great Hunter before God” who originated the project of the Tower of Babel. Orion is not a fortuitous link in Dupin’s chain but a surrogate for himself as the detective-hunter. In certain versions of the myth, Orion is blinded by Artemis (the goddess of the hunt) because he threatens to surpass her, but he continues to hunt using his other senses until his sight is restored by the god of the sun, Helios (the name Muybridge adopted as a photographer, incidentally). Orion is thus the one who does not see, or who sees with new eyes. He is the arch-hunter, never “at fault,” who never loses the scent of his animal prey. But ironically, Dupin hints that the hunter himself has a scent, making himself liable to being hunted.82 The giant owes his original name, Urion, to his birth from the urine of Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury.83 Over time, Dupin recalls, his name was corrupted (perdidit), concealing the “pungencies” associated with it (hiding ignoble origins behind a new name, just as the cobbler Chantilly sought to climb the social ladder by playing the role of a king, just as the ape’s shaving could be interpreted as a sign of its attempt to pass as human).84 The transformation of Orion’s name performs a literal sublimation—a sublimation at the level of the letter. About this alteration, Ovid writes: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum,” meaning “the first letter has lost its original sound.” Dupin quotes the Latin poet who laments the counterintuitive degeneracy of language (wherein decay gives way to purification, as the obscene letter no longer smells). This sanitization marks the shift from soma to semiosis, from hunt to capture. The hunter-detective is the one who exhumes the stench of the animal from within the ostensible cleanliness of the letter, who decrypts the traces that unknowingly animate the human institution of written language. With his reference to Urion/Orion, Dupin thus acknowledges his dependence on his senses rather than mere logic. Not only does he track the scent of the animal encrypted in the letter, but he also shows that it takes an animal to smell it out (Orion is both the hunter and the hunted). “[Feeling] his way . . . in search of the true,” Dupin is Nietzschean avant la lettre: “It is my fate,” writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, “that I have to be the first decent human being; . . . I was first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.”85
In the beginning was the word Urine (with which animals mark their territories), but this pungent origin soon covered its own tracks—and the evolutionary tracks leading from the ape to the human. Urion is made Orion; the prefix Ur (denoting origin) became the conjunction Or (indicating equivalence).86 Combined, these two fragments spell out the first syllable of Ourang-Outang. This may be the reason behind Poe’s strange spelling. Or perhaps Ourang-Outang is spelled this way because, unlike the more traditional variants, there is but one single letter setting apart the two hyphenated words: OuRang-OuTang (from orang, “man,” and hutan, “forest”). In Le règne animal, Cuvier notes that Ourang, meaning “reasonable” in Malay, applies to the human as well as to the Ourang-Outang and the elephant.87 The only “thing” preventing the senseless repetition of the same—the only “thing” that stands between human reason (ourang) and animal instinct (outang)—is a single letter. The balance between reason and unreason, between body and mind (or head), between human and animal, rests upon the (dis)articulation of two letters. The letters become sigils of their animal descent. Specular chase: Edgar Allan Poe, whose imprimatur is EAP, encrypts his own signature: APE. Therein Poe acknowledges his debt to the animal language ghosting human language.88
Creatures of Reason
With the figure of the detective, the archaic knowledge of the hunt does not disappear but becomes subordinated—Foucault would say “subjugated”—to a form of knowledge that dons the white mantle of Reason.89 For Lindon Barrett, Dupin is a direct descendent of that exemplary “figure of reason,” French naturalist Georges Cuvier, both “in terms of intellectual notoriety and in assuming the co-implication of the bestial and the non-European.”90 Barrett makes Dupin the figurehead of an enlightened order of things that subjects nature to an inescapably rational and deeply hierarchized system of classification.91 Barrett’s reading is convincing, but I would qualify his claim that “Dupin and Poe share Cuvier.” His claim rests on these three having a shared belief in pure rationality, a belief that rests on a strict partition between mind and body.92 But this partition, for Dupin, is precisely the “reason” for the prefect’s error, whom Dupin mocks for being “all head and no body” (431). Poe writes Dupin as a fundamentally ambiguous figure who displays not just logos but mètis, or “cunning,” another form of intelligence that is typically associated with both the practical acumen of the hunter and the wiliness of the hunted animal.93 In Poe’s story, mètis has been subjugated to rational logic, as the ape, eventually, is made subject to the rational grid of surveillance in the city. The hunt only appears cryptically, between the lines; when the animal(ized) rises to the surface, it is as if by magic, because its traces have been deemed illegible and the technique for decrypting them has been delegitimized. So Barrett is right that non-Western subjects and unreasoned animals are affiliated with one another, and he is right that this is a story about keeping the unwelcome animalized and racialized others under control. Reason, however, is less the means than the alibi of this immunological operation.
Dupin undergoes a certain degree of animalization in order to “feel [his] way . . . in search for the true” and “scent” the traces of the lost animal, but he ultimately proves a relatively safe figure: he closes the mysterious case, restores order in the city, and reassures the good people of Paris that the borders delimiting their space and species remain strong. Yet the tale’s denouement hinges on a troubling aporia. It is only when the detective postulates an unbridgeable threshold of difference between the human and the animal that the ape is allowed to make his entrance. Thus glimpsed from across an abyss of unknowability, the animal disappears just as it comes into being; he is presented as a purely negative being whose motivations cannot be fathomed, whose voice defies intelligibility, and whose actions occur on an absolutely incommensurable plane (symptomatically, the animal is never physically present in the diegesis but exists only through retrospective narration of his owner, the sailor). He exists only cryptically, as that which stubbornly eludes the ingenuity of the police, who are guilty of proceeding excessively “by ‘the book.’” Yet for Dupin it is the police’s form of reason, not the animal, that is essentially negative.
The epigraph of Poe’s tale introduces Dupin as a modern-day Ulysses, an allusion that encrypts how he successfully solves the puzzle posed by the story’s titular murders: “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture” (397). The reference to the sirens anticipates the threat posed by the orangutan to the fantasized hermeticism of species difference: whether depicted as winged creatures or mythical beings with the trunk of a woman and the tail of a fish, sirens are hybrid creatures, part-human, part-animal. Their captivating melodies allure sailors onto rocky shores where they perish in shipwrecks or, in some versions, are eaten alive by the sirens. The challenge raised by Poe’s epigraph thus lies less in hearing the sirens’ song than in surviving their encounter to report what was heard. In the Homeric account of the myth, Ulysses orders his crew to chain him to the mast of his ship and to ignore his supplications to set him free. Although Ulysses probably hears the sirens sing—a probability challenged by Kafka in his rewriting of this episode of The Odyssey—his knowledge requires self-alienation.94 The episode of the sirens is an allegory of the pursuit of knowledge (typically rendered as the masculine conquest of a feminized object); the story of Ulysses and the sirens posits knowing as both irreconcilable with and tragically dependent on aesthetic experience, on one’s sensory contact with the world. Bondage and isolation are the price that Ulysses must pay to know what song the sirens sang (a knowledge he cannot directly share with his crew).
Poe’s version of this tale differs significantly from the original Greek story. In Homer’s version, Ulysses must chain himself to avoid being captivated by the sirens’ hybrid of humanity and animality, but in Poe’s tale it is the humanlike animal that ends up captured.95 What the narratives share, though, is their construal of knowledge—a knowledge intimately tied to the issue of ontological difference—as fundamentally grounded in detachment and distinction. Indeed, once it has been identified as a nonhuman animal and locked up in the Jardin des Plantes (Cuvier’s favorite haunt and workplace), excised from the anthropic milieu of the city, the murderous ape is no longer seen as a threat to the human community. The tale of detection invites a prophylactic interpretation of Dupin as a champion of human exceptionalism, but it also reflects on the types of knowledge that are overtly and covertly at work in the capture of the fugitive animal. What other genres does the new animal condition allow and invite when animals appear far gone? This is the question that will preoccupy us in the next chapter, which reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s last published romance as a poetic response to the hegemonic submission of knowledge and imagination to the new form of rationality that Cuvier emblematizes. Here I turn to Hawthorne’s own attempt—and self-avowed failure—to pen an elusive creature. In Hawthorne’s romance, it is no longer the place of the animal that is in question but its time: while Poe’s beast emerges from some unmappable elsewhere, Hawthorne’s instead comes out of the depths of a time before the human.