Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s coining of the ‘metaphysical detective story’ as ‘a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions’ (1999, p. 2) is almost certainly born of a desire for detective fiction’s best-known works to be elevated to the level of literature, that is, to integrate a neutral, unmarked literary space in which the generic descriptor ‘detective’ (or ‘crime’ – the argument that follows holds, whether or not these terms are considered synonymous) becomes irrelevant. The paradox is that, in order to do this, they create a sub-genre, in which they effectively hive off these best-known examples of the genre, thereby condemning those other staples of the genre, which one assumes must be considered formulaic in opposition to their metaphysical counterparts, to coincide with those conventions, which, they note, include ‘narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader’ (p. 2). It may be argued that this is not a paradox at all, since it is quite legitimate for a parody to take on an inflected label of the genre that it parodies. My aim here is to demonstrate precisely why and how the concept of metaphysical detective fiction is paradoxical, and why what may have set out as an attempt to save detective fiction’s best and brightest ends up condemning the genre more broadly, and this quite unjustly.
To achieve my goal, I must put my own cards on the table and reveal my own bias, my own critical sub-generic affiliation, if you will. My appeal to the idea of justice aligns me with a mode of detective criticism made famous since 2008 by Pierre Bayard (founder of what he dubs la critique policière1) and more recently by the research network InterCriPol. For Bayard, the idea of a generically delimiting model of narrative closure is absurd2. The classic of the genre that he takes as his first example is not the kind of text that Merivale and Sweeney have in mind: it is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a seminal work of the genre – if ever there was one. For Christie’s text to coincide with its ‘narrative closure’, which is to say, the detective’s final revelation of the truth of the mystery, this novel of some 359 pages in length must be judged exclusively in light of a concluding section of only eleven pages3. This is precisely what detective fiction is celebrated for: it bombards the reader with clues and lines of inquiry, appearing for all the world to be almost infinitely open (the very model of what Roland Barthes considered the writerly text, or le texte scriptible; indeed, many readers claim to enjoy the genre for the challenge that the text offers to compete with the detective, to co-write the novel’s meaning as the story develops), only in its final pages to close all but one of these lines down, confining its meaning to one reading, that being the detective’s solution (and in so doing, to become the very embodiment of the transparently meaningful readerly text, or le texte lisible). Bayard’s refusal to close down lines of inquiry in light of the final reveal is, in poststructuralist terms, a very simple endorsement of the novel’s literariness: these lines of inquiry are lines of flight, examples of the text’s will to otherness. Bayard does not, however, use what is the fundamental plurality of text to argue that Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not a work of detective fiction; indeed, his reading is precisely a detectival analysis, designed to produce a new murderer in place of Poirot’s. This is important to stress, for the inflection of his critique, which he styles a counter-inquiry (une contre-enquête), does not work against detective fiction; on the contrary, it is always already offset by the adjective policière. Detective criticism turns the table, therefore, not on detective fiction, but on the critical praxis (both scholarly and profane) of reading detective fiction that has become the dominant paradigm and that has confined the genre to a locked room from which it has, from its very beginnings, sought to escape.
In its simplest terms, the goal of Bayard’s detective criticism is precisely to right wrongs (and to write rights); it takes classic works of detective fiction and demonstrates the living textuality of their whole texts (and not just their endings) in order to engage in a critique that either rectifies or amplifies the original creative project. My own ambition here is rather more mundane: I consider, like Bayard, that end-orientation, this tendency of the work to rush towards an ending that consequently erases or represses potentially significant amounts of the text that precedes it, is a generic frame imposed on the text a posteriori; however, unlike Bayard, who seeks a new truth in place of the ostensibly authorially sanctioned one4, I am more interested in the sheer literariness, the multiplication of meanings, that is released when a detective novel is freed from the shackles of the detective solution. In other words, I consider that detective fiction is worthy of its generic label because of its investigation and solution, but I also consider that it is also, and at the same time, fundamentally literary.
Here, I wish to take this reasoning one step further and look at a classic example of the genre in order to assess whether the conclusion itself is not in fact what enables the reader to read against the grain of the detective’s solution and thus to unbridle the text. The text that I have chosen may in fact be better described as the classic of the genre; its author is certainly located at another paradox of metaphysical detective fiction, and this time one of which Merivale and Sweeney are quite conscious: Edgar Allan Poe, they argue, ‘may well have invented not only classical detective fiction and its offshoot, the metaphysical detective story, but also the kind of playfully self-reflexive storytelling that we now call “postmodernist”’ (1999, p. 6). The text in question here is not Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, to which I shall return in due course, but ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in 18415. I shall not offer a reading of this text as such, not even a reflexive one, for it has been read by so many before me; instead, I shall take some lessons from a previous reading, J. A. Leo Lemay’s seminal essay of 1982, ‘The Psychology of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’, and argue that what emerges from it is not only a highly reflexive text, but also one that may be considered meta-reflexive insofar as its narrative goes beyond exposing its own textuality and offers itself as a template for a genre that will remain, across the breadth of its iterations, fundamentally reflexive. What emerges from this reflexivity is a double text, which is both analytic and affective, and this elicits from readers both critical and emotional responses. This double text will conclude with a primal metaphysical shudder, in light of which all subsequent detective fiction will have reflexivity, albeit with an inevitable lessening of the shudder, as a trademark. I shall conclude by discussing some instances of these shudders in the works of Agatha Christie, which, unlike Poe’s, have, Bayard’s above-mentioned essay aside, tended to remain impervious to theoretical critique.
The strength of Lemay’s reading of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is also what makes it easy for scholars of crime fiction to overlook. While it is (proto-)Bayardian to the extent that it rejects the detective’s solution, it is much more straightforwardly critical because the other truth it finds is of the metaphorical kind that literary critics so often seek. The ‘psychological’ aspect of Lemay’s detection of metaphors has at its core, the reader will not be surprised to learn, sex. It is precisely sexual deviance that enables the story to deviate beneath the surface layer of its own narrative. This is what Lemay has in mind when he writes: ‘the reader suspects – or at least feels – that something is going on in the story beside the obvious plot’ (1982, p. 174). In order to take Lemay’s close reading of the text and escalate it into a reading at the level of the genre, I wish to map the sexual deviance that is his focus onto a deconstructionist model of textual deviance, by which I understand the way in which a text’s manifest interpretation (what it appears to mean) hosts within itself its nihilistic other (those potential meanings that are not immediately apparent) and the seeds of its own deconstruction.
This deviance itself is reflexively signposted in Poe’s text, which does not end on (and thus coincide with) its apparent solution (according to which, as we all know, the orangutan did it) but, rather, prolongs its narrative with three enigmatic metaphors:
I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two about the propriety of every person minding his own business.
‘Let him talk,’ said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. ‘Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna – or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has “de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas”’. [Poe, 1986, p. 224]
These are the closing paragraphs of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Paradoxically, this second ending, which is made necessary because the orangutan is not seen and thus evaporates from the story as mysteriously as it had previously entered the L’Espanayes’ house, outlines the reasons why the Parisian Prefect of Police failed to solve the murder and also why Dupin ‘like[s] him’ (Poe, 1986, p. 224). The three metaphors illustrate the love-hate relationship that cleaves Dupin and the Prefect; in other words, these metaphors divide one detectival couple into two but also conjoin the two detectives as one6. And all three of these metaphors are, as Lemay demonstrates, sexual in nature: the Prefect’s wisdom, we are informed, lacks ‘stamen’, in which regard it can be compared to ‘pictures of the Goddess Laverna’ or a ‘codfish’ (Lemay, 1982, p. 167). The reader has no trouble in following the sexual overtones here. The last part of the ending, on the other hand, is less obviously sexual in its appeal to otherness: ‘I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has maintained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has “de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas”’ (Poe, 1986, p. 224). If the Prefect embodies auto-differentiation in the framework of Lemay’s reading, it is because it is Dupin himself who has just denied what is (for Lemay this is a straightforward sex murder) in favour of a lengthy explanation of what is not (that is, the patently fanciful orangutan solution). In other words, what for Lemay is a final enigmatic metaphor for sexual repression works just as well as a metonym of the story’s singular plurality at the level of the whole text: Dupin (sneakily doubled as the Prefect) may well have concluded the investigation with a solution that is derived from pure ratiocination, but the text’s failure to end on that conclusion signals its refusal to coincide with, or to mean entirely, that solution. At the end, it is the text that denies what it nonetheless is, while explaining (albeit metaphorically) what it is not.
That this metonymy of self-alterity is textual as well as merely sexual lies in its doubly reflexive signposting of its own textual deviance7. First, the story’s final words are written in the original French, and again, doubly so, for not only were these words originally written (in French) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), but they also signal the language in which the investigation of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which is set in Paris with a French detective and French victims, must logically have been conducted. In this way, the use of italics marks both the foreign otherness of the citation inside the original English text and the original French of the citation in a text that is otherwise almost entirely in translation. Second, the status of the intertext itself is problematised here in a way that recalls J. Hillis Miller’s reading of the co-existence of the obvious and nihilistic readings of a text. Interestingly, the metaphor that Miller uses appears particularly appropriate in the present context: ‘Is a citation an alien parasite within the body of the main text, or is the interpretive text the parasite which surrounds and strangles the citation which is its host?’ (p. 177, my emphasis). In other words, does the orangutan solution, with its combination of ratiocinative abstractedness and extreme violence, strangle the life out of the text, repressing all deviation from the end-orientation of the investigation narrative, or is it that very solution that is strangled in the final throes of the tale by this intrusion of textual otherness? Rousseau’s citation gains entry into the text from the outside in a way that cannot but recall the orangutan’s presence in the L’Espanayes’ rooms. Unlike the orangutan, however, the intertext has a veritable existence outside Poe’s tale; the orangutan is strictly a figure of speech (an animal that explains and embodies what is apparently an otherwise inexplicable voice), with no actual textual presence.
Meta-reflexively, the most important aspect of Poe’s final line is the way that it brings attention to its status as a citation. By displaying its otherness reflexively, in the form of its italics and inverted commas, the intertext enables its other, that is, the text (and especially here the detective’s solution), to appear to remain unaffected, uncontaminated. This is an act of textual sleight-of-hand, Poe’s own ‘master stroke of cant’, for this othering of otherness effectively represses repression for the reader who is content to enjoy Dupin’s success. It only represses repression in a superficial, showy way, however; that otherness cannot be entirely repressed is the message of the citation, which points to the text itself but also comes from inside it, as if from its unconscious, rather than being grafted on from the outside. For Michel Riffaterre, an intertext causes readers to become troubled, aware of an uncanny presence that is somehow both additional and integral to the text to which they are present. Riffaterre calls this uncanny feeling ungrammaticality (une agrammaticalité), as only through locating the external origins of the feeling can the text be fully understood, and its grammaticality restored, by the reader. The reader senses, therefore, that there is something here that is both presence and absence, foreign body but also legalised migrant.
For our present purposes, we can construe this readerly sensation as a metaphysical shudder. Perhaps more importantly, in the framework of Poe’s Urtext of the genre, this final citation uses the grammar of citation (quotation marks, italics) to cancel out the uncanniness of intertextual ungrammaticality (the source of the sensation is indicated, explained by the text). At the level of genre-building, this foundational instance of reflexive citation inoculates all texts that follow in its wake. By this, I mean the way in which whenever, as one inevitably does, a character in a crime novel discusses the strangeness of the events that are unfurling in the story as feeling unreal, like the stuff of crime fiction rather than reality, the reader accepts these comments as the reflexive hallmark of the genre, a comic reminder that this is precisely a work of crime fiction. There is no shudder. What Poe’s text teaches us, however, is that such reflexive signals are echoes of his own original suppression-celebration of reflexivity: whenever a character in a crime novel discusses the strangeness of the events that are unfurling in the story as feeling unreal, like the stuff of crime fiction rather than reality, it is because crime fiction is always already somewhere, something else as well as being what it is, the text before the reader’s eyes. Or, as Lemay puts it, ‘something is going on in the story beside the obvious plot’ (p. 174). In fact, if we remember how Poe’s other ending reduces Dupin’s great reveal (the solution that is the typical ending of a crime novel) to the status of imperfect cadence, or non-ending, the inevitable privileging of reality over the stuff of crime fiction implores readers to see, even to prefer, otherness in spite of the detective plot in which they are immersed. It is a desperate plea to shudder on the part of a genre that will henceforth be immune to metaphysical shuddering.
This final shudder with which Poe concludes ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is, however (but also by the same token), a means of inoculating the text against itself. Understood in this sense, it is a metaphysical shudder that undermines the Truth of crime fiction’s manifest solutions. In such a scenario, a character’s disbelief that events should have taken on the appearance of crime fiction when they are unfurling in the real world is to be taken seriously. This is a crime novel’s reminder that the solution of its crime is not all there is; indeed, that aspect of the text is, as we have seen, only a minor element of its whole narrative. Furthermore, as Lemay notes (p. 167-168), in the first paragraph of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, the solution of ‘enigmas’ and ‘conundrums’ is ranked among ‘the most trivial occupations’ (Poe, 1986, p. 189).
Lemay’s reading, with its focus on the unconscious depths beneath the surface events of the text, includes a detailed mapping of the story’s doubles: Dupin versus the narrator, Dupin and the narrator versus the L’Espanayes, Dupin and the narrator versus the sailor and the orangutan. Yet, the original double is that contained within Dupin himself, and it is this doubling that mirrors the text’s fundamental auto-differentiation. Indeed, Dupin is described by the narrator as torn between ‘the creative and the resolvent’ (Poe, 1986, p. 194). Clearly, a crime story requires these two aspects: a mystery must be created in order for it to be solved. That these two aspects of crime fiction should be embodied by the story’s protagonist, however, appears much more than an empty, or humorous, reflexive gesture; rather, it suggests that the mystery of the titular murders is created as well as solved by Dupin. The inverted lifestyle led by Dupin and the narrator, which sees them locked away by day and sallying forth by night, doubtless speaks to the couple’s sexual orientation, as Lemay argues (in his reading, the L’Espanayes are also lesbians, and even the orangutan is shown to come out of a closet). It also suggests a covert space where analysis merges with storytelling. In such a scenario, the modulation of Dupin’s voice becomes telling (literally): ‘His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctiveness of the enunciation’ (Poe, 1986, p. 194).
The proliferation of doubles in the story stems, I argue, from the foundational double voice of the real-life Dupin and the storytelling Dupin: the tenor-versus-treble dichotomy will reappear in the story within the story8 in the form of the two voices overheard arguing at the scene of the crime, the one ‘shrill’ and ‘very loud’, the other ‘gruff’ (p. 201). It is the storytelling process itself that prevents the reader from connecting these criminal voices to those of the detective: layer upon layer of textual voices are added as no fewer than six witnesses are asked about the voices they heard. And these six witnesses, who represent five different nationalities, claim that the shrill voice is speaking in six foreign languages, in each case in a language that is not the witness’s own, and in all cases but one in a language that the witness recognises, perversely, as a result of not knowing it. Such a Babelian proliferation of languages has two results: first, it drowns out the original doubleness of the voices, to the extent that the reader forgets the gruff one; second, it primes the reader for a singular solution, for one truth that will cut through the multiplicity of testimony. Thus, when Dupin produces his orangutan solution, the reader accepts it, despite the fact that, as Caroline Julliot notes9, amid their universal disagreement as to the language that it spoke, all the witnesses recognise the voice as human (like Dupin’s other voice, it enunciates distinctively).
There is something profoundly troubling here. The analytic, which is the stuff of the metaphysical detective story for John T. Irwin, takes on monstrous proportions, to the point that it extinguishes the story’s human voice, its humanity. For Lemay, that humanity is itself something equally violent, equally monstrous, that is, man’s inner dark side. He is quite categorical when it comes to identifying the killer: ‘The murderer is a psychotic sex maniac’ (1982, p. 178). And yet, this sex maniac is not discovered, not pin-pointed as one of the characters – Le Bon, for example, who is Julliot’s preferred candidate; instead, he remains a kind of universal figure, an everymaniac, if you will. To that extent, he lies partially buried inside all the characters, as well as the author and the reader. I qualify the extent of our ability to repress this everyday evil deliberately: for Lemay, readers apprehend this real truth beneath, alongside, despite Dupin’s ratiocinative production of the abstract Truth: ‘The narrator does not use our modern terminology and say that the murderer must have been a psychotic sex maniac – but that is clearly what he (and everyone reading the story for the first time) must think. Poe deliberately creates this impression’ (p. 177). In this way, the reader, like Dupin, is split; instead, perhaps, of being divided between the creative and the resolvent (although this is also one way of framing it), the reader may be considered to be divided between a critical, analytical response and one that comes much more from the gut. As Lemay puts it, ‘[t]he tone of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is primarily one of thoughtful analysis – but at the very time that Poe appeals to the reader’s mind with analysis, he appeals to his emotions […]. It is the narrator who takes us through these emotions’ (p. 177). The text as a whole operates on two levels, and as such it splits the reader. At its conclusion, it yells violently (gruffly and also shrilly) at the reader with the full force of italics and inverted commas. If Poe’s readers – thankfully – escape the text alive, it is certain that, figuratively, they end up like Madame L’Espanaye, with their heads torn from their bodies.
There is another shudder here, one that it is worthwhile acknowledging. I am thinking of Rita Felski, for whom the critical moves made here – the reflexivity, the auto-differentiation – flow from the keyboard all too easily, as if a pre-made structure is simply dropped onto the text, obliterating all (the beautiful text, the powerful words) before it; indeed, I and critics like me, especially Bayard, Julliot and our colleagues at InterCriPol, embody Felski’s suspicious reader. Bayardian detective criticism in particular aims precisely ‘to expose hidden truths and draw out unflattering and counterintuitive meanings that others fail to see’ (Felski, 2015, p. 1). Can the kind of criticism in which I am engaged here be justified in the face of Felski’s reproach? Does a critical approach grounded in theory need to be defended here? My response is that, despite Felski’s assurances to the contrary, detective fiction weathered the storm of critical theory and emerged unscathed (unread, or unreread, in Barthes’s terms). How, then, can Felski write the following: ‘[And] in the heyday of deconstruction, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” spawned a virtual industry of commentary and meta-commentary. Detective fiction has often been a playground for the latest theories of interpretation’ (p. 85-86)? The answer, I contend, lies precisely in the example that she chooses – ‘The Purloined Letter’. The industry that she has in mind (Jacques Lacan on Poe; Jacques Derrida on Lacan-on-Poe; Barbara Johnson on Derrida-on-Lacan-on-Poe) was nonetheless self-contained: it not only remained largely in the kind of critical circles where violence was visited by one critic upon another in the service of criticism, but when it served to read detective novels themselves, as literary analysis, the objects of its critique were also hived off into the sub-genre of metaphysical detective fiction, a taxonomy that can be considered tautological in the framework of the present volume. Those novels that were not considered to lend themselves to theoretical examination, in other words, those that were not manifestly verging on the literary (like Julia Kristeva’s Possessions) or that were not reflexively reflexive (like Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy), were dismissed as just detective fiction.
My argument here is that the metaphysical shudder of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is important for two reasons that are basically the same: it comes forth from a text that is reflexively analytic, ratiocinative, investigation-focused and at the same time monstrous, visceral and mundane; it stands as a sign that detective fiction is to be apprehended both as an investigation-text and as a whole text. This is how the story founds both the sub-genre of metaphysical detective fiction and the whole, unmarked genre to which, and from which, the former forever cleaves. It is important to acknowledge Felski’s argument here because this shudder is so obviously a response to the split in the text: it is an affective shudder – something that the reader feels, as Lemay argues – that occurs at the interface of the real and the analytic. My point above about the importance of Dupin’s role as a storyteller en abyme, which for me is a demonstration that the murders in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ are reflexively fictional, that is, not even real within the economy of the story, is easily dismissed by Felski: ‘that storytelling is an integral part of reasoning and thinking is now a familiar idea’ (p. 87). This is true, but it remains equally true that Dupin does not simply tell a story to apply his reasoning and thinking to the problem of the crime; instead (and at the same time), his reasoning and thinking lead him to tell the story of the crime.
The effect of this is a genuine calling into question of what is important in a detective story (what makes it fit the genre) and what is incidental (what it contains that is not a detective story but that fails nonetheless to elevate it out of the genre). Felski argues that the imposition of critical theory onto a text ‘connect[s] one seemingly trifling detail to another’ (p. 88). Again, I find this point persuasive (and acknowledge that I am doing exactly what Felski is warning against by air-lifting this quote out of her text), but it is important to understand that any call to read detective fiction for the emotional pleasure that it imparts must acknowledge the vexed nature, even the duplicity, of ‘trifling details’. On the one hand, the received wisdom would have it that there is no such thing as a trifling detail in detective fiction: textual details that are not clues are red herrings; both serve the investigation-text. On the other hand, textual details that exist in detective fiction without serving the investigation-text must cause the story to resist the restraints of the genre (not resisting the limits that Felski wants to put on critique, but testing the limits of genre, which are themselves placed on texts by critics).
By explicitly referencing trifling details – in his words, those ‘most trivial occupations’ (Poe, 1986, p. 189) – Poe’s narrator repolarises the trivial-versus-germane dichotomy and, in so doing, encourages readers to feel truths other than those proposed by the detective and to see the (story as) account of the murders – and this at the very moment when the story is in the act of creating (telling but also interpreting) the very end-oriented narrative that will ensure that readers (Poe’s and all those to come) see precisely the murders and nothing else. What is this if not end-orientation being defused and primed, debunked and celebrated, and – let’s say it – critiqued at its very origins? By proving its efficacy (for how many readers have challenged Dupin’s account in all the years that have passed since its publication in 1841?) in such an arena, in which the narrative screams at the reader not to follow blindly down the narrative rabbit hole that leads to the final reveal, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ ensures that detective fiction will instil in readers an enduring love and unawareness of trifling details.
The final question that I wish to ask of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is whether, in this chiasmus of violence and resolution, of foundation and disruption, anything – the text, the genre, the reader (the orangutan?) – is saved. And by ‘saved’ here, I have in mind the kind of textual salvation that Shoshana Felman saw in the refusal of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw to be either a ghost story or a psychological account of madness. While the term is anathema to Felski (p. 5), what saves the text from the interpretation of critics, who take turns to name it either ‘ghost story’ or ‘account of madness’, is its fundamental ambiguity. Clearly, the account that I am giving of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ recalls Felman’s analysis. It seems to me, however, that rather than hesitating, or refusing to choose, between two states (be they analysis and story, or literature and detective fiction), Poe’s text is both, chooses both. This is where the metaphysical shudder comes in: the ambiguity of the story’s final citation (is it text or intertext, original or translation?) enables the coupling of two things that are quite opposed. By enabling the reader to feel that something else is going on but nonetheless to stay focused on the detective’s solution, Poe’s narrative founds the genre of detective fiction and the end-orientation that causes readers to forget trifling details in pursuit of metaphysical truth. At the same time, by enabling the reader to feel that something else is going on, Poe saves the whole text, with all its literariness, including other truths, other solutions, even if only at the level of the unconscious, that is, even if these truths remain just an emotional response. If there is an ambiguity in Poe’s double narrative, it is one that both saves and condemns the text, while also founding a fundamentally paradoxical, metaphysical genre whose narratives are henceforth immune to their detectives’ solutions, forever intending beyond, towards the literary.
There is one theoretical model that fits this account of the metaphysical shudder, and it also comes from the field of psychology. If we consider that the shudder felt by readers is a response to a traumatic epistemological breakdown, then, faced with the detective’s solution, their ability to know that what they have felt about the text until that point is untrue while also continuing to believe that it holds true (or vice versa, if one rejects the detective’s solution while admitting that it is ‘real’ insofar as it cannot be expunged from the narrative) is a fetishistic response. According to Freud’s essay of 1927, confronted with the truth of his mother’s genitals, the soon-to-be fetishist focuses his vision on the last thing that he saw before the traumatic revelation of truth, at which point (the story of) his mother’s penis remained intact. This object, which is contiguous or in some way analogous to the mother’s genitals, becomes a fetish, that is, it screens the truth. This screening, for which the technical term in English translation is disavowal, performs two opposed functions simultaneously: on the one hand, it hides the truth of mother’s sexuality, whose power is henceforth displaced onto the fetish object (the truth is no longer seen); on the other hand, it ensures that whenever the fetish object is seen, the truth is uncannily summoned, if only obliquely, contiguously (the truth is seen everywhere). Insofar as the fetish enables the truth to be hidden and seen, disavowal can be considered a form of partial repression10.
Mapped onto detective fiction’s metaphysical shudder, fetishism enables the truth (of the sex-maniac, for example) to continue to be felt even as Dupin unmasks the Truth (of the orangutan). In this respect, Poe’s use of the expression ‘master stroke of cant’ to describe the fetishistic duplicity of detective storytelling is itself something of a master stroke en abyme, for the word ‘cant’ – both stroked here and disguised by a stroke of the pen – cannot but recall the sexual truth beneath the investigation text. And when a character in a detective novel claims that what is being experienced is the stuff of detective fiction and not real life, fetishistic readers can negotiate the paradox, knowing that what they hold in their hands is detective fiction despite its pleas to the contrary, and enjoying this emotional outcry for what it is (a perverse, reflexive statement of generic affiliation: all detective novels display their true nature by denying their true nature) while also intuiting that something else is at play.
Thus, fetishism enables a degree of textual salvation, to have one’s cake, one’s detective story, or perhaps one’s critique, and eat it. To the questions posed on the rear cover of Felski’s book – ‘Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic’s task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed?’ – my reply, in the framework of detective fiction at least, is simple: because the text tells us to. To respond emotionally, viscerally, to this shocking text of violence (evisceration, decapitation and castration) is to read with stamen; it is, in other words, to do what the Prefect has failed to do. Yet, to do so is to repress, to unsay the final words of the story (usually in detective fiction those words that tell the truth of what is), which reveal the error of denying what is there. Cutting has to be cut. To read without one’s stamen, on the other hand, is to explain what is not there and to deny what is. My suggestion has been that we should consider Dupin’s investigation not to be real within the fictional economy of Poe’s story and thus deny it. But, of course, it is there, before our eyes. A partial response seems pragmatic. We must read what is there – keep one eye on the words – and remain aware of what is not there, or what is also there, often virtual rather than actual, almost entirely repressed, but in fact only partially so, for it erupts throughout the text in these reflexive shudders that alert us to our position in double space.
As has been indicated, Poe’s detective fiction primal scene is such that all that has come since must inherit traces of this fundamental duality. Agatha Christie, perhaps the most famous exponent of the neutral, unmarked genre – her work is detective fiction – if we gloss over qualifiers like ‘Golden Age’ or ‘cosy’, has produced numerous examples of texts demanding to be reread, and indeed unread, including ones that appeal directly to fetishism. To take just three examples, two of which must count among her most famous works, Christie performs Poe’s master stroke of cant by hiding key truths, including entire alternative stories, behind the showy truths of her titular investigation texts: the body in The Body in the Library is not the first spectacular female body encountered in the novel, and the reader is clearly informed that it is not true; the murder of Murder on the Orient Express is a pale imitation, or repetition, of the murder solved by Hercule Poirot before he boards a famous train that is not the Orient Express; and finally, the murder that takes place at a Hallowe’en party in Hallowe’en Party accompanies a lengthy discussion of how the event is not a Hallowe’en party11. I shall conclude this chapter by indicating the key instances of the metaphysical shudder in the opening sections of these three novels.
Far from beginning with the discovery of a body in the library, Christie’s The Body in the Library (1942) begins in denial. It takes almost ten pages before the reader sees the titular body, and for this the intermediary gaze of Miss Marple must first be summoned to Gossington Hall (1983, p. 16). Before that, discussion at the Hall revolves around the fact that the whole story must be a dream, since such things do not happen in real life (p. 9), and the matter of whether or not one of the main characters ought to go and look at the body (p. 7-12). Colonel Bantry is invited by the servants to see for himself (p. 11), and we later learn that he has done this, and that it is the body of a young woman who has been strangled (p. 12). Importantly, however, readers are denied precisely this opportunity to see for themselves. When readers first encounter the body in the library, therefore, the visceral shock has been defused; not only are they forewarned, but when the body is described, it is almost undescribed, made to appear unreal. Certainly, it attracts the gaze (it is said to be ‘flamboyant’, a descriptor that is used twice in the same short paragraph), but its hair is ‘unnaturally fair’ and its face ‘heavily made-up’ (p. 16). If there is a Poe-like master stroke of cant here (which is suggested by the scarlet lipstick that makes the lips look ‘like a gash’), it is hard to miss: as Dolly Bantry remarks to Miss Marple at the conclusion of this description, ‘You see what I mean? It just isn’t true!’ (p. 17).
The emphasis is original in Christie’s text; the message, complete with exclamation mark, could not be more flamboyant. Yet, this is the nature of detective fiction’s shudder: since Poe’s Urtext, it has been normalised, and readers inoculated. The story of The Body in the Library is an investigation into a body that, we are told explicitly, is not the stuff of real life (‘Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life.’ [p. 9]) and is patently ‘made-up’ (p. 16), a phrase whose untruth is partially hidden by its hyphen. Of course, the story explains this artificiality with its subsequent confusion of the bodies of a young girl (Pamela Reeves) and a young woman (Ruby Keene). As a result, Christie is able to rely on the end-orientation of the genre, which is such that the reader rushes to find out whose body it is, how it got into the library and who the murderer is, in order to cause an entire opening scene to be forgotten by generations of readers. In truth, the body in the library is not the original body of The Body in the Library; that title goes to the vicar’s wife, who, in Dolly’s dream – the real opening to the novel – is parading in the village church ‘dressed in a bathing-suit’ (p. 7). The scene of Dolly’s waking up in Gossington Hall is contested by a lengthy discussion between the Bantrys, in which the threshold between the dream (from which Dolly is loath to emerge) and the waking moment is so dramatically overplayed that it becomes quite impossible to know for sure whether the maid Mary really did come in and announce the discovery of a body in the library or whether that was a (part of the continuing) dream. And if that was a dream, so too may well be the whole remainder of the novel, its spectacular bodies mere screen memories enabling the primal body to be partially repressed and, of course, partially retained. For, and this is the story that Christie deploys a range of shuddering reflexivity to disavow, Dolly, whether she is asleep or not, is sexually attracted to young female bodies (a desire that is displaced onto her husband in the story that follows); and whether or not the body in the library has any narrative corporeality, there is at least one other story behind its presence in the library.
This is no aberration in Christie’s œuvre, however. Earlier, in 1934, Hercule Poirot has a dream on board the Taurus Express. For, as with The Body in the Library, the title Murder on the Orient Express (1934) points to a second iteration. As I have described elsewhere (Rolls, 2018), the murder on the Orient Express functions as dream material, processing what is unknown at the beginning of the story, that is, the details of the case that Poirot has just solved for the French army in Syria. Here, I shall focus briefly on the specific ways in which the opening chapter shudders. The title of this chapter locates the narrative present in Aleppo, on a platform awaiting the departure of another train: the Taurus Express. Two people are waiting and their conversation is painfully, but rather beautifully, stilted. ‘Conversations on the platform, before the departure of a train’, we are reminded, ‘are apt to be somewhat repetitive in character’ (Christie, 2013, p. 4). While not yet on the Taurus Express, the story is already in the narrative space of another train. On a second read, this repetition is unmistakeable. Poirot’s interlocutor goes as far as to express his hope that the detective ‘will not be snowed up in the Taurus!’ (2013, p. 5). This exclamation is ominous, for this is precisely what will happen, although ostensibly Poirot will be snowed up in the Orient, not the Taurus Express. That this is a coincidence is belied textually by other repetitions, including of salvation. The French Lieutenant, the man waiting with Poirot, recalls his General’s ‘trembling as he spoke’ to Poirot: ‘You have saved us, mon cher […]. You have saved the honour of the French army’ (p. 4). The repetition of the verb of saving is echoed once more in Poirot’s response: ‘once you saved my life’. The saving here is voluble, but in what this salvation consists is unclear: twice we hear that the Lieutenant does not know ‘what it was all about’ (p. 3), that he ‘was still in the dark’ (p. 4). Textual salvation lies precisely in the ambiguity of repetition. That the journey on the Orient Express appears real and dominates the diegesis screens the fact that it repeats the journey on the Taurus Express. If Murder on the Orient Express does not hesitate between a story of madness and a ghost story, as in Felman’s analysis of The Turn of the Screw, its titular murder is a repetition, perhaps in the French sense of a dress rehearsal, but after the event. The truth that we readers learn stands in for the one that the Lieutenant does not know. In this way, Poirot effectively saves the General twice, by hushing up what happened in Syria a second time, but also, and at the same time, revealing it in a parallel story.
My last example is taken from Hallowe’en Party (1969). Again, reflexivity is used to great effect at the beginning of the novel, in this case incarnated by the author en abyme, Ariadne Oliver. My particular focus here, however, will be on the auto-differentiation of detective fiction space. As in the two previous examples, Hallowe’en Party will cleave itself in two, using its own spatial specificity – the Hallowe’en party – to deny its identity. Hostess Mrs Drake is at pains to get the name right, or indeed wrong: ‘I’m not calling this a Hallowe’en party, although of course it is one really. I’m calling it the Eleven Plus party’ (1977, p. 6). There are ghost stories within the story, and echoes of another novel – Curtain – that, by 1969, had long been written but that would wait a further six years before emerging from its own locked room and being published. Importantly here, however, the novel suggests other aspects of its own textual identity through this embedded dislocation of its title. The horror of this party, in other words, lies in its unspeaking of itself, which begs readers to ask what it is that authors like Mrs Oliver do when they lock themselves away in rooms, as she does at the end of the first chapter. That she begins to write a story inspired by events that she has just witnessed (which will be the basis of the plot – of Hallowe’en Party – that follows) is strongly suggested by this reference to an alternative space for teenagers (those too old for Hallowe’en parties). When Mrs Oliver removes two amorous young people from her path to the locked room, one of them remarks that people ought to pay better attention: ‘They might see we didn’t want to be disturbed’ (p. 11). This shudder – again, those screaming italics – both fails and succeeds. Readers do not see the possibilities that this story contains within, beneath itself another tale of teenage fantasy; but, at the same time, they do what all good readers of detective fiction do – they see everything and yet still push boisterously on, just like Mrs Oliver, casting it all aside in their pursuit of the solution to the crime.
Detective fiction’s metaphysical shudder cleaves the text: it simultaneously shouts out and silences the other spaces, the other stories that accompany the investigation-text. Its italics, inverted commas and exclamation marks demand an emotional response, but not necessarily of the kind evoked by Felski. Rather than a call to read the words that are present and to stop straying down critical alleyways towards absent meaning, those uncanny, ungrammatical moments demand that readers stop, that they resist, at least for a moment, the hasty pursuit of the investigation and take the time to see what is also there, what is very nearly not there. If Poe’s Urtext shudders with an extravagance that lifts it out of the ordinary and gives it a metaphysical edge, Christie is his direct descendant. Once the genie was out of the locked room, there was no putting it back.
This essay argues that all detective fiction stems from an Urtext, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), whose metaphysical credentials have been well established. Edgar Allan Poe’s tale founds the genre’s recurring instances of metaphysical convulsion. Thus, whenever that famous reflexive joke is trundled out, and a character marvels at the way that events happening in the story are more like detective fiction than real life, the text is in fact revealing (coyly, covertly but also brashly, overtly) its fundamental, metaphysical nature as simultaneously present and absent. By theorising such reflexivity as a shudder, this essay seeks to demonstrate, through various instances found in Agatha Christie’s novels, that detective fiction demands to be read critically from beginning to end, and not only for the apparent pleasures of solving the crime.
La thèse avancée dans cette étude est que tout roman policier découle d’un célèbre « Urtext », The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), dont les aspects métaphysiques ont été bien documentés. On s’intéresse à ce texte fondateur d’Edgar Allan Poe pour remonter à l’origine des convulsions métaphysiques du roman policier. Ainsi, à chaque fois que le personnage de roman s’émerveille de manière réflexive des événements du récit comme relevant davantage du roman policier que de la vraie vie, le texte révèle (timidement, secrètement, ou bien brutalement et ouvertement) quelque chose de son essence métaphysique à la fois présente et absente. En élaborant l’idée d’un frisson à partir de ce phénomène réflexif, cette étude tente de démontrer, à travers divers exemples issus de l’œuvre d’Agatha Christie, que le roman policier exige d’être lu de manière critique de bout en bout, et pas seulement pour les plaisirs apparents qu’offre l’auteur par la résolution du crime.