Johntirwing Mysteries We Reread Mysteries of Rereading

man fir for adventure.
"1 The emphasis in Chandler's remarks, as in his

fiction, is on the detectve's character and his with the rev
john Ilrwin
elation of a bidden truth smply serving as a device to illuminate the
Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading:
Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story;
Also Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson*
Let me start with a simpleminded question: How does one write
analytic detective fiction as art when the genre's structure, its
central narrative mechanisn1_ SFFn1S to rlsrollrage the unlimited reread
if the
50lution ofa mystery, how does the wrter
of thar soluton from exhausting the reader's in
terest in the story? How does he write a work that can be reread by
otber than those w1th poor memories? 1 use the term "analytic
detective fiction" here to distinguish the genre invented by Poe in the
Dupin tales of the 18405 from stories whose main character is a detective
but whose man concern 15 not but adventure, stories whose true
genre is Iess detective fiction than
of the adventure mode,
when he gave the name
Marlowe.
For
rcpresents a
In his essay "The Simple Art of Murder, "
he says that a detective is the detective's "adventure in search of a
hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a
*A shortcr version of this essay was delivered at the Jl1I1Ual Hl'_'-"_HF;
Poe Studies Association in 1981 at the kind invitation of Kcnt and
Bcn Fisher. The essay is pan of book entitlcd The M]lsteY)1 to a Soluton:
and (he l1nalvtic Detective Srorv oresentlv being
former and motiva te the latter. But in the pure detective story
the matter i5 otherwisc. As a character, Dupin is as thin as the paper
he's printed on. As for his adventures, they amount to httle more than
.. newspaper accounts of the crime and wirh the prefect of
and rhe narrator in the privacy of his What gives the
detective genre its special appeal is that whch the Gon
coun brothers noted on first reading Poe. In an
described Poe's stories as "a new Iiterary worId" "signs of the
!iterature of the twentieth century-love giving place to deductions ...
the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head ... from the
drama to the solution."2 because t i5 a genre that grows out
of an interest in deductons and soIutons rather than in love and
rhe analytic detective shows lttle interest in
at best to produce caricatures-those monsters of from
Holmes to Poirot. In its purest form it puts a11 its eggs in the basket of
and a specialized kind of plot at rhat. The is thar this
basket seems to be one that can be emptied in a
Related to this difficulry is another. If the writer does his work prop-
if he succeeds in building up a sense of the of some
dark secret or knotted problem, then he has to face the fact
that there simply exists no hidden truth 01' guilty knowledge whose
revelation will not seem anticlimactic compared to an antecedent sense
of rnystery and the infinite speculative possibiltes it Borges,
one of the contemporary masters of the analytic detective acknowl
this difficulty in his tale "Ibn Hakkan Dead in His
" He says that one of his characters, in detective
mought that the solution of a mystery is less
than the mystery itself."3 But ifin the analytic detective sto1'y the s01uton
is always in some sense an anticlimax that in dissipatng the
exhausts the story's interest for LIS, an interest in speculative reasoning
which the mystery empowers, then how does one wrte this kind of
story as a seriou5, that is, rereadable, literary form? How does one both
present the analytic solution of a mystery and at tbe same time conserve
the sense of the mysterious 011 which analysis thrives?
Givcn the predictable economy of a critical essay, 1 think tbe reader is
5afe in assuming that if 1 didn't consider Poe's Dupin stories to
the one hand, archetypes of analvtic detective fiction. and on the
Poe. Borges, and the Detective Story 199
1
I
I
........l
198
serious litcrary works that demand and repay rereading, there would be
no reason for my evoking at this length the apparent incompatibilty of
these modes and tbus the writer's problem in reconciling them. AH of
which brings me to the task of uncrumpling tbat much crumpled
"The Purloined Letter," to consider the way tbat this problem of a mys
tery with a repeatable solution, a solution that conserves
refigures) the scnse of the mysterious, lies at the very
detective story.
11
approach to "Thc Purloincd Lctter" wl1 be along what has recently
become a well-worn path. I want to look bricHy at three readings of the
story that form a cumulative series of interpretations, each successive
commentng both on the story and on the previous reading(s)
in the series. They are Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The
Letter'" (1957), Jacques Derrida's "The Purveyor ofTruth" (IQ7'i), and
Barbara Tohnson's "The Frame of Reference:
Each of these essays a
v In
which "The Purloined Letter" is treated as a which is to say;
read as a oarable of the act of am not so much
interested in following the convolutions of their individual arguments as
111 a thread that runs all a clue to conduct us
through labyrinthine passages. That thread is the position that each essay
takes on what we might eaH the numericall geometrieal strueture of the
story.
Let us with Lacan. He says thar the story consists of "two
scenes, the first of whieh \ve shal1 designa te the primal scene,
and bv no means inadvertently; since the second may be considered its
"4 The first or primal scene takes in "the royal boudor"
the second seene in "the Minster's office" According to La-
can, each of these scenes has a triangular structure: each is eomoosed of
"three 1JlOlnents . , .
subjects, incarnated eaeh time by diffcrent characters":
The tlrst is a glance that sees the King and rhe police.
The second, a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and
deludes itself as to tbe secrecy of what it hides: the Queen, then
the Minster.
The third sees rhat the first two leave what should be
200
Do the Americas Have a Common Literaturel
hidden exposed to whomever would seize it: the Minster, and fi
nally Dupn. (44)
Thus in the royal boudoir, the King does not see the incriminating lerter
which the Queen in her haste has hidden in the open, leaving it with its
address uppermost in plain sight on a tabIe. And the Queen, that
the does not see the letter, mistakes his blindness for the letter's
hersclf vulnerable to tbe Minister who sees
and the and realzes that the letter can
be seized before the Queen's very eyes precisely because she dare not do
to attract the King's attention to it. Similarly in the second
scene, at the Minster's residen ce, the having been turned inside
out and readdressed in a femaIe hand, i5 once again hidden in plain sight
in a card rack 011 the mantelpiece. And this time the polce, who have
searched the Minister's quarters repeatedly ,vithout noticing the letter,
that first glanee which sees the Minister, who mis
takes the blindness of the police for the concealment of the letter, rep
resents the second glance; and the third glance that
that the letter hidden in the open 15 his for
U .... in both these
is the Minister, and his shifting from the position of the third in
the nitial scene to that of the second in its repetiton exhibits the
special vulnerability to self-delusion, to a blnd spot, whieh the posses
sion of the letter conveys.
Consider, now, Derrida's critique of this reading, keeping in mind
that in his essay "'1'he Purveyor of Truth" Derrida i5 motivated less by
all interest in Poe or "The Purloined Letter" than by a desire to score
points off Lacan. As John50n points out, Derrida, in a lengthy tootnote
to his book Positions, sketches the that will become "The
of Truth" and cites in tbis context Lacan's multiple
h1m since the publication of De la grammatologe in
111 I9()5.' l)bviously; Derrida takes the case of "Tbe Purloined
Letter" for one of the same reasons that Dupin did-the Minister once
did "an evil turn" (Poe, 3:993) at Vienna, and Dupin .sees the
affair of the letter as an opportunity to even. The wit of Derrida's
essay hes in the way that ir uses Lacan's reading of "The Purloined
Letter" itself, for if Lacan believes that with his interpretation of
the story he has, as it were, gained of Poe's "Purloined
Letter," has made its meaning his own, then Derrida will show bim that
the possession of that letter, as Lacan himself pointed out, brngs with
1
it a blind spot. In his essay Derrida sets out to repeat the encounter
between Dupin and the Minister with himself in the role of Dupin and
Lacan in thc role of the Minister.
Derrida attacks Lacan's reading of the story on a varety of ponts,
but the one that concerns us has to do with Laean's noton of the tri
strueture of each of the two scenes in the tale. Derrida agrees
that the story conssts of two scenes, but not the two on which Lacan
focuses. He points out that the scene in the royal boudoir and the sub
scene at the N1inister's residence are two narrated scenes withn
artfice of the story, but that the story itself consists of two
scenes of narraton-the first scene being tbe Prefect's initial visit to
during which the Prefect reeounts the events in the royal boudoir,
and the second scene the Prefect's subsequent visit during which
Dupin recounts the events at the Minister's residen ce. Whle the narra
tors of the two rzarrated semes in the royal boudoir and at the Minister's
residence are respective1y the Prefect and Dupin, the narrator of the two
sanes C!f narraron at Dupin's lodgings is Dupn's unnamed companion.
according to Derrida, Lacan reduces the four-sided structure of
the scene of narration-what Derrida calls "the scene of writing"-to
the three-sided structure of the narrated scene "by overlooking the nar
rator's position, the narrator's involvement in the content of what he
seems to be recounting. "6 In ignoring the presence of the narrator of
"The Purloined Letter," Lacan cuts "a fourth side" out of the narrated
"to leave merely triangles" (54). And he does this, says
because as a psychoanalyst, Lacan projects upon Poe's story
the structure of the Oedipal triangle in his desire to read "The Purloined
Letter" as an of psychoanalysis or "an allegory C!f tile
II 5).
Now since in his critique of Lacan's interpretation of "Thc Purloined
Letter" Derrida aims to get even with Lacan being one up on
and since Lacan in his reading of the numerical structure of the tale has
already played the numbers one, two, and three (the tale is composed of
two scenes, the second of which, by repeating the triangular structure
of the first, creates a sameness or oneness between the two), then
one up on Lacan means playing the next open number (four); and that
is what Derrida does in arguing that the structure of the scenes is not
but quadrangular. However, whether Derrida arrives at this
structure by adding Ol1e to three or by doubling
problema tic point, a point on which Johnson focuses in her
Lacan's and Derrida's readings of the tale's numerical structure.
202
As ]ohnson notes, Derrida objects to the triangular structure which
Lacan sees in the repeated scenes because this structure, derived from
the Oedipal triangle, represents in Verrida's opinion a characteristic psy
attempt to dismiss or absorb the uncanny effeets of doubling,
a doubling which Derrida maintains is present in the tale.
Doubling tends, of cour5e, to be a standard cIement of the analytic
detective 5tory, in that the usual method of apprehending the criminal
involves the detective's doubling the criminal's thought processes so as
to anticipate bis next move and end up one jump ahead ofhim. And, of
course, the number associated with doubling is u5ua11y [cmr rather than
two, for what we refer to as doubling is almost always splitting and
doubling. Which is to s ay, the of the double externalIy
an internal division in the protagonist's self (but with the rnaster/slave
of rhat division characteristically reversed), so that doubling
tends to be a structure of four halves problcmatically balanced across the
inner/outer limir of the self rather than a structure of two separate,
opposing wholcs. Thus in the first Dupin story; "The Murders in the
Rue Morgue," the narrator says that while observing Dupin in the ex
ercise of his "peculiar analytic ability;" he entertained "the fancy of a
double Dupin-the creative and the resolvent" in accordance with "the
old ohilosoohv of the 13i-Part Soul" (2:533). And in "The Purloined
as both poet and mathematician, is represented as
this same dual intellcctual power. In matcbing wits with rhe
Minister, Dupin first doubles the Minister' s thought processes-a mental
operation that Dupin illustrates by telling the story of the
who always won at the game of even and odd-and he then replays, or
temporally doubles, the scene in which the Minister originally seized
the letter, but with himself now in the Minister's role, thus shifting
the Minister into the role played the Queen in the original event
and evoking the destablizing "reversal-into-the-opposite" inherent in
doubling.
As Johnson notes, Derrida thinks that "the problem with
analytical triangularity ... is not that it contains the wrong number of
terms, but that it presupposes the possibility of a successful dialectical
mediation and harmol1ious normalization, or of desire. The
three terms in the Oedipal triad enter into an opposition whose resolu
tion resembles the synthetic moment of a Hegelian dialectic" (12.2). But
that synthetc moment, that 5uccessful dialcctical mediation of desire, is
precisely what the uncanny destabilizing effect of doubling constantly
subverts: in the Oedipal triangle each of the three positions functions as
Poe, Borges, and the Detective Story 203
.......
one pole of a mutually constitutive opposltlOn with one of the other
positions and thus each position is subjeet to reversed into its
opposite. There exists in the Oedipal triangle, then, no privleged po
sition that s above or outside the uncanny effects ofdoubling, no exempt,
objeetive posirion from which to mediate or regularze the subjective
interaeton of the other two positions.
As with Derrida's reading of the wit ofJohnson's reading of
Derrida les in the way that she doubles Derrida's OWI1 insights baek
upon themselves to make them problematc. Thus in
rida's to be one up on Lacan by playing the number four to
Lacan's duce, Johnson assimilates their opposed of the numer
ical structure of the tale to the game of even and odd, the game which
Dupn proposed as an iIlustraton ofthe way that one doubles the thought
proeesses of an opponent in order ro be one jump ahead of him. Derrida
opts for a quadrangular structure, that is, he plays the even number four,
in order to evoke the uncanniness, the oddness of doubling; while Lacan
opts for a structure playing the odd number three, in order
to enforee rhe regularizing or normalizing effeet of the dialectieal triad.
In this game of even and odd, Derrida and Lacan end up as reciproca!
opposites, as specl1Iar doubles of one another: Derrida asserts the oddness
of evenness, while Lacan aHirms the evenlless of oddness. Given the
inherent in doubling, Johnson
between Derrida's and Laean's interpretations as an
"oscillation" between the former's "l1nequivocal statements of undecid
ability" and the latter's "ambiguous assertions of decidability"
As to Johnson'5 own position on "The Purloincd Letter," her reading
of Lacan and Derrida is meant to free her from having to take a position
on the numerical structure of the talc, or more to free her from
to take a numercal on that structure. She does not ntcnd,
to play the next open number for since she has re
duced Lacan's and Derrida's of the numerical structure of the
story to the spccular game of cven and odd, there exist only two nu
merical positions that one can take on that strueture-even and odd
and these, Johnson eontends, have already been played by Derrida and
Lacan without any cIear eonclusion. Johnsol1's strategy is to caH into
the whole concern with numbers. At one point sbe asks, "But
can what is at stake here really be redl1ced to a mere numbers
and a bit later she answers, in these the very notion
of a number becomes problematic, and the argument on the basis of
numbers can no longer be read literally" (12 r). As Johnson sees it, taking
204
Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?
a on the numencal strueture o the tale means, tor Lacan and
taking a numercal position, choosing a number, but that means
the game of even and odd, the game of trying to be one up on
a specUlar, antithetical doubIe. And that game means \.-UUi "",y
the structure of "The Purloined Letter" in whieh
up inevitably leads to one down. For if the structure ereated by
the repeated scenes in the tale involves doubling the thought processes
of one's opponent in order to use his own methods against him-as
does with the as Derrida does with Lacan, and as John
son do es with Derrida-then the very method by whieh one Ol1twits
one's opponent in order to come out one up 011 him is the same method
that will be employed oneself by the next pIayer in the garne, the
next interpreter in the in order to leave the preeeding interpreter
one down.
15 it possible, then, to intcrpret "The Purloined Letter" without du
in the intcrpretive act that reversal-into-the-opposite inherent
in the mechanisrn of the letter as that mechanism is described in
the tale? Is it possible to genera te an without a blind in
a ftaw tbat allows the subsequently to be turned itself?
Clearly, the desire for such an invulnerable insigbt 1S at work nJohnson's
essay and accounts for the sometirnes diseoncerting level of self-con
sciousness which she tries to rnaintain regarding her own lTlethodological
stance, her own critical assurnptions. ror John50n the refusal to take a
numerical position 011 the structure of the tale-to play the next open
number-is an effort to avoid the game of nl1merical
which will simply turn into an oscillation between even and odd rl1ntling
to infinity. But is it possible for John50n to avoid becoming involved in
this nl1mbers game simply by refusing to ehoose a specific number with
which to characterize the geometrical/numerical structure of the tale?
Doe5n't the very form of her essay-as a critique of Derrida's critique
of Lacan's readin!?: of "The Purloined Letter" -involve her in the num
bers "
In situating her essay as the third in a series of three critica! readings,
Johnson places hcrself in that third position whch, in the structure gov
erning the wandering of the purloined letter, is not only the position of
maximum insigbt, but also the position in which the observer i5 subject
to mistaking his insight concerning the subiective interactol1 of the other
two glances for an ~
how are we to describe the between inter
pretation and those ofLacan and Derrida? Are they linked in a triangular
----...
---
111 WlllCn LaCan and Verrlda tace oH as antithetical doubles,
whle johnson, by refusing to become involved in the game of even and
of "successful dialectical mediation" aboye
of their Or are
structure in which Lacan and Derrida are
of one pole of a mutually constitutive
trying to be one up on a specular double), while
other pole of this opposition by doubling back Lacan's and Derrida's
methods against them in order to avoid this game of one up? Indeed,
Johnson's final comment 011 her own methodology invokes the of
Derrida's quadrangular frame: " ... my own theoretical 'frame of ref
erence' i$ to a very large extent, thc writings of Lacan and
Derrida. 15 thus fr;:mf'n h" part ofits content; rhe sender
from the receiver"
essay i5 at odds with itself, as shc is the first to
Indeed, ir is her strategy to present the opposed aspects of her
essay-its explicit refusal to take a numerical position on the structure
of the tale coupled with its implicit assumption of a numerical position
in representing its own relationship to the two earlier critical essays, a
numerical position rhat reinscribes the question of a triangular versus a
structure present in the an apora, as a of
not unlike the oue which Paul de Man describes in the
uses as the epigraph to her book The Crtical
final chapter 1S her essay 011 Derrida and Lacan.
In that de Man evokes rhe apora betvveen grammar and
rhetor1c by as an example the case in which Edith Bunker asks
her hmband Archie if he wants his bowling shoes laced over or laced
under-to which the irascible Archie replies, "What's the dtIerence?"
In terms of grammar Archie's reply asks for the difference two
but in terms of rhetoric his reply means "Whatever the
it's nor important to make a difference to me." De
Man "The same grammatical engenders two
that are mutually exclusive: the literal asks for the conc.;':tn
ferencc) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning" (Johnson,
v). It s in this same vein thatJohnson at the end ofher essay, after having
described the opposition between Derrida's and Lacan's positions as "the
oscillation between tmequivocal statements of undecidability and am
biguous assertions of decidability," concludes, "'undecdabilty' can no
more be used as the last word than 'destinaton.' ... The 'undetermin
able' i5 not oPDosed to the determinable: 'disst'minlti()t1' is not
206
Do the Americas Have a Common Literature1
to repetltlon. If we couId be sure of the dfference betwcen the deter
minable and the undeterminable, the undeterminable would be comprc
hended withn the determinable. What is undecdable is whether a thing
s decidable or not" (146).
Now what are we to make of these words? By which 1 mean not just
what do these words say grammatically but what do they convey rhe
for what purpose are they being sad in this contexto 1 think
the hes in Johnson's statemcnt that " can no more
be used as a Iast word than 'destination.''' At the point she says
Johnson is nearing her own destinaron, the end ofher essay, and is faced
with the formal of saying a last word and thus with the
question oC whether a last word can be said in the oft-renewed critica!
dscussion of "Thc Purloined Letter." Having to saya last word, she
says in dIect, "The last word is that there i5 no last word."
This tvpe of statement which says 011e thing grammatically and means
and again in her essay. As we
, refuses to take
a numerical position on the structure of the tale and implicitly assumes
a numerical positon in relarion to the two earlier critical readings which
her own essay retrospectively groups imo a series along with itse1f. It is
at work again when she tums Derrida's in5ights on doubling back upon
tbemselves to ten Derrida that it is im.possible ro be one up on bis
double for though what she says on a grammaticalleve1
is thar it i5 impossible to be one up in 511Ch an encounter, rhe rhetorical
eHect of her statement is to Ieave her one up on her specular double
Derrida. And this is at work once when she
conclude5, "What i5 undecidable i5 whether a is decidable or not."
These instances of an aporia between grammar and rhetorie occur in
statements tbar are in one way or another self-reflexive, statements thar
are themselves included in the class of things to which they rder. A
of 5uch a sclf-including statement would be the sentence
"All statements seven words are false." Precisely because the
sentence is tself a statement made up of seven
a paradox: if this statement i5 tme, t is and if ir is false, it is true.
Similarly, in an apora betwecn grammar and rhetoric we are faced, as
de Man notes, with a single grammatcal pattern that engenders two
mutually exclusive meanings. By reason of the fact that they include
thcl11selves in the c1ass of things to which rder, these statemcnts
double back upon themselves and exhibit that uncanny reversal-into-rhe
inherent in
,
Une tlunks 111 this connection of Russell's paradox. Distinguishing
between two kinds of classes (those which do not include themselves as
members and those which do), Russell calls the first dass "normal" and
the second "non-normal," and he rhen doubles back upon itself this
dstinction between nonself-induding and self ..induding classes by ask
~ whether the class all normal c/asses i5 a normal or a non-normal
dass. By defmition he e/ass of all normal classes includes withn itself all
normal classes. Consequent1y, if it is itself a normal class, ir must be
included in itself. But self-incluson is the distingushing eharacteristic
of a non-normal dass. The e/as.' of al! "normal classes" s, then, a concept
whose torm and eontent are at odds: on the one hand, the concept in
volves a formal notion of e/ass as absolutely nclusive (that is, as ultimately
self-indusive) that is contradicted, 011 the other hand, by the COl1tent, by
the specific definition of the "classes" which the former is to l11clude
wthin itself As a result, the class of all normal classes is
normal only if it is non-normal, and non-normal only if it is normal.
Part of the infinite fascination of paradoxes of self-inclusion is, of course,
that they seem to reflect in the facing mirrors of language and logic the
mysterious nature of self-conseiousness as that which seeks to indude
within itself an exact representaton of that which its very
essence cannot wholly indude itself.
At the very start of her essay Johnson sets the tone for all the self
, ~ statements that are to follow when she remarks that in Poe's
tale, Lacan's reading, and Derrida's critique, "ir 15 the act ofanalysis which
seems to occupy the center of the discursive stage, and the act of analyss
of the aet qf analysis which in some way disrupts that centrality. In the
resulting asymmetrical, abyssal strueture, no analyss-including this
one-can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements
in the sequence, which is thus not a stable sequence, but which nevet
theless produces eertain regular effects" (1 JO). The key phrase,
is "no analysis-including this one." Ir has about ir the brisk Arnercan
quality of Mark Twain's "No general statement is worth a damn
including this one"-a general statement worth a damn 0111y if
statements are not worth a damn. The very faet that Johnson makes an
analytie statement that indudes itself (an analysis of her own
in the sentence immediately following her statement thal' it is the act of
analysis of the act of thar skews analysis in Poe, and
Derrida is her way of announcing her strategy at the start. It is not that
Johnson will do anything different in her essay from what Laean and
Derrida have done in thers. Indeed. it is not dear that she thnks that
208 Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?
anything different can be done at thlS pOlIlt masmucn as LacaIl aHU
Derrida have already replayed the structure of the tale in a critical register
by acting out the game of even and odd in their opposing positions.
What will be different in her verson s that these positions will be
repeated with a complete awareness of their implications, a total critical
self-conscousness that ams to create an insght without a blind spot;
for what is at issue here s not so much whether one's critical
is logically true or fabe, or one'5 reading of the tale perceptive or dull,
but whether one's interpretive stance is methodologically self-aware or
methodologically naive.
In its translaton from fiction to eriticism, the project of analyzing
the act of analysis becomes in effect the program ofbeing infinitely self
eonscious about self-eonseiousness. Or put another way, if the structure
that we find in "The Purloined Letter" involves doubling an opponent's
proeesses in order to turn his own methods against him, then
the only defense against having the same strategy repeated against one
self by the next pIayer is to produce an insight or take a positon that s
self-consciously doubled back 1.1pon as is the case with the
type of self-induding statement that says one thing grammatically but
conveys its opposite rhetorically. For a position that knowingly includes
and its opposite seems to leave no ground on which it can be
undermined.
The commitment ro an increasingly self-conscious analytic posture that
anima tes this cumulative series of interpretations produces at last a kind
of intellectual vertigo, a not uncharactcristic side cffect thought about
thought-the rational animal turning in circles to catch itsclf by a tale
it doesn't havc. And certainly no one enjoyed ereating this vertiginous
effeet more than did Poe, an effeet that he imaged as dizziness at the
edge of a vortex or on the brink of a precipice. That the giddy, self
dissolving effect of thought about thought-what Johnson calls the
"asymmetrical, abyssal structure" of analyzing the act of analysis
forms the continuing theme of the Dupin stories is announced in the
opening sentence of the first tale, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
The story begins with the narrator's lengthy prefatory remarks on the
nature of the analytical power, remarks that condude by presenting the
detective story as a "commentary upon the propostions just
Poe, Borges. and the Detective Story
209
\",.)j 1) . .QU rnose pretatory remarks start wlth this curious proposition:
"The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves,
but Httle susceptible of analysis" (2:527). Now inasmuch as this statc
ment initiates the narrator's own brief analysis of the analytcal power,
it is self:'reflexive: as an analytic statement about the nonsusceptibility
of analysis to being the statement is included in the class of
things to which it but what rhe statement says in effect 15 that
statements cannot wholly indude thcmselves. In analyzing the
act of analysis, self-conscious thought doubles back upon itself to dis
cover that it cannot absolutely coincide with itself
This insight about the nature of thollght is, of course, at least as old
in our tradition as the philosophies of Zeno and Parmenides and as new
as G6del's proofand (and Carroll's and Royce's) rnap ofnatural
size. It 5 the paradoxicaI in5ight that if one considers the act of thinking
and the content of thollght as two distinguishable things-as it seems
1,
one must in with sc1f::"consciousness, with thought that is able
to represent itself to itself, able to take tsclf as ts own object-then the
~ t t ( ' ' I 1 p t to analyze the act of analysis, to indude whoIly the act of think-
within the content of thought, wll be a progression of the arder
11 + 1 to infinity. Which 15 to say that there wilI always be one more
step needed in order to make the act of thinking coincide wth the content
of .
Since the selt-mc!uctmg gesture
a doubling back in which self-consciousness, attempting to be
even with itself, finds that it is originally and essentially at odds with
itselC ir i5 not surprising that Dupin, in illustrating the way that one
doubles the thought processes of an opponent, gives as an example "the
game of leven and odd'" (3:984). In this game "one holds in his
a number" of marbles "and demands of another whether that num
ber is even or odd. If the guess is the guesser wins one; if wrong,
he loses one" (3 :984). Dllpin then tells the of an eight-year-old
boy who was so good at this guessing game that he won alI the marbles
at his schoo1. The boy's "mode of involved "an identification
of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent" (3:9
8
4), and this
doubling of the opponent's processes was achieved by a
doubling of his appcarance. The boy explaincd to Dupin: "I
exprC:SSllon of my as accurately as possible, in
expression" of the opponcnt "and then wait to sec what thoughts or
sentiments arise in my mind ar heart, as if to match or correspond with
the expression" (3:984-85). 'fhe narrator comments that "the identifi
210
Do the Americas Have a Common literature1
cation ofthe reasoner's intelkct with that ofhis opponent, depends, ...
upon the aCCllraCY with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured"
(3:985); and Dupin, agreeing with this observaton, adds that "the Pre
fect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by default of ths identification,
and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through nan-admeasure
ment, of the intdlect with which they are engaged. consider
their oUJn ideas ofingelluity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert
to the modes in which they would have hidden it ... but when the
cunning of the individual felon is diverse in eharacter from their own,
the fclon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is aboye
their own, and very usually when it i5 below. They have no variation of
principIe in their investigations" (3
Now what is going on here? Dupin cannot be the close reasoner that
he is reputed ro be and not realize that what he has just said undermines
his use of the garne of even and odd as an illustration of the way one
doubles the thougbt processes of an apponent in order to be one up on
him. First of all, if "the identifieation of the reasoner's intellect with that
of his opponent, depends, ... upon the accuraey with whieh the op
ponent' s intelleet is admeasured," then it cannot be that the Prefect and
his men fail, "first, by def:1ult of this identification, and, secondly,
ill-admeasurement, 01' ... non-admeasllrement," for if the identificaton
folJows from admeasurement, the Prefect's first failure would have to be
in admeasuring the opponent's intellect. And ir the reason that the Pre
tcet and hi5 men fail so frequently in this admeasurement is that "they
consider only their oUJn ideas of ingenuity," that they are una ble to
ine or conceive of the workings of a mind "diverse in character from
their own" (always the case when the level of the mind is aboye their
own and usually the case when it i5 bdow), then is there that
oecurs in the rest of Poe's tale that would lead us to believe this obser
vation of Dupin's about the reason for the Prefect's failllre? Whieh is to
say, if the Prefcct and his men can catch fclons whose minds are
similar to their own and if what they !leed in this case is the abilty to
imagine the workngs of a mind radically different from their own, then
does Dupin's method of olltwitting the Minister provide us with any
evidence that this to imagine a mind radicalIy different from one's
isn't al! of the tale's on the resem
blance between Dupin and the Minister, on ther possessing the samc
dual creative/rcsolvent power, part of a plot line in whieh Dupin outwits
the Minister only because their minds are so much alike? 1sn't ir precise1y
beca use the Minister has hidden the letter at hi5 residence in the same
way that tlle l.2ueen hId 1t in the royal boudoir-by turning it over and
lcaving ir out in the open-that Dupin already knows whcrc to look fol'
the letter when he visits the Minister? And docsn't Dupin reeover the
letter by replaying the same scenario by which the Minister originally
stolc it?
Isn't a11 tbis simply a device to make U5 realize that it is impossible
to or eonceive of a mind whose workings are radica11y diHerent
[rom one's wn? We don't have any direet aeecss to another's thoughts.
Our ideas of the workings of anothcr person's mind may be derived
from what that person says 01' does or tells us he is thinking, but our
ideas of another's mind are stil1 our ideas, a projecton that we rnake of
another mind's otherness to one's own based 011 the 0111y irnrnediate
experience that one's mind has of psychic otherness, the self's original
otherness to itself, that difference that constitutes personal identit)!. In
his story "Morella" (1835), Poe quotes Locke's definiton of personal
identity as "the sameness of a ratiol1al being" (2:226). But one imme
diately thinks, "Sameness as opposed to what?" l;or in differential terms,
it makes no sensc to speak of the rational being's continuil1g sarneness
with itsclf unlcss there is also a sense in which the rational bcing i5
continually different from itself. In "MoreJla" Poe says, "Since person
we understand an intdligent essence having reason, and since there i5 a
consciousness whch always aceompanies thinking, it is this conscious
ness which l11akes every one to be that which he ealls 'himself'
thereby distinguishing him frorn other beings that think, and giving
him his personal identity" (2:226). It i5 this differenee of thought frol11
itself-which Poe evokes bere as the differenee bctwecn thnking and "a
consciousness which always accompanics thinking"-that enables tbe
rational being to recognize its sameness with itself and thus reeognizc
its difference from others, distinguish itsclf "from other bcings that
think." It is preeisely bccause the self's tbought of another mind's oth
erness to it rcfleets rhe otherness ol' thought to itself that the effort to
the thought proccsses of an opponent produces a speeular, an
tithetical double of the self, the self's own projeetion of psyehic differ
mee. And eonsequently, for a11 that "Thc Purloined Letter" purports
to be about the way in which one eHeets "an identifieation of the rca
soner' s intelleet wirh that of his opponcnt," it is in tact about that psychic
difference whieh permits thought to be dentified with itself, that dif
ferenee which eonstitutes scll'-idcntity but which prevcnts thought from
cver absolutely eoinciding with tsclC indeed, which eonst1tutes selt:'
dentity precisely becaHse it prevents thought from being absolutclv even
212 Do the Americas Have a Common Literaturel
with tself. And It lS t11IS dltterence, UllS C()IlUlLIVll V1
being originally and essentially at odds with itself, that Poe
evokes at the very start of the Dupin stories when he says that the "mental
features discoursed of as the analvtcal are, in themselves. but Httle sus
ceptible of analysis."
As is often the case in his fiction, Poe, the picture language of
radicals, emblematizes this latent meanng on the lcvcl of etymology, a
level to which he explicitly directs our attention in "The Purloined Let
ter" when he has Dupin, in arguing against those who
algebra, remark, "Ir a term is of any importance-if words derive
any value from applicability-then conveys 'algebra' about as
as, in Latin, 'ambitus' mplies 'ambition,' 'religio,' 'religion,' or
'homincs honesti,' a set of honorable men" (3:987). Since in eaeh of these
an English word has a meaning difterent from that of its Latn
root, the infcrcnee seems elear: in "The Purloincd Letter," "il' a term is
of any importanee," we should submit that term to philological analysis
to see if the root from whieh ir derives has difterent or additional mean
eompared to its Englsh form, meanings that might alter, reverse,
01' deepen the significance of the passages in whieh tbese words appear.
Let me apply this principIe suggested by Dupin's remark to two
pairs of words in the tale. On his first the Prefeet
introduces the aftair of the lerter like this: "Tbe faet the business is
indeed, and 1 make no doubt that we can manage it suftl
wcl! oursclves; but then 1 thought Dupin would lke to hear the
details of beeause it is so odd." To whieh Dupin
and odd" (3:975). Dupin's emphatie repetition of the words is
meant to fIx them in our minds so that later when he describes the game
of even and odd. we hear the echo and link the pars. And to rnake sure
that we don't miss the connecon, Dupin. irnmediatcly after mentioning
tbe game of even and odd, says, "This game is simple" (3 :9
8
4).
Simple, even, are their roots' The word
from the Latn simplex, meaning "single,"
The word "evm" derives from the Anglo-Saxon
" and ultimately from the Indo-European base
"what is the same," and containing the adverbial base *im-, meamng
"just like" (503). The word "odd" derives from the Old Norse oddi,
meaning a "point of land, triangle, hence (from the third angle) odd
number" (I017). Tbree words and at the root of eaeh a
Olle; even, things just alike, two; odd, a triangular
three. And these three wrds are groupcd into two pairs-simple/dd.
Poe, Borges, and the Detective Story
213
even/oClCl-tllat contam, as lt were, tour syntactic places between them
which the three words fill by having one of the \vords repeated. The
doubling of the word "odd" links the two pairs; it gives them ther
element of sameness, evokng that condition of being at odds with
that difference with itself, which constitutes the sameness of a ratonal
being (a condition of being at odds with itself that is most clearly per
ceived when thought tries to be absolutely even with itself). The three
words-both through ther meanings and through the way that they are
paired and linked-are an emblem of the numercal structure that gov
erns the tale, whch s to say, of the l1umerical steps or geometrical pat
terns that sclf-conscousness goes through in trying to analyze itsclf.
Dupin says that the game of even and odd is simple, and throughout
the Dupn stories Poe associates smplicity wth the highest, purest form
of ratiocination. It is in this vein that Dupn suggests to the Prefect on
his firsr visit that "the very simplicty" of the affair of the letter consti
tutes ts oddness: "Perhaps rhe mystery s a httle too plain. A httle too
self-evident" (3:975). And later Dupin says that the Minster, in hiding
the Ictter, "would be driven, as a matter of course, to simplicity, if not
deliberatcly induced to it as a matter of choice" (3:989). As in that "game
of puzzlcs ... played upon a map" (3:989), the Minister would choose
a hidin>; place that would observation by dint of beng exces
" rclying on the fact that "the imellect suffers to pass
unnoticed rhose considerations which are too obtrusively and too
ably sclf-evident" (3:990). 13ut what is that simple thing whose very
simplicity makes it so odd, that thing which is so mysterious because
so obvious, hidng out in the open "immediately beneath the nose of
the whole world" (3:990)? What but self-consciousness, that condition
of beinf! at odds wirh itself that constitutes the sameness, the singleness,
of a rational being?
By definiron a number i5 odd if when the number is divided by two,
there i5 a remainder of one. And by that definiton the first odd number
is three. In that simple game of even and odd in which self-conscousness
analyzes itself, the question inevitably arises as to whether, when the
mind's desire to be absolutely even with itself i5 divided into the mind's
essential condition of being at odds with itself, the one that is always
left over is the same as the number one that precedes two, the same as
that mythic, original, undivided unity prior to all paring/pairil1g. Or
put another way; when the mind tries to make the aet of thinking coincide
absolute1y with the content of thought only to find that there is always
one more step needed to achieve this coincdence, s the infinite pro
214 Do the Amercas Have a Common Literature?
gression that results simply thc 1111rrOr nnage, toe annLlleUGU UUUU1C,
a Zenonian infinite regression which, by dividing a quantity in
then dividing the half in half, then dividing the quarter in half and so
011 to infinity; seeks a lower limit, a part that cannot be halved again, a
thing so small that, indivisible, it represents an undivided
an original one? Poe is too good both as philosopher and philologist not
to know that the simple thing that s self-eonscousness could never be
as simple as that. Indeed, if the mind were ever ab1e to make the act of
thinking and the content of thought coincide absolutely so that thcre was
no difference betwecn them, then sdf-conseiousness, that self-identity
constituted by thought's difference from itself: would simply go out like
a light. Such an undifferentiated onc would be indistinguishable from
zero. Though the mot of the word "simple," the Latn smplex, means
"single," "unmixed," "UIlCOlllpounded," the roots of the word sm
Latn words semel, nleaning "once," "a single tinle, " and plco,
meaning "to fold, foId together,,8-make it clear that to be unmixed or
uncompounded does not mean to be undifferentiated. Fol' in the picture
of these radicals we can see that a thng which is sing1e-fold
like a sheet of paper, a lctter-is something that in beng olded a single
time is doubled back upon itse1f. That the image of sclf-conscousness
as a smple fld doubling an inscribed surface back on itself was in Poe's
mind when he plotted the folding/refoldng of the purloined letter can
be nferred from an 1845 pocm on folding money caBed "Epigram For
Strcet" attributed to him:
1'11 tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leas es
Take a bank note and fold it up,
And then you wll find your money in creases!
Ths wonderful plan, without danger or 1055,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where norhng can trouhle it;
And every time that you fold it across,
'Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double ir!
The nfinite progression implicit in tbe analysis of the act of analysis
is evoked at the end of "The Purloined Letter" with tbe revelation of
revenge on the Minister, for ths attempt by a mastermind to
get even with his specular double clearly serves as a figure of the analytic
at mastery, its attempt to be absolutdy even with itself.
Knowing that the Minister "would feel sorne curiosity in regard to the
21S
Poe, Borges, and the Detectve Story
Vl
." ",-. VVHU JIdU UULWlllCU 111H1 1.3:993), LJUpll1 leaves
him a clue by substtuting for tbe purloined letter one contaning a quo
tatioll from Crbillon's Atre copied out in Dupin's own bandwriting,
a hand with which the Minster "5 well acquainted" (3:993). In signing
his deed, Dupin marks ir as revengc, which is to say, be nsurcs rhat
Minister will intcrpret his acrions not simply as the paid intervcntion of
a gifted amateur sleuth or a dueJ of wits between two of the clc:vere,;t
but as a repayment for rhe evil turn which tbe Minister
did at Vicnna. For I take ir thar tbe sarisfactioll of rcvenge re
quircs-excepr in cases wbcre ir is carricd out on a substitute-a
moment o[ revelaron in which the object of revenge learns whom
and for whar he i5 bcing back, a point that Poe underlines having
Dupin choose bis quotarion-signarure just such a reveIatory mo
ment in an eighteenrh-century revengcr's tragedy. And yet from what
we know of the Minister it i5 inconceivable rhat once he learncd o[
Dupin's revengc he would let the matter rest therc-and equally in con
ceivable thar his double would nor know this. For though it seem
thar wirh Dupin's revenge the score between them i5 even at one
bad turn at Vicnna repaid by one bad turn at Pars), if the Minister
a]]ows Dupin 's trick to go unanswered, then Dupin will luye had
last turn; and, as proverbial wisdom assures us, the last word or the last
laugh is not just one word or one laugh like any other. The power ro
say the last word or have the last the power to bring a series of
reciprocal actions to an end, like rhe power to originate, involves the
notion of a one that is simultaneously more than one. Consequent1y, we
are left wirh the paradoxical situation in which Dupin's outwitting o[
the Minister wll constitute an evening of the score them ar one
only if the Mnister does Ilot allow Dupin' s trick to end the
does not allow it to be that one last rurn which in its finality i5
more than one. Ir is not so much that one bad turn deserves another as
that one bad turn demands another if ir is to be experienced as simply
one turno All of whicb emphasizes the mlltually constitutive contradic
toriness of to get even with a specular double being Orle up OH
him.
In the af:tlr of the letter to even an old score, gives up
his "objective" tourth position as an apparently disinterested observer of
the triangular structure o[ King, Queen, and Minister described rhe
in order to insert himsclf for personal reasons into the third
position of an analogolls in which the poliee and the Minister
occupy respective1y the first and second position5. Similarlv in describ
216
Do the Americas Have a Common literature?
WhlCh ing this triangular structure 111 Dupm slutts the Ml1lster trom
the third to the second position, Lacan would himself appear ro occupy
fourth position as a disintcrested observer outside the
Yet to a supposedly more objeetive observer ofLacan's position
as Derrida, Lacan's description i5 not disintercsted at a11, but
a psychoanalyst's imposition of the structure of the Oedipal triangle on
a doublc story. This imposition, though seemingly made from an
tive fourth position outside the triangle, has the effect of insertng Lacan
nto the third position of a triangle in which the psychoanalyst's "objec
unmasking of the personal motive that les behind Dupin's "dis
interested" involvement in the affair of rhe letter shifts Dupin into the
and hs double the Minister into the flrst. Or so says
from a fourth position outside Lacan's trangle, a fourth position
that will itself be shifted in turno
This mechanism by which the shfting from the third to the second
position within the triangle is extended (as a supposedly more objective
ofview is assurned [rom which to observe the subjective triangle),
and thus becomes the shifting from a fourth positon outside the
to the thrd wthn it, evokes the infinte regression that, in thi$
quest for absolute sdf-consciousness, accompanes infinite progression
as its shadow For while the progressive series moves in one di
recrion in its flight from subjective involvement, in its termless search
for an absolutely objective point of vew from which to examine the
ir only exists as a series beca use of the regressive movement of conscious
l1ess, beca use of the retrospective gaze that keeps a11 the earlier terms of
the series in view so that are perceived as related, as serial in char
acter. Thus the mental step that one takes in order to separate the self
from itself, to dstinguish absolutely the observer from the observcd, is
always a backward a step in the opposite direction from the one
in whch we are looking.
IV
In the sardonie name of simplicity Jet me add one more, final (or clse
one, more tinal) element to this discussion. So far we have looked at
Jnalytic readings o[ "The Purloined Letter" by Lacan, Derrida,
Johnsol1, and then gone back to consder Poe's own self-conscious
mematzing within the story of the numerical/geometrical structure en
1 would now like to look at a literary
!
of Poe's tale that antedates the earliest of the three analyses we have
considered by some fifteen years: the reading that Borges gives of "1'he
Purloned Letter" when he rewrtes its numerical/geometrical structure
in his own detective story; "Death and the Compass"
In the openng paragraph Borges explicitly links the tale to
Poe's Dupn stores. remarking that hi5 detective Erk Ll1nnrot "thought
of himself as apure logician, a kind of Auguste Dupn" (65). "Death
and the Compass" concerns a series of murders. AH the obvious c1ues
suggest that the number in the series wi11 be but all the less than
obvious c1ues-the kind that police inspector 1'reviranus would
but Erik Uinnrot wouldn't-suggest that the number of murders wi11
be four. We learn at the end of the story that the series of crimes has
been planned by Lonnrot's archenemy; the criminal Red Scharlach,
~ to lure Lonnrot unawares to his own destruction, has eounted
on the faet that the detective would solve the arcane c1ues which Inspector
1'reviranus misscd and that Lonnrut's intcllectual pride wuuld blind him
into thinking tbat because he was une jump ahead of the police, he was
une jump ahead of the criminal as we11. In effect reworks the
structurc from "1'he Purloined Letter." He has Scharlach
create a stuaton in which Lonnrot's apparent solution to the erimes
constitutes that second glance whose observaton ofblindness in the first
(1'revranus's apparent misreading of the clues) becomcs itsclf a
I
I
blind spot in the observer convincing him that he sees everyth;"N
the meantime Scharlach occupies the position of the third glance
at the fourth point of the compass), the blindness of the first
the blind in the second, and the filct that the object he
seeks-Lonnrot's life-is his for the takng.
Lnnrot and Scbarlach are, of course, doubles of one another, as their
names indicate. In a note to the English transIaton of the tale Borges
says, "'fhe end syllable of Lonnrot means red in German, and Red
Scbarlach 5 also translatable, in German, as Red Scarlet" (269). E15e
where Borges tells us that Lonnrot i5 Swedish, but neglects to add rhat
in Swcdish the word liinn 5 a prefix meaning " "hidden," or
"illicit." 1'hllS Lonnrot, the secret red, pursues and is pursued by his
dOllble, Red Scharlach (Red Scarlet), the doubly red.
Scharlach'5 motive 1S revenge. In their final confrontation, Scharlach
reminds Lonnrot that three years earlier the detective had arrested Sehar
lach's brother in a gambling dive and that in the ensuing shootout Schar
lach had escaped, as he says, with "a cop's bullet in my guts" (75). In
dclirious with fever for nine and n!.rhts, "1 swore," says
Seharlach, "by the who looks w1th two taces ano Dy aH (11(" gous 01
fever and of mrrors that 1 would weave a maze around tbema11 wbo
sent my brother to prison" . 1 take it tbat this elaborate revenge on
"a kind of Auguste Dupin" for the arrest of a brotber is an allusion to
the faet that in "1'hc Purloined Letter" the Minister D has a
brother with whom he is somctimes confused beca use "both have
in lctters" (3 Since Dupin gets even with the
are we to see Scharlach's revenge OIl Lonnrot as an attempt to
even the seore for that earlier revenge on a brother criminal?
1'he maze that Scharlach weaves around the detective begins with the
of Rabbi Marcel Yarmolinsky on the third of December at a
in the north uf the city. Yarmolinsky is a 1'almudic scholar, and
among his eflects the police find "a treatise ... 011 the 1'etragrammaton"
a sheet of paper in his typewriter bearing the words "The letter
Name has leen uttered" (67). 1'he second murder occurs on the
third in the west of the city. The victim, Daniel Simon Aze
vedo, 15 found on the doorstep of a paint store beneath "the shop's
conventional red and ye110w diamond shapes" Chalked across
are the words "The secolld letter
. 'fhe third murder occurs on the night of
the cast of the city. 'fhe victim, whose name i5 either Gryphius or Ginz
telephoncs 1'reviranus offering to him information about the
of Yarmolinsky and Azevedo, but the caH is interrupted by the
of two men who forcibly remove Gryphius-Ginzberg from the
sailors' tavern where he has been It i5 time and the two
men are wearing harlcqun "costumes of green, and yellow loz
(7
0
). 1'racing the interrupted phone 1'revranus arrives at the
tavern to find scrawled on a market slate in front "The last letter ~ f the
Name has been uttered," and in Gryphius-Gnzberg's room "a star-shaped
of blood" and "a I739 edition of Leusden's Philologus Hebraeo
Graecus" wth the following passage underlined: "the Jewish day begins
at sundown and ends the following sundown" (71). On the night of
March flrst Treviranus receives sealed envelope containing "a lctter
one 'Baruch Spinoza'" (72) and a map of the city. 1'he letter
writer predicts that on the third of March there will not be a fourth
murder because the locatuns of the three previous crimes in the north,
west, and east form "the perfeet sides uf an equilateral and mystica
(7
2
), as demonstrated by a triangle drawn in red ink on the
map.
three men will be killed
Appropriately, the letter
reOlcnng that
219
I
IS sem ro uevlranus, the hrst two syllables of whose name recall the
Latn words for "three" and "man"-tres and vir. The Inspcctor's name
probably alludes as \Vell ro the tres1Jiri capitales, a group of three mags
trates who "exercised general control over the city police" in
Rome. According ro the eleventh edition of the Encydopaedia lirlfanmca
"Caesar increased their number to four, bur Augustus reverted to three.
In imperial times most of their passed into the hands of the
vglUI11"9-an etymological-historical link between Borges' s
Treviranus and Poe's Prefecto Not to mention the fact (whieh
must have notieed) that the emperor who restored the number of the
tresviri capitales from four to the original three also gave his name ro the
C. (Csar) Auguste Dupin. In "An Autobiographcal Essay"
Borges reports that he used of the proceeds from a literary
prize he received in 1929 to aequire "a secondhand set of the Eleventh
Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica" (233), by no means an insignif
icant detail in the Jife of a writer obsessed wth the of the ency
a writer who says that some of his earliest memories are of
"the steel engravings in Chal11bers's Enc)'clopaedia and in the Britamca"
in his father's library (209).
It i5 worth noting that in the e1eventh dirion of the Britallnca the
entry tor tresviri occurs on the page the entry for Gottfried Rein
hold Treviranus (1776-1 a German naturalist. Not unpredictably;
Inspector Treviranus's flrst words in the story point to che numerical
that hes at the Latn root of his name: " 'We needn't lose any time
here looking for three-Iegged cats,' Treviranns brandishing an im
perious 'Everyone knows the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the world's
finest sapphires. Somebody out to steal them probably found his way in
here by mistake. Yarmolinsky woke up and the thief was torced to kill
him'" (66). The only historical Tetrarch of Galilee, as the entry for
tetrarch in the Britannica informs us, was Herod Antipas-the Herod of
the gospels-whose (4 B.C.-A.D. 39) began under the emperorship
of Caesar Treviranus's "imperious cigar") and brack
eted the life of Christ. At the death of Herod the Grear in 4 B. c., his
realm was divided arnong his three sons: half went to Arehelaus, with
the titIe ethnarch; a quarter to Philip, with the title tetrarch; and a quarter
to Herod Antipas, with rhe same title. As with Treviranus's initial image
of a four-Iegged animal with only three legs, his reference to the Tetrarch
of Galilee-with its historical resonance of a quadripartite realm
among three peopIe by doubling the portion of (me of them-evokes the
numerical structure that governs the tale. That Borges intends the his
220
torical allusion (alld intends tor us not to miss it) seems dear fram an
e.xchange between L6nnrot and che editor of a Yiddish newspaper at the
scene ofYarmolinsky's murder: "'Maybe this crime belongs to the hs
tory ofJewish superstitions,' Lonnrot grumbled. 'Like Christianity, ' the
editor from theJudsche Zeitung made bold to add" (67). Need 1 add that
the entry for tetrarch in the e1eventh edition of the Britan/lica occurs 011
the page [1cil1g the entry for Tetragral11ma
Treviranus sends the map with the red and the letter sug
gesting that the number of murders will be three to Lonnrot who now
has, he the final cluc needed to capture the murderer. Since the
letters in the Tetragrammatol1 are four rather than three, since the Jewish
begins at sundown so that the three murders were committed not
on the third but the fourth of each month, and since in both the
seeond and tbird murders a diamond shape i5 prominently
Lannrot concludes that the series of murders is not threefold but fourfold
and that the shape which the locations of the critl1es describe on the map
is not a but a diamond. Using a pair of dividers and a compass,
Lannrot pinpoints the loeation of the planned fourth murder in the south
of the city; "the deserted villa Triste-le-Roy" (73); and he arrives there
well in advanee, so he thinks, of the murderer to cateh him in the acto
of course, at the villa of Triste-Ie-Roy-a building of intricate
a kind of House of Usher designed Zeno the Eleatic-
Scharlach is already in wat and easily captures L6nnrot. Com
pleting his triumph, Scharlach explains the maze to his prisoner. "The
first term of the series came to me by pure chance," says Scharlach. He
and some of his associates-among them Daniel Azevedo, the seeond
victim-had planned to commit robbery at the hotel wherc Rabbi
Yarmolinsky was Double-crossing his Azcvedo tried to
commit the robbcry a cady; got into Yarmolinsky's room mis
take, and killed the rabbi whcn he tried to ring for help. From the
newspaper accounts of the crime, Scharlach Icarned that Lannrot was
the to Yarmolinsky's death in the rabbi's writings, and so
he planned the series of murders to encouragc Lonnrot's belief that Yar
molinsky had been sacrificed by a group of 1Iasidic Jews in seareh of the
seeret and unutterable Name of God, a ruse to keep Lonnrot looking in
the wrong direction while being led to his own destruction. Appro
priately, the second victim was the double-crosser A zevedo , while the
thrd murder was simply a ruse with Scharlach himself doubling as the
victirn Gryphius-Ginzberg.
gives liS a clue to the type of cabalistic design on which Schar-
i
l' 'HU" ",o ",,,,"u Wl1Ll1I lle lCllS US rnar alnong t!le books wntten
by Yarmolinsky and kmnd in his room at the time of his death there
was "a Study al the Philosophy cif Robert PIlIdd" (67), the seventeenth
century pbyscian and Christian cabalist whose work on geo
mancy Ca mcthod of divination by mcans of the earth w1th a
pointcd stick" [Poc, 2:420]) Poe had induded a century earlier in hs
II
of Roderick Usber's favorite (Poe, In Fludd's
:'111
"
work, Utriusque cosrn majoris scilcet et mirlOris physica
we find the following diagram illus
between God and rhe
.
"IlI'.J'.
.J \.'
lj;''i
.tI

,
l
...\ ...r .
(\ . '\
Y \C
At the center of the upper triangle (wbose angles represent the three
of the Trinity) i5 the Tetragrarnmaton, and Ol1e side a
Latn which reads: "That most dvine and beautiful counter
visible below in the flowing image of the unverse" (83). In the lower
triangle are "the three of the universe-empyreal, and
which correspond to "the triangular fmm of the trinitaria n
" and along one side of this is the Latin lcgcnd: "A shadow, likeness,
or reflection of the insubstantial visible in the of the un
verse," the lower being "a projection of an idea" in the
mind and thus a mirror of the deity (83-84). Surrounding
triangles is a flamelikc suggesting at once the radant nature
of this Platonc projection or emanaton, the symbolic character of the
as tire m pure light (i. c., as mind) , and the traditional
assocation back at lcast to the Egyptians) of the triangle wilh
the of a flame and obclsk bcing stone flamcs above a
and thus with cternallife.
Since Scharlach knows from the newspaper accounts that Lonnrot
began his investigation of the murders Yarmolinsky's works
011 cabalism, and since one of thesc i5 a srudy of Robert Fludd's mystical
philosophy; it seems likely that the of schema shown he re was the
model for Scharlach's labyrinth and that it is this cabalistic design
Lonnrot believcs he is on tbe landscapc when in his inital surprisc
Scharlach at the fourth of the compass he asks,
are you aftcr the Secret Name?" (75).
that he has been outwitted and that he is about to be
Lonnrot tries to have the last word finding a flaw in Scharlach's maze.
Usng a favorlte of mathematicians and logicans-that
plan, though successful, violates the principlc of cconomy of means
Lonnrot says,
In your maze there are three Enes too many. ... 1know of a Greek
maze rhat i5 a single lineo Along tbis Ene so many
havc lost ther way that a mere detective may very well lose his
way. when in another incarnation you hunt me
stage (or commit) a murder at then a second murder at B, eight
miles from A, rhen a third murder at C, four miles from A and
halfway betwecn the two. by in wait for me then at D, two
miles from A and halfway betwcen them. Kili me at
the way you are going to kill me here at Triste-Ie-Roy.
222
--- - - - ~ . _ ~ . ~ . ~ .. , ~ UVl)SC;' lUCllunes rne stralght-llne labynnth at " u ~ ,
transcategoria1 nature of Being. In his essay "From Somene to No
the story's end" as a figure taken from "Zeno the Eleatic" (
26
9). This
body" in which he sketches the h1storica1 oscillations of the concept of
closing image of infinte regression as the endless subdivision of a line
the ]udeo-Christian God, Borges describes the reciprocal character of
inverts, of course, the figure of inflnite progression evoked in the tale
these two mcthods as "magnificaton to nothingness" (Ol, 147).
by the movement from a triangular to a quadrangular maze, which is
Given Borges's interest in the way that the classical pursuit of a mi
to s ay, the flgure of inflnite progression as the endless addition of sides
and a macrocosmic lmit becomes the religious quest for the
to a polygon-the flgure that symbohzes the attempt to integrate the
origin and end of a11 things, it is not surprising that as Lonnrot
proces s of thinking into the content of thought as the attempt to incor
I
up in the quest for the sacred and unutterable Name of God, tbe
porate an "objective" point ofview outside a structure (e.g., the fourth
meeting at the fourth point of the compass (a proleptc of infinitc
from which one views a triang1e) into a more inclusive, more self
progression) comes to secm like a face-to-tace encounter with the one,
conscious formulaton by making that viewpoint another angle of the
infinite, divinc origin of a11 things. And inasmuch as Lonnrot will die
structure g., the progression from triangle to
at that fourth point, ir does turn out to be the place where he wi11 meet
As we noted earlier, in the mnd's quest to comprehend itself totalIy;
bis maker (his mental
to be absolutcly even or at one with itsel( infinite progression and in
Agreeing to Lonnrot's request that he trap him in a straight-lne
flnite regression represent reciprocal paths to the idealized ground of the
byrinth in their next incarnation, Scharlach takes a step back and shoots
to its original, essential unity-infinite progression pursuing an
the detective with his own gun-shoots him in the head, one would
absolute unity figured as totalty, infinite regression pursuing an absolute
guess, the spot to drop apure logician. In his note to the tale,
simplicty figured as indivisibility. Part of the numerical mystery of in
Borgcs says, "The killer and the slain, whose minds work in the same
dividual self-consciousness is that though it is only one thing in a world
way; may be the same mano L6nnrot is not an unbelievable tool walking
of many things, for its individual possessor ir is one thing that is every-
into bis own dcath trap but, in a symbolic way, aman committing
And this absoluteness of individual sclf-consciousness tor its pos
suicide" (269). What with the prcsence of the color red in the names of
sessor not only underlies the absolute means employed in quest of the
slayer and slain and their talk of repeating their duel in another incar
self's origin (i.e., infinte progressionlregression) but also projects itself
one is reminded of Emerson's poem "Brahma" (which Borges
into the quest for a universal origin figured as a personified
cites in his 1947 essay on Whitrnan):12
Absolute Consciousness, that Inflnite Being whose consciousness is the
that is everything for every
If the red slayer think he
into a re1igious context, inflnite regression and infinite
Or if the slain think he is slain,
progression, as reciprocal modes of seeking an ultimate orgin conceived
know not well the subtle ways
as either a lower or an upper limt of consciousness, suggest the va
1 keeo. and pass, and turn again.
and the lJia positiva of mystical theology. In the va negativa one
Far or forgot to me i5 near;
seeks a11 unmediated encounter with the divne origin by subtracting
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
attributes ffom, by denying aHirmative predicates to, the idea of God
The vanished gods to me appear
until one finally achieves a personal cxperience of the transcategorial
And one to me are shame and fame.
nature of Being. Of this method Borges remarks, "1'0 be onc thing is
not to be all the other things. The confused intuition of that
One question, however, still remains ro be settled. Does Borges, in
truth has induced men to imagine that not being is more than being
rewriting the nUITlercal/geometrcal structure of"The Purloined Letter"
and that, somehow, not to be s to be everything. ",1 In the
in "Death and the Compass," see that structure as threefold and trian
va positil'a one takes the opposte path, constantly adding affirmative
gular does Lacan) or fourfold and quadrangular does
predicates to the concept of God until rhat concept becomes an absolute
Scharlach's Iabyrinth seems to be fourfold and diamond
totalty; though what one experiences in this path is once again the
shaped. But inasmuch as the murder of Gryphius-Ginzberg was a ruse
224
.....
I
::1
111 wbich rhe criminal doubled as tbe victim, there were really only tbree
crimes, and these three-the murders of Yarmolinsky in the north,
Azevedo in thc west, and Lonnrot in the soutb-form a triangle 011 tbe
map. And if the Iabyrinth is real1y threefold and triangular, then all tbe
obvious and simple clues indicating that there would only be three
crimes are tbe correct ones. But if the correct number is three, then
what becomes of rhc name thar is being uttered leuer by Ietter? If it is
nor the four-Ietrer name of God rhat Borges means ro evoke, thcn is ir
rhe three-Ietter lume of Poe, the creator, the orign, of the detcctive
Befare deciding, however, thar rhe structure is rhreefold and trian
gular, we should recall thar rhere finally tums out to be three crimes
because one of the doubles correctly interprets all the arcane clues
and presents himsclf at tbe fourth point ar the expected moment. Is the
numerical structure that Borges rewrtes from "The Purloined
that of the two interlocking pairs of words (simple/odd, even/
odd), a structure in whicb three things are made to f111 four spaces by
one of tbem-and all as of the mind' s quesr for an
undvided one, for a mythic absolute simplicity? Inasmuch as Lonnrot's
search tor God's "Sccret Name" h,) at the fourth point of the
undivided one, it is signif
~ ,name" (68), has the
same structure in all ts various spellings (JHVH, IHVH, IHWH,
YHVH, YHWH) as that ofthe two interlocking pairs ofwords in "The
Purloined " which is to say that three different letters are made
to fill the tour spaces of the name by doubling one of rhem (H). It is
also worth noting that in the case of both the sacred name and rhe
pairs of words the repeated Ietter or word occupies the
second and fourth spaces-the num bers cbaracteristically associated with
(One might also note, rhe quadrangular aspect ofSchar
lach's maze, that two is the only number for which doubIing and squar
ing are rhe same operation.)
Borges's rewriting of the numerical/geometrical structure of "Tbe
Purloined Letter" in "Death and the Compass" assumcs an even greater
significance when we realize that it was part of a largcr project in which
he set out to double Poe's three Dupin stories a century later with three
detective stories of his own. But with this difference: where Poe's de
tective solves the and outwits the cuIprit, Borges' s detectives or
pursuers are outwitted by the peopIe they pursue, are trapped in a laby
rinth fashioned from the pursuer's abilitv to follow a trail until he arrives
226 Do the Ameritas Have a Common Literaturel
in the chosen spot at rhe expccted momento Wc should note, nowevcr,
that in these stories Borgcs consistently undercuts the noton that the
culprt's triumph, his beng one up on hi5 opponent, ultimately makes
any real difference. "And one to me are shamc and fame" might aImost
be the motto of these cncounters.
The first Dupin story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," was pub-
in 184
1
; flrst detective story, "Tbe Garden of tbe Forking
Paths," was published exactly one hundred years latcr in 1941. As How
ard Haycraft, the historian of the detective genre, notes, there were "sev
eral events which marked the Centennial ofthe Detective Story in 194
1
":
one was the first issue of Ellery Queen's M)'ster)' lvIagazine, another was
the publication of Haycraft's own magisterial Murder for P/easure: The
Lije and Times the Detective Stor)'.13 And another, it seems certain,
was the publicaton of Borges's first detective story, which, he recal1s,
"won a second prize in E/1ft)' Queen's Ivl)'stery Magazine" (Aleph, 273)
The second Dupin story. "The Mystery of Marie Rogt," first appeared
in 1842-1843 in serial form; while Borges' s second detective story,
"Dcath and the Compass," was flrst published in 194
2
. This stry was
a150 submitted to Ellery Quem's M)'ster)' Magazine as Borges
notes, "was flatly rejected" (273).
The third Dupin story, "The Purloincd Lettcr," was published in
18
44, but Borges's third story, "Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His
Labyrinth," was llOt publshed untl 1951. In his note to the story Borges
accounts for tbis break in the pattem, commenting that after his "first
two of 194I and 1942" his third effort "became a cross between
a permssible detective story and a caricature of one. The more 1 worked
on it, the more hopeless the pIot seemed and the stronger my need to
parody" Ir is as if in reaching the third term of this series Borges
realized that his dTort to double Poe's three analytic detective stories
wirh the idea of going one up on the inventor of the genre
had gone awry and that he was himself trapped in tbe triangular! quad
labyrinth that Poe had constructed in "The Purloined Letter."
Certainly, in Borges's final detective story the allusions to "The Pur-
Letter" are numerous, culminating in an explict reference. In the
tale, two friends, Dunraven and Unwin, try to decipber the mystery of
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari's death in his own labyrinth. At one point Un
win says, "Don't go on multiplying the mysteries .... They should be
kept simple. Bear in mind Poe's purloined bear in mind Zangwill's
10cked room." 1'0 which Dunraven replies, "Or made complexo ...
Bear in mind the universc" ([ 16). 1 assume that the name "Dunraven"
Poe. Borges, and the Detective Story
.......
227
lS an alluslOn to the author of "The Raven, " as the Tla1ne "Unwin" is to
the unwinnable game of trying to be one up on a double, assumptions
supprted by the Eact that Dunraven is a poet and Unwn a mathema
tlcan. These occupatns recall as well the discussiol1 oE the dual char
aeter of the Minister D __ in "The Purloned Letter." Thinkingthat
rhey have eonfused the Minster with his brother who has also "attained
reputaton in letters," the narrator identifies D __ as "a nlathenuti
can, and no poet." To wheh Dupin "You are mistaken; 1 know
him well; he 5 borh. As poet and mathematician, he would reason
as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at a11, and thus wuld
have been at the merey of the Prefeet" (3
As we noted earlier, the Minister's dual eharaeter as poet and math
ematieian mirrors that "double Dupin" whose reciproeal powers ("the
creative and the resolvent") reminded the narrator in "The Murders in
the Rue Morgue" of "the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul" (2:533).
Borges eehoes this recprocal relationship between the creative and the
resolvent when he has the poet Dunraven suggest a mathematcal solution
to the mystery of the labyrnth and the mathematician Vnwin counter
with a poetie one. Dunraven asks whether, in to solve the mystery,
Vnwin has considered "the theory of seres" or "a fourth dirnension of
space," and Unwin replies, "No ... 1 thought abont the labyrnth of
Crete. The labyrinth whose center was aman with the head of a bull"
(123). adds that Dunraven, "steeped in detective stories, thought
that the solution is always less impressive than the mystery itself. Mys
tery has something of the supernatural about ir, and even of the divine;
its solution, however, is always tainted by sleight ofhand" (J23).
Since the mnimum number needed to constitute a series i5 three (even
if there are only two items in a the idea of their serial rclationship
is already a third thing), Dunravcn's question about whether the solution
nvolve "the theory of series" or "a fourth dimenson of spaee"
suggests n effeet that the key to the mystery turns upon choosing be
tween the numbcrs three and four. And this implied oscillaron between
three and tour, combined wth the image of the labyrinth, returns liS to
the triangular/quadrangular maze of "Death and the Compass" and to
ts origin in the nurnerical/ geometreal structnre of "The Purloned Let
ter"-in much the same way that Borges's remark about the solution
always beng less than the mystery itsclf returns us to the
simplcminded question that began this inquiry.
For by now it should be clear that that question was, in the spirit of
the genre, framed so as to contain a clue, in reverse, to ts answer. Which
is to say, the question abour how one wrtes the analytic detective story
as a rereadable form was, lIke Scharlachs nlaze, a QCVlCe LO IOCU:' aw;;u
tion in one direetion while leading us in the opposite, lcading liS to the
point where that simplcminded guestion about the unlimited repeata
bility f a form beeomes an endlessly repeatable beeause eonstantly re
formulated question about the simpleity of mind, a question always
about to be answered because it requires only onc more step to complete
the analysis. Poc's genius in the invention of the genre was precisely to
understand that the analytic solution of a rnystery always leaves us at the
with the mystery of an analytic 501uton, the mystery of that solving
power thar catehes a partal glimpse of itself in the achievcment of a
deduetive conclusion but that, maddeningly enough, eannot gain a com
plete vicw of itself no matter how often it repeats the analytic moment,
cannot totally comprehend itsc1f simply bceause in doubling back ro
effeet an absolure coincidence of the self with ltself it finds that it is based
on an original noncoincidenee. This paradox of a (non)self-including
self-that if the proeess of thinking and the eontent of thought ever
absolutcly coincided, they \Vould vanish in a condition of no-differenee,
taking with them the differential entity that is rhe se1f-lies at the heart
of the detective genre which Poe invented. And within thc dynamics of
the text, this ultimate condition of no-difference (the imaginarively pro
jected goal of the sclf's attempt to be absolutely even with itself) makes
its presence felt in that ceascless oscillation of differential poles assoeiated
with specular doubling, that continual reversal of a signifying term into
its opposite which, in its tluctuating equation of opposing terms, pro
duces a diffcrentiation that seems to make no difference.
v
What tends to be overlooked in rcadings of "The Purloined Letter" that
treat it as a for examining the analytic act in a specific discipline
such as psychoanalysis, or that make it the more or less naive
point for an agon of methodological sdf-awareness, i5
how self-conscious Poe was about the interpretive effcct produced
by a !iterary text ("The Purloined Letter") that includes within itself a
symbolic text (the purloined letter) whose attributes are clearly those of
the literary text itse1f-"The Purloined Letter" prcsenting the purloined
!etter which represents in turn "The Purloined Lctter" in an
oscillation of container and contained, of outer and l111er (like that pro-
by the turning of the letter inside out within the story). Indeed,
what tends to be ignored in such readings is how self-consciously Poe
229
LUL'lUanZea In rile story ltself the reader's interpretive intcracton with
the story and then proceeded to make the dscovery of that thematization
a further form of interaction with the reader, a subtler game of hde
and-seek, of cIues and solutions.
for exarnple, the solution to the rnystery of the purloined letter
"'",ct",.." ofts concealment in the Minister's hOllSe so that the Prefect
cannot fInd it) i5 that the Minster has turned the letter nside out and
hidden it in the open; but that trick of reversing the missing object and
ir in plain view is also the solution to Poe's concealment, within
the text of "The Pllrloined Letter, " ofthe sollltion to the pur10ined
concealment in tbe Minister's residence. 011 his flrst visir to
Prefect presents us with the mystery of the purloined 1etter, which is to
say, the rnanner of its theft and the tact of its continued nonappearance
bis repeated searches. But that standard scene in the analytic
story (the presentation ofthe mystery) is in effect turned inside
fer in describing how the Minister took the letter, Poe
simultaneously shows us the secret of the lctter' s slIbsequent conceal
ment, indeed, it in plain view, by giving us the detail of the QlIeen's
the letter ovcr and leaving ir in the open on atable to conecal it
from the King.
in Dupin's open presentaton of thc game of even and odd
as a fIgure of the attempt to be one up on a specular double, Poe again
in plain that other, subtler game of simple/odd, cvcn/odd
the game figuring the readcr's batde ofwits with the author as a specular
encounter in which the reader plays or tries to avoid playing the game of
even and odd with Poe through the author's opposing masks of detective
and criminal. Poe hides thiJ game in plain sight havng Dupin
note that the game of even and odd "is simple," a verbal gesture
that drects us back to his earlier emphatic repetition of the Prefect's
that the mystery of the letter was "simple and odd." If one were
to represent in a geol11etric figure the opposing pIayers in this game of
simple/odd, even/odd, the basic form of the fie:ure would look like this:
Poe
( ') Mnsrer
Reader
Ir is only through the battle of wits between Dupin and the Minister
D-- that the reader can engage in a batt1e of wits with Poe, can try
t outwit the author for the interpretive possession of "The Purloined
(l11uch as Dupn outwits the Minister for the physical possession
of the purloined Because the reader cannot directly confront Poe
(the man who concealcd the purloined letter within "The Purloil1ed Let
ter," as he concealed "The Purloined Lerter" within the purloined lctter),
the reader has to conhont him indirect1y through his opposng masks
in a triangular structure of reader, Dupin, Minister. And in a sirnilar
manner Poe can only confront the reader indirectly through these same
in a triangular structure of author, Dupin, and Minister. Poe and
the square then, as specular doubles, each
a self-projected image of the other, within a quadrangular tlgure com
posed of two triangles whose vertices point in opposite directions
the but whose bases are a single hne lnkine: the
051tions of Dupin and the Minister.
In this structure the reader is obviously at a disadvantage, for in having
to match wits with Poe through the game of even and odd played by
Poe's adversaria1 masks, the reader is in effect playing Poe's game. Yet
the wish to avoid this garne played through surrogates, in favor of a
direct confrontation with the author, a150 seems to leave the reader
ing Poe's game. For within that quadrangular figure representing the
indirect confrontation of author and reader through the direet one of
criminal and deteetve, we were to try to tr.(1F'thp1 thp nf'l"'t'r.n"
of Poe and the reader for a direet confrontaton
doubles Lonnrot and Seharlaeh at the fourth point of the eorn
pass), ifwe were to try to make the upper and lower vertices representing
the opposing positions of author and reader coincide, then we would see
that this figure is forrned by a mirror-fold. To visualize
the quadrangular as a fiat surface like a sheet of paper that can be
folded and unfolded along the horizontal line forl11ing the base of the
two triangles: felded, the figure is a triangular shape cornposed of two
identical triangles hinged at their base, with one doubled back on top of
the other so that their vertices coincide; unfolded, the quadrangle whieh
we have described.
Not surprisingly, it is a form of this same operaton-the geometric
projection of a triangle (whose vertex points downward) from the base
of a triallgle (whose vertex points upward)-that LOllnrot uses in "Death
and the Comoass" ro discover the location of the fourth point in Schar
at which the doubles will confront each other tace-
Poe, Borges. and the Detective Story 231
230
of divders, Ujnnrot measures the length of one
Ullarcral triangle inseribcd in red ink on the eity map sent
to Treviranus. Maintaining this same length, he swings an are downward
[rom eaeh cnd of the base line, and where the ares intersect he
discovers thc villa Triste-le-Roy It i5 as if the red triangle on the map
were flipped downward, were unfolded 180 degrees, to produce a dou
an inverted mrror-image, of itsclf. A ppropriate1y enough, this
maze (composed of two identical triangles joined at their
bases by a mirror-fld and with their vertiees ElCing Janus-like in op
directions) was eonceived by Scharlaeh during that period of de
lirious convalcseenee at Triste-Ie-Roy when he "swore by the who
looks with two faces and all the gods of fever and of mirrors" that
he would "weave a maze around the man" who sent his brother to prison
. And ir is also appropriate that \:\1hen Lonnrot arrives at the villa
one of the first he sees is the statue of a "two-faced Hermes"
which easts "a monstrous shadow" (74)-the single mirror-fald of dOll
bling that produces the two-faced Hermes of mirrors) being
dOllbled by its shadow to produce the fourfold.
Like Scharlach's diamond-shaped maze (which is indebted to it), the
representing the indirect eonfi:ontation of author
and reader the direct one of criminal and detective in "The
Purloined Letter" involves a mirror-fold that doublcs identical
shapes back upon and as such it serves as a geometric rep-
an emblem, of self-identity. The represents the dif
the sameness-in-difference, of self-consciousness
as a slmpllelty, a single fold, that in doubling an entity back upon itself
calls it into existence as a self-eonsciolls unit by into it a
difference with itself But this dffrence wth tsclJ is by no means a divison
within itselj: for as distinguished from the material (divisible) body; the
ground of sclf-consciousness (mind, spirit, is understood within
the tradtion in whieh Poe to be to be a simple
substance. And we can see from this figure, which is thrce-sided when
foIdcd back upon itselfbut four-sided when unfolded, the oscillation
between the nurnbers three and four the first odd nurnber and
the cven number associated with doubling) les at the heart of the game
of simple/odd, even/odd, that game in which three words derived from
numbers (simple tone], even [twol, odd [three]) are made to fill four
one of them (odd). For of course what this game of
rooted words evokes is the doubling of a four-sded figure
back upon itself to produce the the evenness, of two three
232 Do the Americas Have a Common Uterature?
sided two denteal shapcs ereated as it wcrc by thc :>HllpllCll
of a mirror-fold-the oscillation between ducc and fur
the flded and unfolded statcs of this geometrie representaton of self
thematized in the geometrical structure of the game of simple!
even!odd, the indircct confrontation of author and reader through
tbe direet one of criminal and detective, Poe makes the discovery of this
thcmatization a further torm of nteraction with the reader by
in the text clues to that oscillation between tbree and fom that evokes
the mirror-fold of the quadr;mgular fIgure. 1 will cite but two of the
several instances of this in rhe tale.
In the very tlrst sentence of "The Purloined Letter" the narrator gives
us the complete street address of Dupill'S residence in Paris, a leve! of
specificity that in the economy of a Poe story usually sgnals the en
cryption of significant information, particularly where numbers are con
cerned. The address is "au No. 33, Rue Dunat, Faubour.!, Sto
(3:974). Now we already know from the first Dupn story that
the house is loeated in the Faubourg Sto Germain, an authentic seetion
ofPars. The street name, however, i5 Poe's own invention and is
an appellation that, in the sound of an eEded "don't know," is
meant to suggest, like Samucl Butler's the nonexistent char
aeter of the place it names. More significantly reasons that wi11 be
apparent in our second examole). the name of the street be2:ins with the
letter D.
The crucial informaton, however, which Poe provides in tbis address
i5 thar Dupin lives "au troisieme" at "No. 33." No annotated edirian of
the tale ever fails to point out that the French "au trosieme" (le troisime
, the third floor, is what Americans call the fourth floor. The custom
in France, of course, i5 ro call the floor at strect levcl "le re.z-de-chausse"
(the ground and begin tbe numberng offloors with the levcl above
that, so that what we caIl the second floor the Freneh call the first floor,
and so 011. Dupin then, in a numerically ambguous spot-on
a floor that in France is called the third but in America the fourth. And
it is only appropriate that this third!fourth Roor should be located in a
building whose street number 1S 33, for in the baek upon itself
of that figure specular self-consciousness, the
doubled figure that results 1S a doubling of a triangular shape
that is paralleled in the game of even/ dd tha t distri
bution of three words in tour spaces achieved through the doubling of
the word "odd," the word whose root is the OId Norse oddi. a
Poe. Borges. and the Detective Story 233
That Borges understood the ellle hidden in the detail of Dupin's re-
au trasieme at No. 33 can be seen from a detail in "Death and
the Compass." The murder of Rabb Yarmolinsky, the first in the
takes place at the Htel du Nord in the rabbi's "room OH floor R, across
trom the slIite occupied ... by the Tetrarch of Galilee" (66). Now since
the name of the hotel is French, one assumes that the designation of its
floors foIlows the French custom and tbat the R of "floor R" is the first
letter of rez-de-chausse (much as in this country the letter M in a building
rprrrw"u stands fOI mezzanine or B for The firsr murder
occurs, rhen, on a floor which the French caIl the ground floor and
Americans caB the firsr floor, a difference in rhe namng/numbering of
the first tenn in a series that rise (and in this case s
ro allude) to rhe numerical ambiguity of Dupin's residence au troisieme.
It is appropriate, of course, thar Yarmolnsky's murder on floor R
first floor) should initiate a series of events that ultimately brings
who thinks of himsc1f as "a kind of Dupin" (65), to
that fourth point of the compass where rbe third murder wiU occur as
who "may be rhe same man," confronr one another.
as well that the first murder in this series was the chance
result of the jewel tbief Azevedo's mistaking Yarmolnsky's room for
"the suite occupied ... by the Tetrarch of Galilee," for as we noted
earlier the titIe Tetrarch of Galilee derives from the historieal division of
a realm four parts in order to distribute it among three per50n5,
two of whom each received a while the third received a half.
The sccond nstance that 1 would cite of Poe's planting a clue in
the text to this three/four oscillation the mirror-foId of specu
lar se!f-consciousness i5 the naming of Dupin's rival, the Minister
Ll___ In a tale entitled "The Purloined Letter" any manipulation of
a letter, such as the substtution of an intial for a name, should attract
our attention. Since Dupin and tbe Minister are antithetical doubles, it
1S only fitting that the Minister's name begins wth the same letter as
Dupin's, and more fitting 5ti11 that the Minister's initial is also the first
letter of the word "double." There is, however, even more at work in
Poe's choice of this letter, If we were to examine the lctter's roots (as
we did those of the words "simple," "even," and "odd"), we would
find that the shape of our capital D derives from rhe shape of the
delta (A) in which is to say, fro111 a triangle. In the Greek
delta is the tourth letter, as D i5 in ours; but in delta (A) also
serves as a sign for both the cardinal and ordinal forms of the number
four. lA The initial of the Minister' s name then, from a triangular
Greek letter that stands for the num ber fom, the same initial as
that of bis double who lives on the third/)urtb floor at No. 33 Rue
Dunt. We should aIso note in tbis connection that delta s the root of
the Greek word deltos! "a writing-tablet, from the letter (the old
of tablets)" (Lexicon, tbe letter D thus being a doubly approprate
fOI the purloiner and the recoverer 01' the letter \ C l l " l L l ~ U
eharacters composed of in this drama of inscrbed surfaces.
1'hat spotted the elue concealed in the Minister's initial ean
be judged fro111 Lonnrot's parting flourish in "Death and the Compass."
Trapped in Scharlach's guadrangular labyrinth, Lonnrot makes one last
atrempt to best his enemy intellectually by proposing a simpler, more
economical labyrinth composed of "a straight line" (78). But
ploy is a trck, his labyrinth's vaul1ted economy more apparent
than real. For what is at issue bere 1S not the number of lines in a
geometric but the number of steps in a mental operaton. And
as there are four steps in Scharlach's labyrnth designated by tbe
four points of the compass, so thcre are four steps in Lonnrot's
designated by the first four letters of tbe alphabet. In Scharlach's maze
the doubles confront each othcr at the fourth point of the compass in the
in Lonnrot's maze they are to meet at the fourth letter
of rhe alphabet. Lonnrot says, "Lay in wait for me then at D, two miles
from A and halfway betwecn them." Lonnrot's suggestion that
their specular due! will be replayed in a future existcnce is
Borgcs's implicit acknowledgemcnt that this meeting of doubles at the
letter D (, four) has been played in a orevious incarnation.
VI
That BOIges decipbered the game of simple/ odd, cven/odd in "The Pur
loined Letter" and then reencrypted it in "Death and the ~
seems beyond doubt. What still remains to be noted in the cirele
of this essay is the distinct possibility that it was Borges's tale which
directed Lacan's attention to the numerical/geometrical di
mension of the stOIY and rhus suggested "Tbe Purloined Letter" as an
ideal text for an analysis of psychoanalysis rhat would project the struc
tme of the Ocdpal triangle onto the reciprocity ofblindness and insight
in the psychoanalytic cncounter. The evidence of this influence is crcum
'CdilCJ'dJ, but certainly no psychoanalyst should object to that.
One of the first promoters of Borges's wOIk in France was Rger
....
, u ~ u'-m.u 1.1lLIC ana SOCIOlOglst whose writings influenced La
can. In his biography of Borges, Monegal notes thar 13orges's
friend Victoria Ocampo had invited Cail10is to lecture in Argentina on
the eve of the Second World War and that Caillois remained rhere for
rhe With Ocampo's help, he starred a magazine in Buenos
Aires caBed Lettres Franr.;aises, and in its October 1944 issue he published
French translatiol1s of two l30rges "The Babylon Lottery" and
Library of Babel." The rdationship between CailJois and Borges,
not an entirdy friendly one, turned in part upon their mutual interest in
detective genre. Rodrguez Monegal notes that Borges wrote "a
rather catty artic1e in Sur (April i942) one of Caillois' pam
phlets, on the detective novel. Against Caillois's statement that the de
tective story was born when Joseph Fouch created a well-trained police
force in Paris, observes thar a literary genre invariably begins
with a literary text and points out that rhe text in i5 one of
Allan Poe's stories. An exchange of notes ensued, and the rela
tionship bctween 130rges and Caillois cooled eonsiderably That did not
affeer Callnis's admiraton for Borges's writing. He contnued to pro
unflnchingly In 1951 Caillois published in Pars a trans-
P. Verdevoye and Nestor Ibarra) of Borges's Fcciones, the
that contains both "1'he Garden of the Patbs" and
and the (Rodrguez Monegal,
was, then, a transIaton of "Death and the Compass"
in France under the of Caillois some five years the
publication ofLacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letrer.'" Given Cail
!ois's interest in the detective story, his ongoing promoton of one of the
genre's most distinguished modern practitioners, the of his
on Lacan, and the psychoanalyst's natural interest in analytic
it seems hard to believe that Lacan had not read "Death and
the Compass" sometime in the early 1950S. Such a knowledge of tbe
story on Lacan's part would at least go a long way toward
the extremely odd reference which he makes to in a lUVL1lUlC;;
the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.'"
In nresenting the Pllrloined ktter as a model of the '-''''-'''UU
tacan points out the letter's property (as the
of smultaneously being and not being present in a
adding that "between letter and place exist relations for
French word has quite the extensio11 of the English adjeerive: odd"
He asks, "Must a letter then, ofaH objects, be endowed with the property
of nullhl'itll' to use a term which rhe thesallrm known as ROr,Jet picks up
from the semlOtlC utopa of Bishop Wilkns?" To which question he
this curious note: "The very 011e to which Jorge Luis Borges,
in works which harmonze so well with the phyIum of our subject
son oeuvre si harmonique au phylum de notre propos], has accorded an
importance which others have reduced to its proper proportions. Cf. Les
Temps modernes, June-JuIy 1955, pp. 213 and Oct. T955, pp. 574
75" The citation of the June-July issue of Les Temps modernes refers
us to the opening pages of a French translation of Borges's "The Ana-
Language ofJohn Wilkins" (one of a group of six short essays
Borges in that whi1e the citaton of the October ssue refers us to
a letter to the editor from an M. Pobers commenting on Borges's essay.
In "The Analytical Language ofJohn Wilkins" (1941),
the universallanguage proposed by the seventeenth-century Englishman
bishop of Chester and first of the Royal Society, in
his book Alz towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
. Borges notes that in tbis language "each word defines itself":
"Wilkins divided the universe nto forty categories or classes, which
werc then subdivisib1e into differcnces, subdivisibk in turn into species.
To each class he a monosyllab1e of two 1etters; to each ditTer
encc, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means an
the first of the elemenrs, fire; deba) a portion of the element
of fire, a fiame" (GI, 102). In his letter to the editor commenting on
Borges's M. Pobers points out that this philosophical langllage,
which replaces arbitrary words and expressions with a of letters
and syllables each a particular sense, was not with WiI
kins. It had beel1 invented another Oxford scho1ar, George Dalgarno,
and Wilkins's work simply completed and the project presented
in DaIgarno's 1661 treatise Ays Sgnorum vulgo character universals et Lin
};ua Philosophica.
Now it is nice to learn new things simply for tbeir own
and yet one cannot help but wonder what it i5 exactly that Lacan's foot
note to Borges is meant to note. There according to Lacan, this special
property possessed a (the sign of an absence) of
simultaneously being and not being present in a particular place, an odd
relationship between letter and place; and to evoke this property he has
found tbe word, "nullibeity" (the condition of being nowhere
existent), a word which Roget's Thesaurus tells him was first used in a
work by John Wilkins. And by the way, says Lacan, this is the same
John Wilkins whose universal analytic Borges has discussed in
an essay that "harmonizes so well with the phylum of our " Is
236
YV'HC eH JUUlIlUlC, lUen, sllnply to note a COlnCldence, this [oot
note whch Lacan has aprended to an essay he cOl1sidered important
""n""'h to place at the start of the crits? Or i5 ir meant to acknow1edge
it does not say so) some debt of influence to, or sense of priority
as regards a knowledge of Wi1kins's work?
Perhaps, for example, Lacan, in discovering from Roget's
that the word "nullibeity" had originated with Wilkins, rccognizcd who
was because he had read Borges's cssay. Such a debt would
been minor, easy enough to acknowledge, and yet in the last ana1ysi5 no
less trivial a marrer than the of a coincidence. So why did Lacan
go to the trouble of including rhis footnote? the property which
the word "nullibeity" designates is important for Lacan's norion of the
the word itself i5 not that important; he has descrbed this
of the signifier often and with other words as good. Still
important and les s obviollS is the word's conneetion with Wilkins, and
kast important and least of al] is Wilkins's connecton wth
Borges-both of which Laean goes to the trouble of pointin2: out to the
Clcarly, there is something odd abollt this an uncanny feel-
that the author has gone out of his way to emphasze a point at once
gratuitous and trivial, the kind of uncanny feeling that is usualIy the
aura (lf an unconscious mechanism, of a repression and a return. For
it is not at a11 dear that essay on Wilkins "harmonizes
so well" with the ofLacan's "Seminar" that it was worth
attention to that essay in a footnote, ir is quite clear that another work
of Borges's hannonizes too wcll with the subject of Lacan's "Sem
inar, " and it is that work, "Death and the Compass," of which, 1 would
the essay on Wilkins remind5 Lacan at crucial moments.
We can see 5uch a moment in the passage quoted above in whieh
Borges illustrates Wilkins's language constructing the word
for deba. He starts with the two-Ietter de, an element; then in the
second adds the consonant b to the fire; and in the
third step adds the vowel ato specify a portion ofthat a flame-
a three-step process to produce a four-letter word that cannot help but
remind us of the way that the successi ve murders in and the
Compass" eacb add, as part of a supposed eabalistie rite, another letter
to the spelling of a four-letter name composed of three different lctters,
the Tetragrammaton. The resemblanee between essay and story in this
regard seems even more strkng when Borges remarks that in "the
words of Tohn Wilkin<; '<o :m,1"tir11 every lctter is mean
238
..1
ingful, as the letters of the Holy Scrptures were meanmgtul tor the
cabalists," the analytical language being "a universal key and a secret
(01,
One recalls rhe cabalistic texts which Lonnrot read in trying to solve
the mystery of the murders: a work on "the magic and the terror of the
Tetragrammaton, which is God's unspeakable name," another on "the
that God has a secret name in which (as in the sphere
that the Persians attribute to Alexander of Macedonia) His ninth attri
bute, Eternity, may be found-that i5 to say, the immediate knowledge
of everything under the sun that will tbat is, and that was. Tradition
lists ninety-nine names of Hebrew seholars explain that imperfect
a mystc fiar C!fCl'et1 tlUmbers; the Hasidim argue that the missing
term stands for a hundredth name-the Absolute Name" (68, italies
mine). This Absolute Name, whieh is "the immediate knowledge" of
everything that i5, was, or will is in effeet "a universal
seeret encyclopedia"; it is the apotheosis of that lnguistic of
rf>tWpsentation which Wilkins 50ught in his analytieal language, and as
it confronts us with the paradox of self-inclusion on the cosmic
level. For the Absolute Name, like "the crystal sphere that the Persians
attribute to Alcxander" or thar other erystal thar named
the s a faithful representaton of everything in the universe. but
it is al50 one of the things contained in that universe.
Consequently, any Aleph-like as a representation of a11 the
things in that universe of whch ir is itsclf one minute part, must contain
within its compass a faithfll representarian of itself, and that represen
taton must contan within itself anather, and so on, Aleph within Aleph,
n an infinite of representatians that is also an infinite re
gression as eaeh sueeessive is reduccd in size to maintain
the proportional relationshp between the original representation and
the universe. This ultimate vanishing of signification in the infinite as
one pursues an absolute coincidence between the cosmos and its self
eontained image probably accounts for the cabalists' fear of even
numbers," the fear that the seeret Absolute Name of God, that hun
dredth name reprcsenting a symbolic apotheosis of evenness, invokes the
condition of zero differenee, the condition where ubiqllity and nullibeity
are the same.
Given the several resemblances between "Death and the
and "The Analytical Language ofJohn Wilkins," one can see that Lacan's
reference to the Wilkins essay may indeed represent the return of a
content, which is to say, the surfacimr of Lacan' s sense of how
muen nIS own o "'1'he Purloined Letter" either owed directly
to, or was anticipated by, Borges's reading/rewriting of the Poe story in
"Death and the Compass." Ami certainIy if Lacan had any misgivings,
any anxiety about the orignality of his reading, such misgivings could
not help but have been increased and given focus by M. Pobers's "letter"
to the editor out that the anaIytical Ianguage which 130rges
attributed to WiIkins did not originate with him but was the invention
of another man. another Pobers write a lctter out that
Lacan's reading of "The Purloined Letter" did not
a letter that Lacan's reading had either been or at
the very least by Borges's readinglrewriting, so that Lacan's
reading, like the purloined letter itself, was out not the first but
the second instance of this particular interpretation of the tale?
If this originality anxety existed for Lacan, then his [ootnote to
Borges would be the trace of an inner division, the visible mark of his
inability, on the one hand, to acknowledge colIsciously a debt of influence
to, or the simple priority of, Borges in a matter so central to his inter
pretation of Poe's and of his equal inablity, on the other hand, not
lo acknowle({ge unconscously his sense of this debt or priority. Or perhaps
it is less a matter of Lacan's unwillingness to 130rges as a
precursor than ofhis reluctance as a psychoanalyst-tha
a writer of 110ntllctl:0l1
or priority 111 a work ot tlCtlOn, S111ce such an acknowled
ment would seem to undermine the privileged, "scientific" status of
Lacan's ofPoe by suggesting the imaginative (not to say, fictive)
component of psychoanalytic interpretation. If this were the case, then
the footnote could be an unconscious compromise that lets Lacan ac
knowledge not by cting one ofhis stories but by referencing one
of hi5 analytc essays, a nonfiction work whose veled resemblance to
"Death and the Compass" allows t to serve as a screen figure far the
tale. In either anxiety or the privileging of psycho
rse-the result would be the same: the
mUUlare poumng out a trivial coincidence.
That the structures of specular self-conscousness in Borges's
"Death and the and in Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter' " nvolve essentially tbe same gcometric configuraton-a
formed by the mirror-doubling of a triangle-can be secn
in a diagram which Lacan included as part of a commentary on the
"Semillar" in his Discussing "the dialectic of intersubjectivity"
prcsented in the "Seminar," Lacan identifies ts central mechanism as
240
.. imaginary objectification of self and Other faund in the
mirror stage.
1
" According to the mirrar stage in human
development occurs between the sixth and tbe eighteenth months when
the chld, lacking motor control of his body, "anticipates on the imagi
nary level the future acquisirion and mastery of his bodily integrity."
This "imaginary integration brought about through identification
with the image of a similar ... as a total form ... is illustrated
realized in the concrete in which the child perceives his
in a mirror. "17 1'0 illustrate the specular nature of "rhe dialecric
in rhe "Seminar." Lacan uses rhe
SCHEMA L: (moi) a
(crits, 1:66)
the mirror-doubling of two triangles is the
thar uses in "Dearh and the
to hgure the face-to-face of the two men "whose
minds work in the same and who "may be the same man." The
difference is that Borges rhe mirror-doubling of a
structure as the projection down ward of a second triangle from the base
of the firsr, while Lacan represents this same mirror-doubling inherent
in "the dialectic of intersubjectivity" as rhe projection upward of a sec
ond triangle from the vertex of the first:
z
VII
Since the self-including structure of"The Purloined Letter" has rhe effect
o[ drawing into its progressive/regressivc vortex any interpretation of ir,
Poe, Borges. and the Detective Story 241
--
1 am rcslgned to my part in the casual comedy, ready to feign astonish
ment should some fi.Iture interpreter pont out that just as Lacan and
Derrida in reading the tale rcplayed the game of even and odd in the
critical so 1 have in reading the tale rcplaycd Lonnrot's geo
metrical response to Scharlach's quadrangular mazc. Which i5 to say
that in writing an essay about Poe's "Purloined Letter" and the rcadngs
ofit by Lacan, Derrida, andJohnson (i.e., in observing the guadrangular
hermencutic figure formed the literary tcxt and a cumulative series
of duce interpretations), 1 have in effeet added one more side to that
hermeneutic figure, a fifi:h sidc adumbrating an infmte progrcssion of
ntcrprctations, while at the samc time 1 have, like Lonnrot with his
straight-linc labyrinth, introduced between points A and B
in the hcnnencutic (between Poe's tale and Laean's reading) an
other story/intcrpretation, Borges's "Death and the Compass," that ad
umbrates an infinite regression of influence/priority in the interpretive
of the analytic detective genre. In pursuing this regresson, one
for example, introduce between "Death and the Compass" and
"The Purloined Letter" Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (
18
9
2
);
and between Borges and Zangwill, H. G. Wells's "The Plattner Story"
and between Zangwill and Poe, Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking Glass (I872), and so on endlessly. But thar is another task for a
different work. For the present, 1 stand ready, should SOl1leone ul1mask
my replaying ofLonnrot's mancuver, to slap my forehead with the pall1l
of my hand (like Clarence Day on readng in his 11l0rning paper thar
there had been another wreck on the New Haven) and exclail1l, "Oh
242
Wendy B. Faris
Marking Space, Charting Time: Text and
Territory in Faulkner's "The Bear" and
Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos
... woods for game and streams for tlSll, ... a
rcfi.lge and sanctuary of liberty and freedom from
what you called the old world's worthless
evening.
- WilIiam Faulkner. CA
2VJ.oses
... un mundo remoto ... un apacible concierto de
tareas que eran las de una vida sometida a los
ritmos
. . a remo te world . . . a harmonious concert of
duties that were those of alife to a
primordial rhythm ...)
-Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps)
The moral and aesthetic force of the new American land contin
ues as a powerful dement in the shaping of fictions in both the United
Stares and Latn America, even as rhe actual land i5 devclaped unrec
beyond its original state. According to Charles Sanford, for
example, "the Edenc myth ... has been the mast powerful and com
prehensive organizing force in American culture. "1 Sanford is speaking
here for North America, and whilc it may be true that rhe Edenic myth
operates with more consistency in the North, perhaps because n the
South the land has been a greater physical obstacle to settlement, his
statemcnt applies in large part to Latn Amcrica as well, the myth of
the promised land spanning the two continents. Juan Durn, for ex
ample, daims that throughout ts Iiterary historv, Iberoamerica, in ts
243
Klefn; Her Vlirld and Vlirk (New York: 1986), 59n, 169-70,317-20,322
23. Skeptics about the valuc of psychoanalytic perspectives on the racist mind
should read the historical account of Tom f)ixon, his work, and family
by Joc! Williamson in The CyCblc of Raee; Blaek- White Relations in the
American South Sinee Emill!r.il1ation (New York: Oxford University Prcss,
140--79
I2. Carolyn L Karcher writes: "In Saddle Meadows, where 'man and horse
are both hereditary,' the descendants of General Glendinning' s horse are 'a sort
of family cousins to Pierre ... ' like the mulatto children fathered
slaveholders" S/ladow Over the Promised Land: Slavcry, Race, and Vio/mee
in Jvfelville's Ameriea [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
Some recent moortant of Pierre nclude: Michae1 Paul
The Po/iries and Ayt of Hennan A1elville (Berkeley:
I55-86; Eric Sundquist, Home as Pound:
C;enealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore:
Tni"pr<;ru Press, I43-85; and Jehlen, A.merican Incamation: The
the Nadon, altd the Coninent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
185-226.
13. Martn Mora Delgado, "Las novelas del seor Villaverde," in Acerca de
Ciri/o 64-97. Reinaldo Gonzlez offers a tolerant if condescending
Marxist of Vllaverde's romantic burdens; see his Contradanzas.
14. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (New York: Random House, quoted in
V Dearborn, Pocahontas's Daughters: Cender ilnd Ethnicity in A.merican Cul
ture (New York: Oxford Universty Prcss, 13 L
15. Cirlo Villaverde, Cecili( Ullds: novela de costumbres cubanas, ed.
City: Porra, 1979), 96. Subsequent references are cited
uanslations are my
Washington The Grandissimes (New York: C. Scrbner's
80. The quotation that follows appears on p. 60. The novel first
in book form in I880. ror an excellent discusson of the author and
his work see Louis D. Rubn, Jr., George Cable: The and Times
Sou/hern Heretic (New York: Pegasus, I969). A new edition has just appeared
in the Classics: see The Grandissmes, ce:!. Mchael Kreyling (New York:
Penguin I988).
17. 100t by A 7i-tms/lltion !/lith Commentary, ed. and transo Anne Pip
pin Burnett Chffs, N J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970). For a view of Ion as
sce Bernard Knox, "Euripidean " in his Vlird and Action (Bal
timore: Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 250--74. 011 of race,
,ee Arlene W Saxonhouse, "Myths and the of Cities: Reflections on the
Autochthony Theme in Ion," in Greek and Political ed.
J Peter Euben (Berke1ey and Los University of Calitornia Press,
252-73; 3nd B. Walsh, "The Rhetoric of Birthright and Race in
ides' Ion." llames 106, 2 (1978): 301-I5.
372 Notes
18. Certanly not in any pedestnan sense, but as a cardll1al vutue, j admIre
rhe egoism of the great and he anonymous among the Puritans. A.nn
Douglas has writtcn that "Calvinism was a great faith, with great lmitations:
ir was authortarian, patriarchal to an extreme. Its demise
was inevitable, and in some real sense welcome"; but she adds that "it deserved,
and e1sewhere and at other times tound, great opponents," and that one "could
argue that the logical of Calvinism was a f ul1y
minded romanticism," of which she regards Melville and
see her The J<eminizatiotl orAmerican Culture
12-13
I9. Richard H. Brodhead, 'Fhe School oI Hmllthorne York: Oxford Ulli
vcrsity Press, I986), 73. Subsequent rcferences are cited in the texto
20. Carol Shloss, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and Daguerreotypy: Disimerested Vi
siol1," in her In Visihle Photographyand American H+ter, 1840-1940 (New
York: Oxfrd University Press, 1987), 25-50.
21 Nathanie1 Hawthorne, The Marble Fa/m; 01; The Romance of MOIlte Beni.
The Edition (Columbus, Ohio: Merill, 23. Subsequent refer
enees are cited in the texL
22. Binon, Frau LOII, 343.
Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading:
Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story;
Also Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson
Chandler, "The Art of " in Detective Fiction:
ed. Dick Allen and David Chacko (New York: Harcourt
I974), 39
8
.
Allan Poe, Collected Vlirks of AlIan Poe, ed. Thomas OIEve
vdlll!L'UU;<-. Harvard Press, 1969- 978), 2: 52 Ir!.
uotatons from Poe are taken from this edition.
3. Luis Borges, "lbn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in Bis Labyrinth," in
The Aelph iJnd OtILer Stories, transo Norman Thomas di Giovanni
York: E. P Dutton, I978), 123. Al! quotations from Borges's [ction
are taken from this edition.
4. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar Oll 'The Purloined Letter,' " transo Mehl
man, Yale Freneh Studies (1972): 41. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent
uotations from the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" are taken from this
edition.
lotmSon, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," in The
5
Critical (Baltimore: Johns University Press, lOSOl. II 8. AH
from Johnson are taken fmm this edtion.
Derrida, "The Purveyor of LJUlIlmgu, J Hul
M. Ron, ami M.-R Ya/e Frencll Studies 52 AH sub
sequent quotatons from Derrida are taken from this editiotL
Notes 373
j' ~ """"'''H.. I L"C-VV YJlVILU l../lLttortUry <.lj L!'le ..tuneruan LZngua,f?e) t.;ollege !:.(lItlon .1
\'--'lcvcland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1964), 1359, " The
etymologies of "even" and "odd" are also taken from this edition.
8. D. r ~ Cassell's Latn Daonary (Ncw York: Macrnillan,
556, "simplex."
9 The Eneyclopaeda Britatmica, 1Ith edition, 29 vols. (Ncw York:
Britannica Co., 1911),27:254.
ro. S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographicol G/ass: Renaissance
Universe (San Marino, CaIr: Hllntington I977), 83, fig.
tions referring to Fllldd's diagram are eited from Heninger. This
was to my attenton my student Boylan.
I!. Jorge Luis "Frorn Someone to Nobody;" in Other
1937-
1
95
2
, transo Ruth L. C. Simms York: Simon and Schllster,
148. Al] sllbsequent quotations frorn Borges's essays are taken trom this edition,
Ol in the texto
Waldo The Complete Works al Ro/ph rtldo ed.
12 vols. (Boston: IIoughton Mifflin, 1903-194), 9:195. See
also Bor2:es. Olhe/' lnauisitions. 69.
13 Howard Murder J()f Pleasure: The
and Times rif the Detective
(New York: Carroll and
14. fln Intermedia/e
19RO), 171.
15. Emir Rodrguez
(New
York: E. P. Dutton,
from
dition du
"Mirror
Yale French Studies 48
Marking Space, Charting Time: Text and Territory in Faulkner's
"The Bear" and Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos
1. Charles L. The
Paradise:
and the American Moral
lmagination (Urbana: University of Illinois
2. For an investigation of this utopian rpylfiF'11('V
see Juan G. Durn, Literatllra y utopa en (Ithaca, N. Y.: ComelI
Latin American Studes Program Dissertaton Series, 259. Like
Alfonso and others, Durn the correspondence of the
of America to dreams nf the promised land, so that Arnerica is, in
Octavio paz's a "premeditated creation" (Octavio "Literatura de
fundacin," in his Puertas al campo [Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autn
oma de Mxico, 1966], 13; cited in Durn, rolIowing Zea, he
believes thar the utopian urge created a kind of maladaptive literarv vision in
374 Notes
WhlCh Latm f\ rnencans contmucd thlS l:'.uropean deSlre to see the!r land as the
prornsed one, writers thus continuing to supply what historv was
denying.
3. WilIiarn Faulkner, "The Bear," in Ca D<1wn, Moses (1940; New York:
Randnm House, 1973). Further references are given in the texto 1 have ehosen
to deal primarily with "The Beal;" only rninimalIy to the rest of Go
Down, I\.1.oses, because it is in "The Bear" that we encountcr a kernel
of Faulkner's paradisal land-eentered vision, and because 1 wsh ro ernphasize
the of that visOl1, whieh survives ironie undercuttings. The faet
that "The Bear" has been so often anrhologized and read as a separate
implicitly a ttests to its force as a of the Edenc impulse in American
hetion and this intensve treatment. Whilc it fOTms an integral part of
Co Down, AJoses, "The Bear" rernains as a knd of rnonolith in that larger
narrative stream, its primitivist themes reinforced by the two sectiol1s preceding
it-"The Old Pcople" and "Delta Alltumn."
Lapentier, Los pasos perdidos (1957; Mexieo City: Compana General
de Ediciones, 1968), 180. Fllrther references are lven in the texto The
translation used s Alejo The Lost
: Penguin Books, 1968), 156. Further references are in
the texto
5. As Fernando Ainsa suggests with his and centrif
rnovernents in Latin American
of text to terrain is the of literature and exile;
Americas shares this polarity, developed in the spaee between them. See
his Los buscadores de la utopa Monte Avila, I have found Professor
Ainsa's book very helpfuJ in preparing tbis essay, and therefore will refer to hs
ideas frequently.
6. Alfonso Reyes, Obras completas City: Fondo de Cultura Eco
nmica, 1960), 6:338.
7, Julio Rodrguez Luis another aspect of the importance ofland
ownership in the developmc11t of Latin American [cton in an essay on "Persis
tencia del terrateniente," in his La literatura . Entre }'
Fundamentos, 1984).
8, 1 am grateful to Los Parkinson Zamora for this general idea
and others which were helpflil to me in this essay.
9. Thanks to Gustavo Prez Firmat for rerninding me of this modal pro
gression, and f()r several other heIptul suggestions.
ro. The words are Faulkner's-from his Nobel Prize speech.
11. Durn agrees that this novel itself is the narrator's me mory of the utopia
he eneountered in the jungle; see his Literatura y utopa en 294.
12. Ainsa maintains that a lack of roots is more endemie to the American
cOl1sciousness and thar the search f()r them is thus more pervasive: see Los bus
cadores de la tova. 123.
Notes 375

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"1 The emphasis in Chandler's remarks, as in his

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