From (De)feats of Detection: The Spurious Key Text from Poe to Econ by Joel Black

Its customary to credit Poe with elaborating all the conventions of detective fiction that subsequent practitioners of the genre have followed to a greater or lesser degree. Yet Poes privileged role as founder or father of a literary genre---a role perhaps unique in literary history--has obscured the fact that he marks what can now be recognized as a first phase of the genres development. Key works of detective fiction in the twentieth century, especially in its latter half, represent a distinct departure from Poes tales of ratiocination and, indeed, from traditional hermeneutics. (Black, p. 75)

*** Poes narratives abound in mysterious documents or texts that are hard to read in the sense that it isnt easy to see (or hear) them, but easy to read in the sense that once they are seen (or heard) their meaning is more or less clear. The stolen document in The Purloined Letter eludes detection because, although it is in plain view where it is at least expected, it has been disguised: it has been soiled and crumpled, torn nearly in two (995), turned, as a glove, inside out (996), and readdressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D----, the Minister, himself. Despite the fact that the letter in the Ministers card rack was, to all appearance, radically different from the one stolen from the Queen, Dupin readily identifies it as the same letter; its excessive physical disfigurement does not extend to the message itself, which has been left intact (995). Similarly, the unintelligible utterances of the unseen killer-orangutan in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) elicit conflicting interpretations from variouswitnesses that baffle the police, until Dupin, learning about the case in a newspaper, recognizes that the speakers very unintelligibility is the key to its identity. For several pages in The Narrative of Arthus Gordon Pym (1838), Arthur struggles to make out Augustuss desperate note in the dark hold of a ship; he later tries to make sense of runes that he finds in a cave. Poe and his readers were intrigued by cryptic texts that resist interpretation (Wimsatt; Irwin, American); in The Gold-Bug (1843)---written a year before The Purloined Letter---a scrap of paper picked up on the shore turns out to conceal an invisible, encoded message detailing the precise whereabouts of Captain Kidds buried treasure. All of these narratives are centered on the problem of a text that is illegible but not unintelligible. For one [end of p. 77] contrived circumstantial reason or another, the texts presented in these stories are difficult to read (because of bad lighting, or human error that mistakes animal sounds for speech), or even difficult to recognize as texts (the letter crumpled in the Ministers card rack, the parchment strewn on the beach, the caves that not only contains runes but are themselves a form of writing). If these purely logistical difficulties can be overcome and the message can be made out or deciphered. Then understanding the message (o decoding it, finding its appropriate code0 is a relatively simple, straightforward matter. The challenge facing the detective in these cases is the phenomenological problem of identifying the text (and even recognizing it as text), not the hermeneutic problem of interpreting it. Prior to the mergence of a truly hermeneutic tyoe

of detective fiction, and prior to detective fictions being dubbed the hermeneutic genre par excellence (Holdheim 2), Poes tales of ratiocination actually had little to do with the detectives interpretation of texts. (Black, pp. 77-78)

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A fresh look at The Purloined Letter and Poes other narratives may perhaps reveal what the French critics (like the Paris police in the story) have overlooked in their search for the letter qua signifier---namely, the difference between the analytical activities of the detective and the critic; the difference between a texts legibility and its intelligibility; the fact that the analytical skills o f the detective are focused on the prehermeneutic task of detecting and deciphering documents, rather than on the problem of interpreting and understanding texts. The kinds of writing that challenge the traditional detectives analytical skills are not texts that are readable or unreadable, intelligible or unintelligible, but simply documents that are legible or illegible, read or unread. (Black, p. 78)

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Key and Prize Texts

The rest of this essay will trace a lineage in detective fiction consisting of works that develop Poes prehermeneutic orientation into a hermeneutic mode that nevertheless reveals anti- or even posthermeneutic features. We may begin with a few general observations about stories, like The Purloined Letter, in which the sleuths attention and the readers interest are directed to a document that plays a crucial role in the narrative. As important as a key text may be, it is not ifself the ultimate object of the detectives quest. The detective uses the information supplied by the key text to achieve his final goal, which is to discover or recover a prized object that may well be another text. The detectives success in finding the prize will depend o his prior ability to find and read the key text that specifies its whereabouts, and even its identity. Thus, in The Gold-Bug, Kidds parchment is a key text that designates the location of the prized treasure. In The Purloined Letter, the hidden letter could be considered either a key text or prize text: it is a key text that Dupin must recover in order to get his reward (or his revenge), but it can also be viewed as the ultimate object of Dupins quest, and in this sense would be a prize text. Indeed, the fact that the key and prize text are ultimately not

distinguishable in The Purloined Letter is chiefly responsible for the seminal role commentators have accorded this story in the genre of detective fiction. The Purloined Letter represents a limit case; most works of detective fiction in which texts play a crucial role make a fairly clear distinction between the key and the prize text. ] As the object of the detectives quest, the prize text is clearly of greater intrinsic value than the key text. But detective stories are about finding something (out), and in this respect the key text is of greater interest and importance. When we say that the problem with the key text is that it is illegible or unrecognizable, we often mean that its vaue in relation to the prize text is not evident. In The Purloined Letter, the Minister knew what he was doing when he disguised the valuable letter as a piec of ordinary crumpled papr: with their eyes on the prize, the police investigators were sure to overlook it. In The Gold-Bug, Legrand utterly fails at first to value Kidds key text; he uses it to wrap up the bug that he believes to be of value, but which, compared with Kidds treasure, is worthless. (Black, p. 79) *** What has been called metaphysical detective fiction (Merivale, Holquist) addresses this issue of value, and reveals the worth of the prize text tobe contingent on a proper assessment of the key text. Before the detective and the reader can make an accurate interpretation of signs and events that will lead them to the prize, they must have the necessary information provided by the key text, which itself becomes the desired object. Metaphysical detective stories often take this situation to itsl logical conclusion. Very little is finally revealed about the object of the detectives quest, or about why it should be so valuable; to do so would diminish the readers interest in the quest, as well as the readers sense of the objects prestige, and would ultimately lead the reader to a reeexamination of all values. The prize object appears invaluable precisely because it is inaccessible and unintelligible. The fact that we never learn the contents of the purloined letter exponentially enhances our sense of its worth. The enduring value of the letter in Poes story, or the falcon in Hammets tale, lies in the fact that even when the precious object is revealed, we know precious little about it: who its sender or rightful owner is, or what it means. The reader of metaphysical detective fiction---and increasingly, as the genre develops, the detective himself---never learns much at all about the signified object of supposedly priceless value and tremendous power that has caused such torment. In its place, the readers and the detectives interest is focused on the substitute object of the key text---the Crebillon quotation, Gutmans history of the falcon, or even Spades own narrative about Flitcraft, which seems altogether irrelevant to the detective lot. One is reminded of what Shoshana Felman, following Lacan, has described as a shift in the readers and detectives respective analyses from the signified to the signifier as the present sign of an absence (148). But by the end of the metaphysical detective story (if we can indeed speak of an end), both reader and detective learn that the key text is less a signifier of the prize text than a substitute for it, and otend a spurious

one at that. As the aged narrator Adso wearily observes at the end of Umberto Ecos first novel, it is not the rose itself that we are left holding, but only its name. (Black, p. 80)