The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Scott Peeples

The Mystery to a Solution ostensibly concens Jorge Luis Borges's rewriting --or doubling--Edgar Allan Poe's three detective tales, but as anyone familiar with Irwin's previous work would guess, this book covers a great deal more ground: Sir Thomas Browne, Lewis Carroll, chess and its implications for psychoanalysis, incest taboos, a variety of Greek myths, number theory, eighteenth-century controversies in mathematics--a glance at the table of contents will affirm that these are only a fraction of the topics he considers. While it would be impossible to identify a single main line of argument, the "simple-minded question" that opens Chapter One resonates throughout The Mystery to a Solution: "How does one write analytic detective fiction as high art when the genre's central narrative mechanism seems to discourage the unlimited reading associated with serious writing?" Four hundred pages of unlimited reading later, Irwin articulates an answer he has been working toward, more or less, all along: that self-consciousness, formulated as the analysis of analytic power, is the central mystery Poe and Borges explore in their detective fiction, and since this mystery is insoluble, the (re)reading--and the detective work--must continue infinitely.

Appropriately, then, insolubility, incommensurability, and infinity play important parts in Irwin's analyses. The oscillation between sameness and difference, even and odd, that Poe and Borges figure into their detective stories and that Irwin traces to a variety of earlier sources represents human self-reflexiveness and self-division. Trying to know oneself requires imagining a part of one's consciousness that can examine the whole of one's consciousness, a concept Irwin explicates through discussions of arithmetical progression, Greek paradoxes, and differential calculus as well as stories such as Borges's "The Aleph" and Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (the "overdetermined D-----" stands for, among other things, difference). In each case some incommensurable element or differential keeps an equation, a puzzle, or a mystery from being solved.

Irwin's analytical path, which deliberately winds and doubles back on itself, leads to flashes of insight more than a sustained, accretive argument. In Chapter 12 he makes brilliant connections between Poe's "exposure" of Maelzel's automaton chess player and the detective tales, going beyond the obvious similarities (Poe playing detective in the Maelzel piece) to reveal that both the chess player and Dupin are figurations of self-division and the mind/body problem: Dupin's superior intellect makes other men seem like predictable automata in comparison, yet in "Rue Morgue," "the narrator's description of Dupin's altered physical appearance as he exercises his analytic skill makes Dupin himself sound like an automaton.... It is as if Dupin's body had suddenly become a physical medium for an alien spirit" (113). In Irwin's reading, "Rue Morgue" centers on the problem of differentiating the human: like the labyrinths Borges constructs and alludes to, Poe's story is a puzzle with a half-human beast at the center, a beast that must be overcome in order to prove the protagonist's superior, non-bestial nature. Irwin also links the locked-room mystery of "Rue Morgue" to labyrinth mythology through Dupin's explanation of his solution, in which a broken nail in the window "terminated the clew" (i.e. the thread of deduction), a clew fastened to a nail at the entrance being Theseus's method for solving the labyrinth. But Irwin presses on: "And, of course, the French work for nail, the word Dupin would have used repeatedly, is clou. Which is simply Poe's way of giving the reader a linguistic clue (hint) that the clew (thread) will ultimately terminate at a clou (nail)--although even the most attentive reader will probably experience this pun as a clue only retrospectively, so that Poe remains one up" (196).

Indeed, trying to be "one up" necessitates keeping an even-and-odd game going, preventing closure or solution--and like the detectives he and Poe created, Borges, in rewriting the Dupin tales, tries to "one up" his literary precursor. (As this analysis calls to mind Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," Irwin points out that "Bloom has always acknowledged that one of his own major precursors in the theory of influence was Borges" [429].) Irwin makes a strong case that Borges self-consciously matched each of his three detective stories with a specific Poe tale: "Ibn-Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth" with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Garden of the Forking Paths" with "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "Death and the Compass" with "The Purloined Letter." The last pairing gives rise to one of Irwin's most interesting and complex arguments, which concerns the meaning of the three/four oscillation in those two stories. The triangular structure of the characters' relationships to the letter formulated by Lacan (King/Queen/Minister, Police/Minister/Dupin) becomes, with the addition of the narrator, quadrangular, as in Derrida's reading. Similarly, in "Death and the Compass," Red Scharlach creates, through a series of murders, a labyrinth for Erik Lonnrot that the police see as a triangle but that Lonnrot sees as a diamond in the making. Although Scharlach kills Lonnrot at the fourth point on the map, only three murders actually take place (one having been faked), mirroring the four-letter series consisting of three different letters in the tetragrammaton (JHVH, YHWH, etc.), the very clue Scharlach uses to bait Lonnrot. Of course, Borges also mirrors Poe's triangular pattern of police, criminal, and detective, complete with the psychic doubling of detective and criminal. When Irwin, in the penultimate chapter, conjectures that Lacan got the idea for his "triangular" reading of "The Purloined Letter" from "Death and the Compass," it comes as almost no surprise, for Borges has emerged in the course of this study not only as an ingenious interpreter of Poe but as a writer who has woven nearly the entire Western literary tradition into his fiction and essays.