Ourang-Outang situation, The

College Literature, Summer 2003 by White, Ed

The interpretive premise of this essay is a simple one: the first American detective story, Edgar Alien Poe's 1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," is a response to American slave rebellions. But my primary concern in what follows will be with the instructional challenges this interpretation poses, for having become convinced of the pedagogical value of this reading while teaching Poe, I have struggled since with the difficulties of presenting it convincingly in the classroom.1 I should stress from the start that these challenges do not strike me as idiosyncratic (to me, my students, Poe, or his story), but in fact illuminate a series of common questions about how we address "historical context" in the teaching of literature. And I want to go so far as to hypothesize that such pedagogical challenges as I describe here emerge from the contemporary academy's dominant theoretical tendencies, above all from what might loosely be called "Cultural Studies" approaches, in interpreting literature. In what follows, then, I will offer a brief and incomplete interpretation of Poe's story, contrasting it with what I Like to be a sophisticated and representative contemporary interpretation. My goal will be to contrast two critical positions on the relationship between "Literature" and "History." I will then briefly outline a methodological framework that many readers may, at first glance, find hopelessly anachronistic-that of the Sartrean "situation." If readers can bear with this account of a by-gone philosophy of freedom, I hope to persuade them that a situational reading of Poe's story in fact takes us substantially beyond the old-fashioned conventions of todays "discourse analysis." I will conclude with some specific suggestions for teaching Poe, and some more general pedagogical ideas for teaching literature historically-and for teaching history literarily.

The Testing Ground

I begin with a nuanced and insightful analysis of Poe's story, that offered by Nancy A. Harrowitz, in her essay "Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection." Harrowitz begins her analysis citing Nietzsche's essay "Homer's Contest," which argued that cultural products fundamentally amount to an agon or contest "between savage impulses . . . and civilization": building on this premise, her account of the story will similarly focus on how Poe's story reveals "the agonistics of detective fiction as a budding genre," one that "invokes some specific historical tensions of America in the early 1840s." For starters, detective fiction emerges out of "the new phenomenon of larger urban areas that were undergoing a process of refinement and topographical categorization" (1997, 182). The development of "large uncontrolled urban areas" created "increasing anxiety" to which "the culture of criminology" and its fictional corollary-detective fiction-were responses (182-83). And specifically, responses of control, as classification attempts not only to categorize the criminal but to make clear the boundaries between the criminal and the citizen. Thus the story's odd construction of the orangutan, whose anthropomorphization gives him enough human qualities not only to commit the crime, but also, obversely, to draw certain qualities of cultural difference away from the normative populace. Thus linguistic foreignness, violent hypersexualization, and ultimately racial difference cohere around the figure of the orangutan, exemplifying "the conflict between our view of different civilizations and our desire to identify scapegoats" (188). In "transferring a cultural anxiety regarding the perceived murderous, monstrous capacities of 'foreigners'" onto the orangutan, Harrowitz proceeds to argue, Poe's text further demonstrates a corresponding displacement of racial anxiety and crisis onto the orangutan (190-91).

Such are the main claims of Harrowitz's essay, which concludes with the programmatic summation that "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a "paradigmatic" agonistic text on two basic counts (1997, 193). First, "it introduces some chilling concerns about difference and its perceived perniciousness that become a subtext in the genre of detection because of this genre's close affiliation with the development of criminology" (193). Secondly, "[b]y setting up duplicitous structures of understanding for the detective, which cover up the racial tensions . . . , the story unsettles the same epistemology of detection that it establishes as reliable and which has been adopted ever since as indispensable to the detective genre" (194). Given these two dynamics, she concludes, the story thus "can function as a testing ground for theories regarding race, sexuality, and the interactions of these two categories through a displacement of 'reason' onto xenophobia" (194; my emphasis).

Now the three points of this summation are revealing of a contemporary approach to historical criticism, and might be read initially as a precis of three related and influential theoretical projects: