Is Anybody at Home in the Text? Psychoanalysis and the Question of Poe

Like all detective fiction written since Poe's Dupin trilogy, each of Poe's famous tales is composed of two stories. One story has occurred in a time defined as the past of the tale and is uncovered in the process of narration. The other story is of the manner in which the first was discovered. This two-story construction is definitive of the detective story, and Poe could be said to have invented it, were it not for the fact that Sophocles did so before him in Oedipus Rex. However, Oedipus Rex is rendered unusual among detective fiction by the interested nature of the detective, so that there is little difference between the high passion of the process of discovery and the high passions involved in the story that is discovered. Most detective fiction follows the lead Poe established by building the first two of the Dupin stories on a contrast between a story of discovery whose protagonist is cool and disinterested, and the high passions that characterize the discovered story. However, it is hard to think of a detective who is as coolly detached from the stories that he uncovers as Poe's Dupin, and it is also hard to think of a work of detective fiction that creates a greater divide between the scientifically cool tenor of the story of discovery and the passions that are implicit in the barely described action of the discovered story in the The Murders of the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. In the first of these the story of discovery consists of the narrator's musing on the superior talent needed to play draughts over the merely calculative abilities needed for chess, an account of his own meeting with Dupin, and of the latter's almost uncanny expertise in understanding what goes on in the minds of other people, including the narrator's own. The contrast between these emotional levels comes into play during the prolonged