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PARTISAN REVIew
ments on Hawthorne, and in his deductive comments on the com–
position of
The Raven,
he reveals the two methods of the literary
critic and applies them in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
But the
rationality of Dupin,
his
inductive gathering of detail and
his
deduct–
ive inferences,
his
need to repress
his
childhood experiences and to
exalt
his
ego by success, indicate that he is--what D. H. Lawrence
called Poe--one of "these terribly conscious birds." He fails in
his detection to recognize that there are more perspectives than
one, and, in his hunt for the murderer, he never once recognizes the
true cultural dilemma, that the Ourang-Outang is the uncontrolled
imagination of disaster and the prefect the absolutely controlled–
even constipated-reason. But Dupin does not unite both in artistic
vision, and in his failure, he, too, is duped.
"As
regards the more
important knowledge," he
says,
"I do believe that she is invariably
superficial." Dupin refuses to become committed,
engage.
And
his
discovery of the Ourang-Outang stems not from his understanding
of human behavior but of animal behavior. He represents not the
critic aware of evil, but, as Poe says, the "diseased intelligence."
In our time, the work of T. S. Eliot as literary critic and
murder mystery writer (I suggest that
Murder in the Cathedral
needs
to be re-evaluated) has sought to unify the dissociation of critical
detectivity. The symptoms of this movement can be seen in Raymond
Chandler's
The Long Goodbye,
in which the private eye, Philip Mar–
low, commenting upon a work by a historical novelist, declares, "I
thought it [his work] was tripe." Chandler, who has also written
criticism, has declared of the private eye that he must be a man of
high moral values, incorruptible when the chippies are down. In other
words, modern criticism has made clear that the very structure
of the detective novel must be studied in order to grasp procedures
practiced by critics.
One of the characteristic structural patterns is the hunt. The
private eye is called in to find the murderer and after a series of
hair-raising alternatives finally apprehends
him.
This
fonn, which
involves several false confrontations before the true one, is an exhibi–
tion of what in criticism is called "perspectivism" or "pluralism."
"Pluralism" recognizes that there is a diversity in approaches to
literature, and "perspectivism" recognizes that literature, though one
