Edgar Allen Poe
...the nineteenth century as a time when literature and ideology were going through “an epistemological crisis, a major cultural transition in attitudes toward how to tell the truth in narrative” . Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd’ engage with the prevailing post-Enlightenment attitudes towards truth and reality. The stories draw attention to the shortcomings of Enlightenment rationality by demonstrating that there are mysteries of human existence and psychology which cannot be explained by Enlightened reasoning. In ‘Murders’, Dupin’s attempts at ratiocination are contrasted with disorder, savagery and the unexplained. Similarly, in ‘The Man of the Crowd’, the narrator’s attempt to discover the truth of modern existence is entirely in vain. In both stories, Poe suggests that there is a part of life which “does not permit itself to be read” and that there is a limit to our ability of finding order in a chaotic world. This juxtaposition of mankind’s potential for discovery and improvement with our limitations and the pervasiveness of the unexplained is one of the central paradoxes of modern life. As Marshall Berman wrote, “it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world’s potentials, without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities”. This Paradox reveals itself in Poe’s short stories in the contrasts between order and disorder, savage and civilised and, above all, rational and irrational.
Poe called the series of stories which started with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ his “tales of ratiocination”. ‘Murders’ begins with an introduction which – on three separate levels – introduces us to this theory of solving an enigma through the application of logical processes. The first level is abstract; Poe provides the reader with a treatise on the distinction between acumen and attention, analysis...
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