Winning the Game: Inductive Reasoning in Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue'

UNIVERSITIES, THOUGH PERIODICALLY ACCUSED OF being flOt beds of radicalism, have an innate conservatism in their rituals and institutions that manifests itself not only in the medieval hoods and gowns of graduation ceremonies, but also in the accepted forms of academic discourse. Scholars, including literary scholars, still tend to establish the intellectual respectability and viability of their arguments by grounding them in some pre-established authority. Bold, daring, and iconoclastic critics are generally those who cite bold, daring, and iconoclastic authori ties; these in turn usually refer themselves to some higher instance, be it Nietzsche or Marx, Freud or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida. This traditional reliance on authority might help explain one of the peculiarities of the criticism of Poe's fiction, specifically of his detective stories. Readers have learned that they cannot trust Poe, that they must approach his narratives warily and with suspicion. The self-absorbed, ob sessed figures through whom he relates his tales are notoriously unreliable in their perceptions and interpretations of events. But the problem with Poe's works goes beyond the unreliable narrator to the unreliable author. Poe as a writer was fascinated by what he called "mystification," by duplicity, obfuscation, manipulation. Himself an adept practitioner of the art of deception, he perpetrated several successful hoaxes on his audience in the course of his career, ranging from journalistic pieces such as "The Balloon-Hoax" to apparently serious but actually tongue-in-cheek critical essays such as "The Philosophy of Composition." His works are full of jokes, conundrums, sly tricks, often made (as in "The Premature Burial") at the expense of his reader. He was also, as we have learned to our chagrin, not above blatant plagiarism. But though we do not trust Poe as author or the often eccentric or half-mad narrators he creates in his tales, we, strangely enough, do tend to trust one of his characters, the brilliant analyst and ratiocinator C. Auguste