Text: Jeffrey A. Savoye, “Poe’s Magic Trick of the Rue Morgue,” prepared for a panel discussion at NEMLA, in Baltimore, March 2016

One of the most fundamental principles of stage magic is misdirection. The idea of misdirection is to control the attention of the audience so that all eyes are focused where the magician wants them to be focused, and, more importantly, not focused on what the magician does not want anyone to see. When the magician is waving his right hand high in the air with his white tipped magic wand, you can be pretty sure that his left hand is doing something he would prefer did not fall under the stare of intense scrutiny.

Another principle falls under the general category of stagecraft, the costumes, elaborate props, music, lighting, and all the other elements that dazzle the eye and that elevate the basic mechanics of the trick to the level of magic. Even something as bare and simple as a card trick, with just the magician, a deck of cards and an unsuspecting volunteer from the audience (or a plant pretending to be an unsuspecting volunteer) is heavily dependent on the patter, the mannerisms, and the style of the performer. Part of what makes Poe’s core works still popular more than 150 years after his death is that he is not merely an author — Poe is a magician.

We can be very confident that Poe was aware of the basic principles of magic not only because he displays them in his writings but because he told us about them in his long and detailed essay on Maelzel’s chess-playing automaton, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. In this essay, Poe specifically mentions David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, a detailed study of the art of illusion from a scientific perspective, written in the form of letters to Sir Walter Scott, originally printed in London in 1832 and reprinted in the US in 1835 by Harper & Brothers. In this case, Poe is not merely name-dropping, as he so often does, but may be presumed as actually having read the work in question, rather than an encyclopedia extract, as he proceeds in his essay to apply very much the principles and the same kind of analysis as Brewster does. (Indeed, among the automata described by Brewster in “Letter XI” is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automation chess-player, which had been purchased, slightly improved and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel after Kempelen’s death in 1804.)

I propose that at its core “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an elaborate literary magic trick, in the tradition of the famous cups and balls routine. For anyone who may not have seen the cups and balls performed, the classic presentation uses some variation of three wide-mouthed cups (about the size of a standard styrofoam coffee cup) and one or more balls (no larger than about the size of a golf ball). The cups themselves may be made of metal, or wood or plastic or any number of materials. They may be very plain or very fancy, although the trick works best if the cups are flashy and attract the eye of the viewer. The cups are placed with the open end facing downward, usually on the top of a cloth-covered table. A volunteer is selected from the audience to participate in the trick. A single ball is placed under one of the cups. The cups are then moved back and forth, rearranging their relative order, and the audience member is asked to pick the one covering the ball. The first one or two attempts are generally done in such a way that the correct cup is easily identified, clearly setting the expectations of the audience. In subsequent attempts, however, these same assumptions are turned completely on their heads as cups are lifted to reveal no ball, or three balls, one under each cup or multiple balls under one cup, apparently appearing and disappearing at the whim of the magician. The magician then proceeds to explain the sleight of hand by which the trick is done, reproducing the sequence of steps but letting the audience see the balls being concealed in the hand and removed from or slipped under the cups. At the end, with the audience confident in thinking that it knows how the trick works, the magician lifts the cups to reveal not the three small balls that the audience saw him slip under the cups, but three very large ones. (In some cases, actual oranges have been used.) Even as the audience members thought they were being let in on the secret, they have been tricked again, one hopes much to their delight.

“The Murders of the Rue Morgue” begins with precisely this kind of trick. Ironically, it does not begin with a murder. Outside of the title, the word “murder” does not appear until we are more than 3,000 words into the story. Instead, it begins with a long discourse on the nature of analysis, on the differences between, and relative intellectual merits of, the games of whist and chess. The reader is then told about an incident in which Dupin, our detective hero, suddenly makes a statement that reveals that he is fully cognizant of the inner thoughts of the narrator, giving the appearance that Dupin is a mind-reader in a magical sense. Having astounded the narrator, Dupin proceeds to explain the means by which he accomplished this trick, practical means requiring skills in observation and analysis rather than magic. (Arthur Conan Doyle was to make much future use of this opening device in many of his Sherlock Holmes stories, having Holmes deduce a host of obscure biographical details about a person merely from his or her appearance.) The entire premise, of course, is utterly absurd. Dupin is only able to devise the thinking of the narrator because both minds are merely reflections of the mind of the author, who knows all of their thoughts precisely because he put them there. As a magician, however, Poe has carefully set up his audience for the trick. He has laid out the assumptions on which his readers will now set their expectations, and in the end, he will still fool them.

Given the static nature of words on a page, and the necessarily passive role of the reader, questions as well as answers can only be raised by the author, who must anticipate or at least seem to anticipate the most obvious interests of the reader. The story lends itself to rereading because the reader thinks that, having followed the story all the way through to the end, knowing the final answer will allow him or her to reconstruct the path by which the solution could have been anticipated. Such an assumption, however, is bound to be frustrated, because in telling the story, Poe is very cleverly cheating. He creates, for example, an impossible locked room mystery, which is only impossible based on the details provided, an illusion reinforced by the fact that these details seem to be so carefully rendered and extensive. The solution is that the room is not quite sealed after all, a window with a trick nail and a hidden spring latch ultimately being discovered as the means of entrance and egress. Poe sets us on a wild goose chase for a human culprit with an undisclosed motive, only to replace the “goose” with an orangutan and reveal that the crime has no motive at all.

Indeed, the whole story is an elaborate fraud, presented from the perspective of the reader, which successfully disguises the fact that the author is completely in control of every detail of the world presented to us. This perspective is accomplished by the creation of a narrator who is not the detective, and who serves not only as someone to whom the detective can explain things as he sees fit, but also as the representative of the reader. He is, in effect, the member of the magician’s company planted in the audience to be selected as a participant in the trick.

We are told from the opening words of the newspaper accounts, from which we first find out about the crime, that the whole case is an impenetrable mystery. Subsequent details tend to confirm this assumption. A host of witnesses are presented, both as possible suspects and to lay out their information, laden with misleading clues and false trails. At every step, the reader is lulled into a false sense of confidence in the story by the overabundance of detail, all of which add up to confusion rather than clarity. A few details do gain meaning in the presentation of the solution, but most of the really important information is not even available to the reader until the solution is being revealed towards the end of the story. We do not find out about the trick nail and the hidden latch for the window, for example, until Dupin and the narrator are awaiting the arrival of the sailor who answers the advertisement Dupin placed in the newspaper. Dupin has already solved the crime, and is now only seeking to verify his deductions, and perhaps reveling in recounting the brilliance of his analytical powers. Dupin has also withheld the critical clue of the tuft of tawny hair belonging to neither of the victims, hair that even the narrator, when Dupin actually shows it to him, immediately recognizes as not being human. All of this detail has been carefully related with precise attention, but exactly out of order of its importance in solving the case. Only near the end of his discourse does Dupin finally even say exactly who it is that they are waiting for, with loaded pistols in hand. The arrival of the sailor, who is the unintentional cause of crime, conveniently grants Dupin a means of confirming many of his suppositions that otherwise would merely be an impossible layering of clever guesses, which might or might not be correct at any point. Dupin has boldly published the detailed advertisement for the missing orangutan and can confidently expect the dramatic and rather timely response of the indented person with all the answers without disappointment only because all of these events are under the control of the author.

As is widely known, Poe himself was fully aware of the duplicity of his detective stories. Frequently repeated have been his words to Philip Pendleton Cooke in a letter of August 9, 1846: “You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend [Dupin]: — that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say they are not ingenious — but people think they are more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method ... Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”

The pleasure of reading a horror story, or seeing a horror movie, is in experiencing the exciting sense of fear without actually being in any real or tangible danger personally. Similarly, the pleasure in reading Poe’s detective fiction, or watching a magic show, is in our harmless suspension of belief and the sensation of surprise in being tricked without feeling foolish because in the end we lose nothing and we gain the knowledge that we have been watching a consummate master at work.

Abstract:

Part of what maintains the popularity of Poe’s core works more than 150 years after his death is that Poe is a kind of magician, using an understanding of audience perception and misdirection long familiar to practitioners of stage magic. In particular, I propose that at its core Poe’s famous tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a literary magic trick. Indeed, in many ways, the story is an elaborate fraud, presented from a reader perspective that successfully disguises the fact that the author is completely in control of every detail of the world presented to us. This perspective is accomplished by the creation of a narrator who is not the detective, and who serves not only as someone to whom the detective can explain things as he sees fit, but also as the representative of the reader. He is, in effect, the member of the magician’s company planted in the audience to be selected as a participant in the trick. The pleasure of reading a horror story, or seeing a horror movie, is in experiencing the exciting sense of fear without actually being in any real or tangible danger personally. Similarly, the pleasure in reading Poe’s detective fiction, or watching a magic show, is in our harmless suspension of belief and the sensation of surprise in being tricked without feeling foolish because in the end we lose nothing and we gain the knowledge that we have been watching a consummate master at work.