C. Auguste Dupin’s Companion in “Murders in the Rue Morgue:”
The Trickster Poet Linking the Phenomenal to the Noumenal Planes
The Emergence of the Hard-Boiled Detective Story
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Hardboiled Crime fiction took America’s imagination by storm as the writings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler became a major presence within the literary ethos. Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, both private detectives who acted outside of society’s prescribed moral and legal boundaries, laws and other mores, did not just solve mysteries but confronted extreme dangers and often exhibited chaotically violent tendencies. Such actions and behaviors resulted in the detectives grappling with feelings of isolation as they never seemed to be understood by the world around them. The first Hardboiled Crime fiction protagonist, private detective Terry Mack, who was created by John Daly Carroll in his short story “Three Gun Terry,” seemed to typify these characteristics of individuality and isolation. In reference to the former attribute, Terry Mack declared at the story’s outset:
My life is my own, and the opinions of others don’t interest me; so don’t form any, or if you do, keep them to yourself. If you want to sneer at my tactics, why go ahead; but do it behind to pages–you’ll find that healthier. (43)
Private Detective Mack’s life was his own to live, which, according to Gary Hoppenstand, made him “a strong individualist, to the point of challenging the reader to question his methods…his talk is tough, as are his actions…he hits harder, shoots faster, and is more able to endure punishment than are his adversaries” (118–119). Being an individualist, Mack refused to be categorized as a “crook” or a “dick” as he “play[ed] the game on the level,” in his own way; consequently, the participating members of society could not comprehend who he truly was, a fact made evident in his declaration, “They don’t get my lay at all…most of them don’t know what to think” (43–44). Concerning Mack’s inability to be understood and thus unaccepted by society, Hoppenstand commented, “Noting the sociological function of the concept of individualism, the ability to be individualistic is correlated to unsuccessful socialization” (119). Thus, Mack’s individualism and being unable to function within society went hand in hand; his identity and paradigm were so unique, society, as a consequence, did not understand him. It was almost as if he needed someone to describe him in such a way that he could be understood, to make his identity palatable enough for society to accept him so that he could become one of its productive members. Unfortunately, the narration of the Hardboiled Crime story was told by the detective himself, so his words and the actions depicted by those words resulted in further misunderstanding and alienation. Conversely, the predecessor of Terry Mack, Sam Spade, and Phillip Marlowe, C. Auguste Dupin, the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, who also displayed individualistic and alienating behavior, often assisted the police in the purging of criminal behavior and consequently the overall improvement of society. Thus, this contrast in social acceptance and productivity was a result of who took on the narrative responsibilities in recounting the story. The Hardboiled Detectives shouldered their own narrative duties, the responsibility of being the intermediary between the protagonist and the reading audience, making the detective’s ethereal insights, as well as the man himself, comprehendible to society, which skewed how they were perceived by society as they attempted to relate their stories to those who they believed did not “get their lay at all.” On the other hand, in Poe’s stories, the narrative obligations were handled by a trickster character, Dupin’s partner and confidant. This, in turn, enabled Detective Dupin to focus his intellectual energies on the case at hand as well as to be understood and accepted by the society at large.
The Trickster Archetype: Its Characteristics and Purpose
Before developing the idea that the narrator in Poe’s detective stories was a trickster archetype who mediated between Dupin and the reading audience, the general concept of “archetypes” and how they correspond to human behavior and perception as well as a specific classification of archetype, the trickster, must be defined. In his essay “On the Nature of the Psyche,” noted psychologist Carl Gustav Jung established:
Man is born with a specifically human mode of behavior and not with that of a hippopotamus or with none at all. Integral to his characteristic behavior is his psychic phenomenology, which differs from that of a bird or a quadruped. (On the Nature of the Psyche 226)
In other words, all of humanity has a set of behaviors that are specific to only humans, and these behaviors are instilled into their psychological make-up. This, according to Jung, is a consequence of humans being “born with a brain that is the result of development in an endlessly long chain of ancestors;” furthermore, “this brain is produced in each embryo in all its differentiated perfection, and when it starts functioning it will unfailingly produce the same results that have been produced innumerable time before the ancestral line” (Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung 371). Contrary to psychoanalytic thought, which was first proposed by Sigmund Freud 70 years earlier, Jung saw human behavior as a manifestation of the collective unconscious mind as opposed to the personal unconscious mind, where the former forms as a result of the paradigms held by the collective social body, which are then unconsciously embraced, practiced, and passed on by its members to the following generations, while the latter is developed from individual life experiences that, in turn, shape the individual’s psyche.
To this matter, Edith Whitehurst Williams qualified Jung’s thoughts concerning the collective unconscious mind by pointing out, “Jung is very careful to designate that he is not postulating an inheritance of ideas, but proposing the inherited possibilities of ideas” (39). Therefore, it is not guaranteed for a man to have his psychological behavior shaped by the reoccurring images, or archetypes, that emerge from the collective unconscious. However, it is these images that still provide a basis for how that same man perceives reality as well as how he navigates through it using language. Specifically, continued Williams, “it is myth and fairytale that we discover evidence of the uniformity and regularity of these images” (39). One of these archetypes that seemed constantly to be made manifest in numerous myths of a wide variety of cultures, be it ancient Greek or Winnebago Native American tribe, has been the trickster. To this fact, Paul Radin observed,
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in sacred and magical rites, in man’s religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite an unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise. He is obviously a “psychologen,” an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to the psyche that has hardly left the animal level. (200)
This seemingly ubiquitous, though sometimes unassuming entity was characterized by David Bynum as “one who…orders or changes the world and who occupies an important if thoroughly ambiguous and transliminal place in myth and in all its generic narrational relatives” (162). When tricksters appeared in a myth or tale, its presence would change the direction of the story by altering the viewpoint of the other characters, as “the world and its inhabitants [would be] transformed by their antics,” using laughter or insightful wisdom to “make characters see the absurdity of the situation, and perhaps force a change” (Voytilla 16). In many of his writings, Jung pointed to the god Mercury, with his jocularity, ability to shape-shift, half-animal, half-divine dual nature, and characteristics of being a sort of savior as the quintessential trickster (195).
The Mercurial characteristic of being half-animal, half-divine has resulted in many commentators acknowledging that the trickster archetype is very difficult to categorize. Essentially, the trickster, as conceded by Barbara Babcock, “muddles all models,” for he transcends the boundaries that separate the ethereal from the earthly realms, breaking all attempts of containment within a heroic-epical context (150). Mercury was one of the few gods who enjoyed the ability to travel from Mt. Olympus, to earth, to the Underworld and back again unhindered, thus resulting in him being assigned the duty of messenger for Zeus, a sort of intermediary between humans and the gods. Moreover, Claude-Levi Strauss, in his seminal work “The Structural Study of Myth,” recognized that the reoccurring raven and coyote characters in Native American myths consistently took on the role of trickster by the very fact that they were omnivores, which gave them the ability to mediate between the carnivores and the herbivores, the former representing hunting and thus death, while the latter representing agriculture and thus life (440).
The capacity to mediate between binary oppositions such as life and death and man and god has made the trickster a necessity in epic myths as the associate of the hero. The hero was the protagonist of the myth whose choices affected its overall outcome, and being only human, he would usually only represent, through his perspective and his actions, the profane side of the dichotomy between the divine and the earthly. According to Miller, it was the responsibility of the trickster to make the hero aware of other godly paradigms that may not have corresponded with his own outlook as well as to make the hero comprehensible to those upon the celestial plane that would otherwise shun him because of his humanistic stature:
The trickster hero should be fully human, as his partners and, occasionally, his foils are, though he himself tends to be able to move more freely than most into and through the supernatural zone, and he often acts as an intermediary between that zone and the zone of heroic human action. (243)
Thus, a partnership between the hero and the trickster formed; however, this relationship seemed peculiar because, continued Miller, “the hero-trickster partnership is of essential equals, sometimes almost ludicrous in their differing characteristics, but parallel in their placement and potency” (244). The role of the trickster was just as important as that of the hero, for even though his actions were not heroic in magnitude, and thus did not affect the story in its entirety, what he did affected how the hero perceived the world and the heavens as well as how the world and the heavens perceived the hero.
The latter task was usually accomplished as a result of the trickster often taking the form of a poet, the lyrical storyteller who recounted the great feats achieved by his partner. Essentially, the hero was, after all, “invented by the epic poets from the available raw material; these bards, occasionally but usually not identifiable as individuals create[d]most of the imaginal heroic world and its inhabitants,” and one of the primary traits held by most trickster characters was their ability to manipulate words through songs, spells, and poems (Miller 250). Hence, with being both an intermediary between man and god and a manipulator of language, the trickster often became the narrator of the hero’s epic adventures. Throughout many centuries of story-telling, the trickster-as-narrator/intermediary archetype has been a fixture in many stories; specifically, its presence was called for by Edgar Allan Poe as he penned his detective stories.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Creation of the Detached Classic Detective
The world depicted by Poe in his tales of Dupin, observed Clive Bloom, was based upon the principles of logic and order, where “everything was [in] its place, everyone [had] his allotted role…anything out of that order, displaced as it were, [would] ultimately relate to crime, the social deviancy of crime, and the criminologists who investigate[d] it” (17). C. Auguste Dupin was this society’s custodian, for he was the detective who was intellectually superior to everyone and, for this reason, was often solicited by the law enforcement agents to find reason in a situation that they previously had deemed out of the ordinary and impossible to comprehend. By finding logical solutions for the most bizarre cases, Dupin was able to accomplish what respected members of this society could not do, to reconcile the contradictions that were characteristic of that society. One of these social contradictions, as in the case of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” entailed civilized society housing within it animalistic and chaotic behavior. Dupin was able to resolve this inconsistency by discovering that it was an Orang-Otang who as the culprit in the gruesome murder of a lady and her daughter.
Hence, he was the quintessential participant of this logical civilization, a fact that ironically resulted in him being looked upon as an outsider, for everyone else, even those charged to solve crimes and thus maintain order within society, like the Prefect, either ignored or accidentally overlooked logical solutions or clues to reconcile society’s contradictions. However, continued Bloom, “precisely because the detective [was] an outsider figure, he [was] more fully integrated into society than those characters who represent[ed] society,” and consequently, “the detective [was] invisible and therefore unacknowledged and he [became] a social ‘nothing’ precisely because he [was] so needed by society” (18). Dupin was such an integral part of sustaining society’s infrastructure that he blended into its logical fabric, which made it easy for him to assimilate into his surroundings, making him easy to overlook. Consistently, Dupin would walk the streets unmolested by the citizens of Paris; even when he looked for clues at the scene of a crime, no one interacted with him–he was being ignored.
Moreover, Dupin’s socio-economic status also created separation between him and the plebian castes, for being an aristocrat, epitomized by his intellect, the result of formal education, living a life of leisure (even though he had lost a good portion of his money), and residing in a “grotesque mansion,” secluded and excluded him from a prosaic existence. Stated Bloom, “Out of place, and out of time…the aristocracy is the only force capable, by its very exclusion from class division, of uniting (from above) the society that no longer recognizes aristocratic status” (20). Dupin’s financial as well as social status, both resulting in him being an outsider, gave him the opportunity to escape the myopia that was characteristic of living amongst the members of society; instead, he transcended above the milieu to find order in situations that would otherwise be considered bizarre.
Along with his outsider status, the intellect of Poe’s detective also contributed to his transcendent nature. Concerning the detective’s mental powers, Hoppenstand wrote,
Poe’s contribution to the genre [of the detective story] was the creation of an uncommonly intelligent hero… a character who could set the wrongs of evil in a proper moral cast (thus subsuming divine will into his own will), and who reinforces the security of social institutions against the threat of criminal anarchy and violence via the process of rational manipulation of the environment. (110–111).
The cognitive faculties that had been endowed upon Dupin seemed to be almost “god-like,” as Bloom argued, “He never serves an apprenticeship and as such the expert in detective fiction is the antithesis of the model of the expert in society, having his expertise by right of nature, not nurture–such natural gifts give the expert inordinate power, the power, in fact, to mobilize matter in order to make it signify” (21). Dupin was born with preternatural brilliance, similar to Heracles being born with superhuman strength or Orpheus being born with exceptional musical ability.
Coincidently, demi-gods such as Heracles and Orpheus had difficulty functioning on the mortal plane–their lives were wrought with tragedy, which had resulted from their inability to connect to the human condition, a consequence of being more god than man. This reality had also affected the hyper-intelligent Dupin, who Henry Douglas Thomson believed was not human at all:
Perhaps it has been time wasted for the simple reason that Dupin has no character. He is the personification of analysis, the mouthpiece of the logical activity. Poe thought it sufficient to label him an eccentric and a recluse. As we might expect this fails to make Dupin human. (86)
Essentially, Dupin was just an abstraction, logic personified, without the qualities that would make him a participant of the human condition, and not being considered human would keep a reading audience, let alone a clientele who may need a mystery solved, from connecting with the detective. With this in mind, Thomson, alluding to Arthur Ransome, noted, “The abstract can never be the material art” (87). Therefore, Dupin could never relate to the rest of humanity unless he had someone to shoulder the responsibility of giving him form, presenting him as a human, thus making him comprehendible to the citizens of Paris as well as to the reading audience. The task of narration fell to his anonymous associate.
Poe’s Narrator as a Humanistic Conduit to the Divine
G.R. Thompson has maintained that “there is a close link discerned between that narrator and his host in many of Poe’s stories” where “the structure wherein the subjectivity of the narrator provides the basic system of structures holding in tension all the others” (144). Hence, it was important that Dupin’s partner did not have a name as that would have undermined his role as the narrator, for Mieke Bal identified the narrator of a story as “the linguistic subject, a function and not a person, which expresses itself in the language that constitutes the text” (119). Without an identity, the narrator became a lens for the reader to gaze through. According to Thomson, “As to [the narrator’s] character there is a touch of the Thucydidean silence–the negation of ego…his personality, if he has one, is never obtruded” (88). However, he was not a passive participant, a soulless, lifeless telescope that could be utilized by the reader so that he could observe the transcend protagonist. Instead, insisted Bal, “The identity of the narrator, the degree to which and the manner in which that identity is indicated in the text, and the choices that are implied lend the text its specific character” (120). The narrator was always mesmerized by the detective’s awe-inspiring intellect: “At such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin” ( ). As a “worshipper” of his partner, the narrator established himself as the binary opposite of “supernatural being,” which would be a mere mortal. Thus, the recounting of the adventures of Dupin would be seen through a humanistic frame, which then would place the protagonist in a humanistic light that, of course, would place him in a context that would be understandable to the readers of the tale.
Nevertheless, the narrator’s humanity did not fully dilute Dupin’s ethereal characteristics, for there were times when the detective’s god-like qualities had to be acknowledged by his partner. This recognition did not come in the form of a prolix description; instead, it came from the absence of words. Thomson noted,
His [Dupin’s] habits were eccentric in the extreme. He would keep his room for a month without stirring or admitting a visitor. What he did “when the fit was on him” heaven only knows! The narrator shirks it and says: “he was engaged on researches”–elegant innuendo. (86)
As was the case in Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful,” whenever the protagonist made contact with the divine, be it through the creation of life or the recreation of the self, the narrator seemed to recognize that words were insufficient to depict what had taken place; instead, he attempted to linguistically circumvent the event, describing everything in the scene but the actual connection with the celestial plane. Dupin’s partner equivocated by making flimsy excuses of the detective’s whereabouts, which, essentially, was done with the recognition of the detective’s connection to the divine as well as his inability to articulate who his associate truly was.
Hence, to connect the reading audience to the transcendent Dupin, the narrator took on the characteristics of a trickster poet as he was a manipulator of language as well as an intermediary between man and the otherwise disconnected divine. Without the assistance of his associate, Poe’s detective would have been forced to take on the narrative duties, thus risking total exclusion from a society that would not understand him. Like Terry Mack and the other Hard-Boiled protagonists, Dupin would have lived a life mired in chaos, alienation, and frustration, but with the help of his nameless partner, he was a productive member of society.
Works Cited
Babcock, Barbara. “’A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered.” Journal of the Folklore Institute. 11.3 (1975): 147–186. JSTOR. California State University, Bakersfield, CA. 14 March 2009. <www.jstor.org>.
Furthering the investigative efforts of Paul Radin, Barbara Babcock reexamines the Winnebago trickster cycle. Her study led her to conclude that this particular archetype, being paradoxical in his behavior as it both supports cultural mores as well as contradicts them, is very difficult to categorize. Furthermore, he often breaks rules and boundaries, thus angering those around him, forcing him in a picaresque existence. Because of his inability to be classified as well as his limit-exceeding behavior, many different Western cultures have attempted to recreate him so that he can act as a supporter of a social infrastructure instead of a boundary-transcending insurgent.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Mieke Bal provides the reader with an understandable, however comprehensive, discussion of the major elements of the theory concerning narrative texts. She divides her book into three sections, Fabula: Elements, Story: Aspects, and Text: Words. Throughout the book she touches on dialogue in narrative, intertextuality, interdicursivity, as well the identity and the function of the narrator.
Bloom, Clive. “Capitalising on Poe’s Detective: the Dollars and Sense of Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction.” Ed. Clive Bloom, Brian Docherty, Jane Gibb, and Keith Shand. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. 14–25.
Clive Bloom connects how Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, even though thought of as vehicles that enable the reading audience to escape the social realities of the time, were actually a direct reflection of the social forces that the readers had to endure. Thus, instead of creating a new world where the reader can escape to, these stories are actually incorporating aspects of the actual world. Specifically, Detective Dupin, according the Bloom, is the quintessential aristocratic capitalist, aloof from the world’s realities and focused on accumulating wealth.
Bynum, David E. The Daemon in the Wood: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
In his book, David E. Bynum focuses on the stories of oral traditional and their cultural significance. As he investigates a wide variety of folktales, Bynum identifies the formulas and symbols that the oral storytellers employed and looks to find a deeper, more momentous meaning within specific attributes of these formulas, namely the significance of the ubiquitous nature of trees. Overall, his study points to how storytelling, specifically its ancient use of symbols, is a transcendent art form that expresses man’s most profound emotions and thoughts on the human condition.
Carroll, John Daly. “Three Gun Terry.” The Black Mask Boys. Ed. William F. Nolan. New York: Morrow, 1985.
This was the first Hard-boiled Crime story written by John Daly Carroll in 1923. It established the archetype of the private detective, a man who strives to bring justice to those who have been wronged by a corrupt social infrastructure. However, while the detective, who in this particular story was named Terry Mack, is attempting to solve the crime at hand, he is also struggling with feelings of alienation and depression as he is a member of a society that does not understand who he is and is, in fact, antagonistic to his quest to purge civilization of all vice and injustice.
Hoppenstand, Gary. In Search of the Paper Tiger: A Sociological Perspective of Myth, Formula and the Mystery Genre in the Entertainment Print Mass Medium. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987.
This book examines how the mystery genre and the formulas that are utilized by this type of literature effects society’s collective psychology. Specifically, Hoppenstand identifies the formulas that are inherent within each subgroup of the mystery genre, Fiction Noir, Gangster, Thief, Thriller, and Detective, and relates the effects each particular formula had on the reading audience at the time, namely how it may have assisted in the defining of society’s paradigms.
Jung, Carl Gustav. “Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung.” 1931. The Collected Works. Vol. 8. Trans R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. 358–381.
In this essay, C.G. Jung acknowledges the effect that analytic psychology has on a person’s world view, or as he terms it “weltanschauung.” Essentially, points out Jung, it is this world view that shapes man’s personality as he adapts his behavior to correspond to this collectively held perspective. Throughout this essay, Jung contrasts analytical psychology with psychoanalysis, the latter viewed by the psychologist as resulting in a limited world view as it would be mired in rationalistic materialism. The former method produces a more complete weltanschauung because it looks beyond the rational and considers the existence of certain unconscious elements that cannot be considered rationally; instead, these elements, which he identifies as the contents of the “collective unconscious,” the part of the mind that comes from man’s whole ancestry, just must be accepted. It is the collective unconscious that gives shape man’s world view.
Jung, Carl Gustav. “On the Nature of the Psyche.” 1954. The Collected Works. Vol. 8. Trans. RFC. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. 159–236.
In this essay, C.G. Jung presents an overview of his theories on the unconscious and its relationship with the conscious mind. Specifically, he discusses extensively his theories of the “collective unconscious” mind, a way of thinking that is common to all of humanity as it has been passed on from generation to generation. This psychic perspective essentially shapes how humankind views not only itself but the world.
Jung, Carl Gustav. “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure.” The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. By Paul Radin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. 195–211.
In this essay, Jung defines the trickster figure as a mythological manifestation of the human psyche that still responds on the animal level. The psychologist explains that the creation of this particular archetype and its insertion into American Indian myths, ancient Greek myths, the Bible, and parapsychology to remind man of his past, that he was once not as sophisticated and complex as he may be presently. Along with Claude Levi-Strauss, Jung establishes the trickster as figure who mediates between who man was, animalistic, and who man aspires to be, god-like.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore. 68.270 (1955): 428–444. JSTOR. California State University, Bakersfield, CA. 14 March 2009. <www.jstor.org>.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss looks at the structures that are inherent in myths from all over the world. He does this to reveal a system of behavior that is adhered to by all humans. This essay lays the groundwork for the school of thought known as Structuralism, which posits that all language gains meaning the result of participating within a system that transcends both time and space. Because language is utilized in their dissemination, myths also adhere to the same structures that language adheres to. Although later refuted by Post-Structuralists like Jacque Derrida and Michel Foucault, Levi-Strauss’ work has resulted in the deeper understanding of cultures and their storytelling traditions.
Miller, Dean. The Epic Hero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Dean Miller presents an extensive study of the epic hero by mapping out an assortment of characteristics and citing a myriad of epic tales from both Eastern and Western mythological traditions. This investigation considers the heroic archetype from the viewpoints of anthropology, psychology, and literary studies as it traces the its most minute characteristic. Along with tracing the hero from his birth, through his life, to his death, and the immortalization process that takes place afterwards, Miller also dissects his associates, namely the trickster. He equates this particular archetype to the poet who describes the hero to his audience, thus establishing the necessity of such a figure in the hero’s life.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
Paul Radin accomplishes a monumental anthropological and psychological study of the reoccurring character in the myths of the Winnebago Native American Tribe–the Trickster. After his thorough investigation of the many manifestations and functions of this archetype within this particular tribe, Radin, with the assistance of foremost Greek mythology expert Karl Kerenyi and analytical psychology C.G. Jung, expands the discourse concerning the trickster beyond this specific tribe to include its other manifestations in the Western literary canon as well as its integration into the collective unconscious mind.
Thomson, H. Douglas. Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story. 2nd ed. Folcroft: Folcroft Library, 1973.
H. Douglas Thomson fastidiously examines the techniques utilized in the creation of the detective story. Meticulously, he dissects the attributes of a wide variety of detective story genres, specifically, the classic detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the French Detective story, the Domestic Detective story, the Realistic Detective story, the Orthodox Detective story, the Thriller, and the American Detective story. Furthermore, he attempts to provide a sort of guide of what he considers to be the best detective stories in the canon in hopes to convert the recreational reader of detective stories into a pedantic expert of this type of literature.
Thompson, G.R. “Explained Gothic [“The Fall of the House of Usher”].” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987. 142–152.
In his critical essay, G.R. Thompson discusses the effect of the ambiguous structural configuration has in the “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He begins by showing a structural similarity between Poe’s short story and the Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, where the slight shifts in the configuration of the story also shift the perspective of the reader. Thompson’s focus primarily rests upon the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” as the choices and observations that the narrator makes seems to effect the direction and focus of the story. Thompson’s work in this essay broadens the discourse concerning the role of the narrator in Poe’s catalog, making him a more complex character than one who is just retelling a story.
Voytilla, Stuart. Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999.
Borrowing from the writings of C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, Stuart Voytilla points out that all stories, specifically film, follows certain patterns–the “hero’s journey.” After defining the different stages, or narrative devices, that the hero must endure as well as identifying the variety of archetypes that he will encounter on his way, Voytilla synthesizes his formula into 50 well-known films, ranging from Seven Samurai to Beauty and the Beast. His attempts at enacting a sort of pop-culture Structuralism seem to be successful as he clearly connects these symbols to these movies.
Williams, Edith Whitehurst. “Morgan La Fee as Trickster in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Folklore. 96.1 (1985): 38–56. JSTOR. California State University, Bakersfield, CA. 14 March 2009. <www.jstor.org>.
In this essay, Edith Whitehurst Williams identifies the character Morgan La Fee, King Arthur’s sister and nemesis who had concocted Sir Gawain’s entire adventure as a humiliating trick, as a trickster archetype. Williams goes on to investigate why the literary community readily accepts a character who is complex and ambiguous, who dawns many disguises, and whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt the course of the story. She eventually points to the fact that because that such a character seems to be recognizable to the reading audience, as if, and here she cites Jung extensively, its psyche already has an unconscious understanding of such a personality.
