There is no doubt that Edgar Allan Poe plays a singular role in the history of detective fiction. Few would argue with Arthur Conan Doyle's description of Poe as "the father of the detective tale"; yet, pronouncements, such as that of Jorge Luis Borges, that "Poe exhausted the genre" are almost as common.[1] Poe's paradoxical placement in literary history as origin and endpoint is, however, appropriate to the detective genre, insofar as detective stories, similarly, begin at the end of the plots which they narrate. Detective fiction is necessarily structured around repetition and imitation, since, as Peter Brooks remarks, the detective's narrative "attaches itself to another's story, seeking there its authority; it retraces another's path, repeats a journey already undertaken" (245). Poe is, moreover, notoriously inconsistent in his discussions of the relative values of imitation and originality. In an anonymous review of his own work, he somewhat ironically insists on his originality: "the great fault of American and British authors is imitation of the peculiarities of thought and diction of those who have gone before them . . . . The evident and most prominent aim of Mr. Poe is originality, either of idea, or the combination of ideas. He appears to think it a crime to write unless he has something novel to write about, or some novel way of writing about an old thing" ("Edgar Allan Poe" 868, 873). Yethe concomitantly concedes that anyone following in the footsteps of great writers is confronted with a dilemma, and "must be weak and original, or imitative and strong:--and since imitation, in a case of this kind, is merely adherence to Truth and Reason as pointed out by one who feels their value, the author who should forego the advantages of the 'imitation' for the mere sake of being erroneously original, 'n'est pas si sage qu'il croit'" ("About Critics and Criticism" 1041). This ambivalence pervades Poe's "stories of ratiocination"; as originals in a genre which testifies to the impossibility of originality, they present a particularly marked case of what Harold Bloom has termed the "anxiety of influence." This anxiety is, in turn, the Tell-tale Heart--the inescapable reminder of the past that refuses to die, at least in the mind of its successor--which haunts Poe's literary career.

The mystery tale, as inaugurated and perhaps prematurely buried by Poe, tells the story of an ineluctably derivative protagonist who, however much more brilliant than his predecessors he may be, is trapped by his own "belatedness." Most notably, whether his adversary is a mastermind such as the Minister D--, an unsophisticated sailor, or a savage animal, all of Dupin's genius can at best track down the culprit, and narrate the story of the criminal's actions and attempts at concealment, without being able to alter the fact that the crime took place, or its more or less irreversible consequences. Even in "The Purloined Letter," although the eponymous document is indeed safely returned before the damage is done, the fact remains that the Queen's intrigue has been uncovered, and D-- is left in possession of her secret, if not of her letter. Moreover, Poe's mysteries underscore this aspect of the detective story, by stipulating that solving the crime an unavoidably "a posteriori" ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue" 17) endeavor--relies in particular on the detective's ability to empathize with, and, as a result, to emulate, victims, villains, and even other detectives. The much-noted doublings in the Dupin mysteries thus reveal the proximity of apparent originality and skillful copying: for although the detective's abilities are described as "peculiar" ("Rue Morgue" 5), "little less than miraculous," "very remarkable," and even an "idiosyncrasy" ("The Mystery of Marie Roget" 28), the root of his talent is imitation.

On his own admission, Dupin can fathom seeming mysteries because he is able to think like someone else, much like the schoolboy whose "principle of guessing . . . lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents" ("The Purloined Letter" 132). This method then transcends simple observation, for ultimately one's success in understanding others is based on "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent" (emphasis added, 132). Dupin himself identifies with the schoolboy whose tactic he describes and claims to have the same ability to predict another person's behavior by imitating that person's actions and appearance:

When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression. (132)

Conversely, the bumbling Prefect in "The Purloined letter" fails in his investigations precisely because of his inability to depart from his own, however highly developed, way of reasoning and to think instead like the culprit whom he is trying to outwit:

The Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill~admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it . . . . when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. (132)

Therefore, the dangerous recipe for successful detection is to lose oneself in an identification with the perpetrator of the crime. Harold Bloom aptly cites Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (a story modeled in part on Poe's "William Wilson") to summarize the terrifying implications of succumbing to influence in this manner: "to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him" (Bloom 6). Yet the influence which Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton so bitterly describes is precisely the modus operandi prescribed by Dupin. Moreover, Dupin's self-assurance notwithstanding, we should not too readily assume that these disparate versions of the drama of influence simply represent varying degrees of proficiency in one's manipulation of the possibilities afforded by empathetic identification. On the contrary, Dupin is by no means immune to the kind of self-division or alienation described by Wilde and identified by Bloom as exemplary of the problem of influence. Dupin often boasts that

most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and [he] was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of [the narrator's] own. His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the enunciation. Observing him in these moods, [the narrator] often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused [him]self with the fancy of a double Dupin--the creative and the resolvent. ("Rue Morgue" 5)

Here Dupin's detective abilities fragment and vacate his identity. Even more significantly, the perceptive power which his empathy makes possible suspends his own creativity.

Moreover, if empathetic identifications among schoolboys seem relatively benign, Dupin extends this method to invite a resemblance between himself and dangerous criminals. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," it appears at first that he has only to place himself in the position of the Maltese sailor, who, like Dupin, may say to himself, "'I am innocent; I am poor . . .'" (22). Dupin's empathy with the sailor's innocence is, however, soon matched by his unnerving resemblance to the "fiendish . . . brute" (26) who commits the murders. Significantly, this resemblance is manifested in Dupin's singular ability to "understand" the Ourang-Outang's peculiar language: where the actual witnesses heard variations of human speech, Dupin, who was not present at the murder, is able conclusively to determine their source. It seems suspicious that Dupin claims he can identify the murderer based only upon the overheard voices, and furthermore that at this point he calls his deductions "the sole proper ones," and refers to "the suspicion [which] arises inevitably from them as the single result" (16). The grounds on which he bases these surprisingly confident conclusions will necessarily strike the reader as somewhat tenuous: he merely notes that none of the "denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize" (16) any words. In particular, Dupin's objection to the possibility that "it might have been the voice of an Asiatic--of an African" simply because "Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris" (16) must appear spurious, since neither, certainly, do loose Ourang-Outangs.

In fact, the result of Dupin's empathetic identification with the Ourang-Outang is that he not only understands its unusual speech but in addition seems to echo some of its characteristics. Just as the Ourang-Outang speaks in a strange and shrill voice, when engaged in detection Dupin's "voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly" (5). Moreover, their similar and theatrically unnatural voices draw attention to both characters' propensity to imitate. Like Dupin, the Ourang-Outang is a mimic, whose performance before the mirror helps to reveal the dangers inherent in copying:

the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all . . . . Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet . . . . the gigantic animal had seized Madame L'Espanaye by the hair . . . and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. (21, 25)

Imitation has, of course, its price, and in both cases this derivativeness produces more than simply anxiety. As a result of their imitative abilities, both the Ourang-Outang and Dupin appear to be mad: hearing Dupin's summary of the "excessively outre" (20) nature of the case, the narrator comes to the conclusion that "A madman. . . has done this deed--some raving maniac, escaped from a neighboring Maison de Santa" (21), recalling his earlier observation that "Had the routine of [his and Dupin's] life . . . been known to the world, [they] should have been regarded as madmen" (5).

Critical reception of Poe has tended to downplay the potential dangers of the imitations and influences to which the detective is prone by focusing on the manner in which Dupin doubles not the sub-human killer of the Rue Morgue nor the only slightly more civilized murderer of Marie Roget, but above all the refined, brilliant, and comparatively harmless Minister D--. However, the closing words of "The Purloined Letter" indicate that literary aggression. is in fact more similar to the murders in the preceding Dupin stories than might first have been imagined: the Minister's actions, and so implicitly Dupin's almost identical reactions, are ultimately likened to the incest, murder and cannibalism of Atreus and Thyestes. In other words, in his resemblance to the Minister D--, just as in his similarity to an Ourang-Outang, Dupin risks becoming a "monstrum horrendum" ("Purloined Letter" 138). This apparently overstated description of D--'s character, as well as the tenacity with which Dupin seeks revenge against him, may have to do with the fact that it is a particularly charged and anxiety-ridden literary rivalry which is at stake: stealing a letter, turning it inside out and changing its ownership, purpose, and appearance--or, finally, replacing it with a letter of one's own--is, after all, an almost textbook example of the kind of influenced "mis-readings" of the literary past described by Bloom.

Thus, the dangers involved in imitation are not confined to cases where the influence comes from an inferior or degraded source but in fact are at least as evident in instances such as Dupin's doubling of the Minister D--, who is, as the citation from Crebillon suggests, enough his equal to be called his brother.[2] Furthermore, Poe's stories attach an even greater anxiety to the possibility of being influenced by a superior teacher or model, particularly when that exemplary figure is a beloved woman. In stories such as "Morella" and "Ligeia," the narrator begins by describing the heroine as super-human, in an attempt to make her less a real rival than a kind of personal muse:

I said her knowledge was such as 1 have never known in woman--but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation. ("Ligeia" 100)

Yet, despite his attempt to co-opt Ligeia's power by making her into a metaphor for his own creativity, this relationship is explicitly depicted as infantilizing for the "child-like" narrator. In "Morella" the narrator loses even more of his agency to the heroine, beginning when he "abandoned [himself] implicitly to the guidance of [his] wife," "became her pupil," and adopted her choice of materials for study, although he admits that he had previously considered them "the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine, were her favorite and constant study--and that, in the process of time they became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit and example" (222). Consequently, "Morella"'s narrator tries to assert his erotic if not intellectual self-sufficiency by insisting that the heroine's influence over him does not extend beyond his literary studies: "my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros . . . . I never spoke of passion, nor thought of love" (222). Nonetheless, he marries Morella, apparently simply at her will: "She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone, rendered me happy" (222). Yet, in her role as his wife, as in that of his teacher, this terrible muse leaves no avenue for the narrator's generative powers, giving birth only to a copy of herself, another Morella who continues to leave him helpless in the face of the "adult powers and faculties of the woman . . . the lessons of experience . . . the wisdom or the passions of maturity" (224) which she possesses?

For Poe's protagonists, then, the attempt to disempower the strong women in these stories by treating them as disembodied muses is spectacularly unsuccessful. Consequently, these protagonists instead hope more literally to disembody the women who have such all-encompassing and inescapable influence over them. Not surprisingly, the result is a specific kind of violence: as Cynthia Jordan remarks, "Poe was especially prolific in creating images of violently silenced women, their vocal apparatus the apparent target of their attackers" (2). Thus, Morella's husband is unable to bear "the low tone of her musical language" (223), and in her last appearance Ligeia reclaims her husband from his second wife at the expense of appearing with a "bandage [which] lay heavily about the mouth" (108) and remaining silent. These attempts at silencing the stories' heroines in both cases represent an attenuated desire to escape their influence altogether by killing them:

Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days--for many weeks and irksome months--until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days, and the hours, and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined. ("Motella" 223)

Similarly, when Ligeia is attempting to come back to life, the narrator refers to the scene as a "hideous drama of revification" which he witnesses "in extremity of horror" (107). In each case, the narrator's morbid eagerness suggests his belief that the death of his wife will put an end to the influence which cripples his creativity, as though Poe's parodic claim that "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world--and . . . the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover" ("The Philosophy of Composition" 19) could be interpreted literally. Yet in each case it appears that the accomplishment of the narrator's quasi-murderous desire is as impossible as it is anxiously awaited. Ligeia returns to marry her husband again in the guise of the Lady of Tremaine, and Morella's rebirth as her own daughter confronts the narrator with the indelibility of influence: "in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror--for a worm that would not die" (225).

Perhaps the most well-known example of a protagonist's attempt to silence his female companion, who perversely refuses to die, can be found in "Berenice." As in the later sections of "Morella" and "Ligeia," the narrator in "Berenice" believes that he can confine the eponymous heroine's influential power to her body, which he can then possess or destroy. Hence, Egaeus's violent removal of his cousin's teeth is explicitly attributed to his desire to appropriate her ideas: "of Berenice I . . . seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idles!-- . . . ah therefore it was that I coveted them so madly!" (175). However, insofar as Berenice is relegated to pure physicality in contradistinction to her cousin's sterile intellectualism, she represents another kind of original whose influence cannot be escaped. Berenice, who is superior to the narrator not in her erudition but rather in her proximity to nature, is clearly coded as a representative of Romanticism: "I ill of health, and buried in gloom--she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side--mine the studies of the cloister--I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation--she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path" (172). Yet this recreation of the Wordsworth/ Dorothy dyad in the figures of Egaeus and his cousin is not so much a repetition as an ironic deflation of the Romantic fantasy. As the narrator's obsession with Berenice's teeth suggests, the abstraction of nature into ideas and art becomes a kind of pointless fetishism, whose only outcome is a diseased version of the Romantic epiphany:

In my case the primary object [of fixation] was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance . . . . The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. (173)

In fact, the depiction of Berenice as a figure for a Romantic ideal which Egaeus finds untenable and stifling should hardly come as a surprise to readers who recall not only Poe's long-standing antipathy for Wordsworth, but also the empathetic identifications in the Dupin stories.[4] Egaeus's acquisition of Berenice's teeth grotesquely literalizes Dupin's method of copying the facial expressions of those with whom he wished to empathize; yet empathetic identification and imitation are particularly problematic tools with which to oppose the influence of Romanticism. As Christopher Rollason notes, empathy of Dupin's type is a recurrent and central motif of the Romantic project itself:

This method, with its tendency to leap the subject-object divide, may be seen as a variant of the Romantic concept of the imagination; one may compare Shelley's A Defense of Poetry (1821): "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others," or Keats's 1818 letter to R. Woodhouse: "As to the poetical character . . . it is not itself . . . A Poet . . . has no identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body."[5]

Thus, the battle with Romanticism is in some respect lost before it has begun, since the very devices used by Poe both prescribe, and enact, an endless return upon the past. Egaeus is therefore unable to eliminate Berenice and the Romantic/natural world which she represents--he can bury but cannot kill her.[6]

Yet it seems uncertain, at the very least, how Egaeus would measure his success even if his cousin could have remained decorously dead. In opposition to the natural world represented by Berenice, the narrator has recourse only to scholarship, which is another reminder of the past. Although Poe may assert that he is not writing from within a Romantic tradition, his very anti-Romanticism continues to emulate, or self-consciously to deviate from (which is itself of course a form of influence) other generic precedents. Recall, for example, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which, ostensibly the first story of its kind, takes unavailing pains to disclaim any precedents or influences: "Let it not be supposed * . . that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance" (5). Similarly, as Roger Lewis notes, while Poe maintained both that his vision was purely personal and that it was common intellectual property (denying any debt to Hoffman, Poe wrote that "terror is not of Germany, but of the soul"), he was clearly drawing in part on previous literary depictions of the "fantastic" (Lewis 107). Poe's sense of the inescapability of literary tradition is reflected in "Berenice," in which Egaeus is trapped in his library, with all of its fatal connotations of a past without future: "Here died my mother. Herein was I born . . . . it is not singular that I. . * loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers--it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life" (171). As a result, in his final moments of extreme, even excessive, action, the narrator is a passive and practically unconscious agent of a story that some outside force seems to have written upon him: "It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decipher them, but in vain" (176). Considering that Egaeus is unable even to decipher the writing which is his own life, it is no surprise that his attempt to steal Berenice's teeth qua ideas renders him no more than the blank slate of her impress, which is to say that he falls victim to the inscription of her "dents": the narrator is shown, to his surprise, that his hand "was indented with the impress of human nails" (176).

However, if stories such as "Berenice," "Ligeia," and "Morella" suggest that the past refuses to die, Poe proposes at least two explanations of why it is impossible to kill these reminders of one's own derivative belatedness. On the one hand, as we have been arguing, a Berenice or a Morella cannot simply be buried and forgotten because the attempt to silence her while appropriating her ideas testifies to her continuing influence over her former lover. However, on the other hand Poe's stories also depict, with equal if not greater horror, situations in which it is impossible to kill something or someone because it is already dead. Thus, in "Metzengerstein," the eponymous family easily retains a position of ascendancy over the rivalrous Castle Berliftzing until the last of the latter family, the infirm and doting Count Berliftzing, dies. At this point he becomes an undefeatable enemy because he no longer exists in any form which can be confronted: he is a horse without substance ("not one of the three [men who caught him] could with any certainty affirm that he had, during that dangerous struggle, or at any period thereafter, actually placed his hand upon the body of the beast" [255]) and, most importantly, he "had no particular name" (255)* Similarly, in "The Masque of the Red Death," Prince Prospero manipulates the material world at will but cannot fight the mummer whose "grave-cerements and corpse-like mask . . . [are] untenanted by any tangible form" (260).

The fear that a dead rival cannot be confronted, and thus can never be overcome, suggests an interesting ambivalence encoded within Poe's frequently employed figure of premature burial. There is apparently a component of wish-fulfillment, as well as of anxiety, in the recurrent insistence that those who seem dead are in fact still alive and are thus both willing and able to do battle with their rivals and successors. Notably, the story entitled "The Premature Burial" begins with an explanation for its subject matter which seems misplaced within Poe's works, where the interment of the living is an everyday event. On closer examination, this explanation reveals additional peculiarities, for it insists that certain topics "are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them" (261). As it happens, the story is not even "true" within the context of its own fictional world, since it narrates nothing more than a deluded hallucination of premature burial. Poe's strange stipulation that this story must be founded upon fact is even more puzzling in light of his argument, in "The Poetic Principle," that truth and poetry are mutually exclusive:

The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do . . . . In enforcing a truth *.. we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive the radical and chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. (76)

Why, then, should the narrator of "The Premature Burial" insist on conferring a factual status on that manifestly fictional work if not to distinguish it, by the "radical and chasmal" difference of truth, as an original bearing no resemblance to conventional "poetic modes of inculcation"?

In effect, the assertion of truth underlying "The Premature Burial" contains a rejection of an earlier set of literary conventions: the narrator insists that, in writing this story, he is no "mere romanticist" who "must eschew [such topics], if he do[es] not wish to offend, or to disgust" (261). In other words, this story goes to some lengths to revive the Romanticist as counter-example and rival; which, taken together with the story's conclusion that the threat of premature burial had been merely the narrator's "fancy" (269) and "less the consequence than the cause" (271) of the catalepsy on which he had blamed his "charnel apprehensions" (271), reinforces the notion that there is something appealing, if dangerous, in the fantasy that the tenants of the grave are not yet dead. Finally, the self-proclaimed veracity of this story notwithstanding, it is acknowledged as one of the "bugaboo tales" (270), which are simply the inventions of an anxiety-ridden narrator. The story concludes, however, that such delusions must be overcome or abandoned for the artist to mature and survive: "I became a new man, and lived a man's life . . . . the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful--but . . . they must sleep, or they will devour us--they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish" (270-1).

Hence, in their relation to rivalrous figures who may represent, inter alia, the threat of influences or of the past, Poe's stories are strangely double-sided: on the one hand, presenting a narrator who hopes for the death of his wife and mentor Morella, on the other revealing through fantasies about premature burial a need to keep such figures at least nominally alive. This latter tendency is also manifested in stories such as "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which literalizes the suggestion that one may want to keep a corpse alive past the moment of its natural death. This story's narrator preserves the semblance of life in what is actually "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome--of detestable putridity" (283) with the acknowledged intention of thus having control of the deceased: P-- hypnotizes the dying and dead man simply to test the extent of his own "magnetic influence" (276). It is furthermore explicitly in order to make the dead speak to him--only to him, and only in answer to his questions--that the protagonist conducts this experiment: "M. Valdemar spoke--obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him . . . . To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed utterly insensible" (281).[7]

Moreover, as stories such as "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-tale Heart" indicate, even when life cannot be artificially prolonged in so remarkable a manner, Poe's narrators imagine or fantasize that their victims are still alive and that they are speaking of or to the narrator: tapping on the wall where he has buried his victim, the narrator of "The Black Cat" finds, "No sooner had the reverberation of [his] blows sunk into silence, than [he] was answered by a voice from within the tomb! . . . half of horror and half of triumph" (69-70). The importance of the voice of the dead is underscored in "The Cask of Amontillado," where the murderous protagonist manifests no guilt or qualms about his crime until he realizes that its result is that his victim has ceased to speak: "I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud . . . . No answer. I called again . . . . No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick" (196).

This emphasis on the voice of their victims is echoed in Poe's protagonists' need to have their own words heard. In fact, their own confessions are often the only clue to the crimes committed by villain protagonists who seem otherwise impervious to the microscopic detection devices employed by Poe's police. For example, the narrator of "The Black Cat," who purports to be "above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect" (65), substantiates this claim in his description of the undetectable facade behind which he hides his crime: "I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old . . . When I had finished . . . the wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed" (68-9). However, characters like this one and the narrator of "The Tell-tale Heart" do inevitably confess, motivated by "The Imp of the Perverse": "I had had some experience in these fits of perversity . . . and I remembered well that in no instance I had successfully resisted their attacks. And now my own casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty . . . beckoned me on to death" ("The Imp of the Perverse" 275).

Yet it is not simply the perversity of Poe's culprits which motivates these confessions; as many of the characters admit, their testimonies also respond to a need to leave their mark, particularly in response to having been injured and insulted in the past:

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge . . . . I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ("The Cask of Amontillado" 191)

Moreover, the letter left by Dupin in "The Purloined Letter" makes the literary nature of declaring one's guilt--which is at once a confession and a form of vengeance evident, since the mark which he leaves is two lines from Crebillon's Atree. By copying these lines in his own handwriting, which D-- will be certain to recognize, Dupin rewrites Crebillon's mark or signature (itself already a rewriting of a classical source) as his own and does so explicitly because he wants to force D--to be left with a disconcerting trace of his opponent: "'I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card rack'" (138).

Dupin's claim to write, proleptically, with a view to the effects which he will produce is similar to Poe's own statement of his writing method: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect . . . afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect" ("The Philosophy of Composition" 13-14). In Harold Bloom's model, this is the end of the line: the strong poet, resigned to the fact that he has been influenced, mis-reads and appropriates precursors' texts and then goes on to influence a succeeding generation. Bloom discounts any subsequent "anxiety of influencing" (6) as mere posturing on the part of the influential, or deluded, poet. Yet if attention to the "anxiety of influence" allows us to reread Poe, Poe also compels a revision of Bloom's model of literary history. The over-determined figure of premature burial and the fantasies of disinterment throughout Poe's works suggest that there may also be an anxiety linked to influencing, a fear that one will be buried and forgotten--in literary terms, that one will be surpassed--before one is really dead. Thus, we should note that Dupin's empathy allows him to double not only the criminals but also their victims, as when he imagines that he is the doomed Marie Roget: recreating Marie's thought process, Dupin muses in the first-person, "'I am to meet a certain person for the purpose of elopement, or for certain other purposes known only to myself . . .'" (51).

Poe's anxiety of influencing is most clearly demonstrated in "William Wilson," where this kind of identification or reduplication is uncomfortable even when the other character is one's "better half": "Let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense . . . was far keener than my own" (162). For much of the story William's crisis comes from being imitated by, not from imitating, this wiser and better alter ego: "His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him" (161). In this case, as in the mysteries discussed above, the doubling operates to indicate a similarity or even identity between ostensible adversaries, which finally has disastrous consequences. "William Wilson" further identifies this doubling as violence done by literary inscription (the pen is metaphorically likened to the knife if not the sword), and additionally suggests that this rhetorical violence is destructive to any semblance of "original form": "Interspersed about the room . . . were innumerable benches and desks . . . so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed" (158).

The self-division which results when the protagonist sees his own image reflected is manifested in his descriptions of himself, and specifically of his ability to exercise his "practical wit" (163):

It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him . . . into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavors on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted. (160)

Here, the protagonist is internally as well as externally divided: he is split between serious motives and jocular manifestations, between the desire for success (which he easily achieves in all other circumstances) and his inability to attain it in this case. Moreover, the protagonist's high rate of failure is contrasted with the great success of his double's imitation of him. As "William Wilson" points out, being copied well exacerbates rather than relieves the anxiety of influencing:

How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me, (for it could not justly be termed a caricature), I will not now venture to describe. . . . The school, indeed, did not feel his design . . . . I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin. (161-2)

Ultimately, being copied affects not only the letter (which was stolen, disguised, and replaced in the last of the Dupin mysteries), but in fact the very spirit of the would-be original.

Surrounded by inscriptions which make "original form" an irrecuperable ideal, and thereby deprived of the exercise of his "practical wit," William Wilson cannot help but be both a copier and copied. The stories of premature burial and belated death also reflect this double bind, portraying situations in which the living, who can speak only through the dead, then hear their words reiterated by the voices of others. Notably, in a story such as "'Thou Art the Man,'" when the narrator--and self-proclaimed "Oedipus"--makes the dead return, and specifically when he makes the dead speak, it is necessarily in the narrator's own voice and with his own words that the corpse does so: "For the words which I intended the corpse to speak, I confidently depended upon my ventriloquial abilities" (236). This theatrical performance predictably prompts another, the guilty man, to speak, and in fact to confess his murder of his one-time patron, unwittingly playing out the drama scripted by the narrator (236). This tension between speaking for the dead and speaking one's own words in one's own voice is central to Poe's description of his aesthetic principles, for although he maintains that "the mere oral or written repetition of . . . forms, and sounds, and colours, and odours, and sentiments [is] a duplicate source of delight" ("The Poetic Principle" 77), if "'Uniformity' is the principle" ("The Rationale of Verse" 34), he must reconcile this repetition or uniformity with the need for "The 'Variety' [which] is but the principle's natural safeguard from self-destruction by excess of self" ("Rationale of Verse" 34). In other words, the artist, however determined by his position between the past and future, must proceed "keeping originality always in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest" ("Philosophy of Composition" 13).

Yet this "originality" is of course never "so obvious and so easily attainable" in Poe's Oeuvre. Hence, while the Dupin of "Marie Roget" places a premium on originality--"the proper question in cases such as this, is not so much 'what has occurred?' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before?'" (37)--the note attached by "Mr. Poe" to the end of that story insists that events in the apparently autonomous present are in fact already predetermined. Refuting even those mathematical laws which govern ostensibly discrete moments in time, he refers to the ongoing influence of the Past:

Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown in the third attempt. A suggestion to this effect is usually rejected by the intellect at once. It does not appear that the two throws which have been completed, and which lie now absolutely in the Past, can have influence upon the throw which exists only in the Future . . . . The error here involved--a gross error redolent of mischief--I cannot pretend to expose within the limits assigned me at present . . . . It may be sufficient here to say that it forms one of an infinite series of mistakes. (Emphasis added, 62-3).

This series of mistakes, which extends backwards infinitely like a line of Bloomian misprision, is, moreover, precisely the endlessly repeated mistake of believing in the possibility of endless repetition. The third throw of the dice will necessarily differ from those which preceded it; the Past determines the Future, paradoxically, by mandating constant change. Ultimately, Poe's stories, which he claimed to have "written backwards" ("Edgar Allan Poe" 872), like all mysteries, are as much prophetic anticipations as backward-looking revisions, and his fiction "may be said to have its beginning--at the end, where all works of art should begin" ("Philosophy of Composition" 20).

Notes

1 Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in Brander Matthews, "Poe and the Detective Story," Scribner's Magazine, September 1907; Jorge Luis Borges, "El poeta dei regresso," tr. Christopher Rollason, Cambio 16 440 (11 May 1980): 131; both cited in Rollason, 4.

I should like to thank Bryan Wolf for his helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support.

2 The doubling of Dupin and the Minister D-- has been often remarked. Liahna Klenman Babener's catalogue of the "almost compulsive duplication of structural elements in the tale" and her suggestion that "the two characters somehow constitute a single person" are particularly interesting (326, 332).

3 Harold Bloom discusses the (implicitly male) poet's struggle with the muse's matemal or generative powers: "what is the Primal Scene, for a poet as poet? It is his Poetic Father's coitus with the Muse. There he was begotten? No--there they failed to beget him. He must be self-begotten, he must engender himself upon the Muse his mother" (36-7). For Bloom, this situation is happily resolved for the strong poet in the generation of an heir who confirms his father's greatness: "The strong poet fails to beget himself--he must wait for his Son, who will define him even as he has defined his own Poetic Father" (37). As we have seen, Poe complicates this narrative of patriarchal triumph, in stories in which, instead of giving birth to a son, the Muse endlessly resurrects herself.

4 Significantly, Poe disparaged Wordsworth for anticipating the end of the creative process in its beginning--"As to Wordsworth, I have no faith in him. That he had, in youth, the feelings of a poet I believe . . . but they have the appearance of a better day recollected . . . He was to blame in wearing away his youth in contemplation with the end of poetizing in his manhood"--although, as we shall see below, he describes his own method in remarkably similar terms. ("Letter to B--" 8).

5 Rollason, 9. His citations are from P. B. Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry" (1821) in Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, 1032; and John Keats, letter to R. Woodhouse (27 Oct 1818), in M. B. Forman, ed. The Letters of John Keats, 226-8.

6 This may also explain how, as Barbara Johnson remarks, Poe and his nemesis/influence Wordsworth may in fact be saying the same thing; not because Poe simply copies Wordsworth or cannot misread his way out of the Romantic aesthetic, but because both identify the manner in which poetry relies on the impossibility of reconciling, or even clearly differentiating between repetition and originality: "Wordsworth and Poe are thus telling symmetrically inverse stories about the nature of poetic language. Wordsworth attempts to prevent the poetic figure . . . from repeating itself as an empty, mechanical device of style. But the formula for recollection in tranquillity involves just such a blind, mechanical repetition of the lost language. Poe writes a poem packed with cliches in order to show that those cliches cannot succeed in remaining empty, that there is also a natural passion involved in repetition" (99).

7 The connection to Bloom's theory of influence is particularly clear here. Bloom describes the "Apophrades or the Return of the Dead," in which "the mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own" (141).

Works Cited

Babener, Liahna Klenman. "The Shadow's Shadow: The Motif of the Double in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Purloined Letter.'" The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985.

Johnson, Barbara. "Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language." A World of Difference: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Jordan, Cynthia. "Poe's Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story." American Literature: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography 59:1 (March 1987): 1-19.

Lewis, Roger. "The Figure of the Decadent Artist in Poe, Baudelaire and Swinburne." The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts. Ed. Donald Morse. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

-----. Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984.