The Detective Fiction of Poe and Borges

Author(s): Maurice J. Bennett

Source: Comparative Literature , Summer, 1983, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Summer, 1983), pp. 262-
275
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1770621

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Comparative Literature

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MAURICE J. BENNETT

The Detective Fiction

Of Poe and Borges

PASCAL offers a classic articulation of the dilemma created by the

triumphs of modern science:
"Le silence 6ternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. / Combien de
royaumes nous ignorent !"1 Since Pascal, artists and intellectuals have
combatted the alienation he voices with variations of two major reac-
tions: the near obsessive search for an inherent order, some secret
principle that would reveal the universe as "home," after all, or the
valorization of human schemes as the only possible bulwarks against
the apparent incoherence of the cosmos. "I want, I desire, quite simply,
a structure," writes Roland Barthes. "Of course there is not a happi-
ness of structure; but every structure is habitable, indeed that may be
its best definition."2 Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges share this
desire for a "habitable" space, for a recovery of the lost anthropomor-
phic face of the universe.3 Although their reactions to man's existential
isolation represent distinct poles, their differences may be attributed
largely to the Romantic faith in cosmic unity and the post-Romantic,
modern sense of fragmentation-a difference less of temperament than

1 Blaise Pascal, Pensies II, Vol. XIII of (Euvres, nouvelle 6dition, ed. Lon
Brunschvicg (1904; rpt. Vaduz, 1965), Sec. III, Nos. 206, 207, p. 127.
2 A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1978),
p. 46.
3 The longing for a humanized universe is directly presented in Borges' A
Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York, 1967), where he writes:
"Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms,
mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people.
Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the
image of his own face" (p. 203). And in the peroration that concludes Eureka,
Poe's atomic theory of the universe is revealed as a stratagem for identifying man
with God, thereby reducing the universe to a function of the human will. See The
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902),
XVI, 313-15; hereafter cited in the text by volume and page numbers from this
edition.

262

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

of historical moment. In any case, they both exhibit Pas

tion with an apparently overwhelming universe and
literary forms as expressions of their vision.
The relationship between Poe and Borges, however, tra
similarities in metaphysical and artistic interests. Critic
passing that Borges is the single most prominent perpet
forms pioneered by Poe.4 The detective story and th
turns narrative action into philosophical speculation
notable literary exercises of both writers. Poe is also th
Borges returns most often in praise, criticism, and expl
Thus, inspired by Emerson's observation that "the condi
pation in any man's thought is entering the gate of
must be committed, before you shall be entrusted wi
any party,"6 my interest here lies in those affinities th
Argentine to admire and emulate his North American p
that allow a reading of his detective fiction-particula
"Death and the Compass"-as both comedic parodies a
writings of Poe's tales of the reified mind.7
Borges has recognized Poe as, effectively, the originat

4 No extended study of Borges can avoid the spectre of Poe

repeatedly appears in critical studies of the Argentine's wor
notations of identities in form and content, see Gerard Gene
selon Borges," in Jorge Luis Borges, L'Herne (Paris, 1964), p. 324; Robert E.
Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New
York, 1977), p. 8; and Barton Levi St. Armand, "'Seemingly Intuitive Leaps':
Belief and Unbelief in Eureka," in Poe as Literary Cosmologer: Studies on Eu-
reka, A Symposium, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford, Conn., 1975), p. 14, n. 13.
5 Borges' most extensive tributes to Poe are contained in "El arte narrativo y
la magia," in Discusi6n (Buenos Aires, 1957), pp. 86-91, and "Edgar Allan Poe,"
La Naci6n (Buenos Aires), Oct. 2, 1949, Sec. 2, p. 1. A few of the briefer nota-
tions of his awareness of, debt to, and appreciation of Poe occur in The Aleph and
Other Stories, 1933-1969, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York, 1970),
pp. 237, 273; The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York,
1977), pp. 7-8; Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (New
York, 1964), p. 86 (hereafter cited in the text as 0I); and with Adolfo Bioy
Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni
(New York, 1980), p. 12. References to Borges' Prosa completa (Barcelona,
1980) will appear parenthetically in the text as Pc, followed by volume and page
numbers.
6 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., X (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 374.
7 The present discussion is essentially limited to the relationship between
"Death and the Compass" and Poe's Dupin tales, although its assertions are
applicable to Poe's other two mysteries and to such Borges stories as "The Garden
of Forking Paths." Beyond its scope are the problematic issues raised by Borges'
and Bioy Casares' Six Problems, where the detective genre is reduced to the
absurd (parodied, as the detective's name suggests). Here, my interest is in
Borges' innovations that enrich rather than exhaust the form; for a discussion of
the serious generic and aesthetic implications of Six Problems, see John Sturrock,
Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford, 1977), pp. 36-39.

263

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

tive story. In his An Introduction to American Lite

that Poe's tales of intellect "inaugurate a new genre, th
which has conquered the world," and in his discussi
history in American literature, he adds:
In 1840 Edgar Allan Poe enriched literature with a new g
above all ingenious and artificial; real crimes are not comm
abstract reasoning but by chance, investigation, or confessi
first detective in literature, M. Charles Auguste Dupin of Pari
same time the convention, later classical, that the exploits o
told by an admiring and mediocre friend ... Poe has had m
suffice to mention for the moment his contemporary, Dicken
Chesterton.8

Borges' most extensive commentary on Poe and the genre, however, is

contained in a published lecture delivered at the University of Bel-
grano.9 It is primarily a meditation on the emphases and techniques that
Poe bequeathed to subsequent practitioners, and Borges here enrolls
himself among the North American's conscious imitators. The elements
he addresses, while perhaps illuminating Poe, point directly to his own
concerns: the detective as an outsider existing spiritually and intellec-
tually beyond the conventions of ordinary humanity; the detective story
as an anti-realist genre, a kind of intellectual fantasy; and Poe's crea-
tion of his readers through the kind of narrative he invented.
Borges has written that "each writer creates his precursors" (OI, p.
108; Pc, II, 228), and one of the signal features of his own work is its
conscious engagement with sources and predecessors.'1 Thus, when the
reader encounters the poet and mathematician narrators of "Ibn Hak-
kan al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth," he is reminded of the original
mathematician-poets, C. Auguste Dupin and the Minister D., in "The
Purloined Letter." Borges' naming one of these narrators "Dunraven"
evokes Poe's famous dark bird, while the reference to Poe's work
becomes explicit when the other narrator, Unwin, recalls Poe's advo-
cacy of the principle of simplicity in the construction of narratives.
A more extensive instance of the conscious evocation of his North

8 An Introduction to American Literature, trans. and ed. L. Clark Keating and

Robert O. Evans (New York, 1973), pp. 23, 80-81. In this essay I am less con-
cerned with the historical accuracy of Borges' literary opinions than with his
identification of Poe as a major precursor. For a brief, intelligent history of the
genre up to Poe, his innovations, and some contemporary developments, see
Marianne Kesting, "Auguste Dupin, der Wahrheitsfinder, und sein Leser: In-
wiefern Edgar Allan Poe nicht der Initiator der Detectivgeschichte war," Poetica,
10 (1978), 53-65.
9 "El cuento policial," in Borges oral (Buenos Aires, 1979), pp. 65-80; here-
after cited in the text as Bo.
10 See Ronald J. Christ, The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion (New
York, 1969), pp. 33-40, and Gerard Genette, "L'Utopie litteraire," in Figures I
(Paris, 1966), pp. 123-24.
264

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

American mentor occurs in "Death and the Compass"

Borges claims, takes place in his native Buenos Aires
fictional city, if not quite Paris, is certainly gallicized: th
place in the H6tel du Nord, whose literal reference is
the Rue de Toulon is the Paseo Col6n; and the villa wh
maxes, Triste-le-Roy, was the former Hotel las Delicias.11
resemble the geographic displacements of the Dupin stori
Borges attributes to Poe's desire to preempt any ques
and one he admits imitating for similar reasons. But they
a form of literary allusion, establishing literary precedent
tale and requesting that the reader not only confront th
fore him but also engage the subtext from which it explic
For both Poe and Borges, the detective story stand
antithesis to the chaos of human experience. Poe makes t
tale the prose equivalent of the poem, which, as the realm
sentiment, becomes the "one circle of thought distinct
marked out from amid the jarring and tumultuous chaos
telligence," the "evergreen and radiant Paradise which
knows, and knows alone, as the limited realm of his a
281). Poe attributes his sense of disorder directly to t
science and industrialism. "The Colloquy of Monos and
the deformation of nature by "huge smoking cities" and
of imagination and taste as the causes of man's se
"Beauty," "Nature," "Life" (IV, 203-04). The restrictiv
vision of the early nineteenth century contributed to
mist" that surrounded man's temporal existence and that
eye of the philosopher could penetrate.
Borges' sense of disorder transcends Poe's historica
chaos is often presented as the informing principle of a
"most notorious attribute is complexity."2 Borges susp
is no universe in the orgariic, unifying sense inherent in
word" and that "it is doubtful that the world has a mean
doubtful still, the incredulous will observe, that it ha
triple meaning" (0I, pp. 104, 128; Pc, II, 224, 241).
particular historical change that Poe laments is subsumed
metareality: "The tumultuous general catastrophes-f
demics-are but a single sorrow, illusorily multiplied in m
(01, p. 178; Pc, II, 292). And, finally, in the Belgra
11 See Borges' notes to the tale in The Aleph, p. 268.
12 In the prologue to El informe de Brodie (Buenos Aires, 197
of his collected stories: "I do not dare claim that they are sim
such thing in the world as a single page, a single word that is [si
all postulate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is co
English translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
265

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

offers this apology for the police tale: "In this our
there is something that, very humbly, has maintain
tues: the police story. Since a police story without a be
dle, and an ending is incomprehensible . . . I would
the police novel, that it needs no defense; read now wi
dain, it is saving order in an epoch of disorder" (Bo
There begins to emerge, then, an essential differ
conception and the role of the order that these men att
a difference originating in the idea of meaning as obje
in the universe, hence, discoverable, or as deriving
activity of the human intelligence, as constructed. For
story reflects a preexistent divine order from which m
erroneous methods of investigation and inadequate
tion. Order depends on a certain aesthetic distance f
object and a certain obliqueness of observation: to close
brush strokes of a painting are "'confusion worse c
"a star may be seen more distinctly in a sidelong su
direct gaze" (VIII, 215).
Poe repeatedly employs the metaphor of stargazing f
vision to which reality may be subjected: to look direc
object of its enchantment; instead, it must be beheld i
obliqueness is central to Poe's aesthetics and epistemolo
opposition is between the direct procedures of science
mind and the indirect processes of poetry and the ima
ceptual organs blinded by the fragmentary details
piricism, existence may appear as a confusion, but o
harmony-summed up by the Platonic IovULK4-are t
ultimately define Poe's universe (IV, 204). It is an im
tion of reciprocally implicated cause and effect, which
tinguishable, also become mutual reflections that can o
analogically-that is, through metaphor (IV, 202;
ence's only positive function is to extend "the range of
which man comprehends God's nature and, ultimate
192). Eureka is Poe's definitive explanation of the
"plot" of God, his ultimate confession of faith in cosm
On its deepest level, then, Poe's detective fiction is
metic, mirroring the formal proportion and echoing th
universe. Borges' skepticism denies his tales an equivale

13 See Poe, Works, IV, 166; VII, xxxiv; XIV, 189-90; XVI, 164. For an
informative discussion of the epistemological implications of Poe's aesthetic of
the oblique and the Arabesque, see David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old: The
Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Garden City,
N.Y., 1974), pp. 55, 57-58.

266

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

endorsement. In the end, they are self-justifying, for "t

of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe" places
man structures (01, p. 104; Pc, II, 224). He advances h
istic image, the labyrinth, as an existential consolation: t
designed to bewilder man, but however frightening or re
goal may be, it constitutes a purpose-meaning. The la
Borges' response to Barthes's desire for a "habitable" s
presents a "hidden cosmos" in which there is a "cente
everything is foreseen," and he concludes that the "vis
secutive and ordering human intelligence is really magnif
The universe itself incites man to constructive proje
skepticism as to the existence of cosmic order, the do
Borges returns most often is the pantheistic notion of the
emanation of God. He retrieves from the Vedic script
Schopenhauer the idea that the world is a dream of co
that all things ultimately find their meaning in the sleep
Dreamer. Each encountered fact presupposes the "inco
verse," and, conversely, "the universe needs the least
mere possibility of this order imposes certain obligations
"We must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture
definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God's se
(01, p. 104; Pc, II, 224). This ancient notion of the univ
text and Poe's version of the same idea-the cosmos a
that must be read analogically-point to the world's final
For both writers, man is launched on a ceaseless quest
plot, to decipher the text, to discover the center of the co
must, to invent them. The identifying human trait thus
physical speculation-"conj ecture."16
Poe and Borges turn to the ratiocinative tale as the liter
most effectively includes both the quest for meaning and
ciphering of uncovered symbols; to both men, it repre
for the ordering mind. The man who creates order out
geneity of casual fact duplicates the divine act of creation
individual who reads order into the same heterogeneity

14 "Jorge-Luis Borges," Magazine Litteraire [Paris], 148 (M

and Discusidn, p. 42.
15 From "La poesia gauchesca," where Borges writes: "It is w
when asked how long it had taken him to paint one of his No
replied: All my life. With equal rigor he could have said that it
centuries that preceded the moment in which he painted it. Fr
application of the law of causality it follows that the least of fac
inconceivable universe and, inversely, that the universe needs t
(Discusidn, p. 11).
16 For Poe passages on the intuitive "guess" as superior to rea
VI, 205-06; XVI, 197-98; XIV, 187.
267

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

exegetical exercise that confounds him with the cre

nists of their detective fiction are drawn from this dua
nature of meaning: as constructed or discovered. Th
according to Poe's and Borges' conceptions of man
tionship to the universe.
Poe, for instance, could assert with confidence that th
the artist, is impelled to creation (discovery) by the co
his own intellectual and spiritual composition and t
"In lauding Beauty, Genius merely evinces a filial
183). The absolute proportion inherent in the universe
in the mind of the poet, who, in turn, suffers a su
longing for that order, harmony, bovtLKcy (XIV, 175;
ever, Borges' "consecutive and ordering human intel
in its attempt to create order; in fact, that very effort
of its alienation. He finds a symbol of the heroic isolat
intellectual in Paul Valery, of whom he writes: "The
sion that Val&ry performed (and continues to perform
posed lucidity to men in a basely romantic age, in t
of Nazism and dialectical materialism, the age of the a
doctrine and the traffickers in surre'alisme" (01, p.
points directly to the central theme here when he add
self is "a derivation of Edgar Allan Poe's Chevalier
conceivable God of the theologians." Homage to the
directly to the American poet who, also in a roman
meant inspiration and affective indulgence, had the te
that literature results from intelligent choice and con
This international trio comes together in its mutual pr
"lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventur
the general chaos of human experience.
Borges observes, however, that Poe never combined h
ror with those of the bizarre, that he never set C. Au
task of solving the ancient crime of the Man of the Cro
ing the image that terrified the masked Prince Prospe
of black and scarlet" (OI, p. 82; Pc, II, 205). The art
is the ceaseless penetration into the labyrinth of the w
perusal of the infinite text of the universe. His Dupin
the final darkness even if he is ultimately lost. "Death
thus attempts the conflation of horror and bizarrenes
absent in Poe. Chief Detective Erik L6nnrot attempts t
der of the prominent Hebraist, Doctor Marcel Yarm
meeting of the Third Talmudic Congress. Lonnrot is an
is more attracted by the esoterica of the rabbi's traveli
outri details surrounding his death and subsequent cri
268

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

any mundane criminal motivations. There is an unimagin

Treviranus who despises what he considers L6nnrot's
surdities, just as Poe's original Prefect G. affected conte
similar predilections. The irony is that the Inspector
as to the motive and nature of the crime is correct-
avenging Poe's maligned policeman and suggesting t
tale occupies from the mere whodunit or its more philo
tivated Poe original.
L6nnrot's intellectuality and his distance from the
indicated in the tale's opening paragraph, where Borges
"believed himself a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin
something of the adventurer in him, even a little of th
L6nnrot, Poe's Frenchman becomes Germanic, a rac
metaphysics and philosophy. This specific tendency of h
faces immediately as he rejects the Inspector's comm
pothesis as "possible, but not very interesting" (L, p
He dismisses objective "reality" in favor of a "rabbin
and thereby inverts Dupin's celebrated method. In
Letter" Poe's detective admits the "interesting" chara
fect's methods but remarks their inappropriateness f
criminal involved. L6nnrot's obsession with the cabalistic and Talmudic
trappings that surround the crimes ultimately parodies Dupin's similar
predilection for the esoteric. In Poe, such tendencies precede the detec-
tive's involvement in the solution of the crime and exist primarily as
symbols of his intellectual distance from common humanity. Here, they
are posterior to the crime and are artificially introduced into the process
of its solution; they are L6nnrot's response to the disorder represented
by the crime and, ultimately, prove to be his undoing.
The tale concludes with the notorious hoodlum, Red Scharlach,
whose name echoes Lannrot's own (Red Lion), explaining that, al-
though the original murder was accidental and proceeded from the
simple motive of robbing the Tetrarch of Galilee, he had himself spe-
cifically designed other incidents in order to even an old score against
Ldnnrot. "I have premeditated everything," he exults, having sworn
"by all the gods of fever and of the mirrors" that he would "weave a
labyrinth" around the detective (L, pp. 85-86; Pc, I, 409). He succeeds,
and L6nnrot is killed, thus presenting the reader of Poe with a series of
significant inversions. In Poe, Dupin always reveals the ratiocinative
sequence through which he solves the crime; here, the criminal both
perpetrates the atrocity and solves the mystery. In "The Purloined
17 Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald Yates and
Frank Irby (New York, 1962), p. 76, hereafter cited in the text as L; and Pc, I,
401.

269

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Letter" Dupin delights in his revenge against the M

him a taunting note; one hundred years later, the rein
original antagonists find the tables reversed, and th
evens the score against the supreme detective.
The death of the detective and the triumph of evil a
most important and suggestive of Borges' permutation
sor's material, for they controvert the implicit assum
a Poe tale is built. The moral thrust of a Poe detective
establishment of conventional order. This derives from his notion of a
harmonious universe, and the narrative reenacts the original divine
creation of order from chaos and its maintenance against the forces of
disruption. The three Parisian tales and "Thou Art the Man" end with
the solution of a crime that frees the innocent, condemns the guilty, and
sets the social universe right again. Dupin's triumph over D. is a sym-
bolic expression of faith in God's triumph over His antagonist; chaos
is defeated and cosmos is guaranteed. The suppositions informing this
fiction are prerequisites for a work like Eureka.
The moral implications of "Death and the Compass" are much more
sinister. Instead of Poe's consolatory discovery-or recovery-of order,
there is the implication that any possible cosmic scheme may be spe-
cifically framed not for man's salvation but for his annihilation. An early
version of this idea appears in Borges' essay commemorating the fourth
centenary of Buenos Aires, where he writes of the gradual absorption
and extinction of the present's racial variety by an imminent "New
Man" in whom all would be confounded.s8 In "The Immortal" the
questing protagonist finally reaches the city of the gods only to discover
a suprahuman reality whose conceptual impenetrability fills him with
an "incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with
more intellectual horror than palpable fear" (L, p. 110; Pc, II, 14)-a
city "so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the
midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in
some way even jeopardizes the stars" (L, p. 111; Pc, II, 15). As long
as it exists, even as a possibility, mankind is enfeebled and life impo-
tent. Finally and most explicitly, he writes in "Three Versions of
Judas" of the heresiarch Nils Runeberg who, having "discovered" that
Jesus and Judas were one, also discovers that "God did not want His
terrible secret divulged on earth" (L, p. 99; Pc, I, 425). His punish-
ment is madness and death.
The latter tale also offers a more specifically illuminating theologi-
cal framework for L6nnrot's behavior. In one of his customary cata-
logues of precedents and analogies, Borges lists:
18 See "Tareas y destino de Buenos Aires," in Homenaje a Buenos Aires en
el cuarto centenario de su fundaci6n (Buenos Aires, 1936), pp. 530-31.
270

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

Elijah and Moses, who on the mountain top covered their face
see God; Isaiah, who was terrified when he saw the One whose
earth; Saul, whose eyes were struck blind on the road to Da
Simeon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous sorcerer John of
Viterbo, who became mad when he saw the Trinity; the Midrashim, who abhor
the impious who utter the Shem Hamephorash, the Secret Name of God. (L, p. 99;
Pc, I, 425)

L6nnrot provides a secular reenactment of the ancient blasphemy

against God's divine inaccessibility. He duplicates the Gnostic sin
Tolmca, the sacrilegious rashness of curiosity concerning divine things
-the first line of the tale identifies his "reckless discernment.""9 Once
he has begun reading Yarmolinsky's library of books on God's unmen-
tionable name, he is no longer interested in solving the crime per se; he
ignores the official police investigation to indulge in a private theo-
logical search. On the way to his final encounter with Scharlach, "he
had very nearly deciphered the problem; mere circumstances, reality
(names, prison records, faces, judicial and penal proceedings) hardly
interested him now" (L, p. 82; Pc, I, 407).
L6nnrot's rejection of circumstantial reality finds its source in
Borges' distinction, cited earlier, between an apparently incoherent
universe and the heroic magnificence of provisional human structures.
L*nnrot informs Treviranus that while reality may avoid being interest-
ing no hypothesis may negate that obligation, and in an interview
Borges justifies that form of extended hypothesis, philosophy, as an
aid to living: "I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of
haziness, but that haziness is all to the good. If you're a materialist, if
you believe in hard and fast things, then you're tied down by reality
... So that, in a sense, philosophy dissolves reality, but as reality is not
always too pleasant, you will be helped by that dissolution."20 However,
as with Nils Runeberg in "Judas," the price of L6nnrot's metaphysical
curiosity is annihilation. As usual, Borges makes the literary and
philosophical background of the tale quite explicit. Scharlach seduces
L6nnrot to his destruction with the idea of the Tetragrammaton-"the
unutterable name of God." Arriving at the scene of the tale's climax,
L6nnrot considers that only a single day "separated him from the mo-
ment long desired by the seekers of the Name," and when he encounters
his nemesis, he asks, "Scharlach, are you looking for the Secret Name ?"
(L, pp. 83, 84; Pc, I, 407, 409). Further, Borges writes that "tradition
numbers ninety-nine names of God; the Hebraists attribute that im-
perfect number to magical fear of even numbers; the Hasidim reason

19 See Andr6-Marie Jean Festugiere, Les Doctrines de l'dme, Vol. III of La

Revelation d'Herm-s trismigiste (Paris, 1953), pp. 63-103.
20 Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York, 1968),
pp. 142-43.
271

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

that that hiatus indicates a hundredth name-the A

p. 78; Pc, I, 403). It is on the hundredth day of the
L6nnrot solves the crime and is killed. The police
search for the identity of an unknown criminal-is thu
the metaphysical search for God. In both cases, the
revealed; in both, the revelation of the secret name en
annihilation.

L6nnrot's death, however, points to a larger issue in Borges' work.

He consistently denies the ontological validity of the discrete historical
personality and posits a meta-identity beyond space and time and syn-
onymous with the very idea of being. As a consequence, he is attracted
to epistemologies that conflate subject and object.21 L6nnrot and
Scharlach become an instance of the obliteration of circumstantial dis-
tinctions: the notes to the tale assert that the two men are really a
single character and that the story is the account of a suicide.22 Borges
once again makes explicit what Poe only suggests or leaves to critical
interpretation: the poetic and mathematical interests shared by Dupin
and D., their similar initials, and Dupin's theory that to understand
anyone one must essentially become that person-all point to their
shared identity. If D. is an example of "that monstrum horrendum,
an unprincipled man of genius" (VI, 52), then Dupin, who outsmarts
him but who is no less a moral and intellectual anomaly, is a monstrum
bonum, a principled man of genius. Both writers offer a vision of su-
preme mind in its disparate and complementary functions: the creator
of an order that can be benevolent or malevolent, good or evil. As noted
earlier, Dupin's victory expresses a faith in an ultimately beneficent
universe; Lonnrot's death calls that universe into question.
Inherent in the identification of the detective and the criminal is the
conflation of creation and exegesis.23 To solve the crime is to recon-
struct it, to duplicate the original series. But Poe's detective fiction
concentrates primarily on reading the problematic text of experience.
The murder of the L'Espanaye women in "The Murders in the Rue
21 In "El tiempo circular," Borges writes that "if the destinies of Edgar Allan
Poe, the Vikings, Judas Iscariot, and my reader are secretly the same destiny-the
only possible destiny-universal history is the history of a single man" (Historia
de la eternidad, Buenos Aires, 1979, p. 102). And in "The Immortal," he adds,
"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa,
I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a
tedious way of saying that I do not exist ... I have been Homer; shortly, I shall
be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead" (L, pp. 114-
15, 118; Pc, II, 19, 22).
22 The Aleph, p. 269.
23 For the analogy (author : reader :: criminal : detective) inherent in the de-
tective story genre, see Tzvetan Todorov's summary of S. S. Van Dine's original
twenty rules for the form in "The Typology of Detective Fiction," collected in
The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), p. 49.
272

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

Morgue" is surrounded by diverse interpretations of the

guage of the criminal, which leaves Dupin with the
penetrating a specifically linguistic ambiguity that is not
the creative intelligence but inherent in the disorder
"Marie Roget," however, is devoted primarily to the
of the conflicting hypotheses that appear in the Pari
"The Purloined Letter" focuses on the oblique vision (
his green glasses) that allows Dupin to "read" the i
study and retrieve the letter.
"Death and the Compass" is a more conscious and bal
tion of the reciprocal nature of reading and writing
creation. According to contemporary theories of the l
ence, every text encodes a specific reader.24 Borges m
this point when he claims that today's readers of detectiv
in some sense, creatures of Poe, that his fiction had t
capable of understanding it (Bo, pp. 66-68). Similarly,
L6nnrot that although newspaper accounts led the p
that the murders were triple, "I, nevertheless, intersp
signs that would allow you, Erik Ldnnrot, the reasoner, t
that the series was quadruple" (L, p. 86; Pc, I, 411
achievement, then, is an act of reading and construct
solves the crime nor prevents his own death, "but he
divining the secret morphology behind the fiendish serie
participation of Red Scharlach" (L, p. 76; Pc, I, 401).
Scharlach and L6nnrot mutually compose the mini-text
and its solution embedded in the encompassing narrative.
events that comprise this text is designed for L6nnrot al
encoded reader. As these events are meaningless without
intellectual passions and eccentricities, his reading o
them duplicates Scharlach's act of creation.
The two men even read the same books-Yarmolinsky
the Hasidic Sect and Leusden's Philologus Hebraeco-G
24 See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Comm
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Md., 1974
mode, How We Read Novels, Fourth Gwilym James Memori
ampton, Eng., 1975). In For a New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet w
from neglecting him, the author today proclaims his absolute ne
cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he
longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed u
the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn
world-and thus to learn to invent his own life" (trans. Richar
York, 1966, p. 156). And Borges himself observes, "One literat
another, either before or after it, not so much because of the tex
ner in which it is read. If I were able to read any contempora
for example-as it would be read in the year 2000, I would kno
would be like in the year 2000" (OI, p. 164; Pc, II, 272).
273

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

plete with underlined passages-one in order to comp

order to decipher, the present text. The narrative beco
tion of texts created and made intelligible by the mutu
analogously informed writer-reader team, an immediat
Borges' assertion that "a book is not an isolated entity;
an axis of innumerable narrations" (OI, p. 164; Pc,
level, the two men become one in precisely the sam
and reader conflate in any text, which they mutually
sense, the murder-or suicide-that climaxes the tale
bolic rendering of that dying into the text proposed b
post-Romantic theories of authorship, and an examp
necessary relinquishing of separate, private reality
the aesthetic experience.25
Borges proposes that "every cultivated man is a
p. 76; Pc, II, 199) and that metaphysics is "the only
finality of any theme" (OI, p. xiv). The metaphysical a
tendency Poe embeds in the ratiocinative tale by
rather than "Beauty" its defining goal (XI, 109) be
constituent of the Borgesian narrative. For both write
story becomes a vehicle for the expression of significa
and philosophical tenets. Poe's idea that genius incor
of intelligence is directly illustrated in Dupin, the
creative and resolvent mind. His belief that truth resides in the surface
relationships among things is illustrated in D.'s tactics for concealing
the letter and in the explicit rejection of the police instinct to search in
depth. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" justifies the exaltation of
the poetic mind, with an implicit justification of the universe that Poe
defines as the thought of God. "The Purloined Letter" accomplishes
those purposes while dramatizing Poe's aesthetic conception of the
universe.
The absence of a private religion like that which underlies a Poe
tale renders "Death and the Compass" less the reflection of a meta-
physic than the exploration of philosophical positions that Borges finds
haunting or attractive. The oriental idea of the identity of the seeker
and the sought, subject and object, surfaces in the identity shared by
the apparent antagonists. To observe Borges' writing returning re-
peatedly to Schopenhauer's notion that all men share complicity in
their own fate is to view L6nnrot's death as a self-willed act and to

25 For contemporary expressions of this idea, see Roland Barthes, "The Death
of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow, 1977),
pp. 142-48, and Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F.
Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), pp. 116-18.

274

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 POE AND BORGES

make the narrative itself that objectification of will and

the literary text, in which both writer and reader lose th
The general stylistic, structural, and thematic tenden
and the Compass" must be read as an intimate engage
body of Poe's detective fiction, but especially with "
Letter." Almost all of its major features may be trac
indirectly to the pioneering effort of the nineteenth
American, and, although it constitutes a signal instanc
of many occasions on which we sense that Borges is imita
under Poe's direct inspiration. However, the literary r
tween the two transcends the issue of mere influence;
presents the inevitable confrontation of a late writer
major precursor but with the originator of those very fo
the necessary vehicles and expressions of his vision. F
confrontation is conscious and desired as he makes Poe's fiction into an
aesthetic resource, part of the material of composition. It is also an
aesthetic consequence of his temperament and philosophy. "Fate takes
pleasure in repetitions, variants, symmetries," he writes ;26 "Death and'
the Compass" is a conscious exercise in literary vision and critical
revision.

University of Maryland

26 A Personal Anthology, p. 15; Antologia personal (Buenos Aires, 1961), p.

21.

275

This content downloaded from

83.37.215.10 on Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:40:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms