Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity

Poe’s stories engage with the history Bruno Latour outlines when he claims that, from the development of modernity in the seventeenth century forward, “the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” and that this separation hinders us from establishing any “direct relations between the representation of nonhumans and the representation of humans, between the artificiality of facts and the artificiality of the Body Politic.” According to Latour, “the word ‘representation’ is the same,” but the conditions of modernity render “any likeness between the two senses of the word unthinkable.”² Poe’s work is an exercise in the unthinkable; his animal representations locate us in the terrain where American literature negotiates between the two uses of representation and shows that their function as synonyms and opposites is central to the way biopolitics operates.

Key to that inquiry is his invention of two new genres: in writing tales of ratiocination, Poe simultaneously generated the genre of detective fiction and became “the inaugural true crime writer.”³ Participating equally in (detective) fiction and (true-crime) nonfiction, his works pit the imaginary and the empirical against each other. Franco Moretti maps that confrontation onto the relationship between the detective and the criminal, where the latter “has created a situation of semantic ambiguity, thus questioning the usual forms of human communication and human interaction. In this way, he has composed an audacious poetic work. The detective, on the other hand, must dispel the entropy, the cultural equiprobability that is produced by and is a relevant aspect of the crime: he will have to reinstate the univocal links between signifiers and signifieds. In this way, he must carry out a scientific operation.”⁴ Detective fiction is a key genre for exploring those two contradictory modes of representation in their relation to subjectivity. The genre takes the illegal taking of life as its point of departure: the inaugurating event is the death of the murder victim.⁵ That death, says Moretti, precipitates a “return to the beginning”;⁶ that is, it inaugurates a process by which the narration tries to recover its own precipitating event and by which the criminal justice system keeps having to return to an act of its own negation and violation. That search for the narrative’s own origins also includes a search for the origins of a narrative of subjectivity, which detective fiction simultaneously negates and inaugurates. On the one hand, detective fiction is premised, as Moretti puts it, on “the individualistic ethic of ‘classic’ bourgeois culture”—that is, on homo oeconomicus as the outcome of a particular liberal history of subject formation. On the other hand, that liberal subject is under several forms of erasure in detective fiction, which pits “the individual (in the guise of the criminal)” against “the social organism (in the guise of the detective)” and thereby creates a tension between a society “conceived of as a ‘contract’ between independent entities” and one imagined “as an organism or social body.” That social body is established through a recursive set of individual deaths that amount, as Moretti has argued, to the death of individualism: “For the stereotypes to live, the individual must die, and then die a second time in the guise of the criminal.” Moreover, the detective “sacrifices his individuality to his work … [and] prefigures and legitimates the sacrifices of the other individuality—the criminal’s.”⁷ Detective fiction produces a set of social deaths; it does not merely stage the mechanisms of biopower but is deeply complicit with them.

But Poe’s detective fiction plays with and resists the larger genre’s complicities. If detective fiction ascribes “the individualistic ethic … to the criminal,” Poe questions that ethic in the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by making the criminal—that is, by Moretti’s definition, the author of a “poetic work”—an animal.⁸ Associating individuality and poesis with animals, Poe’s fiction develops a practice and a theory of animal representation that not only critiques biopower’s operations but imagines the negation of subjectivity as the grounds for new representative and representational possibilities.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841, 1845), the newspaper account of the unfolding police investigation concludes: “A murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all its particulars, was never before committed in Paris—if indeed a murder has been committed at all.”⁹ In the context of the newspaper report, this aside makes no sense: How can there be a doubt that “a murder has been committed” when we have just heard of one corpse having been thrust up a chimney and the other having been decapitated? The end of the sentence undermines its beginning, which declared “a murder” to have been committed, and creates a moment of doubt whose object is the validity of Poe’s own account, his own true crime report on “the murders in the Rue Morgue.”¹⁰ This moment of textual contradiction not only strikes at the core of the newspaper’s query but undermines the interpretative validity of the framing narrative—Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” That rupture in sense-making places the question “if indeed a murder has been committed at all” at the center of Poe’s work.

The presence of two victims is not refuted. How and under what circumstances would a murder not have been committed? The newspaper’s aside anticipates the story’s resolution: it asks whether the actions of the Ourang-Outang (as spelled in Poe’s story) who killed the two women can be considered “murder.” In the context of the police investigation that frames the newspaper account, the answer to that question must meet certain judicial criteria to qualify as “criminal homicide with malice aforethought.”¹¹ The definition of murder calls for a specific capacity: not only the capacity for thought, but also the capacity for a temporally forward-looking (afore)thought that carries a moral component (malice). Moreover, for homicide to be “criminal” implies that a legal subject carries it out. The newspaper calls into question whether the mystery at the heart of the tale is solved and solvable. Although Detective C. Auguste Dupin’s investigation ultimately makes clear how the murders were committed, the question whether murder was committed remains unanswered. The judicial system never brings anyone to justice for the deaths, and, in that sense, these deaths remain outside of the purview of criminal prosecution that would make them murders. The question the story raises and fails to resolve is precisely “Who dunnit?”—that is, whether the Ourang-Outang has the forethought, the moral capacity, and the legal standing required to commit murder.

Poe’s story raises a fundamental question about subjectivity and about our ability to interpret and “read” that subjectivity. Unhinging verbal representation from the ability to capture and express the subject adequately, Poe indicates that we must look elsewhere; we must also examine the body to understand subjectivity, and this understanding will be physically mediated.¹² In the 1845 version of his story published in Tales, Poe explains that “the mental features discoursed of as analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects.”¹³ The 1845 text, on which most scholars have based their work on Poe’s tale, later gives a clue how we are to read “effects” when it refers to “phrenologists” in distinguishing analytical power from ingenuity.¹⁴ That reference to phrenology, the now discredited “science” of mapping cognitive and moral abilities onto the body, is far more pronounced in the originally published version of the tale, which included an additional paragraph that preceded the one just quoted: “It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not the actual discovery and location of an organ of analysis.”¹⁵

Although this emphasis on analysis seems to draw attention to Dupin’s role in the story, Poe in fact links the detective early on to the Ourang-Outang when he writes: “As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.”¹⁶ On the most basic level, the simile establishes a link between someone of physical strength and someone of analytic strength. But Poe presses beyond that analogy: the story repeatedly describes the murderer by his strength, and in that sense the “strong man” invoked here refers to the murderer.¹⁷ Thus, the sentence constructs a parallel between the murderer and the detective. But Poe complicates that parallel further yet. When the murderer turns out to be an Ourang-Outang, this initial reference to a “strong man” would seem to be misleading in that the murderer is strong but not a man. Poe uses that seeming misdirection to frame his narrative in relation to fundamental questions regarding human and animal subjectivity. In Poe’s time, a synonym for the word Ourang-Outang was wild man.¹⁸ In the discourse that emerged in eighteenth-century naturalism, that wild man was both a colonial subject and a figure of liminal humanity/animality (what Agamben might call a “wolf-man” and what is here configured as an ape-man). The very thing that the story seemingly reveals to be true—that the murderer is “strong” without being a “man”—is called into question by this synonym. Poe seems to confound our ability to disentangle the bodily from the analytic in this opening. Instead of separating the analytical subject, Dupin, from the object of analysis, the Ourang-Outang, Poe places them in proximity to one another. The question the story’s unresolved inquiry into murder then raises is not solely a question about the murderer’s specific identity, but a question about subjectivity as such.¹⁹

It is, of course, nothing new to suggest that Poe’s stories reveal a deep interest in and deep anxiety about matters of subjectivity. Scholarly interest in Poe has centered on this issue, though between the two major schools of Poe criticism—the psychoanalytical and the historicist—there has been much disagreement about the appropriate terms in which this investigation should be framed. The psychoanalytic school of reading Poe has by and large privileged an approach that reads his work as highly symbolic and has rejected literal readings even among its own ranks. For instance, one of the founders of this psychoanalytic approach to Poe, Marie Bonaparte, in the late 1940s read “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as a particularly violent Oedipal triangle in which the Ourang-Outang represented the male infant.²⁰ Her work has been criticized for depending “on a style of anatomical literalization now out of fashion, discredited in an era in which psychoanalytic critics rightfully prefer textual and rhetorical criticism to readings that, as [Peter] Brooks notes, mistakenly choose as their objects of analysis ‘the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text.’”²¹ The work of Jacques Lacan especially has privileged a reading of the letter in Poe’s stories—that is, a privileging of the symbolic order and the slippage of the signifier, on the one hand, and an insistence on the inaccessibility of the real and imaginary, on the other.²² Dissatisfied with this emphasis on individual subjectivity (however fragmented and mediated), historicist scholars have integrated Poe into the antebellum literary, cultural, and historical landscape. Reintroducing both the body and the body politic to his work, they have succeeded especially in capturing Poe’s complicated racial politics. Arguing that Poe’s notions of subjectivity depend on a racial unconscious, critics such as Toni Morrison have documented the centrality of slavery to Poe’s works.²³

As much as they differ from one another, these critical assessments of Poe share a fundamental approach to the question I am raising here in that they both read the Ourang-Outang as symbolic—of the infant and his primitive impulses, on the one hand, and as an index of Poe’s own or his era’s racist association of African Americans with apes, on the other.²⁴ In both contexts, the question I am asking about animals’ relation to subjectivity is a critical heresy that risks being hopelessly literal and therefore at best naive, at worst complicit with the racism to which such literal reading has all too often been in service. Keenly aware of these dangers, I hope nevertheless to take up the question that I have located as being at the heart of Poe’s enterprise: the question of the animal in its bearing on our understanding of subjectivity and of reading as not only a symbolic act, but also a corporeal process. Although I have so far been focusing on “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and will anchor much of my discussion in that text, animals are in fact present in and central to virtually all of Poe’s works; a brief catalog includes the title characters in “The Black Cat,” “Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Raven.” Indeed, Poe’s most famous work, “The Raven,” centers on an animal that by his own account he chose as a “non-reasoning creature capable of speech,”²⁵ a figure for the conundrum that psychoanalytic criticism confronts in letting go of notions of linguistic intentionality but brushes aside in insisting that the subject is always verbal and the verbal subject always already human. Poe asks us to question those certainties and to inquire anew into the relationships between verbal representation and subjectivity with all their ethical and legal repercussions.

In characterizing Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Eliot described him as having suffered an “arrested” development.²⁶ As Jonathan Elmer has argued, Eliot reads Poe as “both childish and sick, sick because childish.”²⁷ Dismissive as these comments sound, they give us a vantage point into Poe’s fascination with childhood as a scene of self-making and unmaking, a fascination that puts him in dialogue with John Locke’s educational theories in their emphasis on children’s relationship to animals. Although Poe rarely describes children per se in his works, he often stages an inquiry into childish behavior and children’s development. Central to that inquiry are the relationship between children and animals and the role that relationship plays for the formation of subjectivity.

The most sustained example of this interest occurs in “The Black Cat,” which stages the protagonist’s evolution and devolution through his relationship to animals:

This passage pivots between two ways of framing the affective relation to animals: the frame of bestiality that I outlined in the previous chapters and the frame of Lockean pedagogy that I explore here and in subsequent chapters. Poe depicts a scene of bestiality in these two paragraphs. Although he initially seems to be invoking merely an emotional connection that ties the speaker’s “tenderness of heart” to the “love of a brute,” the passage constructs this affection in relation to bestiality by tying it to the speaker’s growing “manhood” and to the (incomplete) transfer of his (physical) affection to his wife. Poe emphasizes that the speaker relates directly to the animals’ bodies—he enjoys “feeding and caressing them.” Instead of abandoning this connection, the speaker intensifies his relationship to animals, and they become one of his “principal sources of pleasure” as he enters a stage of sexual maturity and develops into “manhood”; he derives intense “gratification” from his relationship to animals. Although this gratification seems to lead him to his marriage, he does not (fully) transfer his affections to his wife. She sets out to find any “opportunity for procuring” for him a range of “domestic pets” of a “most agreeable kind” and thus perpetuates his relationship to animals.

But the passage also invokes the assumption prevalent in nineteenth- century children’s literature that we learn to be human by being taught how to be humane. John Locke’s widely read Thoughts on Education (1693) made animals themselves central to children’s education. As I discuss more fully in the next chapter, Locke suggests that we gain our humanity by performing acts of kindness to animals, and he locates subjectivity in the relationship among different species. Animals function as the “other” and as the ground from which subjectivity becomes possible. In this passage, Poe constructs not only an aberrant subject by invoking bestiality, but also an exemplary subject in his use of sentimental pedagogy. We find out that the speaker was “noted” from “infancy” for his “humanity” and that this “humanity” manifested itself in his relationship to animals. Mocked for his “tenderness of heart” by his human companions, he finds better companions in the animals that his parents (and later his wife) procure for him. His “character” thus develops in relation to its emotional ties to animals, whose friendship and fidelity exceeds that of “mere Man.” Animals lie at the crux of his construction of manhood and model for him a superhuman way of constructing humanity. Poe’s narrator stages for us a scene of Lockean pedagogy, but one that goes awry because he maintains a literal love of animals and fails to undergo the expected process of symbolic transference.

Poe’s relationship to Locke has been well documented,²⁹ but even if Poe had not directly engaged with Locke’s educational writings, they would have been available to him in their popularization by the didactic children’s literature of his time. Poe may have gotten the idea for his particular story from books such as The Fire, or, Never Despair. With the History and Adventures of a Cat (1812).³⁰ The book combines the account of a family that prevails through the destruction of their home by fire and an animal autobiography—a first-person account narrated by an animal who recalls her trials and tribulations before finding loving human caregivers (see chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of this genre). A typical excerpt from this children’s literature appears in The Hare; Or, Hunting Incompatible with Humanity: Written as a Stimulus to Youth Towards a Proper Treatment of Animals (1802): when the titular animal is rescued from imminent death, he reflects that “the humanity of the son was only equaled by the humanity of the father; and seeing this, I learned whence the youth had derived his merciful temper. What a blessing is a virtuous education!”³¹ Poe’s narrator seems in his childhood to have perfected the lessons learned by this educational literature. He exhibits to a heightened degree the kindness to animals that is a marker of humanity and whose transference to his wife enables the child to move from the parental home to the formation of his own family.

But Poe’s account explores the tensions and the fissures in the assumptions that kindness toward animals is commensurate with kindness to human beings and that both are markers of humanity. Indeed, such didactic tracts’ reliance on the animal’s first-person perspective already raises a question of speakerly subjectivity and how the transmission between an animal and human subject occurs and is mediated. That question is further complicated by the tension in these accounts between humanity as an inheritance by which the “humanity” and “merciful temper” of the son derives from that of the father and a humanity that is portrayed at times as a familial, biological inheritance and at other times as the imprinting of education on the child.

At stake in the relationship to animals is a moral education that determines the individual’s ability to participate in society as a subject. Redirecting Puritan concerns with bestiality into the pedagogical enterprise of regulating affect, books such as the widely popular The Rotchfords; or the Friendly Counsellor: Designed for the Instruction and Amusement of the Youth of Both Sexes (1801) link these lessons of kindness to animals with an evangelical desire to “inculcate the benevolent religion of Christianity, and teach the youthful heart to reflect upon the importance of each word and action.” Reprimanding his son for having beaten up a boy who was tormenting birds, Mr. Rotchford explains that “mercy ought indeed to be shewn towards every beast and insect that has life, yet are not the human species exempted from sharing it, and to injure one of your fellow creatures, for the sake of defending a bird, can certainly by no means be right…. To check our own impetuosity, Charles, is one of the first, as well as most necessary duties; and till we can enough conquer ourselves, to be guided by the dictates of reason and prudence, we are very ill qualified (however good our intentions may be) to set up for the correctors of others.”³²

Kindness to animals is the very origin of reason—from which Poe’s narrator has removed himself by his violent actions that precede the telling of his tale. By virtue of this logic, Poe’s narrator is indeed what he most vehemently denies—mad.³³ However, he creates a tension between his statement that he is not mad and the unreasonable violence to which he confesses.³⁴ One way of understanding that tension is via the post-structuralist distinction between the content (the énoncé) and the act of speaking (énonciation)—that is, between intentionality and iterability and the production of the subject via its entry into and its splitting in language. But Poe’s story questions the assumptions that go into this line of argumentation—the assumptions of the signifier’s slippage and the inaccessibility of materiality. In “The Black Cat,” Poe develops that line of questioning by the open narrative frame of his story: “For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet mad I am not—and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me.”³⁵

The repeated inversion of the sentence structure (“Mad indeed would I be” as opposed to “I would be mad” and “Yet mad I am not” instead of “I am not mad”) relegates the subject to a subordinate position that anticipates physical death. The narrator draws attention to the bodily act of narration—to his act of speaking: he is “about to pen” his “narrative,” but instead we get a verbal statement. That verbal statement begins with a reference to “the most wild,” which is only later clarified by its referent “narrative.” That narrative is described via a parallel construction that links “the most wild” with the “most homely.” Juxtaposing the wild with the homely breaks down what should (by John Winthrop’s logic, as I discussed in chapter 1) be a division between nature and domesticity (Poe again emphasizes an association between the home and the word homely by referring to “household events”).³⁶ That juxtaposition between two seeming opposites creates a crisis of understanding: the narrator explains that he can “neither expect nor solicit belief” and then justifies that statement by pointing not to abstract cognition, but to “my very senses,” which “reject their own evidence.” Here, Poe invokes an important understanding of the term sense: its double reference to cognitive and physical ways of understanding. The paragraph underscores this emphasis on the physical: the narrator draws attention to the somatic effects that these events have had in terrifying and torturing him, and his assertion that they have “destroyed” him makes them anticipate and enact his pending execution.

The story’s conclusion further highlights that physical, somatic effect. The story does not return to its opening frame, to the prison cell confession, but instead revisits the scene of the murder’s revelation: “Of my thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eyes of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”³⁷

The narrator begins with the inadequacy of thought and of speech—it has become “folly” to “speak” one’s “thoughts.” His expressive register has shifted to the physical act of “swooning” and staggering.³⁸ The “folly” of speech affects not only the narrator, but also the spectators (and by extension the readers), who experience the “extremity of terror and of awe” as a somatic effect: they “remained motionless.”³⁹ Moreover, the narrator next refers to these spectators metonymically, as “a dozen stout arms.” Those arms tear down the wall and are themselves implicated when it “fell” by their “bodily” strength and in its falling it reveals the “erect” body of the narrator’s dead wife. That body is emphatically described as physical matter, “greatly decayed and clotted with gore.” Although the “spectators” can read this body that stands “before the eyes,” their visual testimony is underscored and amplified by the “solitary eyes of fire” and the “red extended mouth” of the “beast.” That beast has come to occupy the seat of cognition and reason—the head—and from there speaks with the “informing voice” that condemns the narrator “to the hangman.” The cat’s vocal testimony, not the narrator’s own confession to the crime, convicts the killer. That confession is secondary to this scene of revelation and through the story’s open-ended frame remains inadequate; the physical referents and the animal’s “informing voice” form the conclusion of this story and the narrator’s culpability. The animal not only is an extension of the physical evidence against the narrator but provides an alternative form of vocal testimony that is more authoritative than his own narration. This point bears emphasis: the story does not align the animal with the physical and the human with the verbal but, on the contrary, shows the intermingling and interdependence of both across the species line. Poe does not engage here, as Joan Dayan has suggested in another context, with the “precise and methodical transactions in which he revealed the threshold separating humanity from animality”;⁴⁰ instead, he examines the permeability of that threshold. The animal relays the relationship between the verbal and the physical, the linguistic and the bodily, rationality and matter; it lies at the crux of these different reading practices, enabling and confounding both.

What reading practice, then, does this relationship call for? One way in which this question has been answered is through the recovery of the details of Poe’s historical context, especially his fascination with animal magnetism and phrenology. Both practices were interested in making the body the locus of interpretation and shared “in the conviction that mind and body were interrelated, that via the mind changes could be effected in the functions of the body, and that between metaphysics and physics there was no gap.”⁴¹ Poe capitalized on the profitability of both practices when he published “Mesmeric Revelations” (1845) in the American Phrenological Journal, though he later retracted the text as a hoax.⁴² But Poe’s serious engagement with these practices is evident—for instance, in his favorable review of Mrs. Miles’s Phrenology and the Moral Influence of Phrenology: Arranged for General Study, and the Purposes of Education, from the First Published Works of Gall and Spurzheim, to the Latest Discoveries of the Present Period (1836). Writing in the Southern Literary Messenger in March 1836, Poe argued that phrenology had “assumed the majesty of a science” and that its most “salutary” use “is that of self-examination and self-knowledge.”⁴³ Recapping Miles’s argument, Poe explained that

the faculties are divided into Instinctive Propensities and Sentiments and Intellectual Faculties. The Instinctive Propensities and sentiments are subdivided into Domestic Affections, embracing Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Inhabitiveness, and Attachment—Preservative Faculties, embracing Combativeness, Destructiveness, and Gustativeness—Prudential Sentiments, embracing Acquisitiveness, Secretiveness, and Cautionness—Regulating Powers, including Self-Esteem, Love of Approbation, Conscientiousness, and Firmness—Imaginative Faculties, containing Hope, Ideality and Marvelousness—and Moral Sentiments, under which head come Benevolence, Veneration, and Imitation. The Intellectual Faculties are divided into Observing Faculties, viz: Individuality, Form, Size, Weight, Color, Order, and Number—Scientific Faculties, viz: Constructiveness, Locality, Time, and Tune—Reflecting Faculties, viz: Eventuality, Comparison, Causality and Wit—and lastly, the Subservient Faculty, which is Language.⁴⁴

In invoking the “homely” narrative of “household” events, Poe opens “The Black Cat” by invoking the domestic affections, but he also warns us that they are paired with the “wild” preservative faculties. The instinctive propensities and sentiments are also the locus of subjectivity, especially in regard to the regulating powers, and the site of the imaginative faculties, in which the poet’s supreme quality, “ideality,” is located. Whereas psychoanalytic and post-structuralist criticism has privileged language, for phrenologists language functions as the “subservient faculty” and is located in the intellectual faculties, which are distinct from the instinctive propensities and sentiments.

Mapping these qualities onto their supposed physical manifestations, nineteenth-century phrenologists developed an elaborate system of racial categorization, in which the term race designated different species as well as distinctions within them—that is, the categorization of the so-called races of man.⁴⁵ Engaging in comparative anatomy, the most egregious examples of this practice performed a racial comparison that invariably attributed superior qualities to whites over blacks.⁴⁶ This practice of interpretation was also extended to texts; indeed, it might count as a professional embarrassment that one of the origins of literary criticism lies in phrenology. Taking literally the physical descriptions of characters, phrenologists used them as a basis for making character judgments. Phrenologists paid particular attention to Shakespearean characters, most notably Iago from Othello. The character was invoked as an example of phrenology’s standing as an accurate science. Writing in the American Phrenological Journal, “L.N.F.”—Lorenzo Niles Fowler, the coeditor of the journal with his brother, Orson Squire Fowler—delighted in two articles from the Edinburgh Phrenological Journal in which a phrenologist had performed a reading on the character Iago and had then passed on his sketch as if it were of a “real, and even of a living, character” to another phrenologist, who had arrived at the same interpretive results.⁴⁷ This practice of literary interpretation not only attaches a premium to reading the body as text but also allows for a reading of the text as body.

Poe was familiar with the Fowlers, and it is quite likely that he drew inspiration for “The Black Cat” from their phrenological literary analysis.⁴⁸ In an 1839 follow-up article that further expanded phrenological readings of Iago, “A. Wren” quoted the passage from Shakespeare’s text where Iago admonishes Roderigo: “Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies…. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than drowning … seek thou rather to be hanged in compassing thy joy, than to be drowned.”⁴⁹ Whereas Shakespeare’s character argues for a distinction between the proper modes of animal and human death, the larger phrenological debate continuously blurred the boundaries between the human and the animal. In the same article, for instance, we hear about Iago that “his intellect was quite considerable, but it wrought in the service of the selfish and animal feelings…. To refinement of feeling and elevated sentiments he was a comparative stranger; and hence his attachments to the other sex, though strong, were merely animal and selfish.”⁵⁰ Used here as an adjective, animal becomes a quality proper to human beings and, moreover, one that functions synonymously with selfish in defining a key quality of subjectivity—namely, the self-interest of homo oeconomicus. The same applies to animals as well and precisely around the issue of expression and language. In a later lecture, Lorenzo Niles Fowler argued that “animals have their language: even the cat and dog express their peculiar states of mind by the intonations of their voices. Man has more language than animals. He can modulate his voice so as to express every variety of emotion. The voice, under the action of the base of the brain, will be strong and harsh.”⁵¹

Fowler separates animal and human languages from one another by degree, not by kind. Those differences by degree enable and unsettle categorizations by species, race, gender, and (dis)ability. As Joan Dayan has reminded us, “animality … emerges for most nineteenth-century phrenologists, theologians, and anthropologists in those beings who are classified as both human and beast: lunatics, women, primates, black men, and children…. Poe’s reconstructions depend upon experiences that trade on unspeakable slippages between men and women, humans and animals, life and death.”⁵² In other words, he confronts us with hybrids such as the wolf-man (in “The Gold-Bug”) and the ape-man (in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”).

There are many instances where Poe replicates the racist trope of using animal imagery to describe slaves.⁵³ For instance, in “The Gold-Bug,” he describes the slave Jupiter’s demeanor as “dogged” and attributes to him a “dogged air of deliberation.” However, he also draws our attention to the logic that enables this racism—the logic that wants to turn a simile (a slave is like a dog) into a metaphor (the slave is dogged)—and removes that metaphor from the symbolic realm into the real (the slave is a dog). Poe in fact points out the rhetorical strategies and the logic of racism by including a dog that these descriptions themselves mark as a literal dog in counterdistinction from the symbolizations of doggedness. Here is the context of the phrase I just quoted: “We dug very steadily for two hours. Little was said; and our chief embarrassment lay in the yelpings of the dog, who took exceeding interest in our proceedings. He, at length, became so obstreperous that we grew fearful of his giving the alarm to some stragglers in the vicinity…. The noise was, at length, very effectually silenced by Jupiter, who, getting out of the hole with a dogged air of deliberation, tied the brute’s mouth up with one of his suspenders, and then returned, with a grave chuckle, to his task.”⁵⁴

This passage participates in several cultural assumptions yet delights in their reversal. The link between slaves and domestic animals was a commonplace—in the Virginia debates on slavery, for instance, slaves were habitually referred to as “pets.”⁵⁵ Poe aligns Jupiter with that association by referring to him as “dogged.” But the fact that he is “dogged” in tying up a dog’s mouth is important. The dog’s presence marks as an image the reference to Jupiter as “dogged”; Jupiter is symbolically but not literally “dogged,” as the contrast with the dog establishes. The dog disrupts the symbolism to which it also gives rise. Animals draw our attention to the symbolic order’s functioning—that is, to its processes of symbolization. But Poe insistently returns us to animal voices and noises as discursive registers in excess of that symbolic order. That point is brought home by the fact that Jupiter marks his silencing of the dog with “a grave chuckle” as he and his companions continue working. If Jupiter is animalized here, then it is only in the sense that the animal cannot and will not be silenced—if he is animalized, then it is in a way that would undermine the metaphor. Instead of perpetuating slavery’s symbolization of slaves as animals, this scene disrupts those processes of symbolization by imagining animal voices as an alternative discursive register that will not be silenced but that perpetuates itself and gives rise to nonlinguistic forms of communication. The dog’s silencing marks a shift from linguistic to other forms of communication. The passage reveals to us the real constraints that define Jupiter not—or at least not only—as a sliding signifier, but as a slave. For Poe, the relation to animals gives rise to a mode of understanding that exceeds processes of symbolization.

Again, “The Gold-Bug” provides an important example. Much has been made of Poe’s interest in cryptography and his boast of being able to solve any soluble cryptogram.⁵⁶ But two of the chief examples for Poe’s staging of ratiocination—“The Gold-Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—disrupt the course of reasoned, linguistic analysis via the presence of animals. Legrand, in recounting how he solved the mystery of the treasure’s location, recalls that “without the intervention of the dog at the precise moment in which he appeared, I should never have become aware of the death’s head, and so never the possessor of the treasure.” The animal is not only central to the discovery of the invisible ink, but the writing itself revolves around the figure of the animal: Legrand’s deciphering of the legend hinges on his understanding “the figure of what I at first supposed to be a goat,” which on “closer scrutiny” turned out to be “intended for a kid.” That kid turns out to be a referent for Captain Kidd; Legrand recounts that he “at once looked upon the figure of the animal as a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature. I say signature, because its position upon the vellum suggested this idea.”⁵⁷ Poe establishes a circular reference here to the animal, the person, and the signature. The intervention and interpretation of the animal lie at the core of the reading processes and subject formations Poe stages in his stories.

To explain that relay, I need to step back from the use of the term animal or the animal and ask what these terms designate. The binary human/animal is itself vexed, as several scholars have pointed out, in that the term animal becomes the catchall for creatures as different as the elephant and the snake.⁵⁸ A helpful way of speaking about “animals” without replicating the human/animal binary and without repeating structures of abjection may be achieved by drawing a key analytic move from “thing theory” (with which I engage more extensively in chapter 5). In defining this theory, Bill Brown argues that “things” are not the same as objects and do not preexist the conditions of our encounter with them; they are “objects asserting themselves as things.”⁵⁹ We may likewise—very cautiously—define Poe’s understanding of “animal theory” as life asserting itself as animal. The caution here comes from the fact that I do not want my argument about Poe to replicate, as I have been saying, the structures of abjection that attach to the notion of “bare life.” What I am trying to work toward in my reading of Poe is a way of critiquing those structures via Derridean notions of otherness that can function as a viable critique to the biopolitics of bare life outlined by Agamben. I am also interested in invoking thing theory here for the way in which attributing agency to animals—“asserting themselves”—blurs the subject/object dyad. In this way of thinking about assertion as a physical and a verbal act, subject and object cease being ontological categories and become performative. The danger remains that it is possible to perform or to be performed as an object, but the performance structure itself makes the object relational, not categorical. The animal becomes a relational agent by this definition and can enter into ad hoc relationships where individuality and subjectivity become possible. The human conversely emerges in this relationship not as the opposite of the animal, but as the result of the relationship to another designated as “animal.” The production of “human” subjectivity is then contingent on the relation to “the animal,” where both share the same shifting terrain.

Poe’s clearest exploration of this argument occurs in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His story does not just present a conundrum of agency; it interrogates the limits the law imposes on notions of subjectivity. One way of reading subjectivity in this story is via a clear hierarchy (along lines of gender and race), mapped onto structures of embodiment on the one end of the spectrum and onto structures of symbolization on the other. The women in this story are purely corpses and, for that matter, are anomalous in the Poe canon: whereas many of his dead women find an afterlife as (poetic) subjects, the women here are utterly inanimate, physical matter. The position of (re)animated embodiment is occupied by the figure of the animal, the Ourang-Outang, and his excessive physical strength. At the top of this hierarchical reading, we can then place Dupin, whose ratiocination apparently allows him to occupy the preeminent position of symbolization—that is, of someone who can both produce and decode symbols, who is both a reader and a writer.

The reading I just presented works seamlessly with the way Poe’s own theorization of poetic composition is usually excerpted: he is often quoted as saying that “the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”⁶⁰ But the story also subverts that reading and that way of thinking about and hierarchizing the body and language, the abject real and the abstract symbolic. Poe prefaces his comment by explaining how he alighted on the figure of the Raven to achieve his desired “effect … of Beauty” and the “tone of its highest manifestation”: “Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone of melancholy.”⁶¹

The idea of a creature that is nonreasoning yet articulate stages one of Poe’s favorite themes: the theme of “in-sanity” as a removal from social structures. Poe unhinges reason from speech, and abstracts tone, a physical quality of poetry, and affect (melancholy) as the somatic origins and aims of literary work. To understand Poe’s theorization, it is helpful to invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of the “corpus.” Arguing that the “ontology of the body is ontology itself,” Nancy insists that “Bodies don’t take place in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘mind’ or ‘body.’ They take place at the limit, qua limit: limit—external border, the fracture and intersection of anything foreign in a continuum of sense, a continuum of matter.”⁶² For Poe, that limit and continuum mark the threshold where animals and animality encounter one another.

Nancy explains that “sense” is precisely where making sense of something becomes possible and impossible in that “sense making” only partially accounts for sense and vice versa. The second newspaper account of the investigation in “Murders” consists largely of interviews with witnesses. Those witnesses are markedly not eyewitnesses, but earwitnesses. Each testifies to having heard, not seen, the crime as it occurred, thus highlighting Poe’s interest in language as tonal. Yet each fails to recognize, to witness tonally, because each attempts to witness linguistically. Although the witnesses hear the same sounds, they seem to interpret them differently. What only Dupin recognizes is that, in fact, they all interpret these acoustic events uniformly: they disagree on which language was spoken, but they agree that what they heard was a language and that it was a language with which they were not familiar. They all hear the same sounds and share the same sensory perceptions; what distinguishes them from each other is the sense making they perform—that is, the way in which they try to examine cognitively the bodily data they have received. It is that sense making that ultimately obscures their sense perception. Their mistake lies in wanting to ascribe that language to a national frame, which reinscribes all language in a human frame. Dupin can break with that frame of reference because of his more expansive understanding of language and his ability to recognize an otherness that is not readily recoded as a similarity, but that can entertain the limit or fracture produced by the senses and sense making. Although the earwitnesses’ senses are correct, their sense making is incorrect—Poe stages a misattachment of the sound to the symbolic structure, and that misapplication for him marks the crisis of symbolization as such.

The way in which this alternative practice of reading the body challenges our notions of subjectivity and especially human subjectivity has recently been the subject of several articles that investigate Poe in relationship to the “posthuman.” These articles take up N. Katharine Hayles’s critique of posthumanist inquiry for having “systematically downplayed or erased” embodiment “in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman in ways that have not occurred in other critiques of the liberal humanist subject, especially in feminist and postcolonial theories.”⁶³ Poe scholars have located their inquiry into his “posthumanism” precisely by examining his understandings of embodiment, particularly as they occur in his invention of what we might consider to be science fiction “cyborg” characters. James Berkley has argued that the way Poe deconstructs the liberal humanist subject makes him the “first great author of reification” precisely because he emphasizes “language’s ability to circulate … forms that are curiously detachable, even prosthetic, with regard to individual agency.”⁶⁴ Matthew Taylor similarly argues through a reading of Poe’s “Eureka” that his version of posthumanism is neither celebratory nor anthropocentric and that he creates an ahuman universe by collapsing selves and worlds into a single term—bodies.⁶⁵

What is missing from this discussion is a consideration of the way Poe sees bodies as not always-already human. What happens to arguments about Poe’s posthumanism when we read his animals? To address this question, it might be helpful to follow Taylor’s lead and to situate Poe’s interest in bodies in relation to his study of a “science” affiliated with phrenology—mesmerism, also known as “animal magnetism.”⁶⁶ This practice studied the “influence mutuelle entre les corps célestes, la terre, & les corps animés”—the mutual influence of heavenly bodies, the earth, and animated bodies, which the movement’s founder, Anton Mesmer, elsewhere refers to as a “corps animal,” an animal body.⁶⁷ Poe repeatedly invokes the scene of mesmeric trance to (re)produce this slippage between animated bodies and animal bodies. For instance, the raven makes his entry: “while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”⁶⁸ This scene places the raven at the center of a practice that relied on states of trance and on interpreting rapping noises; it produces an odd replacement in which the communion with the transcendent realm turns out to be a communion with the animal.⁶⁹ That animal simultaneously stands in for the lover and the lost love; it becomes a liminal figure that unsettles the division between life and death. The raven becomes the figure for the corpus itself—that is, for “the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it.”⁷⁰ For Poe, literature, especially poetry, creates that paradox. Writing in “The Poetic Principle,” he divorces Poetry from Truth and argues that “taste informs us of the beautiful.” For Poe, taste is a literal, physical quality, as he makes clear when he refers to the “sense of the Beautiful” as an “immortal instinct,” which “administers … the manifold forms, and sounds, and colours, and odours, and sentiments” that “oral and written repetition” of nature accomplishes.⁷¹ These definitions expand aesthetic experience to encompass sensory experience; Poe’s work meditates on the conditions under which sensory experience is produced and instantiates a significant expansion of the aesthetic from the sublime to the abject. Indeed, the “death of a beautiful woman” then becomes “unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” precisely because it combines the corporeal (death, the woman’s body) with the aesthetic (beautiful).⁷² Punning on the French (the language in which “Murders in the Rue Morgue” presumably takes place and with which Poe was well familiar from childhood), Poe’s stories often read the term corps animés literally as “animated corpses.” The animated corpse is most often that of a woman, but in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Black Cat” animals take on the role of animated corpses.

Given Poe’s rejection of “the heresy of The Didactic,”⁷³ we should reread what he is setting out to accomplish in the so-called tales of ratiocination. Writing to Philip P. Cooke in 1846, Poe expressed his concern at Evert Duyckinck’s selection of tales to publish. He complained that the focus on tales of ratiocination and the emphasis on analytic stories did not adequately represent his “mind in its various phases,” and he included a copy of the “Philosophy of Composition” as a corrective. Poe’s tales themselves immanently include this critique and this desire to integrate, as his letter points out, ratiocination into a larger “whole” that locates its aesthetic enterprise in relation to the body.⁷⁴

As Doris Falk has pointed out, Dupin is in a state of mesmeric trance as he investigates the murders in the Rue Morgue; that is, he is in a state of communion with the corps animés.⁷⁵ Although most critics privilege Dupin’s reading of the newspaper, Poe insists throughout his story that Dupin’s reading practice is also bodily and embodied.⁷⁶ Poe’s tales engage in a “relentless literalism, … [a] desire to demetaphorize, which often involves the reinvigoration of formerly dead metaphors.”⁷⁷ In the opening of the tale, Poe places Dupin in a “time-eaten” mansion, where he indulges the “wild fervor … of his imagination” and follows his “wild whims,” venturing out only at night “amid the wild lights and shadows” of the city to experience the “mental excitement” they afford. This emphasis on consumption and lack of emotional restraint animalizes Dupin, as does the incantatory evocation of his “wild” actions. Moreover, his sequestration resembles that of the victims, Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, but also that of the Ourang-Outang, whom the soldier kept “securely confined” till he could recover from a “wound in the foot.”⁷⁸

These forms of sequestration share an important element: each is linked to a removal from symbolic circulation. The Ourang-Outang is a commodity temporarily removed from the marketplace; upon recovering him, the soldier hopes to (and eventually does) sell him. The L’Espanayes trade in the circulation of physical signs—Madame L’Espanaye is reputed to have “told fortunes”—but they remove themselves from symbolic circulation: they hoard money and have just withdrawn their savings from the economic system altogether. Dupin presents an even more extreme form of this lack of economic symbolization and circulation: he is from “an illustrious family” that “had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes.” Unlike Madam L’Espanaye, who still “told” fortunes, Dupin has removed himself from such symbolic modes of signification; the realm of meaning making in which he engages is that of “counterfeit[ing],” in which he and his companion “busied our souls in dreams—reading, writing, or conversing.”⁷⁹ This encounter with the unconscious is not, as it is for Lacan, an encounter with language and vice versa; it is a “making animal” of the two protagonists. Poe underscores this point by describing Dupin’s analytic abilities as giving him an “intimate knowledge” of men, who, “in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.” They offer him the same mode of access, the window, that the Ourang-Outang turns out to have found in entering the home of the L’Espanayes. The most important doubling, however—between Dupin and the Ourang-Outang—occurs in the explanation of analytic method: “the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith.”⁸⁰ To solve the mystery, Dupin has to identify with the Ourang-Outang, which ultimately means that the crime committed is not solved but rather repeated in the act of analysis. The crime’s repetition is the process of law enforcement itself, which, however, will always remain incomplete because the body is related to writing but is not itself part of the symbolic order that links the letter to the letter of the law; it produces a language that is subjected by and yet is not subject to the law precisely because of the strategy of doubling, which always leaves room for extralegal excess.

For Lacan, the very condition of subjectivity is fracture, but for him that fracture creates a disassociation from the body, which in the mirror stage can be seen as whole, the Ideal-I, only in projection. Poe experiments with forms of subjectivity that experience fracture as physically imminent and in the process doubles the systems of signification at his disposal. That doubling achieves two goals: on the one hand, it illustrates how a process of law and of law making can occur, and, on the other, it marks an excess that cannot be subsumed to that law, even though it occupies the position of its disavowed origin and supplement. That extralegal position is precisely the position of animality. The question whether that animality is literally or figuratively an animal—that is, whether it is an Ourang-Outang or a rebellious slave—becomes available only in light of Poe’s argumentation. At the site of the animal, the literal and the symbolic become possible and are confounded. This use of the figure of the animal makes it available for racist iconography, but it also reveals the mechanisms for such racism and such iconography, all the while opening up alternative forms of subjectivity and representation. In the encounter with animals, the letter and the letter of the law become (un)hinged.