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.Dupin continues his physical investigation: Besides, the hair ofa madman is not such as I now hold in my hand.I disentangled this little tuftfrom the rigidly clutched fingers of Madam L Espanaye.Tell me what you 85Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis, and the Analytic Sublimecan make of it: Dupin! I said, completely unnerved, this hair is mostunusual this is no human hair (ibid.).Recall that in the openingparagraph of the story, the analyst is said to glory in that moral activitywhich disentangles : just the word Dupin uses to describe the process ofphysically extracting his tuft of hair from the rigidly clutched hand of thecorpse.For all the text s insistence on the separation between the pleasuresof the strong man and those of the analyst, the solution of the Rue Morguemurders requires that Dupin make forceful, even violent, contact with thetraces of the ape.After producing his assembled physical evidence, Dupin asks thenarrator: What impression have I made upon your fancy? repeating as ametaphor the word used to refer to the uncanny and inhuman marks left onthe dead woman s neck.Prior to the moment in which Dupin histrionicallyreveals the orangutan as the culprit, the reader s body has been anesthetizedby Dupin s disembodied analytics (an anesthetization also evident in Dupin,who in moments of excitement becomes frigid and abstract, his eyes vacant in expression [ibid., 401, 415]).In the creeping of the flesh thatfollows (ibid., 423), the narrator s body identifies with the ape throughDupin s recreation of the crime, revealing that he, too, through his directsomatic response, is implicated in the narrative to which he listens. Asymptom, writes Lacan, is a metaphor in which flesh or function is takenas a signifying element (Lacan 1977, 166); and in the moment when thereader s skin shivers in sympathy with the narrator, we witness the overthrowof the metonymic order.In the shift to the metaphoric, in the symptomaticreproduction within the reader s body of a sensational response, the readerreveals his collaboration with the ape.Through the creation of this response,Poe circumvents Freud s complaint that in analysis the patient hears whatwe say but it rouses no response in his mind (Freud 1963b, 251).To rousethe mind, a text must also arouse the body: only through the symptomaticcommitment of the reader s flesh can the text realize its transferential effects.Appropriately, it is the knowledge of his own embodiment that permitsDupin to solve the mystery of the L Espanayes deaths.This is theimplication of Dupin s final comments on the Prefect, in which he takes painsto emphasize the futility of the latter s bodiless wisdom: In his wisdom isno stamen.It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the GoddessLaverna or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish.But he is a goodcreature after all.I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by whichhe has attained his reputation for ingenuity.I mean the way he has de nier cequi est, et d expliquer ce qui n est pas (Poe 1984b, 431).Though figured as a creature, it is just the Prefect s failure to negotiate between head and body 86Shawn Rosenheimthat prevents him from imagining the animal nature of the killer.As a kindof walking bust, all head and shoulders, the Prefect, not Dupin, is an emblemfor excessive rationality, unable to accommodate the ape s physical presence.By contrast, Dupin twice notes his admiration for the animal. I almost envyyou the possession of him, he admits to the sailor (Poe 1984b, 431); and wemay suppose that Dupin longs for the animal s intense physicality, even as herevels in the physical effects, the creeping of the flesh, he produces in hislisteners.(Once more, Dupin appears as a stand-in for Poe, who also reliesfor his very bread and butter on the ability to conjure identification.) Whereis the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for theexpress purpose of unravelling? Poe asked of Cooke; we may now be able toanswer that it lies in having in the meantime caught something in that web
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