From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris

Abstract

The ‘Rue Morgue’ of my title refers to an 1841 detective story by Edgar Allen Poe entitled ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’.1 The story entails the detection of a non-human murderer. Dealing with the relation between animality and criminality, the crux of the plot involves audible but ambiguous animal cries that give no articulate testimony, but suggest pure affect and the difficulty of distinguishing an animal cry from a word uttered in a foreign language. If the mysterious world of detective fiction dominated Poe's Rue Morgue and the ‘extraordinary murders’ that took place there with the aid of a razor slash to the throat, it is rather the absence of detection that shapes Haneke's Rue des Iris in a disturbing thriller without a clear-cut crime (but nonetheless with a cut to the throat). The key question that confronts Haneke's film is the following: what, exactly, is caché? There are two frame narratives to Poe's story.2 The first involves a treatise on analytical powers and on the ingenuity of calculation that requires careful observation and the employment of memory. The second tells us of the relationship between our narrator and his unstoppable protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, an avid reader and observer of all details, such that at times he can mind-read. ‘Books … were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained’.3 We soon come to understand, as we move into the main body of the story, that he is also an expert in reading the signs of a crime without attributing any particular motive to the logical connections that link these signs together. Dupin pieces together a possible narrative out of the resources available in the newspaper story that initiates the plot. Immediately, detection is associated with reading and with adequate interpretive skills. Dupin demonstrates that the sounds described in the testimonies given, rather than the assumed meanings of those sounds and stories, is essential. Eschewing a content-driven explanation, Dupin allows for the possibility of an arbitrary murder rather than a carefully plotted one. The human associated with the crime may not be directly guilty. However, as Dupin says, ‘I am now awaiting a person who, although perhaps not the perpetrator of these butcheries, must have been in some measure implicated in their perpetration. Of the worst portion of the crimes committed, it is probable that he is innocent.’4 This unwitting accomplice to the crime is a swarthy Mediterranean sailor from Malta. He is guilty, by association, of a larger economic crime than the one for which he may stand trial. Meanwhile, the aptly named M. Le Bon has been wrongly accused of the sailor's crime. The main perpetrator of the crime first manifests itself not through any visual evidence but through voice as evidence.5 Various witnesses report that they heard screams and then two voices – one gruff and the other shrill. The gruff voice (ultimately revealed to be that of the Maltese sailor) seems to have uttered ‘Mon Dieu’. Witnesses of different European nations and national languages claim the second voice sounded foreign, and each conjectures that it was a European language, but one that they did not know. ‘How strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited! – in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognise nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic – of an African. Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris.’6 The foreign voice (which we too may have suspected was from the Antilles, La Réunion or Algeria, given the time frame and process of elimination in the story and its other colonial references) is revealed ultimately to be that of a non-human, an orangutan, in fact. Voice as distinct from language becomes the crucial marker of the trace of the animal rather than the human. Dupin identifies the beast through his reading of Cuvier, and through the beast from Borneo's digital calling-card, its finger or paw prints, which continue to exist beyond the presence of the animal itself, and which can be understood through a technology of reading the evidence. The orangutan's agency was also revealed by non-human agility and strength, which Dupin deduced from the escape route and the bodily marks left by the ferocity of the attack.