The paradoxes of Roland Barthes’s fait-divers murders and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Things external to the game’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Characters in works of detective fiction often declare that the events in which they are caught up are more like detective fiction than reality. As a result, detective fiction is tensely present and absent in itself. In other words, this genre whose meaning corresponds so exactly with its detective solution is simultaneously one that strains against the textual parameters of that same solution. This paradox is here mapped onto Roland Barthes’s description of the structure of the fait divers, an unclassifiable event that always intends towards classification, and thus towards its own disappearance. Barthes’s analysis focuses on the way in which the fait divers loses its identity when external, taxonomical explanations are brought to bear on it. The same interplay of inside and outside is exposed in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. By revealing how that famous text both coincides with and lies outside its story of detection, this article will debunk Poe’s orangutan solution and demonstrate the way in which, through its own failure, Dupin’s investigation inoculates the entire genre that follows it, ensuring that no fictional solution can ever be definitive and no text with a crime ever neatly and comprehensively classified as ‘detective fiction’.