Handedness and the Self: Poe's Chess Player
1989; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/arq.1989.0023
ISSN1558-9595
Autores Tópico(s)Music Technology and Sound Studies
Resumoclose reader of Poe's detective stories soon discovers that .real mystery in these tales turns not so much upon startling identity of killer in Rue Morgue or actual cause of Marie Roget's death or manner in which purloined letter is concealed by Minister D_________ (all of which are soluble), as upon analytic power itself, that mysterious mental ability to solve a mystety. Starting with narrator's opening argument in first Dupin story that the mental features discoursed of as analytical are, in them- selves, but little susceptible of analysis,1 Poe expands his analysis of analytic power over course of three tales to include mysteries of mind-body relationship and structure of self. In making nature of human self-consciousness real object of investigation in Dupin stories, Poe is simply continuing and refining a thematic concern that had been present from beginning of his career as a prose writer. Indeed, some five years before publishing first Dupin story, The Murders in Rue Morgue, Poe made what is perhaps his most explicit examination of criteria of mental activity in an 1836 essay entitled Maelzel's Chess Player. In essay Poe presents a lengthy analysis of chess-playing au- tomaton invented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1 769 and exhi- bited during 1820s and '30s in United States by Johann Maelzel, an inventor of musical automata and a one time friend and business partner of Beethoven. Poe's analysis—which critics frequently point to as a prefiguration of analytic method of three Dupin stories—is
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