탐정 소설의 기괴하고 숭고한 대상: 포우의 「군중 속의 그 사람」 과 「도둑맞은 편지」를 중심으로

Abstract

According to Poe’s poetic theory, “the contemplation of the beautiful” or “the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty” functions as the poetic principle and makes it possible to experience the pleasurable excitement or the poetic sentiment. But Poe’s beauty is differentiated from ‘beauty’ in the classical aesthetics such as Edmund Burke’s or Immanuel Kant’s in that it is defined as not a main source for order and balance but as “a something in the distance,” and related to the unattainable like the death of a beautiful woman. Rather, Poe’s beauty can be said to have a similarity with the role of ‘sublime’ argued in Burke’s or Kant’s aesthetic theory. We come to find a paradoxical structure based on Poe’s definition of beauty as the unattainable repeated in Poe’s detective stories. For example, in “Ligeia” the relation between a husband and a wife represents the typical structure of other detective stories in that the husband’ efforts to fathom something profound in his wife’ face fails in the end and both of two can’t escape their tragic destiny repeating the endless chase like vampires. In “the Man of the Crowd,” this chasing structure deepens more and is presented more variously through the relation between ‘I’ and “the man of the crowd.” Finally, we find that in “The Purloined Letter” which shows how the chase go when the chased object doesn’t allow it to be read, the place of subject is determined by that of the unreadable object and the one replaced endlessly by the other without finding any solution or safety.