Failed Detectives Make a Case: (Un)Solving the Poe Mystery in Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe is now undoubtedly among the most representative writers of American literature. Not only are his stories and tales being widely taught in class and studied by scholars, Poe pops up everywhere in contemporary American culture. Ranging from a football team and a rock album to graphic novels and movies, Poe is continuously and diversely re-produced by the mass media. At a closer look, however, we get to see how limited and redundant this cultural re-production of Poe is in that it mostly envisions Poe as a person who is as dark and eccentric as his own gothic fictional characters. Considering that limitedness and redundancy as the indication of our over-simplistic reading of the author’s life and work that is blindly mass-produced and mass-consumed, this paper attempts to propose an alternative view of Poe. To do so, the paper first addresses the Poe controversy that begins right after his mysterious death and puts into action the violent merging of his life and work. It goes on to examine the same controversy in light of Joe Moran’s cultural study on the literary celebrity system that updates the Barthesian “death of the author.” Associating Moran’s insight into the mass media with the dead Poe’s popularity, the paper then examines one of the mass-produced and mass-consumed representations of Poe, Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow, as an example of how a media-mediated portrayal of Poe can ironically contribute to liberating him from the restriction of the pop-cultural imagination. The paper discusses in particular the novel’s deliberate manipulation of the conventions of detective fiction by focusing on the detective characters who fail to find the truth of Poe’s death and who thus allow readers to conduct their own investigation.