Today's Elites

Sunday, November 04, 2018

Decoding Edgar Allan Poe

The recurring Poe protagonist (and alter ego) C. Auguste Dupin was decidedly not the archetype of the genre of so-called detective novels. All one needs do to prove this to oneself is simply read what Poe has written about the method of scientific investigation in his Mellonta Tauta. This satire replicates Leibniz' (whom Poe greatly admired) book length refutation of the "creeping and crawling" ontology of John Locke's infamous empiricism. Thus Sherlock Holmes is the very antithesis of Dupin. Q.E.D.

And as my Twitter acquaintance Undine has reminded me, this month is the anniversary of the publishing of Edgar's the Gold Bug in French. I leave you with this:


1845 “Le Scarabée d’or” ("The Gold-Bug") appeared in "Revue Britannique." It was the first translation of Poe's work into a foreign language.
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