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🦋 Poe's Detective Stories
Borges categorizes 5 of Poe's stories as detective stories, I just wanted to list them with links to sources: If I'm reading him correctly, he thinks that detective stories are spoiled if you know the solution going in*, and that Poe's stories have been spoilt because we all know how they're going to turn out. But this solution [the end of "Murders in the Rue Morgue"] is not a solution for us, because we all know the outcome prior to reading Poe. This, of course, takes away much of its power....
Not sure how to react to this -- I think I remember being surprised by the ending of "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which I read as a child; but it was so many years ago, I could be wrong. Borges goes ahead in the next sentence and spoils the ending for any of his listeners who do not already know it, which seems a little mean-spirited.
 * This is a little curious taken side-by-side with his assertion in "The Book", that re-reading is more important than reading -- it seems like an inescapable conclusion from these two statements, that detective fiction is not important literature...
posted afternoon of Saturday, February 28th, 2009
➳ More posts about Borges oral
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Edgar Allen Poe
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