78 The Deferred Voice in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” Paul Jahshan Juno [said]: ‘I shall curtail the powers of that tongue which has tricked me: you will have only the briefest possible use of your voice’.....Echo still repeats the last words spoken, and gives back the sounds she has heard. 1 The academic frenzy following in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s groundbreaking reading strategies did not, as is well-known, spare Edgar Allan Poe’s works. From Joseph Riddel to Roland Barthes, a plethora of studies attempted to fathom the extent to which Poe’s writings allowed themselves to be read as an allegory of writing. 2 J. Gerald Kennedy’s Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987), John Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics (1980) and The Mystery to a Solution (1994), among many others, testify to the continued appeal Poe’s works exert on post-structuralist theories of language. Indeed, Heta Pyrhoenen’s Murder from an Academic Angle (1994) masterfully shows the extent that mystery tales have engaged critical theorists of all schools, whether formalist, thematic, or cultural. Tzvetan Todorov, after exploring the almost unlimited possibilities offered by readings of Poe, exclaimed: “Here, nothing is imitation, everything is construction and game.” 3 Yet, as early as 1968, even before the explosion of Poe criticism, J. Albert Robbins bemoaned the fact that there was “no shortage of books and articles on Poe. They flow in a steady stream year after year...There is a flood of words, but they threaten to drown, not buoy us.” 4 What would a study of the deferral of voice offer to the now gargantuan literature on Poe? Marita Nadal, in her study of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym calls Poe a “cunning proto-postmodern artificer,” and an “arch- trickster,” 5 and it is along similar lines that I categorize Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In his first detective tale, Poe masterfully plays a game of deferral of the voice. The fascinating problem of voice has not, contrary to all expectations, been fully explored in Poe’s tales, although it is a recurrent theme not only in his detective stories but also in his theories of writing. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is, indeed, the most conspicuous application of Poe’s theories of writing and reading and firmly positions him as a proto-post- structuralist theorist of the deferral of voice and the dissemination of trace. The question of voice is one which has haunted the critical mind for ages. Echo, in Ovid’s story, has her voice curtailed, and the immediacy which is