"What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed "
It is always of joy to conjecture an
author’s intention behind the epigraph of his story. Edgar Allan Poe quotes Sir
Thomas Brown’s words for the epigraph of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: “What
song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among
women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture” (p196).
The
fact that there are two mythological allusions in the first half of the sentence
is worthy of ponderation. Sirens are dreadful creatures that seduced Odysseus’
sailors and caused shipwreck by singing songs in Homer’s Odyssey, while
Achilles is a hero in the Trojan war who disguised himself as a woman among the
daughters of King Lycomedes (Museodelprado.es). Both questions raised by Brown
focus on the trivial details of the story that would contribute little to the
overall plot. However, he states that although they seem to be unanswerable, we
can still make guesses.
After
finishing the whole story, I am able to make educational guesses about Mr. Poe’s
intention for including this sentence. Firstly, the narrator spends quite
amount of effort on introducing the nature of analytical ability even before
telling the story. He basically argues that conjecture based on observation is
an essential element of insightful analysis when he gives the example of
playing whist. The idea that people should not refrain from making conjectures
to solve seemingly impossible problems or to interpret obscure messages is
present in both the epigraph and the body text. Likewise, Dupin solved the
murder by utilizing almost unperceivable clues, which delivers similar lesson that
no matter how puzzling a case may be, we can still use observation and logic to
unriddle the mystery. Secondly and coincidentally, the “songs syrens sang” can suggest
the shrill voice that is perceived as nonhuman by the witnesses later in the
story since sirens are half-bird, half-woman creatures and the perpetrator of
the murder also turns out to be not human.
The narrator says that observation is much more importance that inference, and given those two pieces of drawing conclusions I would say that conjecture falls under inference. The songs of syrens is an interesting example because no one can collect evidence on this: anyone within earshot of the syrens dies. Dupin is able to go to the crime scene and make the necessary observations to solve the murder mystery. He wouldn't have known what to think if he hadn't inspected the window nails for example. Maybe the song of the syrens really is not beyond conjecture but is beyond plausible identification.
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