Dismembering and Remembering

I once drafted but didn’t finish an article titled “Dismembering and Remembering in Poe.” It was about his short story called “The Man That Was Used Up.” The narrator is a quasi-detective figure investigating a character named A.B.C. Smith. The problem is that the narrator can’t get a definite fix on Smith. We can’t remember when or where they were introduced. As he says: “The truth is — that the introduction was attended, upon my part, with a degree of anxious embarrassment which operated to prevent any definite impressions of either time or place. I am constitutionally nervous — this, with me, is a family failing, and I can't help it. In especial, the slightest appearance of mystery — of any point I cannot exactly comprehend — puts me at once into a pitiable state of agitation” (The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 566).

The closer the narrator gets to composing Smith’s story, the more discomposed Smith appears to become. It eventually turns out, that Smith is a prosthetic man. Dismembered time and again in the war (the tale was published in 1839), he has been slowly replaced by mechanical arms, legs, and organs. So when he prepares for bed at night, taking off his various prostheses, there is no one left to hold the various mechanisms together.

This, I think, is a primal fear of detective fiction (think of how it plays out in Oedipus), and I think the “digital” updating of the genre in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang brings us back to one of the West’s formative worries about human relationships – that trying to understand our lives can leave us both literally and figuratively cut off from ourselves.

Watching Harry, I laughed and winced on cue, but I felt the threat of what is explored in Poe’s tongue-in-cheek tale. At the center of this assemblage of “cuts” there might be nothing there.