“I will be a naturalist!” Emerson declared in his journals after visiting Paris and the Jardin des Plantes in 1832. What he did was to become an author for whom writing was a vehicle, partly literary, and partly scientific. Edgar Allan Poe, otherwise so unsympathetic to Emerson's “owl–like dignity,” “mystification,” “transcendental notions,” “cul–de–sac machinations and pure fuss ” (the feeling was mutual, Emerson infamously called Poe the “jingle man”), nevertheless pursued not dissimilar aims if in widely differing forms. D.H.Lawrence for one saw Poe as being “more a scientist than an artist,” and for reasons which bring Poe surprisingly close to the Emerson who would smash “the sepulchers of the fathers”: “Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's ‘morbid’ tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything new can come to pass” (1961, 330).

The scientific streak discerned by Lawrence is apparent in the original 1841 version of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which Poe's anonymous narrator takes issue with “the vulgar dictum … that the calculating and discriminating powers … are at variance with the imaginative.” Such a view, as Matthew Pearl has commented, will on inspection be discovered as “ill–founded … the processes of invention or creation are strictly akin with the processes of resolution – the former being nearly, if not absolutely, the latter conversed” (MRM, xi). We have seen similar processes of invention at play in Proust's “natural history” of inversion in Sodome et Gomorrhe, where Emerson's influence was decisive in allowing Proust to marry the disciplines of naturalist with those of poet. Poe's Dupin, too, is described as both poet and analyst, and it is the various contributions Poe made to A la recherche that I now want to examine.

The distinction we have come to accept between science and art is a relatively recent one. Not until the 1830s did the word “science” begin to assume the contours that today distinguish it, and in many ways define it, as the opposite of imagination.