A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. by MichaelJ. S. WilliamsReview by: J. A. Leo LemayNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Sep., 1989), pp. 246-247Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044954 .

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246 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

cure for Irving a place in American letters. Like Ichabod Crane he was "an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity," and like Rip Van Winkle he was an amiable loafer "telling endless sleepy stories about nothing." Also like the narrator of "The Stout Gentleman"-a story that Rubin-Dorsky inexplicably ignores-he sensed that fiction is far more interesting than fact. His forte was legend, and his legacy was not history, but nostalgia.

JOHN CLENDENNING

California State University, Northridge

MICHAEL J. S. WILLIAMS, A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii + 182. $29.50.

Michael J. S. Williams has written an excellent book on Poe's semiotics, the self-conscious ways Poe's texts contemplate language and meaning, exploring "the conditions of their own meaning and the displacements implicated in any act of signification" (p. xv). He especially follows, of course, the readings of Jacques Derrida, John T. Irwin, Jacques Lacan, and Joseph N. Riddel, but he also shows a mas- tery of all relevant scholarship. Williams is obviously familiar with all of Poe's writings, though except for two allusions, he ignores the poetry. The texts to which Williams devotes more than six pages are "Berenice," Eureka, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Gold Bug," "Shadow-A Parable," "Von Jung, the Mystific," and "William Wilson."

Williams does a better job than anyone hitherto in delineating the implications of Poe's self-consciousness about language and identity, but he restricts his arguments to these two subjects and does not seem to realize that Poe picks up and drops his concern with language and meaning. In short, Williams treats Poe as an allegorist of semiotics rather than a symbolist, whose concern with identity and meaning sometimes shifts to cosmogeny, comparative religions, abnormal psy- chology, aesthetics, metaphysics, metempsychosis, Egyptology, phren- ology, astrology, and various systems of speculative cosmology. At the same time, Poe is always especially concerned with the emotional effect of his tales upon the reader.

Though Williams explores Poe's texts with wit, creativity, sensitiv- ity, and an excellent knowledge of the scholarship, his treatment is fi-

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REVIEWS 247

nally reductionist. We will always want to consult him about Poe's se- miotics, but he treats the writings-even the most complex tales-as if they were only about language, meaning, and identity. Let me take an example from the tale that Williams treats at greatest length, "The Gold Bug." Focusing upon its ending, Williams tells us that Legrand spec- ulates about the murders that evidently took place when the treasure was buried but "finally can ask only, 'Who shall tell?"'

Williams concludes: "Most obviously this suggests that mortality is a mystery that evades 'accounting,' but it also suggests that there is al- ways a mysterious surplus in signification (like the surplus that enables the pun), which both resists the closure of single meanings and gen- erates new versions, new rumors, new stories" (p. 140). But the literal and obvious reply to Legrand's question "Who shall tell?" is, "You can tell!"

Throughout the story the reader is provided with clues that Le- grand is Captain Kidd. Legrand/Kidd had murdered his collaborators who helped him bury the treasure-and the reader has, during the digging up of the treasure, constantly feared that Legrand would kill his present assistants, Jupiter and the narrator. In his explanations Le- grand moves from the present back into the past when Captain Kidd buried the treasure-and Legrand frequently enters Kidd's mind to account for his actions.

"Who shall tell?" The unanalyzing reader shivers the first time he concludes the story, for he feels and fears (and this is Poe's greatest ge- nius, the ability to manipulate so carefully, so precisely, and so brilliantly the emotions of the reader), without knowing why, that Legrand can tell.

Despite my general reservation that Williams treats Poe as an al- legorist (rather than a symbolist) of semiotics, I enjoyed the book. Poe was repeatedly concerned with the nature of language and problems of meaning and identity. Williams does an excellent job of finding and following these concerns throughout Poe's texts.

J. A. LEO LEMAY University of Delaware

D A V I D S. R E Y N O L D S, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Mel- ville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Pp. x + 625. $35.

As someone who has been teaching a course in the American Renaissance for the last fifteen years, learning in the pro-

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