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Adina Popescu Alan Bass [email protected] Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction II
Edgar Allen Poe – The Purloined Letter A Lacanian Reading
1. Introduction
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is a detective story featuring the detective
Dupin. It was published in 1844 in the book ‘The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s
Present’ for 1845. Poe’s story offers a number of possible interpretations. In this
paper I will mainly focus on Jacques Lacan’s ‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.
“To account for poetry in psychoanalytical terms has traditionally meant to analyze
poetry as a symptom of a particular poet.”1 This could be viewed as a more common
approach amongst Freudian psychoanalytical critics. Lacan, however, “does not talk
about the psychology of the individual author, but sees the text as a metaphor which
throws light upon aspects of the unconscious, on the nature of psychoanalysis, and
on aspects of language.”2 I will therefore take a look at Lacanian criticism compared
to Freudian psychoanalysis. In addition, the content of Poe’s detective story will be
explored and divided into its four phases. The main focus of this paper will then lie
on Lacan’s psychoanalytic criticism of ‘The Purloined Letter’.
1 Shoshana Felman, “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 133. 2 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002) 117.
His criticism focuses upon three distinct features, which will also constitute the
argumentation of this work:
The stolen letter is an emblem of the unconscious itself.3
Dupin’s investigation of the crime of the stolen letter enacts the process of
Psychoanalysis.4
-The letter with the unknown content is an embodiment of aspects of the
nature of language.5
As a last step, a short overview will be given on the crucial differences between the
Freudian and Lacanian analysis as well as the interpretation of Poe’s ‘The Purloined
Letter’ by Derrida. All three analyses are distinctly different, although the latter two
rely on the “same original body of Freudian theory.”6
In this paper I would like to focus on Lacan’s main argument, stating that the letter
in Poe’s short story functions ‘as a mere signifier’.
Muller and Richardson describe Lacan’s approach as follows:
“For the ‘place’ of the signifier is determined by the symbolic system within which it
is constantly displaced. It is only in terms of a symbolic order, for example, that one
may speak of the signifier as ‘symbol of an absence’ the way a slip of paper – or even
an empty space – may symbolize the absence of a book on a library shelf.”7
2. The Purloined Letter
3 Barry 117.4 Barry 117-118.5 Barry 118. 6 Barry 118. 7 John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 58.
In the following I will take a short look at Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis in
order to show Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ and it’s crucial
difference to the Derridian, as well as to the Freudian approach as presented by
Marie Bonaparte.
2.1. What Freudian and Lacanian Critics Do
Freud’s psychoanalysis mainly focuses upon the distinction between the conscious
and the unconscious mind. Freud would say that a work has two sorts of contents:
the overt and the covert. He, therefore, would aim at separating the two.
Consequently, the motives and emotional subtext of either the author or the
characters in a specific work would be analyzed in order to exemplify how timeless
psychoanalytic symptoms (as a ‘conditio humana’) are at work within world
literature (as an expression of human relations).
Lacan took up Freud’s criticism of literary works and developed it further in terms
of his own notions. Lacan, therefore, also pays close attention to unconscious
motives, however, not within the author or main characters but the literary work
itself: He therefore deconstructs the text and while doing so, points towards his own
psychoanalytic theories, e.g. his notion of the work of ‘desire’, within the text.
2.2. Content (Four Phases)
The content of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ can be divided very basically into four
Phases. Its protagonists are: the Queen, the King, the Minister, the Chief of Police and
the detective Dupin.
The first phase, which Lacan calls a ‘primal scene’, shows the Queen in discussion
with the Minister, when the King enters the room. There is a letter on the Queen’s
desk, which the King apparently is not supposed to see. The Minister notices this
and becomes curious, thus in an unnoticed moment he takes the letter and
substitutes it with a similar letter from his pocket.
In the second scene, the Queen realizes the theft of her letter knowing that only the
Minister could have taken it. Thus, she calls the Chief of Police in order to search for
it at the Minister’s apartment but they are unable to find the letter.
Consequently, the Queen asks detective Dupin for help. He visits the Minister and,
while conversing with him, finds the letter. Dupin concludes that the letter cannot
be on the Minister because this would be too dangerous. It, in addition, cannot be
hidden outside the house but at the same time also not ‘hidden’ inside the house, as
the police would have found it then. Thus, the detective discovers the letter openly
lying amongst other things above the Minister’s mantelpiece. The detective,
however, keeps his discovery for himself.
Finally, Dupin returns to the Minister’s apartment. While the Minister is distracted,
he exchanges the letter with another one and then returns the original letter to the
Queen. At the end, the Minister finds in Dupin’s letter a note saying that this was his
revenge on the Minister for being duped in an earlier love affair.
2.3. Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Lacan’s quite lengthy interpretation has challenged quite a few literary theorists and
revealed a radically new ‘psychological’ interpretation. In ‘conventional’
Psychoanalysis, the text had been interpreted in terms of the author. The French
Psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte offered a reading of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ in
1949, which reads the text as an expression of the author’s mental state, i.e. “mother
fixation and necrophilia”. Lacan, on the other hand, reads the text itself as a
metaphor, which is to throw light upon aspects of the unconscious, on the nature of
psychoanalysis, and on aspects of language. He completely leaves out the analysis of
the author. In the following, an account of Lacan’s interpretation will be given.
2.3.1. The Stolen Letter is an Emblem of the Unconscious Itself
“Love letter or conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of
summons or letter of distress, we are assured of but one thing: the Queen must not
bring it to the knowledge of her lord and master.”8 In other words, it is the letter
itself that matters. It matters as a pure signifier, regardless of its content.
The reader of Poe’s story does neither get to know the content of the letter nor the
originator. Consequently, the content of “what is being kept ‘unconscious’ in the
8 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter”. Translated by Bruce Fink, 42
story” is unknown to the reader. In Freudian psychoanalysis the content of the
Unconscious is the focus of his investigation. Lacan on the other hand, has a
different view on the Unconscious: “Like the letter, the pieces which might make
sense of our inner mental universe have been purloined, and we have to learn to
operate without them.”9
The content of the Unconscious can be merely inferred by the behavior of the
people acting within the short story, because the content of the letter does affect
“the actions of every person in the tale.”10 Thus, the Queen’s behavior upon the
appearance of her husband reveals the letter as the “symbol of a pact.”11
Lacan, furthermore, ads that “the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic
chain foreign to the one which constitutes her faith [i.e. the King].”12
The letter constantly changes its owner from the Queen to the Minister to Dupin
to the Prefect and back to the Queen. This means that the shifting parameters of
power for the subjects concerned derive from the different places where the letter is
diverted along this ‘symbolic circuit’. As already said, the letter is a “pure
signifier”13 “whose signified (i.e., content) is irrelevant to the proceedings.”14
However, the letter causes a shift “of human relations”15 due to its constant
movement.
The letter, therefore, functions independently in terms of its content and its owners.
9 Berry 11710 Ibid.11 Lacan 4212 Ibid13 Lacan 3214 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.
15 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.
Lacan then poses the following questions: “Might a letter on which the sender
retains certain rights then not quite belong to the person to whom it is addressed?
Or might it be that the latter was never the real receiver?”16 Lacan in fact does not
answer these questions, however, starts discussing the proper ‘place’ of the letter.
He treats the letter, therefore, as a signifier playing on the ambiguity in the notion of
‘letter’ itself, which may be taken as a typographical character as well as an epistle.
Therefore, Lacan argues that “’the letter is a unit of signification without any
meaning in itself. In this it resembles the ‘memory trace,’ which for Freud is never
the image of an event, but a term that takes on meaning through its differential
opposition to other traces.”17
In addition, Lacan states that the letter is “by nature a symbol only of an absence.”18
Consequently, when regarding the letter as an epistle, Lacan says: “Which is why we
cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a
particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it
goes.”19 This contributes to the earlier mentioned statement by Lacan that the letter
“is determined by the symbolic system within which it is constantly dis-placed.”20
Lacan adds here that only “the real […] is always in its place.” Therefore, the letter
must be symbolic because “that what is hidden is never but what is missing from its
place.”21
16 Lacan 4117 qtd. in Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.18 Lacan 3919 Ibid.20 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.21 Lacan 40
Thus, it can be said that for Lacan the letter is not so much stolen or purloined but
always remains ‘displaced’ in a certain way. Lacan himself refers to this situation as
“letter in sufferance.”22 Finally, Lacan argues that the letter is the “true subject” of
Poe’s short story because in reference to binary circuits it is required “to leave its
place, even though it returns to it by a circular path.”23
To Lacan, the letter is an emblem of the Unconscious itself and functions as a
signifier, whose signified is irrelevant within its symbolic system.
2.3.2. Dupin’s Investigation of the Crime of the Stolen Letter Enacts the Process of
Psychoanalysis
In addition to his analysis of the function of the letter as a signifier of the
Unconscious, Lacan offers an interpretation of the letter in terms of the process of
Psychoanalysis itself: Upon closer examination, Lacan will identify the ‘subject(s)
position’, which is represented here within a ‘repetition automatism’:
“This is indeed what happens in the repetition automatism. What Freud teaches us in the
text we are commenting on is that the subject must pass through the channels of the
symbolic, but what is illustrated here is more gripping still: it is not only the subject, but the
subjects, grasped in their intersubjectivity, who line up, in other words our ostriches, to
22 Lacan 4323 Ibid.
whom we here return, and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the
moment of the signifying chain which traverses them.”24
And:
The plurality of subjects, of course, can be no objection for those who are long accustomed to
the perspectives summarized by our formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
(…)
What interests us today is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their
displacement during the intersubjective repetition. We shall see that their displacement is
determined by the place which a pure signifier-the purloined letter-comes to occupy in their
trio. And that is what will confirm for us its status as repetition automatism.25
It can be said that the subjects assembling around the letter are interchangeable
and function according to their position. Lacan, therefore, analyzes the short story
within the first three scenes only briefly touching upon the ending, which can be
regarded as a fourth scene, as mentioned above.
Lacan develops three groups in which the characters can be organized. The first
group “sees nothing”26 i.e. ‘the blind’, the second “that sees that the first sees
nothing”27, i.e. ‘the complacent seer’, and thirdly, the group that “sees that the first
two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it”28, i.e.
‘the robber’. The blind are at first the King, then the Queen, and finally the Minister.
24 Lacan 4225 Ibid.26 Lacan, 32.27 Ibid.28 Ibid.
The complacent seer is the Queen, then the Minister, and lastly Dupin. The robber is
in the first scene the Minister, in the second Dupin, and last but not least Lacan
himself.
The just investigated subject positions contribute to Lacan’s analysis of Dupin’s
investigation of the crime of the purloined letter and how this enacts the process of
Psychoanalysis. In Freudian terms a psychoanalytical treatment focuses on the
themes of repetition and substitution. This is done in order for the patient to
verbalize repressed memories, the original event is repeated in verbal form, but the
verbal account is then substituted in the conscious mind for the repressed memory
in the unconscious.
In Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ the process of repetition and substitution can be
found as well in the just explained subject positions. Dupin’s investigation of the
stolen letter, for instance, can in this sense be summarized as follows: Dupin’s theft
of the letter from the Minister is a repetition of the Minister’s theft of it from the
Queen, and the theft is achieved by substitution, a false letter being used as a
replacement for the real one.
Lacan’s main statement about the connection between psychoanalysis and “The
Purloined Letter” is that “the unconscious means that man is inhabited by the
signifier.”29 He, furthermore, adds as an example that the Minister forgets the letter,
“[b]ut the letter, no more than the neurotic’s unconscious, does not forget him.”30
Consequently, the Minister is transformed into “the image of [the Queen …].”31
29 Lacan 4830 Lacan 4731 Lacan 47
Lacan, furthermore, discusses four other connections to Psychoanalysis. These will
be explained briefly in the following:
First, “there appears to be a certain correlation between the position of the
‘blind’ personage and the real, between the position of the self-absorbed ‘seer’ and
the imaginary, and between the position of the perspicacious ‘robber’ and the
symbolic.”32
Lacan here refers to a certain usage of the word ‘real’, i.e. ‘real’ signifies “a naively
empiricist objectivism that is oblivious of the role of symbolic structures in the
organization of ‘reality’.”33 The position of the self absorbed ‘seer’ and the imaginary
has to be understood “in terms of narcissism […] implied in the subject’s ‘seeing’ but
failing to see that he is seen.”34 The connection between the ‘robber’ and the
symbolic establishes because “it discerns the role of structure in the situation and
acts accordingly.”35 The link to psychoanalysis then becomes apparent because it is
important “to help the subject discern this dynamic [i.e. the changing roles of the
characters within the subject position triangle] and thus attain the third position in
the triad.”36
32 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.33 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.34 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.35 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.36 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 64.
Another correlation is suggested by Lacan, for it recalls his frequent allusion to the
problem of femininity in the latter part of his essay.”37 Lacan obviously refers to the
Queen and her position within the short story. Lacan argues, bearing in mind the
above described subject positions, that “in playing the part of the one who hides,
[the Minister] is obliged to don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of
femininity and shadow, so propitious to the act of concealing.”38
“Like the man who withdrew to an island to forget, what? He forgot-so the Minister, through
not making use of the letter, comes to forget it. (…) But the letter, no more than the
neurotic's unconscious, does not forget him. It forgets him so little that it transforms him
more and more in the image of her who offered it to his capture, so that he now will
surrender it, following her example, to a similar capture.
The features of that transformation are noted, and in a form so characteristic in
their apparent gratuitousness that they might validly be compared to the return of the
repressed.
Thus we first learn that the Minister in turn has turned the letter over, not, of
course, as in the Queen's hasty gesture, but, more assiduously, as one turns a garment inside
out. So he must proceed, according to the methods of the day for folding and sealing a letter,
in order to free the virgin space on which to inscribe a new address.
That address becomes his own. Whether it be in his hand or another, it will appear
in an extremely delicate feminine script, and, the seal changing from the red of passion to the
black of its mirrors, he will imprint his stamp upon it. (…)
37 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 6438 Lacan 44
But in either case it is significant that the letter which the Minister, in point of fact,
addresses to himself is a letter from a woman: as though this were a phase he had to pass
through out of a natural affinity of the signifier.
Thus the aura of apathy, verging at times on an affectation of effeminacy; the display
of an ennui bordering on disgust in his conversation; the mood the author of the philosophy
of furniture can elicit from virtually impalpable details (like that of the musical instrument
on the table), everything seems intended for a character, all of whose utterances have
revealed the most virile traits, to exude the oddest odor di femina when he appears.39
And so does Lacan also draw our attention to the letter the Minister stole: The letter
“of a woman”:
Just so does the purloined letter, like an immense female body, screech out across the
Minister's office when Dupin enters. But just so does he already expect to find it, and has
only, with his eyes veiled by green lenses, to undress that huge body. 40
And then concludes:
“as though this was a phase he [the Minister] had to pass through out of a natural affinity of
the signifier.”41
39 Lacan 4840 Ibid41 Ibid
At last Lacan continues by raising the question about the nature of Truth in
Psychoanalysis. In the mid of Dupin’s investigations a suspicion occurs. Lacan
phrases Edgar Allan Poe’s style with the following words:
“Is not the magician repeating his trick before our eyes, without deceiving us this time about divulging his
secret, but pressing his wager to the point of really explaining it to us without us seeing a thing? That would
be the summit of the illusionist's art: through one of his fictive creations to truly delude us.?”
(…) But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the poet's superiority in the art of concealment.42
At this point in his essay, Lacan refers to Heidegger and his initial investigation of
the Greek word of truth: aletheia. Lacan states that “[w]hen we are open to hearing
the way in which Martin Heidegger discloses to us in the word aletheia, the play of
truth, we rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and
through which they learn that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most
truly.”43
Language delivers its judgment to whoever knows how to hear it. For Lacan,
negativity - a negative gesture of withdrawal - precedes any positive gesture of
enthusiastic identification, functioning as its condition of (im)possibility, that is,
laying the ground or opening up the space for it, but simultaneously being
obfuscated by it and undermining it.
42 Lacan 5243 Lacan 37
“For that reason, Lacan implicitly shifts the balance between Death and Resurrection toward Death,
which at its most radical stands for not merely the passing of earthly life but the "night of the world,"
the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity in which its very links with "reality"”44
Here it is that Lacan and Derrida strongly diverge in their interpretation of ‘The
purloined Letter’ and its reading towards the Truth in Psychoanalysis:
In his essay, Lacan offers the following thoughts on Psychoanalysis and its relation
to death:
“… nor is our aim to confuse letter with spirit, even if we receive the
former by pneumatic dispatch, and that we readily admit that one kills whereas
the other quickens, insofar as the signifier (…) materializes the agency of death.
But if it is first of all on the materiality of the signifier that we have insisted, that materiality
is odd [singulière] in many ways, the first of which is not to admit partition. Cut a letter in
small pieces, and it remains the letter it is – and this in a completely different sense than
Gestalttheorie would account for with the dormant vitalism informing its
notion of the whole.”45
44 Slavoj Zizek, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POST-MARXISM- The Case of Alain Badiou. in: The South Atlantic Quaterly. Durham, Spring 1998
45 Lacan 38-39
The Master Signifier does not allow partition. (The phallus is not to be cut.)46
It remains ONE in relation to its place within the symbolic chain. It structures the
symbolic field around the void that it is. This is why the master signifier marks is the
place of death, of pure negativity.
“For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not
be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it
goes.”47
In Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ the notion of death is taken up by the Minister,
who says that “human life [is] a reprieve“48 while awaiting death.
I will return to this question of negativity and death in a later chapter that will be
dedicated to Derrida’s reading of Poe’s short story.
2.3.3. The Letter with the Unknown Content is an embodiment of Aspects of the
Nature of Language
Very basically, “there is an endless play of signifiers [in language], but no simple
46 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988)47 Lacan 3948 qtd. in: Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 66.
connection with any signified content beyond language.”49 Lacan, as stated
previously, acts from the assumption that the signified is always “lost or
purloined.”50 In Poe’s short story the content, i.e. the signified, never is revealed to
the readers. The letter thus becomes “an example of signification itself.”51 Muller and
Richardson summarize Lacan’s argument as follows:
“All words are purloined letters [because] we can never open them and view
their content unambiguously; we have the signifiers, which are the verbal
envelopes of concepts, so to speak, but these envelopes cannot be unsealed, so
that the signified will always remain hidden, just like the content of the
purloined letter in Poe’s tale.”52
In addition, Lacan analyzes “the conventional nature of the signifier, but rather its
priority in relation to the signified.”53 As an example, Lacan focuses on the word
‘purloined’ which according to the OED means:
“To purloin, says the Oxford dictionary, is an Anglo-French word, that is:
composed of the prefix "pur", found in purpose, purchase, purport, and of the
old French word: loing, loigner, longé. We recognize in the first element the
Latin "pro", as opposed to ante, insofar as it presupposes a rear in front of
which it is borne, possibly as its warrant, indeed even as its pledge (whereas
ante goes forth to confront what it encounters). As for the second, an old
French word: loigner, a verb attributing place au loing (or, still in use, longé), it
does not mean au loin (far off), but au long de (alongside); it is a question then
49 Barry 11850 Ibid51 Ibid52 Ibid53 Lacan 42
of putting aside, or, to invoke a familiar expression which plays on the two
meanings: mettre à gauche (to put to the left; to put amiss).54
The letter then is not ‘lost’ but just “diverted from its path.”55 Lacan, furthermore,
argues that the “signifier is not functional.”56 By saying so, Lacan infers that the
letter has a different meaning to every character in the story making the letter quite
“dangerous”57 because the letter’s “meaning possesses them.”58
2.4. Crucial Differences to the Freudian Interpretation
As already mentioned above, Marie Bonaparte does offer a brief Freudian method
of analyzing ‘The Purloined Letter’ which is reprinted in The Purloined Poe.
Bonaparte approaches the text by inferring from the writing to the mental state of
the author. Thus, she argues that Poe in his writings expresses the “regret for the
missing penis, with reproach for its loss.”59
The first thing she throws at her readers is that the “letter [is a] very symbol of the
maternal penis.”60 This is closely connected to Freud’s ideas of the unconscious,
which he thought to be linked to the desires of the human penis. The conflict taking
place between the Minister and Dupin “represents, in effect, the oedipal struggle
54 Lacan 4355 Ibid56 Lacan 4057 Lacan 4158 Lacan 4459 Bonaparte, Marie. “Selections from The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A PsychoanalyticInterpretation.” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and PsychoanalyticReading. Trans. John Rodker. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson.Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988. 101-132.60 Bonaparte 130
between father and son, though on an archaic, pregenital, and phallic level, to seize
possession, not of the mother herself, but of a part: namely, her penis.”61 Bonaparte
argues further that ‘The Purloined Letter’ is an “illustration of that ‘partial love’ and
desire, not for the whole of the loved being but for an organ, which characterizes
one stage of infantile libidinal development.”62 She calls the Minister an “impressive
father figure.”63 Most importantly, the Minister is portrayed as a poet, which also
accounts for Edgar Allen Poe. Bonaparte uses this fact to state that Poe “identifies
himself with the hated though admired father by that same gift of identification
whose praises he sings in ‘The Purloined Letter’ as being the one supremely
effective way of penetrating another’s thoughts and feelings.”64 She, furthermore,
claims Poe to be impotent and therefore identifies with the intelligent Minister and
claims his mental state to be a result of his glorification of his mother who died
when Poe was still a child.
2.5. Deconstructing “The Purloined Letter” with Jacques Derrida
The perhaps most serious challenge to Lacan’s reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’
comes from Jacques Derrida. This paragraph will briefly touch upon the difference
of Lacan’s and Derrida’s analyses of ‘The Purloined Letter’ as both rely on similar
reading techniques, however, interpret the short story differently. Lacan and
61 Bonaparte 13062 Bonaparte 13063 Bonaparte 13064 Bonaparte 131
Derrida in fact exchanged a series of letters concerning Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s
short story. Both have an almost identical approach in analyzing the short story,
only that Derrida goes further in his analysis by adding that the frame is thus framed
again by part of its content. He states that for Lacan “the subject is very divided, but
the phallus is not to be cut”65 and argues that the letter is neither ’the truth’ nor
‘present’ and that it should be divided rather than unified. Derrida has two direct
claims towards Lacan’s analysis: “(1) what Lacan puts into the letter and (2) what
Lacan leaves out of the text.”66 As to the first point it can be said that while asserting
that the letter's meaning is lacking, Lacan turns this notion of a ‘lack’ into meaning
itself (the letters absence is its very ‘prensence’). Going further, Derrida asserts that
what Lacan means by that lack is the truth of lack-as-castration-as-truth: “The truth
of the purloined letter is the truth itself […].”67 Secondly, Derrida criticizes Lacan for
neglecting to consider ‘The Purloined Letter’ in connection with the other two
stories in what Derrida calls Poe’s ‘Dupin Trilogy’. Lacan views the text primarily “as
an allegory of the signifier” and is thus “blind to the disseminating power of the
signifier in the text of the allegory.”68 Finally, Derrida dismisses Lacan’s ‘style’ as a
mere “ornament.”69
65 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 66 Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan Derrida,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 21767 Ibid.68 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988)
69 Ibid.
(…)
3. Conclusion
Lacan main focus remains the letter itself.
Although it’s contents always will always be unknown to us, Lacan emphasizes that
it is exactly this ‘unknown’ content that allows a letter to function as the threefold
signifier, signifying the Unconscious itself, the process of Psychoanalysis as well as
the function of language: (1) Poe’s stolen letter is an emblem of the Unconscious
itself. Therefore the Unconscious can be inferred from the characters’ actions in
connection with the letter. (2) In this regard, the letter enacts the process of
psychoanalysis because the psychoanalytic treatment of repetition and substitution
is enacted within ‘The Purloined Letter’ via the interchangeable subject positions.
(3)The letter is an embodiment of ways language is structured, as the signified itself
is always already ‘purloined’, just as signifiers that maintain an arbitrary connection
to the signified content.
Lacan stresses the importance of the signifier over the subject. This aspect runs
through Lacan’s essay and forms its central theme. Towards the End of his reading
of Poe’s short story, this becomes perfectly clear:
“So runs the signifier’s answer, above and beyond all significations: ‘You think
you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your
desires. Thus do they grow in force and multiply in objects, bringing you back to
the fragmentation of your shattered childhood. So be it: such will be your feast
until the return of the stone guest I shall be for you since you call me forth.”70
70 Lacan, 52