Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

Pravina Pillay
of real effects in its wake. Ragland-Sullivan and Bracher (1991:09) believe
that Poe’s story fascinates Lacan most probably because it is empty of
content, laying bare the path of signifying effects that catalyze the desire to
narrate as itself a defense against desire. Neither Lacan, Poe, nor Dupin seek
to know what is in the letter.
The letter offers a focus for an allegory of gazes—a story concerning
the ‘right way of seeing’, for only those who know how to look for it will
find it, only a specific interpretative strategy will reveal the object (even
though its content remains veiled). The police, failing to find the letter, are
‘realists’, operating on reality with a common-sense stupidity which can only
see selectively. Muller and Richardson (1988:40) state:
Theirs is the realist’s imbecility, which does not pause to observe
that nothing, however deep in the bowels of the earth a hand may
seek to ensconce it, will never be hidden there, since another hand
can always retrieve it, and that what is hidden is never but what is
missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a
volume lost in a library. And even if the book may be on an adjacent
shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it
may appear.
To Dupin, as to the psychoanalyst, nothing in the unconscious, or the library
or the text is ever lost or finally hidden. Psychoanalysis, like detective work,
thus becomes a question of developing the right way of seeing, of casting off
the imbecility of the realist. How did Dupin guess the hiding place straight
away? An accurate assumption, he tells us, that the clever Minister would be
sure to avoid all the most obscure places of concealment (which were bound
to be searched by the conscientious police), and would place the letter in a
prominent, open position. The average intellect, Dupin argues ‘suffers to
pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too
palpably self-evident’ (Lacan in The Purloined Poe 1988:20). According to
Ruth Van Herik (1985:50) by Lacanian extension, the ‘proper place’ of the
letter, obvious only to Dupin (who stands in for the analyst), is the place of
castration represented by the woman’s body. Lacan (1985:50) describes the
‘spot’ in these terms:
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