Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal
Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal
Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal
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379<br />
<strong>Re</strong>-<strong>reading</strong> <strong>The</strong> <strong>Purloined</strong> <strong>Letter</strong><br />
And that is why without needing any more than being able to listen<br />
in at the door of Professor Freud, he will go straight to the spot in<br />
which lies and lives what that body is designed to hide …. Look!<br />
Between the cheeks of the fireplace, there’s the object already in<br />
reach of a hand the ravisher has but to extend.<br />
Van Herik (1985:50) contends that what is so obvious it cannot be seen must<br />
also be named. <strong>The</strong> phallus, unspecified, is thus replaced on the woman’s<br />
body through the seductive play of phallocratic signification. What is lost,<br />
the phallus/letter, is returned to circulation, back to the Queen, the woman’s<br />
body, from which it has been castrated. As empty signifier, the phallus, like<br />
the letter, is something to which meaning is ascribed by everyone but from<br />
which it is also missing.<br />
According to Muller and Richardson (1988:48), Lacan states that<br />
when Dupin enters the room wearing green sunglasses, spread out before<br />
him is an immense female body, waiting to be undressed. Lacan avers that<br />
Dupin did not need to listen at Professor Freud’s door to know where to look<br />
for the object this body is made to conceal. It is there, between the legs of<br />
the fireplace, within reach, waiting to be ravished. But Dupin restrains<br />
himself, recognizing that if the Minister knows that the letter has been<br />
ravished and that the ravisher is under his control, Dupin will not leave the<br />
house alive. Thus, Dupin prepares an act that fictionally will be the ravishing<br />
of a female body, one where the subject of the body will not know<br />
immediately that the body has been ravished or by whom. Stuart<br />
Schneiderman (1991:15) asserts that Dupin knew that he could not take<br />
possession of this signifier, of an inscribed signifier, a localized signifier,<br />
without leaving in its place a facsimile, a substitute, an object, a worthless<br />
piece of paper whose destiny will be to be rolled up into a ball and tossed<br />
out with the trash. However, Dupin did not believe that his facsimile was<br />
worthless; but Lacan emphasized the unlikelihood of this substitute<br />
producing the effect Dupin expected. <strong>The</strong>re, of course, Dupin did suffer a<br />
lapse of judgement due, as Schneiderman (1991:153) said, to the fact that<br />
those who take possession of the letter are possessed by it. Dupin repeated<br />
the scene in which the Minister purloined the letter in the first place,<br />
because, when the Minister substituted a worthless piece of paper for the<br />
precious letter, Muller and Richardson (1988:40) state that Lacan writes that