Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

Pravina Pillay
The letter then acts as the key decentring element in the text, in that it insists
on being heard and affecting everyone in its proximity, even if they cannot
decode its meaning into a consciously realized truth. In this sense it
exemplifies what Lacan calls ‘the insistence of the signifying chain’, and
chain of unconscious thoughts which Freud identified as the controlling
psychological element.
Another issue which runs through Lacan’s text is the question of the
gaze, which is central to his theorization of the development of the subject
and, in turn, crucial to the important work on subjectivity and the image
which took its cue from Lacan. Since The Purloined Letter for Lacan hinges
on a dynamic of mis-seeing; it also offers an allegory of how the gaze
operates in psychic life. Lacan’s seminal essay of 1949 The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I, focuses upon the moment upon which the
infant (aged between six and eighteen months) first identifies with a whole
gestalt image of itself as separate from the world, a unity which is selfsufficient
and contained. No longer, from this moment onwards,
undifferentiated from the mother’s body or the sensual world around him,
the child recognizes himself through identification of and with a selfimage—a
reflection in the mirror, or through identification with another
body like its own. This startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror
is described by Lacan (1977:1f):
Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is
by some support, human or artificial … he nevertheless overcomes,
in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and,
fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to
hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.
This is a transformative experience, signaling for the child entry into the
Imaginary; the child imagines itself as whole through identification with the
image it sees. Lacan (1977:1f) continues ‘we have only to understand the
middle stage as an identification, namely, the transformation that takes place
in the subject when he assumes an image’.
The Imaginary is then opened up not only by the narcissism of the
child at this moment before lack intrudes, but by an essentially visual
experience—whether the child goes through this by actually looking in the
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