Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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371 Re-reading The Purloined Letter engaged. Reading the method of appropriation as a key to the method of concealment, Dupin surmises that the best way of hiding the object is to place it on show. Dupin states: do you not see the Prefect has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter … in some out-of-way hole or corner … such researcher’s nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions (Poe, Selected Writings 1984:374). Dupin looks elsewhere—not in a hiding place, but in the open room and at what lies right in front of him. He visits the Minister, and spies the letter hanging visibility from a rack on the mantelpiece. Repeating the Minister’s initial act of appropriation, Dupin substitutes another in its place, and is able to return the original to the Queen—a scene which repeats the first ‘primal scene’, but, with a key difference, for the second time round, a solution is reached, not a problem created. Lacan’s seminar on The Purloined Letter formed part of a series he presented in 1955 on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle entitled The Ego in The Theory of Freud and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published just after the First World War, according to Williams (1995:55), is best known as Freud’s primary articulation of the theory of the death drive—a complex of ideas attempting to explain certain puzzling psychic phenomena which didn’t ‘fit into’ Freud’s earlier accounts of desire and mental regulation. Freud was also faced with the phenomenon known as ‘repetition compulsion’, and in its role as a response to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan’s essay on The Purloined Letter forms an extended meditation upon ‘repetition compulsion’. For Freud, according to Williams (1995:55f), pain and the possibility of pleasure in pain, was crucial to ‘repetition compulsion’. One of the factors which led him to the formulation of the death drive was the phenomenon whereby those who had experienced extreme trauma continued to relive the trauma, with no apparent resolution, in fantasy, long after the original moment had passed. For Lacan, according to Williams (1995:56), the question of repetition is focused on loss than on pain and The Purloined Letter, with its repeated losses of a circulating object (first by the Queen, and then by the Minister), becomes in Lacan’s reading a crucial literary articulation of this compulsion. At the
Pravina Pillay heart of Poe’s ‘original’ is a repetition: it is a narrative within a narrative, as the story is itself told (repeated) by the ‘I’ narrator who hears and repeats the tale of the filched letter, which is retrieved through the same pattern of the original filching. The original repetition is then critically repeated. Thus, at the heart of the story itself lies both an absence and a pattern of repetition, which is then mimicked in subsequent readings which try to find the text out. Williams (1995:56) believes that Poe is himself already The Purloined Poe culturally retrieved through the same strategies suggested by his own text. The story’s second scene—which repeats the story’s ‘primal scene’ but with a difference—is also the key to how Lacan understands the text as allegory. Williams (1995:56f) views this as repetition with understanding: the narrative repeats as psychoanalysis does, reworking and unknotting anxieties of psychic pre-history. Thus, it is only with the second scene that the whole story emerges as an allegory of the psychoanalytic situation, with Dupin acting as analyst in ‘restoring’ the Queen to herself. Of this, Shoshana Felman (1980:147) writes: In what sense, then, does the second scene in Poe’s tale, while repeating the first scene, nonetheless differ from it? In the sense, precisely, that the second scene, through the repetition, allows for an understanding, for an analysis of the first. This analysis through repetition is to become, in Lacan’s ingenious reading, no less than an allegory of psychoanalysis. The intervention of Dupin, who restores the letter to the Queen, is thus compared, in Lacan’s interpretation, to the intervention of the analyst, who rids the patient of the symptom. Williams (1995:57) stresses two points of difference, both of which are highlighted by Felman in her reading of Lacan’s essay. First, the way in which Lacan handles Poe’s narrative repetition-with-difference is important to our understanding of identity in his work. Felman (1980:148) says: … for Lacan, any possible insight into the reality of the unconscious is contingent upon a perception of repetition, not as a confirmation of identity, but as the insistence of the indelibility of a difference. 372
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Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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