The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading

by John P. Muller (Editor), William J. Richardson (Editor)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Theory, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Essays

408 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1987

Reviews

[Melissa Rudder · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Purloined Poe is at once astonishing and frustrating. It is incredible to read Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and then watch how the story unfolds in the hands of critics like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. I've gone through the experience of reading the short story, Lacan's seminar, and Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth" twice now, and both experiences were astonishingly similar. I began reading the criticism incredulously. How can he honestly make this short story be about that? And then I finish reading each piece almost entirely convinced, suspecting some sort of conspiracy between critic and author that is at the root of this whole literature thing. It upsets me how easily I'm manipulated by these thinkers' fancy words and theories, but I am. Though I suppose it's okay that I can't keep up with one of the foundational writers of psychoanalytic literary theory and the father of deconstruction.

I end up siding with Derrida, by the way. Though that may only be because he had the last word. I wish Lacan would have responded in writing.

The book is frustrating because the criticism is, at times, horribly inaccessible (at the other times it's just very inaccessible). It's one of those books that, as I'm reading, I feel the need to force anyone around me to listen to a sentence, just to try to illustrate how challenging the writing is. The editors, John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, do a fairly good job of supplying materials explicating and commenting on the different texts, though I wish they would have included an overview of some more psychoanalytic terms, because I had to use other supplementary materials to understand the supplementary materials included.

[Peter Mathews · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I picked up The Purloined Poe, I expected to be given a new series of perspectives on Poe and Lacan. After the editor's introduction, however, I came to the first chapter - the text of "The Purloined Letter," which I don't feel the need to reread yet again. Skip.

What comes next? Jacques Lacan's famous seminar on Poe's story, which I have read both in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 (twice) and Écrits. Skip.

The next three chapters are detailed notes on Lacan's seminar. I don't need such editorial help, thank you very much. Skip.

Chapter 6 consisted of selections from Marie Bonaparte's book on Poe, which is completely nuts and only worth reading for the Schadenfraude.

I first became aware of Bonaparte's book from Shoshana Felman's chapter on Poe in Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Guess what? That chapter is reprinted here too. Skip.

The third section of the book focuses on the deconstructionist response to Lacan's seminar. I started in on an uncannily familiar essay by Derrida - and yes, you guessed it, it was reprinted from The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Skip.

The chapter after that is by Barbara Johnson, a response to Derrida. I actually read that YESTERDAY in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Skip.

Johnson's chapter is followed by an essay by Irene Harvey. I read every last word of that dull piece, but I wish now that I had skipped it.

The final chapter in this section is by Jane Gallop, whose work on Lacan is simply brilliant. Sure enough, it was a reprint of a chapter from Reading Lacan. Gallop is always worth rereading, but I don't have time right now. Skip.

The last section of the book is clearly an afterthought by the editors, so much so that they simply titled it "Other Readings." I liked the first piece here by Ross Chambers, but the remaining chapters are anything but groundbreaking. I read them, but they can probably be skipped.

I suppose this book might be useful to someone new to this topic, but it really doesn't offer much to the more advanced reader. This is especially true if you have already read Poe, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, Felman, and Gallop, then I strongly suggest you just, well, skip it.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good chunk of the scholarship regarding Poe's "The Purloined Letter." Not a casual read, but I appreciate having the thought collected. Some of the essays do an excellent job opening up Lacan's Seminar on The Purloined Letter and Derrida's critique of Lacan. Not only are these essays useful for appreciating Poe, but they comprise a good primer of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridian deconstruction. I am interested to see how my students will read Poe's work.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scholarly and comprehensive in its coverage

[Maruša Kres · Rating 4 out of 5]

bila sem tako zmedena, derrida mi je sou na zivce, lacan je biu mal serve

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this guy. So first off, this is a collection of related essays which all stem from Poe's "The Purloined Letter," and especially a lecture Lacan gave on said story. All the other essays are tangential to these two works.

First off, the poe story is among his worst, one which follows an abysmal "plotline" consisting of the real plot already being over, but some clever sleuth gets to explain how he's so smart and clever and has sleuthed in such a way contrived by Poe to make Poe feel oh-so-smart. The other famous story of Poe's that follows this abysmal, tension-less model is "The Gold Bug." The aesthetic quality of the story is irrelevant to the rest of the collection; instead, it's Lacan's weird psychoanalytic reading of the story which takes center stage. As such, this was my first real encounter with psychoanalysis (other than my previous, largely abortive attempts at Freud himself), as well as my first taste of Lacan.

Second, our professor provided a supplemental summary of psychoanalytic basics (such as what the Id, Ego, and Superego are) which I found lent my disagreement a clearer and more articulate virulence. The original reason I grew to hate Freud was how incommensurate Interpretation of Dreams was with my own experience. Some of the starting assumptions I cannot stomach, like there being only two instincts: Eros and Thanatos (death drive). I found it almost funny when Freud shied away from any “loving unity” to which everything returns, because this so obviously sounds theological and he feels he must flee from that, no matter if it’s inevitable even within his own system. The phallo-centrism which Freud deploys in sexual maturation is also a strange fixation (pun intended?), given what we know about fetal morphology apparently originating as female, with the male being the exception. I do have to thank Freud for his popularization of the helpful idea of the unconscious, as well as how his Interpretation of Dreams hints at what I’d call the “poetic mind”, that half-conscious state where you’re near sleep (id) but awake enough to function, where in my experience all the best poetry and art lies. Lastly, I want to thank him for coining the term “preconscious”, which is a term I had been searching for lately, a state where a memory or thought is buried and just needs to be touched or grazed to resurface (not truly forgotten, but buried in a sense).

Third, before you get to the Lacan lecture, the editors generously provided a summary. The symbolic (cultural/linguistic), imaginary (narcissistic/ego?), and real (sensory/“lost due to language”) triad was fascinating but felt arbitrary, and I feel like it’s jumbled up in my mind with Baudrillard’s Real/Hyper-Real/Simulacra stuff. I loved the idea of having these three slots where the characters rotate through, but I wondered “do not we then assume the third position, Lacan joining the second, and the Poe story itself joining the first?” I was perhaps most confused about why Dupin’s (the sleuth) outburst relegated him to slot #2 (symbolic). Aside from that, the Letter which cannot be used “beyond the sheer retention of it as a threat” reminds me of nukes. There were some fun crazy diagrams which didn't make all that much sense but reminded me vaguely of some diagrams we made in undergrad programming classes to map out programs.

As for the meat of the Lacan lecture itself, I had far more questions than observations to make. Lacan started it exceptionally densely, and I left the entire first paragraph unmarked (out of confusion, and perhaps respect). I had questions about how he was using words like “foreclosure” and “denial”, though I have a rough idea of how he was using “repression” and “displacement”. I agree to a limited degree (that is, if I even understand what he’s saying) that truth can operate through fictions, through lies, which is something I discovered when reading Dostoevsky, that sometimes fiction (and art in general), though not literally true, can be truer (in a metaphysical? sense) than real life itself. There is an extreme skepticism which I don’t share when he claims that language divorces us from reality (the real); something in that reeks the noble savage myth, some anti-human animalism/pantheism that I can’t get behind. But it is good and healthy to question these squiggles we so furiously scribble. It seems that Lacan (on p. 55) says that truth is found in relation between subjects, i.e. in intersubjectivity, which sounds like a parallel to Derrida’s claim about meaning in words being only relational to other words (all words in the dictionary referring to other words in the dictionary, etc.). Two last things I want to mention: if we’re being skeptical about things, how the heck can we ever know “the [right] place” of a thing (in order for it to be hidden)? And lastly, it’s a powerful (but simple) observation that Poe and Lacan make that cutting one’s self off from possibilities is a catastrophic (and common) problem [“The limits of your language are the limits of your world”, etc.]. This is why I find poetry so utterly imperative, that without a creative, poetic tolerance of strangeness, of grammar-breaking and word-coining, you cannot ever advance anything, cannot invent the new solutions we need to the new problems we face.

After Lacan, we explored some other essays, including one by a certain Bonaparte (unfortunately not the emperor), whose essay reminded me of all the things I dislike about psychoanalytic approaches, especially the confidence with which she proclaimed that X object in some Poe story absolutely, without question, represented Y (something repressed). The sense I got after all the phalluses and dentured vaginas piled up was that this psychoanalytic approach really tells us more about the people who use it than any “analysis” it does (which, spoiler alert, is exactly what Derrida posits!). After the exhausting marathon of Bonaparte’s essay, I could only deduce two things that we gleaned from a PA approach to Poe’s oeuvre: 1) Poe was a sexual being and 2) Poe had a childhood. The rest of it was baseless assumptions, guesswork, and leaps of logic, but none of it helped us as readers to understand the text. It posited to explain the author in some morbid, voyeuristic way, but even that felt utterly lacking. Words like “identical,” “the only psychology worth the name,” “doubtless,” “the fact,” and others tipped me off that this wasn’t a search for knowledge, but a partisan jamming of facts into pre-sized containers. This dogmatic approach of Bonaparte’s felt deterministic in its approach, not leaving any room to the author’s agency, instead monopolizing preconscious/unconscious proto-memories (which the second essay rightfully criticized, mentioning Freud’s preface which toned things down). Part of this determinism-stench was the claim that children have to developmentally re-live the various evolutionary stages (from lower animals to humans), only arriving at full humanity later in life (after puberty); this surprisingly echoed something I learned about in high school biology class, namely Haekel’s outdated “theory of recapitulation”, which claimed that fetuses traced their evolutionary lineage in the womb, transitioning from animal to animal until arriving at a human baby. Additionally, I thought the attempted character archeology was fruitless, as they claimed that X character in the stories was Y family member/friend of Poe’s, when of course we don’t know every person Poe knew or ran across, so it’s preposterous to claim such direct 1:1 correspondences. Lastly, one more thing which seemed odd was that the conscious mind’s filtering was only ever framed as a negative thing, a “censoring” or “repressing,” when that is implicitly prioritizing the animalistic, the Id, over the distinctly human, the conscious, the socialized, the acculturated. Over thousands of years we have managed to filter out things and sort things in a way which has produced wonderful art, and isn’t just fecal matter on cave walls; I’m more than happy to leave those smelly caves behind.

Speaking of fecal matter, Felman’s article helped to cover the stench and dispense with some of the most dogmatic moments of the Bonaparte article. Right off the bat, I do have to strongly disagree that writing numerous negative critiques of Poe means you secretly appreciate him. If tomorrow Rupi Kaur became popular with scholars, I would do my part to counter-balance that. It wouldn’t mean that she has secretly “influenced me”, or that her work is somehow “important,” but I would on principle write dissenting opinions because I think it’s so unimportant, and should be thought so by others. Felman’s logic, I thought, was very flawed here. She was helpful in that she provided the nuance which the previous article lacked, namely that there is a talent in Poe, despite the strong possibility of his psychology inserting a lot of the strangest and most interesting things. Felman attacked the common PA (Psychoanalytic) tone of “condescending, guaranteed, authoritative stance of truth”, which won me mostly back, and they also brought up a good point about being willing to raise questions instead of only seeking out answers (p. 140). I’m also thankful that Felman added in some more diagrams which transposed the triangle into explicitly Freudian terms. On the next page (p. 147) they also helped explain that Lacan was able to see the pattern here in The Purloined Letter precisely because it differed while being repeated. “What can be read… is not just meaning, but the lack of meaning” helped to explain what Lacan was doing in a broader sense, and I liked how Felman ended on a nondogmatic note, pointing out that we shouldn’t merely follow rote-ly in Lacan’s footsteps, but perhaps use him as tangential inspiration to discover other new ways of reading.

Lastly, I attempted a third article by Muller, but it was so dense and my knowledge of Hegel is so lacking that I got very little, if anything from it. All I know about Hegel is that apparently my understanding of dialectic is wrong haha. If there’s a Thesis and an Antithesis, my knowledge is somewhere in pre-thesis, not even making it out of bed in the morning.

Finally, let's tackle Derrida's response to Lacan. I noticed right off the bat that for some reason he loves the phrase “always, already”, and I couldn’t unsee it once I detected the pattern. This seemed odd for someone whose primary approach to texts is finding internal contradictions, since using many absolute statements containing “always” would make one more susceptible to such deconstruction that he specializes in. Derrida agreed with me that PA approaches tend to “say more about itself than does the deciphering,” but this for me raised the question of why he put so much effort to clarify/argue these things. Next (and often throughout the essay), Derrida brought up the intriguing issue of “Truth inhabits fiction”, or perhaps even is the basis of fiction, but he got quite out in the weeds and I lost sight of him (he became absent, or rather his meaning was absented).

I appreciated two different ways that Derrida problematized Lacan’s essay: first, that he brought up the Form of the story, including its narrating narrator and the non-dialogue sections, both of which Lacan discarded (to his own detriment, according to Derrida), and secondly he interrogated Lacan’s assumption that there is a definite place that the Letter should be, and that it’s self-evident that the Letter would always go there. I’m somewhat hazy how Derrida extrapolated from there, but I was cheering him on regardless. Lastly, as I run out of time, the “truth as woman” part sadly made some sense to me, but I didn’t enjoy it. I get that, developmentally, the shock of the castration wound is supposed to signify a sort of revelation, a truth about the Other, but going beyond that lost me.

Overall I found this collection of essays to include enough supplemental context to make the exceptionally dense conversations partially comprehensible, but the whole time I was wanting something more directly relevant to interpretation instead of just reinforcing my disdain for psychoanalysis, which is quite a shitshow when you see how people abuse it as a dogmatic framework. Apparently some other theories use it as a basis and have benefited from it, but I still have nothing but disdain for the pervert Freud. Lacan I still can only stand filtered through Zizekian humor, and Derrida is still a squiggly lil french fry who looks burnt on the outside but is cold on the inside. Bleh Blah Blue. Babba dee babba do my brain is goo. To quote T. S. Eliot, "Goonight."

[Daniel Rosler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning collection. I read it slowly and actively, as with most scholarship and theory; one needs to in order to digest properly.

Bonaparte’s psychoanalysis makes me roll my eyes, but every other essay brings something to the table, not just Lacan’s seminar and Derrida’s response; Johnson’s was fantastic, and I loved the way Muller—one of the editors of the collection—brought Hegel into the conversation because, as is so often the case, at the end of the day, Hegel is waiting for us. He cannot be avoided.

[Eirin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haven't read all of it, as I only had Lacan's and Shoshana's text on my curriculum, but I certainly plan on reading the whole book sometime during a vacation. Lacan's essay was really difficult, but interesting, and Felman's was downright wonderful. They have made me appreciate psychoanalysis again - I was seriously fed up with it, and Freud still is a douchebag in my opinion, but the approaches that have derived from him can apparently be quite intriguing.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent examination of the interplay between Poe's story, Lacan's seminar, and Derrida's deconstruction.

[Isham Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anything dealing with Lacan is getting into tough material, but this delving into a single Poe short story works and is fascinating.

[Dib Nadjla · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's an amazing book to read

[Joy · Rating 1 out of 5]

myopic BS, waste of time

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a treasure--I love the Poe stories, and I love the academic debate about them. I have to admit that a lot of the psychoanalytic concepts went over my head, but the essays, presented in a series as they were, often enlightened each other. After reading this book, I might even have a vague idea what Lacan and Derrida were talking about!

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychedelic.