More Fun with Repetition (But Seriously, This is Different…)

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

Response 9

22 OCT 2008

 

 

In his seminar response to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan attempts a psychoanalytic reading of the short “detective story” (which is a point to which I will return) wherein he traces various characters’ responses to and actions involving a letter which must not be found. In this story, we are presented with two camps of persons: those invested in keeping the letter hidden (i.e. the Minister) and those interested in finding the letter (i.e. the police, M. Dupin). Lacan seeks to demonstrate how the subject (signified) is constituted in relationship to the letter (signifier). Drawing upon Freud, he asserts that “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” and illustrates “in a story the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier” (Lacan 28).

 

 

Repetition, particularly following from Freud’s idea of the repetition automatism, is one aspect of “The Purloined Letter” that Lacan engages. On page 32, Lacan introduces the idea of intersubjective repetition: although an action is repeated, this repeated action is performed by different persons for different reasons with different results. Taking the example of the glance, Lacan identifies three instances of repetition with different contexts: a glance that “sees nothing,” one that “sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides, “ and the third glance that “sees that first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it” (32). This kind of intersubjective repetition allows variations within the repeated action to inform the subjective development of those engaged in later instances of repetition. Gérard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, also raises the issue of repetition not being a direct replication of something original (such as an action); because each repeated action occupies a different moment in time, the actions cannot be exactly the same, which, as we discussed, goes against Walter Benjamin’s concept of repetition. How does Lacan’s addition of the psychoanalytic element to the repetition of an action further complicate the relationship between repetition and reproduction? What is at stake in producing a psychoanalytic reading of a structural choice within the narrative? And perhaps I’m jumping the gun, but how might a Lacanian reading of “The Purloined Letter” differ from a cognitive theoretical reading?

 

 

A last little tidbit from this essay that caught my eye is Lacan’s fleeting mention of genre and convention. What of “the fact that the story is told to us as a police mystery?” (Lacan 33) Lacan mentions how a certain genre, such as the mystery, can “provok[e] a specific interest in the reader,” yet he backtracks, saying that, with regard to Dupin’s tale, “even if the genre were established in the first, it is still a little early for the author to play on a convention” (33). What is the relationship between genre and convention for Lacan? If the genre has been established early on, what prohibits the authors from using generic convention?  

What happened to the Queen’s Desire?

Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” establishes the primacy of the signifier as that which constitutes the subject and provides the subject with “decisive orientation” (29).[1] Lacan points out the purloined letter is a signifier and never a signified—the reader is never made aware of the meaning or the contents of the letter. The subjects in Poe’s story align themselves in relation to the circulating signifier—the letter—by repeating a triangular epistemological and visual structure consisting of the unknowing and unseeing subject, the concealing and seeing subject, and the knowing and seeing subject. The signifier effects movement and subject alignment independent of the signified and even independent of its own identity—the signifier repeats through difference, as with the replacement of one letter for another. However, Lacan insists upon the indivisible materiality of the signifier: “it is first of all on the materiality of the signifier that we have insisted, that materiality is odd in many ways, the first of which is not to admit partition. Cut a letter in small pieces and it remains the letter it is” (38-39). The signifier is unfragmentable because it is the “symbol only of an absence…[the purloined letter] will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes” (39). As such, the signifier is everlastingly in abeyance, a symbol of lack of the signified.

Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” challenges Lacan’s primacy of the signifier, arguing that meaning in Lacan’s formulation—the signified—is castration, the lack of the phallus. Derrida argues that Lacan’s indivisible signifier must be divisible in order to circulate; it is the threat of not returning, of dissemination, of fragmentation that makes possible the “itinerary of the signifier”—the itinerary is “to protect the letter from this fragmentation” (187)—through which the subject aligns herself. Further, Derrida argues that Lacan’s system is guaranteed by the Oedipal law of the father, which ensures the return of the signifier. Derrida’s assertion of the fragmentability of the signifier begins with a discussion of narrative framing because, he argues, Lacan constructs his intersubjective triangular structure by violently eliminating the narrator. To Derrida, Lacan elides the narrator by erasing the narrative framework of the narrating and narrated narrator. Although Lacan squashes the meaning of the story into a narrator-less triangle, Derrida argues that the story “overflows the two triangles” (198), and indeed overflows all narrative framing.

I have about a million questions about these two texts, but I will restrict myself to those that I can actually articulate. First, what are the stakes for narrative if it overflows narrative framing? How does the reader’s narrative repetition operate in Lacan and Derrida’s formulations? Indeed, since Derrida, Lacan and Poe repeat “The Purloined Letter” (because each telling is a conscious repetition—there isn’t an original telling) so differently, what does it mean for the reader to repeat through reading the text? Finally, and most importantly, what about the Queen’s desire? Derrida indicates that the Queen is both participating in and subverting her pact with the phallus, the law of the father, the King, but he also insinuates that her desire is somehow outside the economy of the phallus. What do we do with this desire? How might the Queen’s desire ally with that of the reader? Does the Queen’s desire have the capacity for upsetting Lacan and Derrida’s reading of “The Purloined Letter”?

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[1] All quotations from The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John Muller and William Richardson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).