Purloined Letter\" and Lacan Edgar Allen Poe\'s

¶ … Purloined Letter" and Lacan

Edgar Allen Poe's short mystery story "The Purloined Letter" offers an ideal location in which apply some of Jacques Lacan's theories regarding human psychology, and in particular his theory of identification outlined in the essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." Although Lacan is ostensibly discussing a process in childhood development, his discussion of self-identification offers useful insights into the identification (and misidentification) that constitutes the solution to the mystery of Poe's titular letter. In particular, examining the ways in which the Prefect of the Parisian police, the villainous Minister D, and the amateur detective Dupin view each other with an eye towards Lacan's theory will reveal how Dupin ultimately represents the sufficiently self-aware individual, whereas the Prefect has failed to progress through the process of self-identification which occurs during the mirror stage, but rather assumes the identity of an ideal other without truly realizing what this means. Considering "The Purloined Letter" in conjunction with Lacan's essay will reveal that ultimately, Dupin is able to solve the mystery of the stolen letter and fool Minister D. precisely because he understands the process by which identity is formed, a process outlined in "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function."

Before discussing the way in which "The Purloined Letter" uses its characters to demonstrate the important of self-identification and awareness, it will be useful to discuss Lacan's theory in general as a means of providing the necessary critical framework for the subsequent analysis of the story. In his essay, Lacan purports to discuss "a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of the human world," in that he seeks to understand the nature of desire by determining the process by which humans establish the notion of an identity that desires, and he finds this process in the mirror stage (Lacan 2). Lacan's discussion ostensibly focuses on a particular development in childhood, but his theory of identification and desire has far ranging applications, including an analysis of "The Purloined Letter."

Although Lacan's larger discussion of the mirror stage is ultimately theoretical and does not directly correspond to an easily definable age or range of ages, he does begin by noting an observable phenomenon in children "from the age of six months [….] up to the age of eighteen months," and briefly discussing this phenomenon will make understanding Lacan's overall theory somewhat easier (Lacan 1). Lacan describes the image of a child in front of a mirror who, "unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial […] 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" (Lacan 1). This image of the child is meant to demonstrate the fact that "the child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror," and Lacan's essay is an attempt to describe the potential process by which this recognition occurs (Lacan 1). However, Lacan's theory is generally applicable because it also serves to reveal "the function of the imago," which is "the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image," and although this will be discussed in greater detail later, for now it is worth mentioning that in the case of "The Purloined Letter," the particular images at play are those of the police inspector, the poet, and the amateur detective (Lacan 1-2, 3).

The function of the imago "is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality," but this relation only ever serves to bring the individual closer to an understanding of reality asymptotically, because self-identification brings with it an attendant realization that individual experience and perception can never result in total understanding as a result of the difference between any individual experience and the perceived experiences of others (Lacan 2, 3). In the case of the mirror stage, gap is revealed in the self-identification of the child as he sees his whole body but lacks the motor function to control it, in contrast with image of the adult holding him (Lacan 2). In reality, of course, the adult is has no more of a total control over his or her self than the child, but the child "anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power" in the form of the adult, and so sets up a distinction between his individual experience and perceived reality that Lacan argues dictates the functioning of human identification in general (Lacan 2). The recognition of this gap between experience and perceived reality necessitates the adoption of the I function, because the I serves to bridge the gap between the individual and everything else. With this in mind, one can now begin to discuss Lacan's relation to "The Purloined Letter," because the ways in which the central characters identify themselves and are perceived by others constitute the most important elements of the story.

When considering "The Purloined Letter" from a Lacanian perspective, the Prefect of the Parisian police may be seen to represent a kind of unaware, mystified consciousness embodied in the child who has not yet traversed the mirror stage, because the Prefect fails to understand his relation to reality, but the Prefect presents a special case. Instead of merely lacking an understanding of the relation between the individual and reality, the Prefect assumes the identity of the ideal other (represented in the image of the adult) and believes himself to have bridged the unbridgeable gap between experience and reality. The narrator notes that the Prefect "had the fashion of calling everything 'odd' that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities,'" demonstrating how fully the Prefect has failed to reconcile his individual experience with the experiences of others as a result of his assumed identity (Poe 213). This failure is what precludes the Prefect from solving the mystery on his own, because his inclination is to consider Minister D, the thief, particularly dim, and a look at the Prefect's identity as a police officer demonstrates this further.

The prefect states that while Minister D. is "not altogether a fool," the Prefect regards him as lacking intelligence, because he is a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool" (Poe 218-219). Obviously, the Prefect's use of "I" shows that he has traversed the mirror stage in the strictest sense, but in the context of the story, he nonetheless represents a failure to appreciate the function of I and its relation to experience and reality, because his self-identification is actually a kind of misidentification. The Prefect imagines himself to actually be the "form in its totality" which serves as the ideal other which individuals asymptotically aspire to be, and so he fails to acknowledge the assumptions which govern his thinking and have influenced his attempt to solve the mystery of the stolen letter (Lacan 3). He does not appreciate how his self-identification as a member of the police force dictates his actions or how that self-identification affects his perception of Minister D, and Minister D. takes advantage of this ignorance by playing to the easily predicted actions of the police, to the point that Dupin tells the narrator that Minister D's "frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success," were in reality "only […] ruses to afford thorough search to the police, and thus sooner to impress them with the conviction […] that the letter was not on the premises" (Poe 232).

In other words, rather than attempt to align his experience with that of another, as occurs in the case of the mirror stage and subsequently reveals the limitations of one's own experience, the Prefect, identifying as one of the Parisian police and thus as "persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand," believes himself to be already privy to the entire range of human experience, with any experiences that fall outside his knowledge being deemed "odd" (Poe 225). The Prefect is unable to solve the mystery "first, by default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged" (Poe 227). Thus, the Prefect represents a kind of misfiring of the mirror stage, where, instead of recognizing the gap between individual experience and the perceived total control in the image of the idealized adult, the Prefect has simply seen the idealized other and assumed it was him, without bothering to confront the fact that his own experience would suggest that he is not nearly as aware as he imagines.

The character of Minister D, then, represents a kind of middle ground, because while he understands the police and their likely methods of investigation, he nevertheless fails to appreciate the skill of Dupin. In this way, one might consider Minister D. To represent one who has traversed the mirror stage, but who nonetheless believes himself to be far closer to attaining the identity of the ideal other than he really is, because he does not actually understand the process. Where the Prefect represents a kind of forgivable misidentification, Minister D, as the villain, represents a successful identification coupled with a kind of hubris born out of his assumption that he understands not only how others self-identify, but the process by which this self-identification occurs.

Thus, Minister D's identification as "both mathematician and poet […] courtier too, and as a bold intriguant" meant that he "could not fail to be aware of the ordinary modes of policial action" (Poe 232). In his successful self-identification, Minister D. subsequently successfully identifies his relationship to the police, and as such "he could not have failed to anticipate -- and events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate -- the waylayings to which he was subjected" (Poe 232). His failure, however, comes in assuming the intellectual weakness of Dupin, because while he is able to imagine how the self-identification of the police would lead them to search in a particular manner, he ultimately does not understand the process by which that self-identification occurs, and as such is unable to imagine how the mind of an amateur detective might work.

Of the three main characters (excluding the narrator), Dupin is the one who most fully understands his relationship to the world and the extent to which his own experiences allow him to understand reality. In fact, much of Dupin's dialogue consists of discussing what he knows and how he knows it in conjunction with what he can presume others to know, and this characteristic identifies him as the kind of, if not ideal, then at least asymptotically-ideal consciousness which is achieved after traversing the mirror stage. This is because alone among the characters, Dupin recognizes not only his position as an amateur detective, but also the process by which all of the other characters self-identify. Put another way, Minister D. fails because although he successfully identifies himself and others, he fails to understand the process by which this identification occurs. Dupin, on the other hand, not only successfully identifies himself and others, but also realizes how these identities are formed, and even describes an attempt to mimic this process as a means of understanding others.

When discussing the story of the boy who wins the game of "evens and odds," the narrator notes that his success is due to "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with than of his opponent" (Poe 226). Dupin responds by relating the boy's answer for how he was able to win so handily:

When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts as the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression. (Poe 227)

That there is actually some scientific evidence to suggest that the act of smiling can make one happier and the act of frowning can make one sadder is somewhat interesting, but even this is not necessary to appreciate the importance of this description for one's understanding of Dupin's identity in the context of the story and Lacanian theory. Dupin is essentially describing a kind of mirror stage mimicry, in which the boy attempts to alter his own image as a means of inhabiting the identity of others. While Dupin himself does not claim to engage in this particular process, his acknowledgment that "this response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella" reveals that he understands the importance of the image in the process of self-identification, an understanding which ultimately allows him to solve the mystery (Poe 227). However, Dupin's success depends not only on his own understanding of the process by which identity is formed, but also on Minister D's ignorance of this process, which is further revealed by the distinction between the professional identity of the police embodied in the character of the Prefect and the amateur identity assumed by Dupin.