The Power-Figure Dialectic: Poe's "Purloined Letter"

It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”

In Poe’s three sea stories, the sea yawns into vast funnels down which the son precipitously returns to the place wherefrom he issued.

—Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe: Etude psychanalytique

At the moment of the letter’s furthest trajectory—at the precise moment, that is, when Dupin substitutes his facsimile for the Minister’s stolen letter—the Minister rushes to the window, drawn by a diversion of Dupin’s. In his Seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan refers to this diversion as “an incident in the street,” but Poe is more explicit about the distraction through which the entire circuit of the letter is itself diverted:

A loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. ¹

At this moment, Dupin reports, “I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile.” Then the scene outdoors again in a kind of secondary revision:

The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D— came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay.

(Poe, 20)

For Lacan and many subsequent readers, the letter changes hands according to the repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang) developed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I want to suggest now that the entire compulsion repeats the historical violence staged, in Poe’s story, by the man with a musket, and even earlier by the shoutings of a mob. To read the story in this way is also to repeat it, not by imitating its various transformations but by suggesting that its power to transform is really too plain—that is, hidden in the diversion.

In privileging the scene of exchange at the desk over the moment of diversion in the street, psychoanalytic readings of the story like those by Lacan and Marie Bonaparte understandably emphasize inside over outside, but the scene outside very much restages, and a moment earlier, the same psychoanalytic drama as the scene inside. In Bonaparte’s brief remarks on the letter’s purloining, she notes how the momentary presence of Dupin at the Minister’s desk serves as an image of Poe the author, but no mention is made—and this in a book notorious for its emphasis on Poe’s dipsomania—of the man in the street, “suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard” (Poe, 130–31). The movement from inside to outside is also a movement from Poe’s most exalted sense of self (Dupin) to his most diminished (“a lunatic or a drunkard”). For Lacan, Dupin’s repurloining of the letter from the Minister’s dangling “fillagree card-rack” signifies castration, yet in the scene outside the still more phallic musket “proved to have been without ball,” in the story but also in the Seminar. For while this purloined “ball” receives no direct commentary by Lacan, it rolls into view anyway, like a repression, at the very moment when the importance of just such an unconscious “remainder,” or reminder, is being emphasized, “a remainder that no analyst will neglect, trained as he is to retain whatever is significant, without always knowing what to do with it: the letter, abandoned by the Minister, and which the Queen’s hand is now free to roll into a ball [rouler en boule]” (Poe, 34...