Puns in "The Gold-Bug": You Gotta be Kidding

RICHARD HULL Puns in "The Gold^Bug": You Gotta be Kidding Did not the most profound of all early thinkers, Heraclitus, discover the depth of meaning contained in the play on words? Gadamer The gold-bug" rests on the overarching pun of its title. Supporting this arch is an abundance of other puns, such as those on Kidd, antennae, and gold/ghoul. Poe makes the story out of literalizing the title 's figure for obsession with wealth (getting bit by the gold bug), in having a gold-colored bug bite Legrand: "Upon my taking hold of it, it gave me a sharp bite" (59)· Legrand is interested in the bug because he thinks it will make him rich. But for Jupiter the bug's bite is terrible, and the scarabaeus a scary bug: "Massa Will cotch him fuss, but had for to let him go 'gin mighty quick, I tell you—den was de time he must ha' got de bite. I didn't like de lok of be bug mouff, myself, nohow" (46). The predominant device in this story is the hearing of words in other words, letting a narrative rise out of the uncontrollable connections puns make. "The Gold-Bug" is comprised of two parts, a narrative of coincidences which stupefy, and then Legrand's triumphant explanation of his code cracking—an explanation which builds on rather than eliminates the stupefaction of the first part. Though we must admire Legrand's logical method, logic is neither the only method nor Poe's ultimate method.1 Legrand's "definite point of view, admitting no variation" (68), is what Heidegger calls Enframing, a thinking which Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 2 Richard Hull banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which [works] in the sense of poiesis. (QCT 27) Legrand's rigid, self-absorbed logic or ordering drives out Jupiter's kind of revealing. But to disdain the chaotic wordplay which clashes with Legrand's ordering, would be to lose much of the story, miss poetry, and miss Poe. It would be to miss in what Heidegger finds most important in "art": "the letting happen of . . . truth" (PLT 72). For as we shall see, Jupiter's doubling of meanings lets a truth happen. Legrand describes an uncanny, stupefying effect of a coincidence of meanings in the same sign, as he finds something he didn't intend in his own drawing. I perceived, in fact, the figure of a death's-head, just where, it seemed to me, I had made the drawing of the beetle. ... I was too amazed to think with accuracy . . . that, unknown to me, there should have been a skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately beneath my figure of the scarabaeus, and that this skull, not only in outline, but in size, should so closely resemble my drawing. I say the singularity of this coincidence stupefied me for a time. The mind struggles to establish a connection—a sequence of cause and effect—and being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis. (58-59) Something other has intruded, something out of Legrand's control. Why should two things be so alike? What brings them together? What is there immediately beneath our signs besides what we intend? Legrand 's stupefaction leads to an important generalization about the way puns paralyze the mind. The same coincidences affect Jupiter and Legrand. That Jupiter should be "stupefied" (56) when they find the treasure together with corpses exactly reflects Legrand's stupor at the coincidence of gold-bug and death's-head. "And dis all cum ob de goole-bug! de putty goolebug ! the poor little goole-bug what I boosed in dat sabage kind ob style" (56-57). Jupiter sees a truth, that Legrand's bug means death, but Legrand 's drive for wealth imposes an order that drives out any such connection between the bug and death's-head. Puns in "The Gold-Bug' 3 Legrand's buried...