The reading that I found most interesting from this week’s set was Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”. This is undoubtedly because I really enjoy literature and Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favourite American authors; it had been years since I read “The Purloined Letter” so I grabbed a copy of it from the library to re-fresh my memory, and what I enjoyed the most was getting to read Lacan’s seminar on it after reading it, as I had never been exposed to it before. Significantly, to me, this seminar is such an excellent example of what I am always struggling to do when writing a paper in grad school; establishing this sound link between the work of literature and whatever it is that we call theory (when I was completing my undergraduate degree, the framework of my literature papers, both for Spanish and English courses, always consisted of my thesis, the corresponding supporting arguments, and the integration of outside secondary sources, but these were articles on the texts that themselves incorporated theory, but the application was never initiated by me; however, I do believe that while I was writing these papers, I was obviously putting together my own implied “theory”; I just didn’t always pause to think about school of thought it belonged to).
However, having read Lacan’s seminar, I feel like I have a good model of what I should at some point be able to do; it is very well-integrated with Poe’s story and Lacan carries out a thought-provoking analysis that he lays out in a manner that to me seemed reminiscent of a litigator’s argument in court; he pretty much walked us through the plot of the story and pulled out instances and examples that he essentially used as evidence to advance his arguments. I also thought that what the introduction highlighted was also very key and very interesting, especially the discussion on how the crux of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the term “letter” in Lacan’s analysis, because I believe that this notion is absolutely central to the way one reads Lacan’s work. Is a typographical character or is it an epistle? I also don’t think that that we should view it simply as a rationalization that the story is told to us as a police mystery; I believe that this is rather indicative of the overarching idea that messages belong to the fluid dimension of language and they cannot always be taken at face value. Just as Lacan explains, the dialogue between the police prefect and Dupin, being played out as between a deaf man and one who hears, demonstrates that an act of communication may “give the impression at which theorists too often stop: of allowing in its transmission but a single meaning, as though the highly significant commentary into which he who understands integrates it, could, because unperceived by him who does not understand, be considered dull” (47). I think that while obviously the type of analysis that Lacan lays out here lends itself very well to an author like Poe whose prose always contains a type of mysterious play and boundary-blurring, this is a valuable perspective to employ when reading several other types of works of literature as well.