SOURCE: Cole, Merrill. “The Purloined Mirror.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 8, no. 2 (October 1997): 135-51.

[In the following essay, Cole investigates the sexual and gender role of the mirror and mirroring in Poe's fiction, specifically focusing on the tale “The Assignation.”]

Does the mirror tell the truth? Does it consolidate a fiction that becomes the truth for the viewer? A mirage of unwavering identity, an unreachable oasis which fixes in permanence the hazy limits of sexuality and gender? Does it reveal not only who is the prettiest, but also who best fits an ideal, heterosexual model? How then would the mirror position the queer viewer? In “The Purveyor of Truth,” Jacques Derrida contests Jacques Lacan's use of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Purloined Letter,” “to illustrate,” to mirror the meaning and the truth of a psychoanalytic law: according to Derrida, in Lacan, “the letter will always refind its proper place … will be where it always will have been, always should have been, intangible and indestructible via the detour of a proper, and properly circular, itinerary”¹ (Derrida 177). Lacan states in his seminar that, “what the ‘purloined letter’ … means is that a letter always arrives at its destination” (Seminar 53). Derrida reifies the argument into its insistence on closure in order to focus upon Lacan's logocentrism. Derrida counterclaims that the Poe story “imprints … effects of indirection … the play of doubles, divisibility without end, textual references from fac-simile to fac-simile, the framing of the frames … ‘The Purloined Letter’ operates as a text which evades every assignable destination”² (Derrida 204). Poe's œuvre also evades, though Derrida does not spell this out, the compulsory delegations of normative gender and sexuality.

Lacan's assertion of the perfect return of the signifier in the symbolic reduplicates his claims about the fixity of the mirror in the imaginary. As Jacqueline Rose succinctly states in her explication of the Lacanian imaginary, “the image returned” to the subject “is fixed and stable” (Rose 172). Although the subject may angle herself or himself at variance with this proper view of the image, there is a proper image, a proper mirroring that totalizes the subject's self-identity. “The libidinal drive,” according to Lacan, “is centered on the function of the imaginary” (Book I 122). The mirror configures sexual orientation, and tells the story of the subject's sexuality. Everything “depends upon” the subject's “position in relation to the real image”³ (140); and the correct position in Lacan is invariably the heteronormative, replete with its strict gender binary. If this “coherent” vision of the self is always a delusion for Lacan, it is a necessary fiction for the constitution of the subject, and therefore a fiction that tells the truth.

What if the mirror, instead of insuring the lack-predicated closure of the subject, disrupts identity claims, deflects the compulsion to truth, and multiplies unstable subject-positions to infinite proliferation, beyond the possibility of proper assignation? In other words, what if the mirror operates like the Derridean sign, or the Deleuzian desiring-machine, and thereby suspends Lacan's division between the symbolic realm of language and the imaginary realm of images? Judith Butler argues that the mutation of Lacan's supposedly unalterable law will “call into question not only the compulsory heterosexuality attributed to the symbolic, but also the stability and discreteness of the distinction between symbolic and imaginary registers” (Butler 106). This problematizing of the boundary between registers serves as a queer reading strategy that raises the imaginary contestations of identity in queer politics to the power of intervening in and changing the symbolic law. Lacan claims that the imaginary is subordinate to the signifier, to the letter, and, therefore, to the unalterable symbolic law; but what if the signifier is the mirror?

To illustrate the non-illustrative figure of the mirror in Poe, the little-known short story, “The Assignation,” provides an example of the problematics of attempting to extract a singular truth from a text.⁴ While “The Assignation” gestures toward exemplification, especially in relation to its protagonist, it brings into question the truth value of this interpretive process. The story shows that even the exemplary figure may be impossible to retrieve. Of course I implicate myself in the play of mirrors: a reading of Poe that hopes to describe the intertextual play of gender and textuality, of sexuality and truth, necessarily submits itself to the logic of the text's mirror chamber, where every viewpoint is immediately doubled and reversed, every stance creates its opposite, and the play of reflection recedes into the endless abyss of opposing mirrors.

In “The Assignation,” interpretive models that involve figures of representation like the mirror, the eye, and the statue problematize the possibility of any sort of hermeneutic recovery on the part of the reader, as well as that of the narrator. Instead of establishing a progression of readerly codes that would render the text transparent or decipherable, Poe's use of these figures in explicitly and convolutedly intertextual contexts redoubles and confounds every issue of concern. Just as the narrator's journey within the past time of the narrative is a quest for knowledge that never succeeds fully, so is the quest of the implicit reader: the identity of the mysterious figure, the model who serves as a mirror around whom the text revolves, must remain undecidable. A tracing of the interaction of poetry and prose, of allusion and storyline, sketches out the text's dynamics of identity. Questions of genre and allusion redouble into questions of sexuality: the mysterious figure fails to become the kind of self-enclosed entity that the narrator wishes to presume him to be. His interactions with the other two characters, the Marchesa and the narrator, operate in terms of mirroring and reflection that inscribe identity as mirror, and a kind of inter-subjectivity that transgresses boundaries of heterosexual desire precisely where it crosses textual boundaries. These mirror moves do not effect all characters symmetrically; often the Marchesa is reduced to playing the flat surface on which the male characters reflect their desire for each other, and even so, it is the protagonist, not the Marchesa, who the narrator figures as the perfect mirror. While the protagonist and the narrator use the Marchesa to embody in themselves alternative forms of subjectivity, she, as a passive object upon which to act and to reflect, is never granted permission to destabilize actively her gender, or her sexual identity.

If such conflation of textuality with sexual identity engenders a male homoerotics, its representational basis, the mirror, allows no foreclosure of meaning into fixed, characterizing terms like “homosexual.” Indeed, the term, “character,” becomes questionable in the interpretation of “The Assignation,” for it suggests the possibility of determining assignations. Thus, the stakes in a deconstructive, queer theory reading do not concern proofs that the characters are queer, or that Poe is queer. Rather, my reading points both to Poe's subversive homoerotic textuality—a topic heretofore almost completely ignored in Poe criticism—and to a far less fixed setting for the imaginary than Lacan's.⁵

A multiple mystery whose complex hermeneutical figures undo all possibility of solution to the ostensible plot, “The Assignation” is a difficult text to summarize—so treacherous, indeed, that traditional commentary has either treated the story as a failure; or, after Richard P. Benton, characterized it as a hoax.⁶ The story begins with the reflections of an anonymous narrator on a protagonist whom he never names. He recalls their meeting in Venice, where, as the protagonist rescues the child of the Marchesa from the Grand Canal, the narrator speculates upon the Marchesa, the meaning of her gestures, and her relation to the protagonist. He is unable to comprehend what he sees. The narrator and the protagonist agree to meet at the protagonist's exclusive quarters. While they discuss art and the Marchesa, the narrator espies a poem written by the protagonist, which offers clues to his inscrutable identity. The protagonist unveils a portrait of the Marchesa and offers to share a drink with the narrator. The drink of the protagonist is poisoned, and he dies. Just as this happens, a page rushes in to tell of the Marchesa's similar demise.

Although the narrator claims to recognize “the entire and terrible truth” (80) of the situation, the reader never learns the identity of the protagonist, or whether the poisoning is a dual suicide or a murder. A plot summary cannot indicate adequately the variety of questions “The Assignation” raises; an abstracted plot performs the action for which Derrida criticizes Lacan, fishing out a structural semantics, “a message,” for the text in disregard to its specifics (Derrida 178). “Lacan excludes the textual fiction from within which he has extracted the so-called general narration” in such a way that the “formal structure of the text is overlooked, in a very classical fashion, at the very moment when, and perhaps in the extent to which, its ‘truth,’ its exemplary message, allegedly is ‘deciphered’” (180). Poe continually disrupts the itinerary of the message by multiplying and dispersing, rather than reducing, its possible destinations.

While the title of the story, “The Assignation,” sets up the expectation that its subject will be a lover's tryst, the inset couplet immediately following the title, and the parenthetical note attached to it, suggest a particular type of assignation:

Stay with me there! I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
[Exequy on the death of his wife, by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester]

(69)

There is nothing unconventional about beginning a piece of prose fiction with an inset quote from another author; nor is it particularly unsettling to suggest that “The Assignation” will here mean the meeting of a woman and a man after death. Yet the way the couplet gets played out in the opening narrative unsettles every word of it. It bears strange relation to the prose, which, in mirroring it, distorts the confines of genre and gender:

ILL-FATED and mysterious man!—bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me!—not—oh not as thou art—in the cold valley and shadow—but as thou shouldst be—squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim vision, thine own Venice—which is a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, and the wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters. Yes! I repeat it—as thou shouldst be.

(69)

Both poetry and prose begin with an apostrophe to a missing person and continue in an invocatory manner that connotes loss and misery, implying that such bereavement serves as the occasion for the elegiac mode. Since the narrator's construction of mourning involves envisioning the other only as he should be, in the “Elysium” of Venice, it echoes the implied “Heaven” of the couplet, and thereby suggests that the narrator of the couplet, too, has placed his lost beloved in what I shall call the realm of “the shoulds.” Poetry, then, would be an idealization of the other, a conditional discourse removed from the other as she or he truly is. The “hollow vale” becomes not “that city of dim visions,” but Elysium; and the meeting described in the couplet, an imaginative journey. The description of the waters creates a surface/depth dichotomy, which presupposes the possibility of disclosing “secrets,” of enacting a hermeneutic operation that would comprehend a mystery.

The passage itself, however, enacts a double mystery: how can prose be poetry, and how can an assignation involve two men? For the “other” changes sex, from female to male, and the prose mimes the poetry, registering the doubling effect of a discourse of the supposedly same, of a man on a man. The narrator not only desires the protagonist: he identifies with him. Even though this “mysterious man” has fallen already into the flames of his own imagination, and destroyed himself therein, the narrator goes on to write, “in fancy I behold thee!,” reduplicating the protagonist's self-destructive trajectory. In his construction of the protagonist in the realm of ideality—that is, “the shoulds”—as a basis for his own identity (insofar as the narrative constructs this identity), the narrator will appear to perform the same action that the Lacanian subject takes in relation to the ideal, unified image in the mirror. This identity, which I will discuss later in relation to the description of the features of the protagonist, is a construct, a fiction that promises “a deep and bitter meaning,” a “truth” about loss it will refuse to deliver.

The action of the story commences with another apostrophic note, a woman's cry of loss: “a female voice … broke suddenly upon the night, in one wild, hysterical and long continued shriek” (70). She shrieks because her child has fallen out of her arms and into the Grand Canal. Upon moving closer, the narrator recognizes her as “the Marchesa Aphrodite—the adoration of all Venice—the gayest of the gay—the most lovely where all were beautiful” (70). If the unusual name itself does not establish her as a symbol for, or invocation of, the goddess of love, the list of superlatives situates her more surely within traditional discourse about Aphrodite. Yet it is not the Marchesa, but the protagonist, who proceeds to act like the goddess: after plunging “headlong into the canal” to rescue the child, “in an instant afterwards, he stood … by the side of the Marchesa, his cloak, heavy with drenching water, became unfastened, and, falling in folds about his feet, discovered to the wonder-stricken spectators the graceful person of a very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing” (72). The allusion to Aphrodite rising out of the ocean to the acclaim of the world is unmistakable; this literary reference, however, serves to describe a displacement from female to male as object of ultimate desire, which occurs when gender attributes switch sex. The figure of the goddess also serves to elucidate the narrator's desiring gaze upon the protagonist, at the same time flattening the Marchesa into a reflective surface.

Between the loss of the child and its recovery, a play of mirror images complicates the Aphrodite shift:

She stood alone. Her small, bare, and silvery feet gleamed in the black mirror of marble underneath. Her hair … clustered, in curls like those of the young hyacinth … yet—strange to say—her large lustrous eyes were not turned downwards upon the grave wherein her brightest hope lay buried—but riveted in a widely different direction! … Nonsense! Who does not remember that, at such times as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far off places, the woe which is close at hand?

(71)

Just as the male protagonist metamorphoses suddenly into a simulacrum of a female goddess, so the Marchesa is likened to Hyacinth, in Greco-Roman mythology a male lover of Apollo, after whose untimely death the grief-stricken god changes into a flower. The trope of metamorphosis reappears when the narrator likens the Marchesa to a “statue” (72). The concluding sentence provides another model for the representation of loss: a generative source, the eye, reduplicates its interior bereavement in a repetitive projection onto a far away place. Its topography could be heaven, Venice, or, as it is in this scene, “The prison of the Old Republic” (71). The source, the mirror, is “shattered,” no longer capable of the one-to-one representation that might allow it to recuperate the object of its sorrow. Instead of fixing the object of loss, the eye, as reflective surface, “multiplies” it. Loss does not prefigure a unitary idealization, an “assumption of the armour of an alienating identity” (Ecrits 4). Although the Marchesa becomes a statue, she fails to turn into the totalized art-object the protagonist later will demand. The shattered mirror disperses loss, and the absence thereby reaffirmed fails to consolidate the mourning self.

In the figure of the protagonist, the narrator looks for a mirror that will return a proper reflection, a wholeness he can appropriate. He describes the unfragmented features of the protagonist after the Romantic type of the artist:

his were features than which I have seen none other more classically regular, except, perhaps, the marble ones of the Emperor Commodus. Yet his countenance was, nevertheless, one of those which all men have seen at some period of their lives, and have never afterwards seen again. It had no particular—it had no settled predominant expression to be fastened upon the memory; a countenance seen and instantly forgotten—but forgotten with a vague and never-ceasing desire of recalling it to mind. Not that the spirit of each rapid passion failed, at any time, to throw its one distinct image upon the mirror of that face—but that the mirror, mirror-like, retained no vestige of the passion, when the passion had departed.

(73)

A face like a statue, like a mirror; a face that mirrors the passions, implicitly, of the narrator; is a face that recalls not only Narcissus but the water into which he gazes. The passage is prototypical of explanations of homosexuality that rely upon the Narcissus model.

In “On Narcissism,” Sigmund Freud's text upon which Lacan bases much of his reading of the imaginary, Freud explains his discovery,

in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed “narcissistic.”

(18)

Yet the narrator figures his choice as an ideality, not as a perversion, and obviously the mother figure of the Marchesa plays a role in this construction. Indeed, as Michael Warner points out in “Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality,” “[w]here Freud initially argued that an intricate confusion of the desired object with the image of what one would like to be is just the pathological derivation of homosexuality, Lacan shows that such an investment always structures the erotic” (198). In other words, the imaginary misunderstanding said to organize homosexuality is also the precondition of heterosexuality; Lacan, however, fails to follow through with a depathologization of homoerotic desire. Although Lacan notes “the narcissistic character of the relationship of imaginary love, and … how and to what extent the loved object is confounded, by means of one whole facet of its qualities, of its attributes, and also on its impact on the psychic economy, with the subject's ego-ideal” (Book I 112), he still censors the homosexual for narcissism: “[i]t is himself whom he pursues” (221). This is in contradiction to the insistence that the “exact equivalence of the object and the ego ideal in the love relationship is one of the most fundamental notions in Freud's work” (126).

Poe's narrator might be said to offer an oppositional model to Freud and Lacan for the proper interaction of identification and desire, an interaction within which the two terms serve not as bipolar opposites, but as complements to each other. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet that “modern, homophobic constructions of male heterosexuality”—which include the traditional explanations of psychoanalysis—

have a conceptual dependence on a distinction between men's identification (with men) and their desire (for women), a distinction whose factitiousness is latent where not patent. The (relatively new) emphasis on the “homo-,” on the dimension of sameness, built into modern understandings of the relations of sexual desire within a given gender, has had a sustained and active power to show how close may be the slippage or even the melding between identification and desire.

(62)

Although Poe does not have access to the power prefix, “The Assignation” enacts the subversive slippage of which Sedgwick speaks. The story proposes a model of identity in which the homophobic dichotomy simply does not operate.

An ideal model. Not only does the protagonist's face recall—with the important difference that there is no shattering here—the eyes of the Marchesa and the water into which she does not look, but it also reinscribes the site of mournful recollection in aperfect mirror. A theory of the composition of masculine identity is drawn as easily from this passage as a theory of male homosexuality: selfhood is a mirror that reflects past versions of the self; every man has once looked into this mirror and desires to recover it to the present but cannot, because the very imaginative act that recreates it as it should be posits that it never was what he imagines it to be now—that there never was a perfect mirror with which to begin.

However much this theory of the mirror may resemble Lacan's description of the mirror-stage, locating self-conception in the gaze of the other, it is important to note that the narrator concentrates not on the facility of this image in constructing his own identity, but on its irretrievable loss. An identity based on the mirror guarantees no stability. “The Assignation” presents a figure who exemplifies the impossibility of determining what an example might mean. Irene Harvey argues that “Exemplarity, as the transformation of a given into a sign for something else (either not present now but with the capacity to be made present, or never present intrinsically) or as the transformation of the given into a case, a particular that illustrates or represents a universal, always evokes the same metaphysical assumption” (265). It is the assumption of an intrinsic meaning to the sign, a signified absolutely corresponding to its signifier, a proper return—an assumption that Poe problematizes with his mirror-figure who totalizes no reflection and remains irrecoverable. Because the question of who the protagonist “truly” is—which contains the question of what his name is—receives no answer, the reader, after the narrator, can construct no more than a fiction of whom the protagonist might or should be.

As the narrator enters the quarters of the protagonist, the later suggestively says, “With one exception you are the only human being besides myself and my valet, who has been admitted within the mysteries of these imperial precincts … !” (75). The implication is that the Marchesa has been there, too; but the protagonist, through the mediating language of art, proceeds to dismiss her:

“Ha!” said he thoughtfully, “the Venus—the beautiful Venus?—the Venus of the Medici?—she of the diminutive head and the gilded hair? Part of the left arm (here his voice dropped so as to be heard with difficulty), and all the right are restorations, and in the coquetry of that right arm lies, I think, the quintessence of all affectation.”

(76)

Broken and unsuccessfully restored, the feminine statue—like the Marchesa on the Grand Canal—fails to articulate the self-identical oneness the protagonist demands of an “original” work of art. Shattered, she most certainly cannot assume centrality: like Luce Irigaray's “female imaginary” in This Sex Which Is Not One, she is relegated to “the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) ‘subject’ to reflect himself, to copy himself” (30). Paradoxically, the Marchesa also serves as the necessary mirror which allows the narrator to “see” the protagonist; like the figure of woman, the image of the Marchesa subtends phallocentric representation.

The protagonist then states his choice:

Give me the Canova! The Apollo, too!—is a copy—there can be no doubt of it—blind fool that I am, who cannot behold the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help—pity me—preferring the Antinous.

(76)

The Antinous represents the Roman Emperor Hadrian's male lover. Socrates and Michelangelo quickly follow, two figures enframed most prominently in the discourse of (sublimated?) homoeroticism, the same tradition to which the Apollo Belvedere and the Antinous belong. The convoluted statement about the Apollo implies that the protagonist is a “blind fool” because he cannot envision what is impossible to envision: how a copy, a mirrored thing that is like the memory of a mirror, allows imagination to work, and therefore is a perfect mirror. The question of how a copy can do the work of the “original” is problematized by the lack of the “original.” When, after paraphrasing Socrates, the protagonist dismisses a Michelangelo couplet on the basis that it is not original, that it is a mere paraphrase of what Socrates already said, he quotes the couplet, and, in doing so, ends up repeating its sentiment for the second time. Condemning mirror-like reiteration, he does it himself, and thus proposes a model of artistic production at odds with the organicism of a possible “Socrates who said the statuary found the statue in the block of marble” (76). That he cannot be sure Socrates first uttered the sentiment suggests the unrecoverability of its origins. The passage also implies that the artist finds his statue in other statues and the poet finds his poems in other poems, just as the description of the protagonist implies that the male subject finds his identity in other men. The “original” recedes from view: in terms of the constitution of a subject's gender and sexuality, this means that there is no immutable heterosexual ideal that can claim an originary precedence. A poem relates to other poems; a sexual identity relates to the identities of others, who may or may not pose as the heteronormative “real image.” These associations of texts and of bodies need not be unequivocal: there is no fixed one-to-one correspondence that rules out divergence from the model.

The narrator relates his “discovery” of “English lines” (77) in the protagonist's apartment. He finds the poetry enfolded in the first native Italian tragedy about other than the first poet, Orpheus. Yet the book, like the protagonist, lays “upon an ottoman,” and is “tainted with impurity” (77). Such tainting suggests homoerotic content, but more striking is the way in which the protagonist violates the rigid masculine/feminine affective pattern the narrator expects: instead of feeling “heart-stirring excitement” (77), the protagonist cries; and the particularity of the handwriting may indicate a feminine style. The narrator frames the poem intertextually, somehow related to a previous literary production. In spite of psychological overtones and tears—which position the poem as the spontaneous outcome of strongly felt emotion—the narrational frame for the poem problematizes the “purity” of such emotion. Although, arguably, the poem presents an ideal of autotelic poetic beauty and of a self unified through the consolidation of loss, its ties to the ongoing narrative render its autonomy questionable.

The poem sets up the kind of topographical paradise of desire described at the commencement of the story's narration: “A green isle in the sea, love, / A fountain and a shrine” (77) echoes the description of Venice, implying that this paradise, too, serves as the site of an imaginary, perfect origin. The repetitiveness of the narrative's ever doubling mirror imagery finds reflection in the poetic refrain. Naming a present separation—“Ah, dream too bright to last; / Ah, starry Hope that didst arise / But to be overcast!”—the speaker creates a distance from the unnamed other, a tactic which allows him the pretense of autonomous selfhood and the aggrandizing title of “poet.” The speaker of the poem can assert his autonomy only because he isolates himself: separation generates voice. Loss is supposed to provide cohesive subjecthood. The “dream too bright to last” recalls the mysterious man “bewildered in the brilliancy” of his own imagination and residing in the realm of “the shoulds.” The other is figured in terms that the speaker fabricates in order to feel a present loss: “starry Hope that didst arise / But to be overcast!” The speaker supposes the poem will constitute a stable and separate identity through the holding power of poetry: “(Such language holds the solemn sea / To the sands upon the shore)” (77). If the speaker tells us his dreams are with the beloved, “In what ethereal dances, / By what Italian streams” (77), is he the narrator talking about the protagonist, or the protagonist talking about the Marchesa? Again, loss fails to foreclose identity, and this is important because it allows the identificatory slippage that permits expression of homoerotic desire.⁷

The protagonist unveils the portrait of the Marchesa to the narrator, which causes the narrator to burst “instinctively” (79) into poetry. Yet the poetry is a quotation from another author, Chapman; and it speaks of a man, not a woman: “He is up / There like a Roman statue! He will stand / Till Death hath made him marble” (79).

Since the citation suggests the erection of the penis, as well as the rigidity of death, it shows how the Marchesa once again serves as an image that manages the transfer of desire between two men. However, to assume that, like the portrait of the Marchesa, the true face of same-sex desire can be unveiled or admitted is to postulate the hermeneutic recovery of a preexisting homosexuality. The portrait, in its mirror capacity, may less reflect than generate a textual homoerotics. Instead of consolidating heterosexual identities, it multiplies the possibilities of identification and desire: the narrator can identify with either the protagonist or the Marchesa, and desire either—all combinations are available.

After twice commanding, “Come!” (79), the protagonist shares his wine with the narrator. This improper communion ends with swallowing. The protagonist says twice, “It is indeed early” (79), emphasizing the impropriety and helping to give the paragraph the kind of reiterative refrain the poem has. The protagonist goes on to speak of “that land of real dreams whither I am now departing” (79). Although the phrase foreshadows his ensuing demise, it is unclear whether he knows he has drunk poison, or merely comments on the effects of alcohol. The phrase recalls the realm of “the shoulds,” the realm of poetry and unified identity. After repeating the Henry King lines quoted at the opening of the story, he throws himself “at full length upon an ottoman” (80), at once suggesting femininity and the Nineteenth Century's fantasy of the feminizing Orient.⁸

A page enters to tell of the death of the Marchesa. The way the narrator inscribes his statement gives the reader yet another apostrophic, invocatory voice for which to account: the page “faltered out, in a voice choking with emotion, the incoherent words, ‘My mistress!—my mistress—poisoned! Oh beautiful—oh beautiful Aphrodite!’” (80)—words which might apply to the narrator's feeling for the protagonist. The final paragraph begins with the narrator “Bewildered” (80); in the first paragraph of the narrative, the word, “bewildered” appears fifth from the beginning and applies to the protagonist. Again, the narrator follows the trajectory, the life journey, of the protagonist.

Bewildered, I flew to the ottoman, and endeavored to arouse the sleeper to a sense of the startling intelligence. But his limbs were rigid—his lips were livid—his lately beaming eyes were riveted in death. I staggered back towards the table … and a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over my soul.

(80)

The narrator italicizes “death” as he italicizes “shouldst be” in the first paragraph; death is, of course, a version of the realm of “the shoulds.” This final paragraph completes the literalization of Henry King's opening couplet, enacting it in a prose context which places it under the critique of irony. For who come together in “The Assignation,” but the narrator and the protagonist? Insofar as the prose reinscribes or mirrors the couplet's heterosexual assignation, it does so as a same-sex parody of “the couple,” a parody that, through its dissonant reiteration, renders the “shouldst be” of compulsory heterosexuality visible and, therefore, questionable. As Judith Butler writes, “the ideal that is mirrored depends upon that very mirroring to be sustained as an ideal”⁹ (14). But Poe skews the mirrors and complicates proper assignation. Exposing and problematizing the complex hermeneutic figure of the mirror, “The Assignation” challenges the mimetic truths of the very interpretive system that perpetuates heterosexist discourse.

Yet “The Assignation” does not place the reader, blissfully, in the realm of the queer. Although the mirrors in the text refuse to reflect a stable, unitary heterosexual masculine identity, disseminating idealities of ambiguous gender and sex formation that challenge phallogocentric formulations of the proper image, the story requires a reified femininity and a backdrop of financial superabundance to enframe its mirrors. Without the hypostatized image of the Marchesa Aphrodite, the story would lack its mechanism for the conveyance of homoerotic desire. The desire of the Marchesa herself does not speak in “The Assignation”: were it to do so, it would disrupt her passive position as mirror. The story, thus, depends upon an idealized and flattened femininity to represent its desire, to serve as a facsimile of legitimacy, at the same time excluding the feminine from the scene of action. Within the narrative, the Marchesa always already exists in the realm of “the shoulds”: that is, elsewhere. If the reader can pull fragments of a theory of depathologized homosexuality from “The Assignation,” it is a theory of aristocratic, androcentric homosexuality. Homosexuality, like poetry, for Poe, is the prerogative of the wealthy, highly cultured, European elite. Interestingly, Poe presents an aristocratic ideal that is only ideal because it has vanished; that aristocracy, and with it homoeroticism, it would seem, have nowhere to go but the realm of “the shoulds.” This is the realm of statues, and of the dead. Aristocratic homosexuality can exist in art, perhaps, and in the fictional constructions of memory, but not in everyday life. Nor does it have a name.

The narrator makes the protagonist into an exemplary figure whose name is often hinted but never confirmed. It is unclear how the narrator comes to recognize “the entire and terrible truth,” which would include the protagonist's name and the motive behind his death. The story sometimes hints that its protagonist is none other than Lord Byron, and sometimes shows that he cannot be Byron. A “very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing” (72), probably “an Englishman” (78) whose personality traits mime those of the Romantic poet, the protagonist's sad trajectory, however, does not parallel the historical Byron's. Far from halting the text's mirror play of identity, the entry of Byron only compounds it: the “historical” Byron becomes one more countenance/mirror against which to diffuse identity. Byron's “presence” is no more than a diffusion of inscriptions and myths; the reader encounters neither a documentary slice from the life of Byron, nor a fictional character who merely resembles Byron, but fragments of the famous poet that allude to his life and legend without allowing positive identification. As Dennis Pahl writes in “Recovering Byron: Poe's ‘The Assignation,’”

“Byron” stands as a point of presence, a fixed origin, that vanishes the moment language, or representation, submits itself to its primary activity of interpreting … Interpreting Byron, Poe's language effaces the very origin it desires to obtain.

(212)

Perhaps Poe's “language” desires to efface origins, not “obtain” them. The insertion of the name, “Byron,” into interpretation fails to establish a hermeneutic grounding from which the security of unified identity and stable exegesis can ensue. Poe does not disclose the proper name; such designation would be “at once the setting of a boundary, and also the … inculcation of a norm” (Butler, 8).

“The Assignation” offers no privileged hermeneutic route of recovery; nonetheless, a reading that fixes the play of identity, and thereby offers exemplary meaning, threatens to reify the text. The absence of any centered and authoritative voice precludes the possibility of closure, of a proper return. Poe's deconstruction of identity makes the project of recovery itself seem contingent, gendered, and constructed—as is assuredly the case with “The Assignation.” The proper image recedes from the frame of possibility, producing chains of simulacra that reveal no truth firmly set behind them. The itinerary of attempting to circle back, the very trajectory of nostalgia, narrates the significatory function of the imaginary. The imaginary, instead of serving as a vaguely pre-discursive site always already subordinated to the symbolic action of the signifier, itself is structured like a language. As such, it cannot offer the perfect correspondence of signifier and signified through an analogy to the mirror and the image it reflects.¹⁰ Without the guarantee of proper mimesis, any claim to recourse to a “real image” belies the fact that the “real image” is nothing other than an idealization, a transposition of “as thou art” to “as thou shouldst be.” If this transposition compels the regulatory law that dictates the formation of the subject, its efficacy depends upon the invisibility of its action. To conceive the heteronormative as the image of reality requires a blindness to its contingency, to its position as one of many simulacra of the self. Through the figure of the mirror and the various permutations it produces, Poe narrates not the closure of identity, but its unstoppable proliferation. “The Assignation” thematizes the project of idealization, of constructing the exemplary, as a fiction that cannot claim the status of singular truth. The mirror, it would seem, has many stories to tell.

Notes

1. Derrida quotes the words “to illustrate” from Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” (29).

2. Slavoj Žižek, for whom Derrida's critique is a misreading that “exhibits what we could call a primordial response of common sense,” claims that “Lacan's exposition of the way a letter arrives at its destination lays bare the very mechanism of teleological illusion” (9-10). Yet this “illusion” is inescapable, since the letter's “true addressee is namely not the empirical other which may receive it or not, but the big Other, the symbolic order itself which receives it the moment the letter is put into circulation.” Žižek abjures Lacan of a logocentrism which his own essay subtends, as indicated by the “true addressee” and the all-swallowing symbolic. “[T]he symbolic debt has to be repaid” (16): to avoid it is to go outside the realm of proper subjecthood. “Stricto sensu, there is a subjective position within which a letter does not arrive at its destination, within which the repressed does not return in the shape of symptoms, within which the subject does not receive from the Other its own message in its true form: that of a psychotic” (26, n. 30). Against the implications of this reasoning, Judith Butler writes,

   though the symbolic appears to be a force that cannot be contravened without psychosis, the symbolic ought to be rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability … The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology prior and autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation. What is ‘forced’ by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force. (14-15)

3. My critique of Lacan does not extend beyond The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Mirror,” and “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” Thus I am open to the charge of selective focus, though I believe such reification is necessary.

4. A singular truth could be a psychoanalytic law, or as it is for Dennis Pahl, the very principle of indeterminacy.

5. Recent readings of “The Assignation” from psychoanalytic and deconstructive perspectives do not broach the topic of homoeroticism. See Dennis Pahl, David Ketterer, and Katrina Bachinger. Their readings, which begin to address the textual erotics of Poe's prose, build on a long-standing and little-contested critical tradition of circumscribing Poe within the confines of heterosexuality.

6. For a summation of the dismissive attitude of traditional American critics toward Poe, see Jonathan Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe.” Also see Richard P. Benton, “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax?”

7. To give a name would be, indeed, to foreclose identity.

   Bodies only become whole, i.e., totalities, by the idealizing and totalizing specular image which is sustained through time by the sexually marked name. To have a name is to be positioned within the symbolic … the paternal law produces versions of bodily integrity; the name, which installs gender and kinship, works as a politically invested and investing performative. To be named is thus to be inculcated into that law and to be formed, bodily, in accordance with that law. (Butler 72)

8. For a detailed reading of the feminized Orient and European homosexual projection onto the East, see Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.”

9. Butler further argues,

   [t]he expressive power of the symbolic is itself produced by the citational instance by which the law is embodied … The imaginary practice of identification must itself be understood as a double movement: in citing the symbolic, an identification (re)invests the symbolic law, seeks recourse to it as a continuing authority that precedes its imaginary instancing. The priority and authority of the symbolic is, however, constituted through that recursive turn, such that citation … effectively brings into being the very prior authority to which it then defers. (108-9)

10. Lacan states that to understand the imaginary, “we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus” (Book I 75). In such an optics, “for each given point only in real space, there must be one point and one corresponding point only in another space, which is the imaginary space” (76). Thus, there is an exact replication from the real to the imaginary: “the reflection in the mirror indicates an original noetic possibility” (125).

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