SOURCE: Felman, Shoshana. “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches.” In Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 119-39. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1980, Felman examines the limitations of psychoanalytic criticism that links Poe's life to his poetry and thus concludes that the poetry is symptomatic of sickness or abnormality.]

To account for poetry in psychoanalytical terms has traditionally meant to analyze poetry as a symptom of a particular poet. I would here like to reverse this approach, and to analyze a particular poet as a symptom of poetry.

No poet, perhaps, has been as highly acclaimed and, at the same time, as violently disclaimed as Edgar Allan Poe. The most controversial figure on the American literary scene, “perhaps the most thoroughly misunderstood of all American writers,” “a stumbling block for the judicial critic,” Edgar Allan Poe has had the peculiar fortune of being at once the most admired and the most decried of American poets. In the history of literary criticism, no other poet has engendered as much disagreement and as many critical contradictions. It is my contention that this critical disagreement is itself symptomatic of a poetic effect, and that the critical contradictions to which Poe's poetry has given rise are themselves indirectly significant of the nature of poetry.

THE POE-ETIC EFFECT: A LITERARY CASE HISTORY

No other poet has been so often referred to as a “genius,” in a sort of common consensus shared even by his detractors. Joseph Wood Krutch, whose study of Poe tends to belittle Poe's stature and to disparage the value of his artistic achievement, nevertheless entitles his monograph Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius. So do many other critics, who acknowledge and assert Poe's “genius” in the very titles of their essays, and thus propose to study “The Genius of Poe” (J. M. S. Robertson), Le Génie d'Edgar Poe (Camille Mauclair, Paris, 1925), Edgar Allan Poe: His Genius and His Character (John Dillon, New York, 1911), The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe (John R. Thompson, privately printed, 1929), Genius and Disaster: Studies in Drugs and Genius (Jeannet A. Marks, New York, 1925), “Affidavits of Genius: French Essays on Poe” (Jean A. Alexander). “It happens to us but few times in our lives,” writes Thomas W. Higginson, “to come consciously into the presence of that extraordinary miracle we call genius. Among the many literary persons whom I have happened to meet, … there are not half a dozen who have left an irresistible sense of this rare quality; and among these few, Poe.” For Constance M. Rourke, “Poe has become a symbol for the type of genius which rises clear from its time;” The English poet A. Charles Swinburne speaks of “the special quality of [Poe's] strong and delicate genius;” the French poet Mallarmé describes his translations of Poe as “a monument to the genius who … exercised his influence in our country;” and the American poet James Russell Lowell, one of Poe's harshest critics, who, in his notorious versified verdict, judged Poe's poetry to include “two fifths sheer fudge,” nonetheless asserts: “Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius. … Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism. Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting.”

However suspicious and unromantic the critical reader might wish to be with respect to “that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius,” it is clear that Poe's poetry produces, in a uniquely striking and undeniable manner, what might be called a genius-effect: the impression of some undefinable but compelling force to which the reader is subjected. To describe “this power, which is felt,” as one reader puts it, Lowell speaks of “magnetism”; other critics speak of “magic.” “Poe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty.” T. S. Eliot quite reluctantly agrees: “Poe had, to an exceptional degree, the feeling for the incantatory element in poetry, of that which may, in the most nearly literal sense, be called ‘the magic of verse.’”

Poe's “magic” is thus ascribed to the ingenuity of his versification, to his exceptional technical virtuosity. And yet, the word magic, “in the most nearly literal sense,” means much more than just the intellectual acknowledgment of an outstanding technical skill; it connotes the effective action of something which exceeds both the understanding and the control of the person who is subjected to it; it connotes a force to which the reader has no choice but to submit. “No one could tell us what it is,” writes Lowell, still in reference to Poe's genius, “and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of … its power.” “Poe,” said Bernard Shaw, “inevitably produced magic.” There is something about Poe's poetry which, like fate, is experienced as inevitable, unavoidable (and not just as irresistible). What is more, once this poetry is read, its inevitability is there to stay; it becomes lastingly inevitable: “it will stick to the memory of every one who reads it,” writes P. Pendleton Cooke. And T. S. Eliot: “Poe is the author of a few … short poems … which do somehow stick in the memory.”

This is why Poe's poetry can be defined, and indeed has been, as a poetry of influence par excellence, in the sense emphasized by Harold Bloom: “to inflow” = to have power over another. The case of Poe in literary history could in fact be accounted for as one of the most extreme and most complex cases of “the anxiety of influence,” of the anxiety unwittingly provoked by the “influence” irresistibly emanating from this poetry. What is unique, however, about Poe's influence, as about the “magic” of his verse, is the extent to which its action is unaccountably insidious, exceeding the control, the will, and the awareness of those who are subjected to it. “Poe's influence,” writes T. S. Eliot, “is … puzzling”:

In France the influence of his poetry and of his poetic theories has been immense. In England and America it seems almost negligible. … And yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing has not been influenced by Poe.

Studying Poe's influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, Eliot goes on to comment:

Here are three literary generations, representing almost exactly a century of French poetry. Of course, these are poets very different from each other. … But I think we can trace the development and descent of one particular theory of the nature of poetry through these three poets and it is a theory which takes its origin in the theory … of Edgar Poe. And the impression we get of the influence of Poe is the more impressive, because of the fact that Mallarmé, and Valéry in turn, did not merely derive from Poe through Baudelaire: each of them subjected himself to that influence directly, and has left convincing evidence of the value which he attached to the theory and practice of Poe himself. …

I find that by trying to look at Poe through the eyes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, I become more thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance of his work as a whole. [Eliot's italics]

Curiously enough, while Poe's worldwide importance and effective influence is beyond question, critics nonetheless continue to protest and to proclaim, as loudly as they can, that Poe is unimportant, that Poe is not a major poet. In an essay entitled “Vulgarity in Literature” (1931) and taxing Poe with “vulgarity,” Aldous Huxley argues:

Was Edgar Allan Poe a major poet? It would surely never occur to any English-speaking critic to say so. And yet, in France, from 1850 till the present time, the best poets of each generation—yes, and the best critics, too; for, like most excellent poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry are also admirable critics—have gone out of their way to praise him. … We who are speakers of English …, we can only say, with all due respect, that Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry were wrong and that Poe is not one of our major poets.

Poe's detractors seem to be unaware, however, of the paradox that underlies their enterprise: it is by no means clear why anyone should take the trouble to write—at length—about a writer of no importance. Poe's most systematic denouncer, Yvor Winters, thus writes:

The menace lies not, primarily, in his impressionistic admirers among literary people of whom he still has some, even in England and in America, where a familiarity with his language ought to render his crudity obvious, for these individuals in the main do not make themselves permanently very effective; it lies rather in the impressive body of scholarship. … When a writer is supported by a sufficient body of such scholarship, a very little philosophical elucidation will suffice to establish him in the scholarly world as a writer whose greatness is self-evident.

The irony which here escapes the author is that, in writing his attack on Poe, what the attacker is in fact doing is adding still another study to the bulk of “the impressive body of scholarship” in which, in his own terms, “the menace lies”; so that, paradoxically enough, through Yvor Winters' study, “the menace”—that is, the possibility of taking Poe's “greatness as a writer” as “self-evident”—will indeed increase. I shall here precisely argue that, regardless of the value-judgment it may pass on Poe, this impressive bulk of Poe scholarship, the very quantity of the critical literature to which Poe's poetry has given rise, is itself an indication of its effective poetic power, of the strength with which it drives the reader to an action, compels him to a reading-act. The elaborate written denials of Poe's value, the loud and lengthy negations of his importance, are therefore very like psychoanalytical negations. It is clear that if Poe's text in effect were unimportant, it would not seem so important to proclaim, argue, and prove that he is unimportant. The fact that it so much matters to proclaim that Poe does not matter is but evidence of the extent to which Poe's poetry is, in effect, a poetry that matters.

Poe might thus be said to have a literary case history, most revealing in that it incarnates, in its controversial forms, the paradoxical nature of a strong poetic effect: the very poetry which, more than any other, is experienced as irresistible has also proved to be, in literary history, the poetry most resisted, the one that, more than any other, has provoked resistances.

This apparent contradiction, which makes of Poe's poetry a unique case in literary history, clearly partakes of the paradoxical nature of an analytical effect. The enigma it presents us with is the enigma of “the analytical” par excellence, as stated by Poe himself, whose amazing intuitions of the nature of what he calls “analysis” are strikingly similar to the later findings of psychoanalysis:

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects.

Because of the very nature of its strong “effects,” of the reading-acts that it provokes, Poe's text (and not just Poe's biography or his personal neurosis) is clearly an analytical case in the history of literary criticism, a case that suggests something crucial to understand in psychoanalytic terms. It is therefore not surprising that Poe, more than any other poet, has been repeatedly singled out for psychoanalytical research, has persistently attracted the attention of psychoanalytic critics.

THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES

The best known and most influential psychoanalytic studies of Poe are the 1926 study by Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, and the 1933 study by Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe: Étude psychanalytique, later to appear in English as the Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. More recently, Jacques Lacan has published a more limited study of one tale by Poe, “The Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” first published in 1966.

JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH: IDEOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, OR THE APPROACH OF NORMATIVE EVALUATION

For Joseph Wood Krutch, Poe's text is nothing other than an accurate transcription of a severe neurosis, a neurosis whose importance and significance for “healthy” people is admittedly unclear in Krutch's mind. Poe's “position as the first of the great neurotics has never been questioned,” writes Krutch ambiguously. And less ambiguously, in reply to some admiring French definitions of that position: “Poe ‘first inaugurated the poetic conscience’ only if there is no true poetry except the poetry of morbid sensibility.” “He must stand or fall with that whole body of neurotic literature of which his works furnish the earliest complete example.” Since Poe's works, according to Krutch, “bear no conceivable relation … to the life of any people, and it is impossible to account for them on the basis of any social or intellectual tendencies or as the expression of the spirit of any age,” the only possible approach is a biographical one, and “any true understanding” of the work is contingent upon a diagnosis of Poe's nervous malady. Krutch thus diagnoses in Poe a pathological condition of sexual impotence, the result of a “fixation” on his mother, and explains Poe's literary drive as a desire to compensate for, on the one hand, the loss of social position of which his foster father had deprived him, through the acquisition of literary fame, and on the other hand, his incapacity to have normal sexual relations, through the creation of a fictional world of horror and destruction in which he found refuge. Poe's fascination with logic would thus be merely an attempt to prove himself rational when he felt he was going insane; and his critical theory merely an attempt to justify his peculiar artistic practice.

The obvious limitations of such a psychoanalytic approach were very sharply and very accurately pointed out by Edmund Wilson in his essay “Poe at Home and Abroad.” Krutch, argues Wilson, seriously misunderstands and undervalues Poe's writings, in

complacently caricaturing them—as the modern school of social psychological biography, of which Mr. Krutch is a typical representative, seems inevitably to tend to caricature the personalities of its subjects. We are nowadays being edified by the spectacle of some of the principal ornaments of the human race exhibited exclusively in terms of their most ridiculous manias, their most disquieting neurosis, and their most humiliating failures. [italics mine]

It is, in other words, the reductionist, stereotypical simplification under which Krutch subsumes the complexities of Poe's art and life that renders this approach inadequate:

Mr. Krutch quotes with disapproval the statement of President Hadley of Yale, in explaining the refusal of the Hall of Fame to accept Poe among its immortals: “Poe wrote like a drunkard and a man who is not accustomed to pay his debts”; and yet Mr. Krutch himself … is almost as unperceptive when he tells us, in effect, that Poe wrote like a dispossessed Southern gentleman and a man with a fixation on his mother.

Subscribing to Wilson's criticism, I would like to indicate briefly some further limitations in this type of psychoanalytic approach to literature. Krutch himself, in fact, points out some of the limits of his method, in his conclusion:

We have, then, traced Poe's art to an abnormal condition of the nerves and his critical ideas to a rationalized defense of the limitations of his own taste. … The question whether or not the case of Poe represents an exaggerated example of the process by which all creation is performed is at best an open question. The extent to which all imaginative works are the result of the unfulfilled desires which spring from either idiosyncratic or universally human maladjustments to life is only beginning to be investigated, and with it is linked the related question of the extent to which all critical principles are at bottom the systematized and rationalized expression of instinctive tastes which are conditioned by causes often unknown to those whom they affect. The problem of finding an answer to these questions … is the one distinctly new problem which the critic of today is called upon to consider. He must, in a word, endeavor to find the relationship which exists between psychology and aesthetics. [italics mine]

This, indeed, is the real question, the real challenge which Poe as poet (and not as psychotic) presents to the psychoanalytic critic. But this is precisely the very question which is bracketed, never dealt with, in Krutch's study. Krutch discards the question by saying that “the present state of knowledge is not such as to enable” us to give any answers. This remark, however, presupposes—I think mistakenly—that the realm of “aesthetics,” of literature and art, might not itself contain some “knowledge” about, precisely, “the relationship between psychology and aesthetics”; it presupposes knowledge as a given, external to the literary object and imported into it, and not as a result of a reading-process, that is, of the critic's work upon and with the literary text. It presupposes, furthermore, that a critic's task is not to question but to answer, and that a question that cannot be answered, can also therefore not be asked; that to raise a question, to articulate its thinking power, is not itself a fruitful step which takes some work, some doing, into which the critic could perhaps be guided by the text.

Thus, in claiming that he has traced “Poe's art to an abnormal condition of the nerves,” and that Poe's “criticism falls short of psychological truth,” Krutch believes that his own work is opposed to Poe's as health is opposed to sickness, as “normality” is opposed to “abnormality,” as truth is opposed to delusion. But this ideologically determined, clear-cut opposition between health and sickness is precisely one that Freud's discovery fundamentally unsettles, deconstructs. In tracing Poe's “critical ideas to a rationalized defense of the limitations of his own taste,” Krutch is unsuspicious of the fact that his own critical ideas about Poe could equally be traced to “a rationalized defense of the limitations of his own taste”; that his doctrine, were it to be true, could equally apply to his own critical enterprise; that if psychoanalysis indeed puts rationality as such in question, it also by the same token puts itself in question.

Krutch, in other words, reduces not just Poe but analysis itself into an ideologically biased and psychologically opinionated caricature, missing totally (as is most often the case with “Freudian” critics) the radicality of Freud's psychoanalytic insights: their self-critical potential, their power to return upon themselves and to unseat the critic from any condescending, guaranteed, authoritative stance of truth. Krutch's approach does not, then, make sophisticated use of psychoanalytic insights, nor does it address the crucial question of “the relationship between psychology and aesthetics,” nor does it see that the crux of this question is not so much in the interrogation of whether or not all artists are necessarily pathological, but of what it is that makes of art—not of the artist—an object of desire for the public; of what it is that makes for art's effect, for the compelling power of Poe's poetry over its readers. The question of what makes poetry lies, indeed, not so much in what it was that made Poe write, but in what it is that makes us read him and that ceaselessly drives so many people to write about him.

MARIE BONAPARTE: THE APPROACH OF CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS

In contrast to Krutch's claim that Poe's works, as a literal transcription of his sickness, are only meaningful as the expression of morbidity, bearing “no conceivable relation … to the life of any people,” Marie Bonaparte, although in turn treating Poe's works as nothing other than the recreations of his neuroses, tries to address the question of Poe's power over his readers through her didactic explanation of the relevancy, on the contrary, of Poe's pathology to “normal” people: the pathological tendencies to which Poe's text gives expression are an exaggerated version of drives and instincts universally human, but which “normal” people have simply repressed more successfully in their childhood. What fascinates readers in Poe's texts is precisely the unthinkable and unacknowledged but strongly felt community of these human—all too human—sexual drives.

If Marie Bonaparte, unlike Krutch, thus treats Poe with human sympathy, suspending the traditional puritan condemnation and refraining, at least explicitly, from passing judgment on his “sickness,” she nonetheless, like Krutch, sets out primarily to diagnose that “sickness” and trace the poetry to it. Like Krutch, she comes up with a clinical “portrait of the artist” which, in claiming to account for the poetry, once again verges on caricature and cannot help but make us smile.

If Poe was fundamentally necrophilist, as we saw, Baudelaire is revealed as a declared sadist; the former preferred dead prey or prey mortally wounded … ; the latter preferred live prey and killing. …

How was it then, that despite these different sex lives, Baudelaire the sadist recognised a brother in the necrophilist Poe? …

This particular problem raises that of the general relation of sadism to necrophilia and cannot be resolved except by an excursus into the theory of instincts.

Can poetry thus be clinically diagnosed? In setting out to expose didactically the methods of psychoanalytic interpretation, Bonaparte's pioneering book at the same time exemplifies the very naïveté of competence, the distinctive professional crudity of what has come to be the classical psychoanalytic treatment of literary texts. Eager to point out the resemblances between psychoanalysis and literature, Bonaparte, like most psychoanalytic critics, is totally unaware of the differences between the two: unaware of the fact that the differences are as important and as significant for understanding the meeting-ground as are the resemblances, and that those differences also have to be accounted for if poetry is to be understood in its own right. Setting out to study literary texts through the application of psychoanalytic methods, Bonaparte, paradoxically enough but in a manner symptomatic of the whole tradition of applied psychoanalysis, thus remains entirely blind to the very specificity of the object of her research.

It is not surprising that this blind nondifferentiation or confusion of the poetic and the psychotic has unsettled sensitive readers, and that various critics have, in various ways, protested against this all too crude equation of poetry with sickness. The protestations, however, most often fall into the same ideological trap as the psychoanalytical studies they oppose: accepting (taking for granted) the polarity of sickness versus health, of normality versus abnormality, they simply trace Poe's art (in opposition, so they think, to the psychoanalytic claim) to normality as opposed to abnormality, to sanity as opposed to insanity, to the history of ideas rather than that of sexual drives, to a conscious project as opposed to an unconscious one. Camille Mauclair insists upon the fact that Poe's texts are “constructed objectively by a will absolutely in control of itself,” and that genius of that kind is “always sane.” For Allen Tate,

The actual emphases Poe gives the perversions are richer in philosophical implication than his psychoanalytic critics have been prepared to see. … Poe's symbols refer to a known tradition of thought, an intelligible order, apart from what he was as a man, and are not merely the index to a compulsive neurosis … the symbols … point towards a larger philosophical dimension.

For Floyd Stovall, the psychoanalytic studies “are not literary critiques at all, but clinical studies of a supposed psychopathic personality”:

I believe the critic should look within the poem or tale for its meaning, and that he should not, in any case, suspect the betrayal of the author's unconscious self until he has understood all that his conscious self has contributed. To affirm that a work of imagination is only a report of the unconscious is to degrade the creative artist to the level of an amanuensis.

I am convinced that all of Poe's poems were composed with conscious art.

[p. 183]

“The Raven,” and with certain necessary individual differences every other poem Poe wrote, was the product of conscious effort by a healthy and alert intelligence.

It is obvious that this conception of the mutual exclusiveness, of the clear-cut opposition between “conscious art” and the unconscious, is itself naïve and oversimplified. Nonetheless, Stovall's critique of applied psychoanalysis is relevant to the extent that the psychoanalytic explanation, in pointing exclusively to the author's unconscious sexual fantasies, indeed does not account for Poe's outstanding “conscious art,” for his unusual poetic mastery and his ingenious technical and structural self-control. As do its opponents, so does applied psychoanalysis itself fail precisely to account for the dynamic interaction between the unconscious and the conscious elements of art.

If the thrust of the discourse of applied psychoanalysis is, indeed, in tracing poetry to a clinical reality, to reduce the poetic to a “cause” outside itself, the crucial limitation of this process of reduction is, however, that the cause, while it may be necessary, is by no means a sufficient one. “Modern psychiatry,” judiciously writes David Galloway, “may greatly aid the critic of literature, but … it cannot thus far explain why other men, suffering from deprivations or fears or obsessions similar to Poe's, failed to demonstrate his particular creative talent. Though no doubt Marie Bonaparte was correct in seeing Poe's own art as a defense against madness, we must be wary of identifying the necessity for this defense, in terms of Poe's own life, with the success of this defense, which can only be measured in his art.”

That the discourse of applied psychoanalysis is limited precisely in that it does not account for Poe's poetic genius is in fact the crucial point made by Freud himself in his prefatory note to Marie Bonaparte's study:

FOREWORD

In this book my friend and pupil, Marie Bonaparte, has shown the light of psychoanalysis on the life and work of a great writer with pathologic trends.

Thanks to her interpretative effort, we now realize how many of the characteristics of Poe's works were conditioned by his personality, and can see how that personality derived from intense emotional fixations and painful infantile experiences. Investigations such as this do not claim to explain creative genius, but they do reveal the factors which awake it and the sort of subject matter it is destined to choose. …

Sigm. Freud

No doubt, Freud's remarkable superiority over some (most) of his disciples—including Marie Bonaparte—proceeds from his acute awareness of the very limitations of his method, an awareness that in his followers seems most often not to exist.

I would like here to raise a question which, springing out of this limitation of applied psychoanalysis, has, amazingly enough, never been asked as a serious question: is there a way around Freud's perspicacious reservation, warning us that studies like those of Bonaparte “do not claim to explain creative genius”? Is there, in other words, a way—a different way—in which psychoanalysis can help us to account for poetic genius? Is there any alternative to applied psychoanalysis?—an alternative that would be capable of touching, in a psychoanalytic manner, upon the very specificity of that which constitutes the poetic?

Before endeavoring to articulate the way in which this question might be answered, I would like to examine still another manner in which Poe's text has been psychoanalytically approached. Jacques Lacan's “Seminar” on Poe's short story, “The Purloined Letter.”

JACQUES LACAN: THE APPROACH OF TEXTUAL PROBLEMATIZATION

“The Purloined Letter,” as is well known, is the story of the double theft of a compromising letter, originally sent to the queen. Surprised by the unexpected entrance of the king, the queen leaves the letter on the table in full view of any visitor, where it is least likely to appear suspicious and therefore to attract the king's attention. Enters the Minister D., who, observing the queen's anxiety, and the play of glances between her and the unsuspicious king, analyzes the situation, figures out, recognizing the addressor's handwriting, what the letter is about, and steals it—by substituting for it another letter which he takes from his pocket—under the very eyes of the challenged queen, who can do nothing to prevent the theft without provoking the king's suspicions, and who is therefore reduced to silence. The queen then asks the prefect of police to search the minister's apartment and person, so as to find the letter and restore it to her. The prefect uses every conceivable secret-police technique to search every conceivable hiding place on the minister's premises, but to no avail: the letter remains undiscovered.

Having exhausted his resources, the prefect consults Auguste Dupin, the famous “analyst,” as Poe calls him (i.e., an amateur detective who excels in solving problems by means of deductive logic), to whom he tells the whole story. (It is, in fact, from this narration of the prefect of police to Dupin and in turn reported by the first-person narrator, Dupin's friend, who is also present, that we, the readers, learn the story.)

On a second encounter between the prefect of police and Dupin, the latter, to the great surprise of the prefect and of the narrator, produces the purloined letter out of his drawer and hands it to the prefect in return for a large amount of money. The prefect leaves, and Dupin explains to the narrator how he came into possession of the letter: he had deduced that the minister, knowing that his premises would be thoroughly combed by the police, had concluded that the best principle of concealment would be to leave the letter in the open, in full view: in that way the police, searching for hidden secret drawers, would be outwitted, and the letter would not be discovered precisely because it would be too self-evident. On this assumption, Dupin called on the minister in his apartment and, glancing around, soon located the letter most carelessly hanging from the mantelpiece in a card-rack. A little later, a disturbance in the street provoked by a man in Dupin's employ drew the minister to the window, at which moment Dupin quickly replaced the letter with a facsimile, having slipped the real one into his pocket.

I will not enter here into the complexity of the psychoanalytic issues involved in Lacan's “The Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” nor will I try to deal exhaustively with the nuanced sophistication of the seminar's rhetoric and theoretical propositions; I will confine myself to a few specific points that bear upon the methodological issue of Lacan's psychoanalytic treatment of the literary material.

What Lacan is concerned with at this point of his research is the psychoanalytic problematics of the “repetition-compulsion,” as elaborated in Freud's speculative text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The thrust of Lacan's endeavor, with respect to Poe, is thus to point out—so as to elucidate the nature of Freudian repetition—the way in which the story's plot, its sequence of events (as, for Freud, the sequence of events in a life-story), is entirely contingent on, overdetermined by, a principle of repetition that governs it and inadvertently structures its dramatic and ironic impact. “There are two scenes,” remarks Lacan, “the first of which we shall straightway designate the primal scene, … since the second may be considered its repetition in the very sense we are considering today.” The “primal scene” takes place in the queen's boudoir: it is the theft of the letter from the queen by the minister; the second scene—its repetition—is the theft of the letter from the minister by Dupin, in the minister's hotel.

What constitutes repetition for Lacan, however, is not the mere thematic resemblance of the double theft, but the whole structural situation in which the repeated theft takes place: in each case, the theft is the outcome of an intersubjective relationship between three terms; in the first scene, the three participants are the king, the queen, and the minister; in the second, the three participants are the police, the minister, and Dupin. In much the same way as Dupin takes the place of the minister in the first scene (the place of the letter's robber), the minister in the second scene takes the place of the queen in the first (the dispossessed possessor of the letter); whereas the police, for whom the letter remains invisible, take the place formerly occupied by the king. The two scenes thus mirror each other, in that they dramatize the repeated exchange of “three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.” What is repeated, in other words, is not a psychological act committed as a function of the individual psychology of a character, but three functional positions in a structure which, determining three different viewpoints, embody three different relations to the act of seeing—of seeing, specifically, the purloined letter.

The first is a glance that sees nothing: the King and the Police.

The second, a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides: the Queen, then the Minister.

The third sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin. …

“What interests us today,” insists Lacan,

is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their displacement during the intersubjective repetition.

We shall see that their displacement is determined by the place which a pure signifier—the purloined letter—comes to occupy in their trio. And that is what will confirm for us its status as repetition automatism.

The purloined letter, in other words, becomes itself—through its insistence in the structure—a symbol or a signifier of the unconscious, to the extent that it “is destined … to signify the annulment of what it signifies”—the necessity of its own repression, of the repression of its message: “It is not only the meaning but the text of the message which it would be dangerous to place in circulation.” But in much the same way as the repressed returns in the symptom, which is its repetitive symbolic substitute, the purloined letter ceaselessly returns in the tale—as a signifier of the repressed—through its repetitive displacements and replacements. “This is indeed what happens in the repetition compulsion,” says Lacan. Unconscious desire, once repressed, survives in displaced symbolic media which govern the subject's life and actions without his ever being aware of their meaning or of the repetitive pattern they structure:

If what Freud discovered and rediscovers with a perpetually increasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindnesses, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier.

In what sense, then, does the second scene in Poe's tale, while repeating the first scene, nonetheless differ from it? In the sense, precisely, that the second scene, through the repetition, allows for an understanding, for an analysis of the first. This analysis through repetition is to become, in Lacan's ingenious reading, no less than an allegory of psychoanalysis. The intervention of Dupin, who restores the letter to the queen, is thus compared, in Lacan's interpretation, to the intervention of the analyst, who rids the patient of the symptom. The analyst's effectiveness, however, does not spring from his intellectual strength but—insists Lacan—from his position in the (repetitive) structure. By virtue of his occupying the third position—that is, the locus of the unconscious of the subject as a place of substitution of letter for letter (of signifier for signifier)—the analyst, through transference, allows at once for a repetition of the trauma, and for a symbolic substitution, and thus effects the drama's denouement.

It is instructive to compare Lacan's study of the psychoanalytical repetition compulsion in Poe's text to Marie Bonaparte's study of Poe's repetition compulsion through his text. Although the two analysts study the same author and focus on the same psychoanalytic concept, their approaches are strikingly different. To the extent that Bonaparte's study of Poe has become a classic, a model of applied psychoanalysis which illustrates and embodies the most common understanding of what a psychoanalytic reading of a literary text might be, I would like, in pointing out the differences in Lacan's approach, to suggest the way in which those differences at once put in question the traditional approach and offer an alternative to it.

WHAT DOES A REPETITION COMPULSION REPEAT? INTERPRETATION OF DIFFERENCE AS OPPOSED TO INTERPRETATION OF IDENTITY

For Marie Bonaparte, what is compulsively repeated through the variety of Poe's texts is the same unconscious fantasy: Poe's (sadonecrophiliac) desire for his dead mother. For Lacan, what is repeated in the text is not the content of a fantasy but the symbolic displacement of a signifier through the insistence of a signifying chain; repetition is not of sameness but of difference, not of independent terms or of analogous themes but of a structure of differential interrelationships, in which what returns is always other. Thus, the triangular structure repeats itself only through the difference of the characters who successively come to occupy the three positions; its structural significance is perceived only through this difference. Likewise, the significance of the letter is situated in its displacement, that is, in its repetitive movements toward a different place. And the second scene, being, for Lacan, an allegory of analysis, is important not just in that it repeats the first scene, but in the way this repetition (like the transferential repetition of a psychoanalytical experience) makes a difference: brings about a solution to the problem. Thus, whereas Marie Bonaparte analyzes repetition as the insistence of identity, for Lacan, any possible insight into the reality of the unconscious is contingent upon a perception of repetition, not as a confirmation of identity, but as the insistence of the indelibility of a difference.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE SIGNIFIER AS OPPOSED TO AN ANALYSIS OF THE SIGNIFIED

In the light of Lacan's reading of Poe's tale as itself an allegory of the psychoanalytic reading, it might be illuminating to define the difference in approach between Lacan and Bonaparte in terms of the story. If the purloined letter can be said to be a sign of the unconscious, for Marie Bonaparte the analyst's task is to uncover the letter's content, which she believes—as do the police—to be hidden somewhere in the real, in some secret biographical depth. For Lacan, on the other hand, the analyst's task is not to read the letter's hidden referential content, but to situate the superficial indication of its textual movement, to analyze the paradoxically invisible symbolic evidence of its displacement, its structural insistence, in a signifying chain. “There is such a thing,” writes Poe, “as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the most important knowledge, I do believe she is invariably superficial.” Espousing Poe's insight, Lacan makes the principle of symbolic evidence the guideline for an analysis not of the signified but of the signifier—for an analysis of the unconscious (the repressed) not as hidden but on the contrary as exposed—in language—through a significant (rhetorical) displacement.

This analysis of the signifier, the model of which can be found in Freud's interpretation of dreams, is nonetheless a radical reversal of the traditional expectations and presuppositions involved in the common psychoanalytical approach to literature, and its invariable search for hidden meanings. Indeed, not only is Lacan's reading of “The Purloined Letter” subversive of the traditional model of psychoanalytical reading; it is, in general, a type of reading that is methodologically unprecedented in the whole history of literary criticism. The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumption—usually unquestioned—that reading is finding meaning, that interpretation—of whatever method—can dwell but on the meaningful. Lacan's analysis of the signifier opens up a radically new assumption, an assumption which is nonetheless nothing but an insightful logical and methodological consequence of Freud's discovery: that what can be read (and perhaps what should be read) is not just meaning, but the lack of meaning; that significance lies not just in consciousness, but, specifically, in its disruption; that the signifier can be analyzed in its effects without its signified being known; that the lack of meaning—the discontinuity in conscious understanding—can and should be interpreted as such, without necessarily being transformed into meaning. “Let's take a look,” writes Lacan:

We shall find illumination in what at first seems to obscure matters: the fact that the tale leaves us in virtually total ignorance of the sender, no less than of the contents, of the letter.

The signifier is not functional. … We might even admit that the letter has an entirely different (if no more urgent) meaning for the Queen than the one understood by the Minister. The sequence of events would not be noticeably affected, not even if it were strictly incomprehensible to an uninformed reader.

But that this is the very effect of the unconscious in the precise sense that we teach that the unconscious means that man is inhabited by the signifier.

Thus, for Lacan, what is analytical par excellence is not (as is the case for Bonaparte) the readable, but the unreadable, and the effects of the unreadable. What calls for analysis is the insistence of the unreadable in the text.

Poe, of course, had said it all in his insightful comment, previously quoted, on the nature of what he too—amazingly enough, before the fact—called “the analytical”:

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects.

But, oddly enough, what Poe himself had said so strikingly and so explicitly about “the analytical” had itself remained totally unanalyzed, indeed unnoticed, by psychoanalytic scholars before Lacan, perhaps because it, too, according to its own (analytical) logic, had been “a little too self-evident” to be perceived.

A TEXTUAL AS OPPOSED TO A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH

The analysis of the signifier implies a theory of textuality for which Poe's biography, or his so-called sickness, or his hypothetical personal psychoanalysis, become irrelevant. The presupposition—governing enterprises like that of Marie Bonaparte—that poetry can be interpreted only as autobiography is obviously limiting and limited. Lacan's textual analysis for the first time offers a psychoanalytical alternative to the previously unquestioned and thus seemingly exclusive biographical approach.

THE ANALYST/AUTHOR RELATION: A SUBVERSION OF THE MASTER/SLAVE PATTERN AND OF THE DOCTOR/PATIENT OPPOSITION

Let us remember how many readers were unsettled by the humiliating and sometimes condescending psychoanalytic emphasis on Poe's “sickness,” as well as by an explanation equating the poetic with the psychotic. There seemed to be no doubt in the minds of psychoanalytic readers that if the reading situation could be assimilated to the psychoanalytic situation, the poet was to be equated with the (sick) patient, with the analysand on the couch. Lacan's analysis, however, radically subverts not just this clinical status of the poet, but along with it the “bedside” security of the interpreter. If Lacan is not concerned with Poe's sickness, he is quite concerned, nonetheless, with the figure of the poet in the tale, and with the hypotheses made about his specific competence and incompetence. Let us not forget that both the minister and Dupin are said to be poets, and that it is their poetic reasoning that the prefect fails to understand and which thus enables both to outsmart the police. “D———, I presume, is not altogether a fool,” comments Dupin early in the story, to which the prefect of police replies:

“Not altogether a fool, … but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”

“True,” said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerchaum, “although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.”

A question Lacan does not address could here be raised by emphasizing still another point that would normally tend to pass unnoticed, since, once again, it is at once so explicit and so ostentatiously insignificant: why does Dupin say that he too is guilty of poetry? In what way does the status of the poet involve guilt? In what sense can we understand the guilt of poetry?

Dupin, then, draws our attention to the fact that both he and the minister are poets, a qualification with respect to which the prefect feels that he can but be condescending. Later, when Dupin explains to the narrator the prefect's defeat as opposed to his own success in finding the letter, he again insists upon the prefect's blindness to a logic or to a “principle of concealment” which has to do with poets and thus (it might be assumed) is specifically poetic:

This functionary [the prefect] has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools.

In Baudelaire's translation of Poe's tale into French, the word fool is rendered, in its strong, archaic sense, as: fou, “mad.” Here, then, is Lacan's paraphrase of this passage in the story:

After which, a moment of derision [on Dupin's part] at the Prefect's error in deducing that because the Minister is a poet, he is not far from being mad, an error, it is argued, which would consist, … simply in a false distribution of the middle term, since it is far from following from the fact that all madmen are poets.

Yes indeed. But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the poet's superiority in the art of concealment.

Both this passage in the story and this comment by Lacan seem to be marginal, incidental. Yet the hypothetical relationship between poetry and madness is significantly relevant to the case of Poe and to the other psychoanalytical approaches we have been considering. Could it not be said that the error of Marie Bonaparte (who, like the prefect, engages in a search for hidden meaning) lies precisely in the fact that, like the prefect once again, she simplistically equates the poetic with the psychotic, and so, blinded by what she takes to be the poetic incompetence, fails to see or understand the specificity of poetic competence? Many psychoanalytic investigations diagnosing the poet's sickness and looking for his poetic secret on (or in) his person (as do the prefect's men) are indeed very like police investigations; and like the police in Poe's story, they fail to find the letter, fail to see the textuality of the text.

Lacan, of course, does not say all this—this is not what is at stake in his analysis. All he does is open up still another question where we have believed we have come in possession of some sort of answer:

Yes indeed. But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the poet's superiority in the art of concealment.

This seemingly lateral question, asked in passing and left unanswered, suggests, however, the possibility of a whole different focus or perspective of interpretation in the story. If “The Purloined Letter” is specifically the story of “the poet's superiority in the art of concealment,” then it is not just an allegory of psychoanalysis but also, at the same time, an allegory of poetic writing. And Lacan is himself a poet to the extent that a thought about poetry is what is superiorly concealed in his “Seminar.”

In Lacan's interpretation, however, “the poet's superiority” can only be understood as the structural superiority of the third position with respect to the letter: the minister in the first scene, Dupin in the second, both, indeed, poets. But the third position is also—this is the main point of Lacan's analysis—the position of the analyst. In follows that, in Lacan's approach, the status of the poet is no longer that of the (sick) patient but, if anything, that of the analyst. If the poet is still the object of the accusation of being a “fool,” his folly—if in fact it does exist (which remains an open question)—would at the same time be the folly of the analyst. The clear-cut opposition between madness and health, or between doctor and patient, is unsettled by the odd functioning of the purloined letter of the unconscious, which no one can possess or master. “There is no metalanguage,” says Lacan: there is no language in which interpretation can itself escape the effects of the unconscious; the interpreter is not more immune than the poet to unconscious delusions and errors.

IMPLICATION, AS OPPOSED TO APPLICATION, OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Lacan's approach no longer falls into the category of what has been called “applied psychoanalysis,” since the concept of “application” implies a relation of exteriority between the applied science and the field which it is supposed, unilaterally, to inform. Since, in Lacan's analysis, Poe's text serves to re-interpret Freud just as Freud's text serves to interpret Poe; since psychoanalytic theory and the literary text mutually inform—and displace—each other; since the very position of the interpreter—of the analyst—turns out to be not outside, but inside the text, there is no longer a clear-cut opposition or a well-defined border between literature and psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis could be intraliterary just as much as literature is intrapsychoanalytic. The methodological stake is no longer that of the application of psychoanalysis to literature, but rather, of their interimplication in each other.

If I have dealt at length with Lacan's innovative contribution and with the different methodological example of his approach, it is not so much to set this example up as a new model for imitation, but rather to indicate the way in which it suggestively invites us to go beyond itself (as it takes Freud beyond itself), the way in which it opens up a whole new range of as yet untried possibilities for the enterprise of reading. Lacan's importance in my eyes does not, in other words, lie specifically in the new dogma his “school” proposes, but in his outstanding demonstration that there is more than one way to implicate psychoanalysis in literature; that how to implicate psychoanalysis in literature is itself a question for interpretation, a challenge to the ingenuity and insight of the interpreter, and not a given that can be taken in any way for granted; that what is of analytical relevance in a text is not necessarily and not exclusively “the unconscious of the poet,” let alone his sickness or his problems in life; that to situate in a text the analytical as such—to situate the object of analysis or the textual point of its implication—is not necessarily to recognize a known, to find an answer, but also, and perhaps more challengingly, to locate an unknown, to find a question.

THE POE-ETIC ANALYTICAL

Let us now return to the crucial question we left in suspension earlier, after having raised it by reversing Freud's reservation concerning Marie Bonaparte's type of research: can psychoanalysis give us an insight into the specificity of the poetic? We can now supplement this question with a second one: where can we situate the analytical with respect to Poe's poetry?

The answers to these questions, I would suggest, might be sought in two directions. (1) In a direct reading of a poetic text by Poe, trying to locate in the poem itself a signifier of poeticity and to analyze its functioning and its effects; to analyze—in other words—how poetry as such works through signifiers (to the extent that signifiers, as opposed to meanings, are always signifiers of the unconscious). (2) In an analytically informed reading of literary history itself, inasmuch as its treatment of Poe obviously constitutes a (literary) case history. Such a reading has never, to my knowledge, been undertaken with respect to any writer: never has literary history itself been viewed as an analytical object, as a subject for a psychoanalytic interpretation. And yet it is overwhelmingly obvious, in a case like Poe's, that the discourse of literary history itself points to some unconscious determinations which structure it but of which it is not aware. What is the unconscious of literary history? Can the question of the guilt of poetry be relevant to that unconscious? Could literary history be in any way considered a repetitive unconscious transference of the guilt of poetry?

Literary history, or more precisely, the critical discourse surrounding Poe, is indeed one of the most visible (“self-evident”) effects of Poe's poetic signifier, of his text. Now, how can the question of the peculiar effect of Poe be dealt with analytically? My suggestion is: by locating what seems to be unreadable or incomprehensible in this effect; by situating the most prominent discrepancies or discontinuities in the overall critical discourse concerning Poe, the most puzzling critical contradictions, and by trying to interpret those contradictions as symptomatic of the unsettling specificity of the Poe-etic effect, as well as of the necessary contingence of such an effect on the unconscious.

Before setting out to explore and to illustrate these two directions for research, I would like to recapitulate the primary historical contradictions analyzed at the opening of this study as a first indication of the nature of the poetic. According to its readers' contradictory testimonies, Poe's poetry, let it be recalled, seemed to be at once the most irresistible and the most resisted poetry in literary history. Poe is felt to be at once the most unequaled master of “conscious art” and the most tortuous unconscious case, as such doomed to remain “the perennial victim of the idée fixe, and of amateur psychoanalysis.” Poetry, I would thus argue, is precisely the effect of a deadly struggle between consciousness and the unconscious; it has to do with resistance and with what can neither be resisted nor escaped. Poe is a symptom of poetry to the extent that poetry is both what most resists a psychoanalytical interpretation and what most depends on psychoanalytical effects.