SPECIAL ISSUE LUIZ COSTA LIMA REJOINDER VOLUME 1V ISSUE 11 2010 ISSN: 1833-878X Pages 101-111 Matthew Lamb On the Fictional Specificity of Edgar Allan Poe s The Purloined Letter ; or, Reading in the Outer Darkness of Language with Luiz Costa Lima (Part Two) ABSTRACT Part two of this essay looks more closely at the fictionality of Edgar Allan Poe s short story, The Purloined Letter, and argues for the importance of the possession of the letter in the story. This importance is delineated by examining the context in which The Purloined Letter was composed; in particular, and taking its cues from Kevin J. Hayes remarkable Poe and the printed word (2000), it examines the burgeoning print culture in which Poe lived and wrote. This leads to a discussion of the ideas of Luiz Costa Lima, and to a re-evaluation of Lacan and Derrida s reading of Poe (as introduced in part one of this essay) in light of the control of the imaginary. BIOGRAPHY Matthew Lamb has a PhD in Literary Studies from Central Queensland University, and is currently completing a PhD in Philosophy, from The University of Queensland. 101
ON THE FICTIONAL SPECIFICITY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE S THE PURLOINED LETTER ; OR, READING IN THE OUTER DARKNESS OF LANGUAGE WITH LUIZ COSTA LIMA (PART TWO) It is to the importance of the possession of the letter in Poe s story that we must now turn. This importance may be more readily understood if the focus of our investigation is widened to include also the context in which The Purloined Letter was composed. In particular, I am interested here in the context of the burgeoning print culture in which Poe lived and wrote. The following investigation draws mainly from Kevin J. Hayes remarkable Poe and the printed word (2000); although I must claim responsibility for the tentative conclusions draw in relation to The Purloined Letter. This will lead us to a discussion of the ideas of Luiz Costa Lima, and to a reevaluation of Lacan and Derrida s reading of Poe (as introduced in part one of this essay). I. The central thesis of Hayes study is to show how the changes in a burgeoning print culture in the early to mid- 19 th century impacted on the way literature was disseminated and (under-)valued. He also shows how, operating within this changing culture, and in largely thinking against it, these impacts also affected the way Poe approached the writing of his own fiction. The low status of literary fiction in the 18 th and 19 th centuries may be measured against the two more socially acceptable forms of literature: poetry and history. The high esteem afforded figures such as Sir Walter Scott should not be seen as exceptions to this, because his novels were permissible solely because they were historical fiction; with the fictional being subordinate to the documentary elements of the work. The young Poe also participated in what was by then, as Hayes states, a longstanding aristocratic Southern tradition of writing manuscript verse. i It was a close-knit, gentlemanly manuscript culture, involving the writing of verse in long hand and either passing around the manuscript to read, or else for reading aloud at gatherings. This manuscript verse culture was very much associated with an oral culture, in which the audience is directly known to the poet. But in the 1820s in the United States, daily and weekly newspapers, and monthly journals, began publishing verse. This shifted the oral manuscript culture into a non-oral print culture. Where the manuscript culture was largely a private affair, the culture of print was a public affair and, as such, one of anonymity (where reputation replaces personal acquaintance). And in an era where belles-lettres meets the printing press, this shift created, especially within the domain of poetry, a distinction between that which was worthy of publication and that which was better left for circulation amongst close associates. These domains, however, are not mutually exclusive, with many of the published verses in newspapers and journals, and in book form, usually emerging out of this manuscript culture. Certainly, Poe s first published book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), emerged from this manuscript print culture. Authored by an anonymous Bostonian, the preface to this work attests to the connection with the manuscript culture by asserting that this collection was not intended for publication. ii Another consequence of this burgeoning print culture is the value placed upon the material work itself: with the shift from manuscript to print being at the time a shift from something unique and valued in itself, to something that was to become a disposable commodity, especially with regards to the proliferation of newspapers. By being associated with an oral culture, manuscript verse was not fixed; it could vary with each re-writing. Print culture, however, ensured that the work was fixed, and repeatable only in a uniform manner. The conditions under which the manuscript culture operated included also autograph albums and letter writing. With autograph albums, individuals (usually woman) owned bound manuscript volumes which were handed around and inscribed with a custom written verse. The handing over of an album for another to write in was therefore an act of both trust (on the part of the owner of the album) and honour (on the part of the poet). Hayes, citing the work of Donald Reiman, explains the significance of this: In his fine study of modern manuscripts, Reiman distinguishes three basic types: private manuscripts intended for a single individual; confidential manuscripts often addressed to an individual but shared among members of such close-knit groups as family, friends, or co-workers; and public documents intended for dissemination to a wider readership. Poe well understood the relationship between his writing and his intended readership. Album verse, as Poe realized, were confidential manuscripts written for the album owner and a handful of her close associates with whom she might share the album. Furthermore, confidential manuscript verse could be used as social capital. iii Such forms of trust and honour, which increased social capital, also extended to letter writing, which was an even more personal form of writing operating within an already private manuscript culture. Letter writing also 102
had its own rules of etiquette; for example, letters of introduction were normally written by a third person who was already a mutual acquaintance. Poe often broke this etiquette, however, by introducing himself via letters to potential connections in the publishing world. But what is interesting about the way Poe approached this breach of propriety is the way he included within his letters a piece of verse. As Hayes concludes: In this letter, manuscript verse again functions as social capital. As album verses heighten the relationship between poet and album owner, this manuscript poem softens the impropriety of Poe s self-introduction and creates an intimacy between poet and publisher. iv That Poe was keenly aware of the difference between manuscript and print cultures is also evidenced by the fact that he used cursive writing for both his private correspondence and manuscripts, but used Roman characters when communicating in letters with publishers. v This awareness also shaped the way he eventually came to approach the composition of literary fiction. For although of lower status than historical and other non-fiction publications, there was during this period a growing market for serial-fiction, with installments first published in newspapers or monthly journals, and then collected together and printed in book-form. In an initial effort to conform to the market and to the changing demands of print culture, Poe tried his hand at writing a novel. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket imitated the popular genre of imaginary voyages (such as Robinson Crusoe), which operated under similar strictures in relation to travel literature as historical novels did in relation to documentary histories. This work was an unmitigated disaster, commercially and artistically. Commercially, because the 1837 panic and subsequent economic depression led to a reduction in the number of locally produced novels being published in the United States; the publication of Poe s novel was therefore initially suspended, and when it came out the following year it reviewed badly and sold poorly. Artistically, because novel writing was governed by many social strictures, moral and educative; but also, because of the length of the novel form, Poe felt that the necessary coherence of an artistic work could not be sustained. By this stage, Poe had already decided to give up trying to be a professional writer. But by 1840, the lack of money drove him once more to attempt another novel. This work (The Journal of Julius Rodman) was abandoned after the first six installments, and out of this abandonment a fresh decisiveness emerged in Poe s artistic endeavors. This decisiveness emerged in two ways, both of which are associated with promoting a growing sense of fictionality in his work. The first is his renewed focus on the short story form, as opposed to the serial novel. Hayes explains: In his short stories, Poe had repudiated the idea [that literature must delight and instruct ] in favor of a forward-thinking attitude toward literature as solely an aesthetic object, something which delights yet need not instruct. Being a relatively new literary genre, the short story had yet to receive much critical scrutiny, so it escaped the standards by which book-length narratives were judged. Books, because of their length as well as distinct works, were bound by stricter rules than short stories. Poe was a meticulous literary craftsman, and he believed that the long story could never achieve the tale s level of craftsmanship.... Short stories allowed authors tight control of plot, action, and character, providing the opportunity to tell a highly compact tale, layering multiple levels of meaning one atop another. vi This tightened focus enabled Poe to chart an alternate course between externally imposed social norms and the internally weak structures of longer forms of narrative. It provided a space within which he could focus on fiction. The second way Poe s new artistic decisiveness emerged was in his awareness of the hybrid form of writing out of which fiction was created. In this, Poe s sense of fiction emerged from the coming together of manuscript and print cultures, and with his use of the conventions of manuscript culture within his writing to undermine and question the dominance of print culture. Four examples (drawn from Hayes study) from Poe s writing may attest to this: a) In 1844, Poe published a story in a newspaper that has since become known as The Balloon Hoax. At the time, however, it was printed uniformly, alongside real news stories in the paper, complete with a headline, a by-line and woodcut illustration. vii By mimicking the format of the print media, while deploying the tall-tale of oral culture, Poe undermined the print culture s pretension of authority and objectivity. b) In 1835, Poe wrote an article in which he drew upon the conditions of the manuscript culture. Entitled Autography, this series of small sections contained, first, a type-set print of the text of a letter (which he made up himself), but he then attributed it to an existing author; second, this was followed by a wood-cut facsimile of the actual author s signature; third, Poe then analysed the chirography of the author (which allowed him to be more critical than in his usual literary criticism); and so on. viii 103
c) Another article, combining manuscript and print cultures, was Poe s series on Marginalia. Here Poe printed the margin notes inscribed in various books and printed them together in a magazine. Such marginalia acts to personalize the ownership of particular print books, bringing it in line with the conditions of manuscript culture. But Poe complicates matters by printing these margin notes without reference to the books they inhabited. In other words, he removed the marginalia from their print context. This is complicated further by the fact that Poe fabricated the notes in the first place. The personal library which he informed the reader he inhabited, the books he claimed to have been perusing and in which he found the marginalia, as well as the marginalia itself were all acts of fiction. ix d) For Poe never had a library, and he could not even afford to use the circulating libraries currently appearing in American cities. He received books from reviews, and from friends, but sold both to second hand shops almost immediately. But his imagination was filled with libraries, and libraries in turn fuelled his imagination. Print culture afforded an author a greater distance and anonymity from his audience than with the manuscript culture, which relied upon closeness and personal acquaintance. And Poe exploited this difference, to undermine the supposed objectivity of print culture, by creating for himself as a literary critic and article writer a fictional persona. For the main, this persona enabled Poe to project the image of what he was otherwise not: a well-to-do gentleman with a vast personal library. It was within this imaginary library that Poe found his reported marginalia, gathered his autographic materials, and reported on worthy news stories (like a trans- Atlantic balloon crossing). It was also out of this imaginary space that he wrote his literary fiction. It is interesting to note also how the image of the library and of books operates within Poe s fiction as cues for the imaginary. Hayes identifies this recurring motif in much of Poe s fiction. For example, regarding the story Bernice, Hayes states: The narrator personally identifies with the library.... Indeed, the imaginative world the library represents has affected him so profoundly that he loses the ability to discriminate between the imaginary and the real x ; regarding The Fall of the House of the Usher, Hayes notes that most of the books in Usher s library which obsess him so are either imaginary journeys or geographies: Placing such voyages within Usher s library, Poe reinforced the significance of the imaginary world over the real xi ; while regarding The Sphinx, Hayes offers a description of the narrator which may well describe also Poe himself: The book, in other words, leads to a new way of perceiving the world. Succumbing to the library s influence, the narrator transforms elements of actual topography and entomology into a landscape of the mind. xii It is against this background that we are better able to see the fictionality of Poe s The Purloined Letter. II. The Purloined Letter was first published in 1844 in The Gift, an annual gift-book that mimicks the autograph album of the manuscript culture. During this period, as we have seen, Poe was concerned with the interaction between this manuscript culture and a burgeoning print culture. One of the aspects of this burgeoning print culture that Poe was most concerned with was the lack of internal copyright law. In the late 1830s, the pamphlet novel was the cheap paperback of the day. The lack of international copyright meant that British and European novels (in translation) could be stolen by American publishers and reproduced on poor quality paper, with small font, and sold cheaply. More cheaply, in fact, that the locally produced novels, which had to pay author s royalties and rights. This led to a glut in the market for foreign novels in the United States. But this trend also worked the other way, with American novels being stolen by overseas publishers and reproduced in Britain and Europe (in translation), and the authors receiving no payment. Poe was caught in the middle. Without an international copyright law, he wrote in a letter in 1842, American authors may as well cut their throats. xiii During this period, in Britain, many of Poe s contemporaries and friends had work pirated and reprinted in bowdlerized versions. In 1841, Poe s only novel was published in Britain as Arthur Gordon Pym: Or, Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Famine. This was followed by other stories, such as The Gold Bug and The Facts of M. Valdemar s Cave, which was passed off as a true account of mesmerism. xiv Poe s stories were also translated in French in the 1840s and it is through these pirated copies that Charles Baudelaire first became acquainted with his work. Baudelaire later translated many of Poe s tales and essays, and produced biographical sketches, that spread Poe s fame in France. It is through Baudelaire that Stéphane Mallarmé became interested in Poe, resulting in him learning English solely to translate Poe s poetry into French. What is interesting to note about all this international attention to Poe s work is that, being based upon pirated translations, it was instigated at no material reward to Poe himself. And, of course, this continued long 104
after Poe died (in 1849 from alcoholism and poverty), when Baudelaire first published Histoires Extraordinaires in 1856 (which included a translation of both The Murders in Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter ). His reaction against this culture of publishing piracy also made its way into Poe s fiction. William Harrison Ainsworth was a British author whose pirated novels were successful in the United States; Poe made Ainsworth one of the men in The Balloon Hoax who crossed the Atlantic, from England to America. xv This story, written the same year as The Purloined Letter (1844), was therefore, in part, a reaction to this lack of international copyright; or, as Hayes calls it, a comment on the swiftness with which mediocre British literature made its way to America. xvi Charles-Paul de Kock was one of the French authors whose popular pirated novels also annoyed Poe; so much so, that Poe gave the name De Kock to one of the lunatics in his story, The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether in 1845 (a year after writing The Purloined Letter ). xvii This background possibly highlights two initial aspects of The Purloined Letter. First, it suggests that Poe purposely chose a French setting and protagonist for this story (and the previous Dupin tales) to appeal to his fellow countrymen s appetite for foreign literature. And second, it points to the significance of the conditions of a manuscript culture, which has been compromised by the print culture, by describing the interception (by an individual act of piracy) of the letter from its intended audience. So it is where this manuscript culture and print culture meet that provides the necessary fault lines for the emergence of Poe s fiction. The first two stories of the Dupin trilogy The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget are focused on private individuals being murdered in the public arena. Their deaths are reported in the newspapers, and it is through an analysis of the information detailed within this print culture that Dupin first becomes acquainted with the crimes. Significantly, it is through the exercise of his imagination, and through focusing on what the newspapers ignore, that Dupin is able to solve each crime. What s more, it is through undermining the authority of such print culture, and by resorting to fictional techniques, that Dupin is able to solve the crime. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, for example, Dupin places a fake advertisement in a local newspaper in much the same manner as Poe presented his Balloon Hoax in order to lure the owner of the Ourang-Outang out into the open. While in The Mystery of Marie Roget, Poe takes an actual murder (of Mary Rogers) and transposes it into a fictional key. It is then through these seemingly innocuous differences (for example, setting the murder in France rather than the United States, and so on) that Poe s narrator is able to create the necessary critical remove to enable him to solve, not only the fictional crime or Marie Roget but also the actual crime of Mary Rogers; as Poe inserts in a footnote to the later republication of the story: Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential, facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object.... It may be important to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative), made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which the conclusion was attained. xviii The Purloined Letter differs from these earlier stories, however, by the fact that the crime investigated is not a murder (it is a theft), the victim is not a private citizen (but is the Queen), and the media deployed is not a printnewspaper (but is a manuscript-letter). The Purloined Letter is therefore focused more on the conditions of an aristocratic manuscript culture, with the emphasis therefore placed on a breach of trust (the Minister intercepts a letter addressed to the Queen alone), and the possession of what is a unique an inherently valuable material object: the letter. The value of the letter is thereby measured against the background of an oral culture, which conditions the manuscript culture; it is at the same time distinguished from the print culture, by not being fixed or repeatable only in a uniform manner. What is common to all these stories, however, is the method by which Poe (and Dupin) arrive at these dénouements: the critical use of the imaginary. xix But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary that reason feels its way, if at all, in search of the true. xx In this, Poe s narrator confirms a distinction initiated by Coleridge, between fancy and the imagination, xxi and finds in this distinction, the necessary route by which to deviate from the plane of the ordinary : the analytic use the fictional. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. xxii 105
This shared context is reinforced by the persistent link that unites Dupin and his narrator: libraries and books. They first meet, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in an obscure library, while both men are in search of the same, rare volume. This is repeated in the opening section of The Purloined Letter which finds Dupin and the narrator sitting in Dupin s book-closet, discussing their previous cases and their initial meeting in another library. In this connection, it should be recalled that the image of a library is a recurring motif in Poe s work, reinforcing, as Hayes has said, the significance of the imaginary world over the real xxiii ; this leads to a new way of perceiving the world, as Hayes has concluded: Succumbing to the library s influence, the narrator transforms elements of actual topography and entomology into a landscape of the mind. xxiv Against this imaginary background, then, the figure of fictionality emerges. In this, the text of The Purloined Letter creates an horizon within which a particular difference is produced between 1) how the contents of the stolen letter are known within the context of the story; and 2) how they are kept hidden from the reader. III. We have already noted (in part one of this essay) how Derrida and Lacan proceeded by eliding this difference, thereby bypassing and suppressing the fictionality of The Purloined Letter. We have already seen, for example, how Derrida interprets the motif of books and libraries in Poe s work: he used this aspect of Poe s story to demonstrate that the whole story is really an affair of writing. But we have also seen that this led Derrida into the contradictory position of taking a signified that turns on an event of speech as support for his view that it is writing and the pure signifier that is at stake in The Purloined Letter. Derrida achieved this end by focusing on the artificial separation between speech and writing within the text of the story that is, by focusing exclusively on the text as a product of the print culture of typographic writing, and not, rather, as the byproduct of a compromise between manuscript and print culture and so he proceeded by suppressing the emergence of fictionality. This is reinforced in Derrida s reading by his emphasis on the empty content of the letter, rather than on the power that accompanies the possession of the letter within the broader narrative structure. This misplaced emphasis is reflected also in Lacan s argument that the empty signifier of the letter unconsciously structures the behaviour of the characters within the story. When, rather, as we have seen, it is the characters conscious awareness of the contents of the letter, and the power that would accompany its possession, that is responsible for the figurations within the story. In this, Derrida and Lacan have proceeded by performing what Luiz Costa Lima has called an industrial practice. Although it is fitting that writers should state their intentions, he wrote, in prefacing his chapter on Kafka in The Limits of Voice: it is no less advisable that they should avoid treating their object as the mere illustration of a hypothesis. The interpretation of a work runs the risk of turning into an industrial practice when the raw material must be laminated in order to fit the specifications required for the product. xxv This is evidenced by the way that Derrida and Lacan (and, in turn, other critics that have come after) have been blinded by the textual evidence that suggests that the characters within the story know the contents of the letter. The hypothesis by which Derrida and Lacan have laminated the text of Poe s story, is associated with psychoanalysis; albeit their own unique appropriations of psychoanalysis. Regarding Kafka, Costa Lima concludes: Thus, we have a Freudian Kafka. xxvi Likewise, we now have a Derridian Poe and a Lacanian Poe. I do not mean that such appropriations are arbitrary, says Costa Lima, but they overlook the tension that is characteristic of Kafka s text and ignore its fictional specificity. xxvii In the preceding analyses I have likewise attempted to attend to (although by no means exhaust) the fictional specificity of Poe s short story. And this goes to the heart of the critical difference between these two modes of approaching fiction. Derrida and Lacan approached Poe under the influence of a (mis)guiding question: the relation between truth and fiction. We have already seen how, in practice, this proceeded by sidelining the status of fiction, both as a general question ( what is literary fiction? ) and as a specific feature of The Purloined Letter ( what is the fictionality of the story? ); and by elevating the question of truth in relation to the story ( how is this story an illustration of a Lacanian or Derridian appropriation of psychoanalysis? ). Contrary to this practice, Costa Lima has responded to the general question regarding the status of fiction, and found that it is better raised outside the controlling influence of such standards of truth. Here Costa Lima contrasts between reality discourses and fictional discourse : What we generically call reality discourses are characterized by their basic rule of conduct: the submission to the true/false requirement. On the other hand, the discourses that derive from the thematization of the imaginary are characterized by the fact that they do not contain any truth that is not relative to the desires and values of its agent. Thus fictional discourse is seen as the result of a production of difference, subject to thematization of the imaginary, a territoriality characterized as nondocumental, pleasurable, and critical of the socially established truth. xxviii 106
In his reading of Kafka, Costa Lima elaborates this final point, regarding how fictional discourse is critical of the socially established truth : Fictional discourse is in a class all its own because it suspends the question of truth. It does not say that this question ought to be abolished as irrelevant to its purposes; rather, it places the issue at a sufficient remove to allow it to be seen in perspective.... Thus, fiction operates by means of disconnection from ordinary pragmatics whether that of everyday existence or that of another discourse in order to actualize its own pragmatics: that of placing in perspective, or in question, or allowing the critical viewing of, norms, values, and behaviors that the receiver recognizes or even shares. xxix Following this, I have in the preceding analyses attempted the more specific question: what is the fictionality of The Purloined Letter? And, as we have seen, this is more readily done if the story is initially considered outside the controlling influence of an externally imposed reality discourse, such as psychoanalysis. In doing so, we have been able to consider how the story itself remains stubborn in its refusal to lend itself to such industrial practices. We have already seen that Lacan s strategic use of Poe s short story is to replace the determining role of the (incomplete) interpretation of the dream of Irma s Injection in classical Freudian psychoanalysis. What is interesting here is the explanation which Freud left to an accompanying footnote for this truncated interpretation: There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown. xxx This is a remarkable admission, especially if we recall that the authority of psychoanalysis rests upon its ability to plumb such depths of the unknown. Toward the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, this image of the navel is repeated: There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. xxxi Regarding this, Luiz Costa Lima, in a footnote in Control of the Imaginary, states: In a certain sense Freud defends himself from his own discovery through the reservation that the navel can be ignored because it adds nothing to interpretation. Had he not so stipulated, we could say that the navel can be seen as the limit point of a semantically motivated interpretation. The navel would, then, set the scene for the imaginary, i.e., for that which has no redeemable semantic basis of its own. But it surely would not be a part of the analyst s task to analyse the dream as a discourse that includes imagination, for, were that to be the case, he or she would be prevented from postulating the possibility of a correct, true interpretation of the dream, as Freud does. xxxii Psychoanalysis is therefore singly ill-equipped to approach literary fiction, because it is not equipped to deal adequately with the imaginary. There is, of course, a mountain of psychoanalytic readings of literature that would seem to suggest otherwise (Lacan s included), so I should hastily add why: because psychoanalysis as an interpretative practice is concerned with determining an underlying, albeit over-determined, cause; while literary fiction is concerned with creating (out of well-crafted mole hills) a particular unity of effect. As Poe himself has said in his Philosophy of Composition : Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. xxxiii In this, the indispensable air of consequence, or causation is created, not by some prior (or repressed) point behind the text (be it the author s deranged psychology or the derangements of language itself), but within the specific surface of the text itself. But in fictional discourse, there is no behind the text, such is the nature of the imaginary; it leads critics to act like the Prefect s men in The Purloined Letter, pulling up the floor boards, and dismantling furniture, in order to see something that is otherwise right before them. On the contrary, as Costa Lima asserts, one must determine alone what lines we should let ourselves be led to keep in touch with the navel without surpassing it. xxxiv IV. In order to see how Derrida surpasses the imaginary in his own discourse, thus domesticating its processes, we must turn to his early work, Of Grammatology. It will be recalled that previously I argued that one of the main purposes of Derrida s essay on Lacan s reading of The Purloined Letter was to give a strategic determining place to his own re-interpretation of Poe s short story at the forefront of his own philosophical project. It is to this work that we must now, finally, turn; in particular, to Chapter 2, Linguistics and Grammatology. 107
The main focus of this chapter is summarized in its opening epithet, a quote from Rousseau, which prefigures also Derrida s later analysis of Rousseau in the second part of the book: Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object (J-J.Rousseau). Here Derrida is attacking the exclusion of writing from linguistics and the privileging of speech. But what is interesting, from the perspective of my overall argument, is that this exclusion is based upon two significant features: the privileging of speech is associated with the imagination, and it is through the processes of the imagination that writing is rendered as an image of speech and is thus excluded from the serious concerns of linguistics. What this involves is a shared devaluing of the imagination, by both Saussure and Rousseau, but more importantly by Derrida himself; for what he finds most offensive is not just that writing is excluded from linguistics, but it is the way it is excluded: by be reduced to a mere image. Let us follow closely the logic of Derrida s argument. He cites in quick succession, three quotations to support his initial claims (all emphasis added by Derrida in the original): 1. Malebranche: First, the graphic form [image] of words strikes us as being something permanent and stable, better suited than sound to constitute the unity of language throughout time. Though it creates a purely fictitious unity, the superficial bond of writing is much easier to grasp than the natural bond, the only true bond, the bond of sound. xxxv At this, Derrida states: That the graphic form of words strikes us as being something permanent and stable, better suited than sound to constitute the unity of language throughout time, is that not a natural phenomena, too? In fact a bad nature, superficial and fictitious and easy, effaces a good nature by imposture. xxxvi 2. Saussure: But the spoken word is so intimately bound to its written image that the latter manages to usurp the main role. xxxvii 3. Rousseau: Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object. xxxviii Next, Derrida asks how this exclusion happened, and he finds the culprit in the imagination: How was the trap and the usurpation possible? Saussure never replies to this question beyond a psychology of the passions or of the imagination; a psychology reduced to its most conventional diagrams. xxxix He then asks: Why wish to punish writing for a monstrous crime, to the point of wanting to reserve for it, even within scientific treatments, a special compartment that holds it at a distance? For it is indeed within a sort of intralinguistic leper colony that Saussure wants to contain and concentrate the problem of deformations through writing. xl So this monstrous crime was committed by the imagination. But what is interesting here is that Derrida responds by performing two gestures: he shifts the blame onto the imagination and initially excludes it, but then he argues that the role of the imagination must therefore be reconsidered subordinate within the system of writing: The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general is not image or figuration of language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, unless one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if sign of s sign signifies writing, certain conclusions which I shall consider at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. xli Next, Derrida shifts his attention to the arbitrariness of the sign. The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign (so grossly misnamed, and not only for the reasons Saussure himself recognizes) must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistics and the graphic sign, he argues. xlii This forbids, in turn, the imagination, which Derrida tellingly refers to as the outer darkness of language : The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably contests Saussure s declared proposition when he chases writing to the outer darkness of language. This thesis successfully accounts for a conventional relationship between the phoneme and the grapheme (in phonetic writing, between the phoneme, signifier-signified, and the grapheme, pure signifier), but by the same token it forbids that the latter be an image of the former. xliii 108
Derrida then calls upon Freud for assistance in diagnosing Saussure: One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness of the sign, the Saussurain definition of writing as image hence as a natural symbol of language. Not to mention the fact that the phoneme is unimaginable itself, and no visibility can resemble it [emphasis in original], it suffices to take into account what Saussure says about the difference between the symbol and the sign in order to be completely baffled as to how he can at the same time say of writing that it is an image or figuration of language and define language and writing elsewhere as two distinct systems of signs ( ). For the property of the sign is not to be an image [emphasis added]. By a process exposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, Saussure thus accumulates contradictory arguments to bring about a satisfactory decision: the exclusion of writing. xliv This gesture toward Freudian therapeutics is significant at this point (and not just in relation to the argument of my own paper) because Derrida feels that he has somehow cured Saussure of his repression of writing: Saussure was thus never able to think that writing was truly an image, a figuration, or a representation of the spoken language, a symbol. xlv Derrida then proceeds by ensuring that we henceforth think outside the nefarious influence of images. From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. xlvi He achieves this, first, following Barthes, by subsuming linguistics within semiology, and second, by subsuming semiology within grammatology. This grammatology thereby defines the possibility of language operating outside of the processes of the imaginary. Responding to his own question, How is language a possibility founded upon the general possibility of writing? Derrida states: Demonstrating this, one would give at the same time an account of that alleged usurpation which could not be an unhappy accident. It supposes on the contrary a common root and thus excludes the resemblance of the image, derivation, or representative reflection. xlvii In other words, grammatology is predicated upon the control of the imaginary. It henceforth becomes one of the defining characteristics of Derrida s notion of arche-writing: Metaphor would be forbidden. xlviii On the contrary, Costa Lima has argued that the initial awakening of the imagination is in the negation of the real; it is therefore dependent on the opposition between internal and external, imaginary and presence. What is remarkable about Derrida s argument is that he forbids all such difference that operates outside of the much narrower and reductive difference that occurs within the sign. Derrida s argument, predicated upon the control of the imaginary, proceeds by collapsing all such differences, which he then re-inscribes within the chain of signification. He can then be attentive to metaphors and imagery inscribed in writing now that they have been tamed; domesticated within a specific theory of signification contained within his own philosophical discourse. It is within this reductive field that Derrida s reading of Poe s short story can finally be grasped. The determining strategic position of this reading as the retroactive preface to Of Grammatology marks, for Derrida, a necessary first step in creating the possibility of his own philosophical discourse: the veto of fiction. V. By way of concluding, I want to raise a few questions which seem pertinent to the arguments traced in the preceding essay (parts one and two). First, this essay has dealt with specifics: a particular piece of literary fiction (Poe), and two particular forms of philosophical discourse (Lacan and Derrida). But this raises a more general question: to what extent is the discourse of philosophy more broadly predicated upon the control of the imaginary? Second, we have examined in part Poe s place within a shift in culture, from manuscript to print; this is but a slice of a much longer historical process, from oral to literacy, within literacy from auditory to silent reading, and again from manuscript to print, and from print to digital. Costa Lima has shown that the control of the imaginary in modern times is a consequence of the Renaissance (mis)understanding of mimesis as imitatio. This raises the question: is mimesis as imitatio an effect of the Gutenberg technology that is essential to the Renaissance? For it is the printing press that leads to a consciousness that favours exact copy, uniformity and repeatability, over the incertitude and variance that is acceptable under conditions of a predominantly manuscript and oral culture. It is, after all, also the printing press that provided the preconditions for a particular variety of modern philosophical discourse (itself perhaps predicated upon the selfsame control of the imaginary). Third, under such conditions of reading and writing within a predominantly print culture, is it possible to read mimetically, reading as an activity that produces difference, a reading that questions? And if so, is such a mode 109
of reading an ethical activity? Is there an ethical dimension to Costa Lima s work in his way of reading that liberates the imaginary? I ask this in order to loop this provisional conclusion back to the first part of my essay, which I began with an intuition gleaned from the work of Michelle Boulous Walker. In A Short Story About Reason, Boulous Walker flipped the conventional relationship between literary fiction and philosophy on its head; more recently, from The Ethics of Reading onwards, she has flipped the conventional approach to the essay form, and asked if it is possible to read essayistically. xlix I wonder if the conditions for this mode of reading may not offer a fresh approach to practicing philosophy, one which avers the more conventional discursive approach that is predicated upon the control of the imaginary? If so, then perhaps the possible ethical dimension within Costa Lima s own work may yet provide a required climate of thought. After all, as Costa Lima has said, regarding the essay: [It] is marked more by the forcefulness of its questioning than by the unerringness of its answers. That is why the essay is the form that, though not identified with the literary experience, is closest to it. This closeness becomes more visible when we see literature as the discourse that questions and puts into perspective what a society considers to be true that is, when we see literature as the verbal actualization of fictional discourse. l REFERENCES i Kevin J., Hayes, Poe and the printed word, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17. ii Edgar Allan Poe, cited in Hayes, Poe and the printed word, 20. iii Ibid., 24-25. iv Ibid., 25. v Ibid., 28. vi Ibid., 59-60, emphasis added. vii Ibid., xi. viii Ibid., 28, 101-102. ix Ibid., 28-29. x Ibid., 85. xi Ibid., 85. Also, Michelle Boulous Walker, A short story about reason: The strange case of Habermas and Poe, Philosophy Today 41:3, Fall (1997): 437. xii Hayes, 86. xiii Poe, cited in Hayes, 87. xiv Ibid., 90-91. xv Ibid., 89. xvi Ibid. xvii Ibid. xviii Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Roget, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, (Herotfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993), 91n. xix Luiz Costa Lima, Preface from Control of the Imaginary and Complement to the Preface, Crossroads, 2:2 (2008): 10. xx Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders at Rue Morgue, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, (Herotfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993), 76. xxi Luiz Costa Lima, The Control of the Imagination and the Novel, Crossroads 2:2 (2008): 145-46. xxii Poe, The Murders at Rue Morgue, 64. xxiii Hayes, Poe and the printed word, 85. xxiv Ibid., 86. xxv Luiz Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice: Montaigne, Schlegel, Kafka, Paulo Henrique Britto (trans.) (Stanford, Calif. U. S. A.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 187. xxvi Ibid., 187. xxvii Ibid., 188. xxviii Luiz Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason: Fictionality and Power, Paulo Henrique Britto (trans.) (Stanford, Calif. U. S. A.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 107. xxix Luiz Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, 298-299. xxx Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Part I), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 4 111n. xxxi Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Part I), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (Part II), Vol. 5, 525. 110
xxxii Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 239n.; see also my essay, The Doors of Psychoanalysis, Crossroads 2:1 (2007): 22-31. xxxiii Edgar Allan Poe, Philosophy of Composition, in Essays and reviews, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 13. xxxiv Costa Lima, 191. xxxv Cited in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 35-36. xxxvi Ibid., 36. xxxvii Ibid. xxxviii Ibid. xxxix Ibid., 40. xl Ibid., 42. xli Ibid., 44. xlii Ibid. xliii Ibid., 45. xliv Ibid. xlv Ibid. xlvi Ibid., 50. xlvii Ibid., 52, emphasis added. xlviii Ibid. 71. xlix Michelle Boulous Walker, An Ethics of Reading: Adorno, Levinas, and Irigaray, Philosophy Today 50:2 (Summer 2006): 223-238. l Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, 63. 111