Talk:Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'
The Seminar on The Purloined Letter
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Earlier on we referred to The Purloined Letter. Everything in this tale revolves around the problems of signification, of meaning, of received opinion, and precisely because received opinion is held in common, the truth is at stake in it.
You know the theme of the story. The prefect of police is charged with the recovery of a letter which was stolen by someone of considerable distinction, who is perfectly amoral. The character in question lifted this letter from the table in the Queen 's boudoir. The letter came from another person of distinction whose relations with her she had reason to hide. She doesn't succeed in hiding the letter as quickly as she wanted to but the gesture she makes is enough for the libertine minister, culprit and hero, to see the importance of the piece of paper. She acts as if nothing had happened, and places the letter in plain view. As for the King, who is also there, by definition he is destined not to notice anything, on condition that one doesn't attract his attention. This is what allows the minister, with a manoeuvre consisting in producing a vaguely analogous letter, which he places on the table, to get his hands on it under the nose and in full view - and that's the snag - of those present, this letter which will for him be a source of considerable power over the royal persons, without anyone being able to say anything about it. The Queen realises full well what is happening, but she is bound by the exact conditions of the three-sided game.
The point is to find the letter. All kinds of speculations, including an echo regarding the game of even and odd, lead one to understand that the play of intersubjectivity is so essential that all that's needed is for someone to have the technique, the knowledge and the rigour, for someone to be fascinated by the real, as very intelligent people are, which makes them strict imbeciles. The house of the minister is searched inch by inch, numbering each cubic foot. Everything is looked at through the microscope, long needles passed through cushions, all the scientific methods are employed. And the letter isn't found. However, the letter has to be in the house, for the minister must have constant access to it so as to be able to shove it under the King's nose. He doesn't carry it on himself, since they had him pickpocketed.
The play here is on the very seductive idea that the more the policemen act like policemen the less they'll find. It will never occur to them that the letter is right under their noses, hung on a ribbon above the fireplace. The thief was content just to give it a wellworn look, to camouflage it by turning it inside out and putting another seal on it. The extremely sly character, who has his reasons for bearing a grudge against the minister, doesn't pass up the opportunity of taking the letter and substituting another for it, which will be the downfall of his enemy.
But that isn't the point. What is it that makes this rather improbable tale so convincing? After all, it is surprising that the police didn't find the letter in the course of their ransack. To explain that, Poe places intersubjectivity in the forefront - the clever guy goes to the limit of what is unthinkable for the other, and as such will escape. But if you read the tale for its fundamental value, you will realise that there's another key, which makes the whole thing hang together, and which brings with it conviction, whereas, if presented somewhat differently, the story wouldn't interest us for one moment.
It seems to.me, that you analysts, you should recognise this key immediately - it is simply the identity of the symbolic formula of the situation, in the two principal steps in its development. The Queen thought the letter was safe because there it was, bang in front of everybody. And the minister also leaves it out in the open, thinking that therefore it can't be taken. It isn't because he is a strategician, but because he is a poet, that he wins, until the intervention of the super-poet, Dupin.
Nothing in the way of intersubjectivity is decisive here, because once the measures ofthe real are made tight, once a perimeter, a volume, is defined once and for all. there is nothing to lead one to suspect that when all is said and done even a letter might escape. If nonetheless the fact that they can't find it is convincing, it is because the domain of significations continues to exist, even in the mind of people assumed to be as stupid as policemen. If the police do not find it, it isn't only because it is in too accessible a place, but as a consequence of this signification, namely that a letter of great value, upon which the might of the State now bears, with the rewards which may accrue in such a case, has to be hidden with exceeding care. Quite naturally, the slave assumes that the master is a master, and that when he has something precious within his reach, he grabs it. In the same way, one thinks that when one has reached a certain point of comprehension in psychoanalysis, one can grab it and say - Here it is, we've got it. On the contrary, signification as such is never where one thinks it must be.
The merit of the apologue is of this order. It is on the basis of the analysis of the symbolic value of the different moments in the drama that its coherence, and even its psychological motivation, can be discovered.
It isn't a game for the subtlest, it isn't a psychological game, it is a dialectical game.
The symbol's emergence into the real begins with a wager. The very notion of cause, when viewed as being capable of bringing with it a mediation between the chain of symbols and the real, is established on the basis of an original wager - will it be this or not7 It's not for nothing that the notion of probability takes up a place at the very heart of the development of the physical sciences, as the most recent discussions in epistemology show us; nor is it for nothing that probability theory is reviving a set of problems which, throughout the history of thought, for centuries, have alternately been highlighted and occulted.
The wager lies at the heart of any radical question bearing on symbolic thought. Everything comes back to to be or not to be,~ to the choice between what will or won't come out, to the primordial couple of plus or minus. But presence as absence connotes possible absence or presence. As soon as the subj ect himself comes to be, he owes it to a certain non-being on which he raises his being. And if he isn't, if he isn't something, he obviously bears witness to some kind of absence, but he will always remain purveyor of this absence, I mean that he will bear the burden of its proof for lack of being capable of proving the presence.
That's what's important about this chain of pluses and minuses, aligned here on a bit of paper, drawn from diverse experimental set-ups. The examination of the results we've gathered has concrete value, in showing certain deviations in the curve of gains and losses.
As we saw last time, playing amounts to pursuing in a subject an alleged regularity which escapes observation, but which must be translated into the results by something of a deviation in the probability curve. That is in fact what the facts tend to show, indicating that just by the simple fact of dialogue, even the most blind, no pure game of chance exists, instead there is already the articulation of one word with another. This word is included in the fact that even when the subject plays by himself, his play only has any meaning if he says in advance what he thinks will come out. You can play heads or tails by yourself. But from the point of view of speech, you aren't playing by yourself - there is already the articulation of three signs, comprising a win or a loss, and this articulation prefigures the very meaning of the result. In other words, if there is no question, there is no game, if there is no structure there is no question. The question is constituted, organised, by the structure.
By itself, the play of the symbol represents and organises, independently of the peculiarities of its human support, this something which is called a subject. The human subject doesn't foment this game, he takes his place in it, and plays the role of the little pluses and minuses in it. He is himself an element in this chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organises itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always on several levels, caught up in crisscrossing networks.
Anything from the real can always come out. But once the symbolic chain is constituted, as soon as you introduce a certain significant unity, in the form of unities of succession, what comes out can no longer be just anything. . . .
Within this perspective, what is immediately clear is what I have called the inmixing of subjects. I will illustrate it for you, since chance has offered it to us, with the story of The Purloined Letter, from which we took the example of the game of even and odd.
This example is introduced by the spokesman of the tale's meaning, and it is supposed to give an elementary image of the intersubjective relation, founded upon the following - as a function of the other's supposed capacities for trickery, for dissimulation, for strategy, capacities to be found in a dual reflective relation, the subject assumes the thought of this other. This depends upon the idea that there is a way of distinguishing the understanding of the idiot from that of the intelligent man.
I have stressed how fragile this point of view is, even how completely alien it is to what is at issue, for the simple reason that the intelligent thing to do, in this case, is to play the idiot. However, Poe is a prodigiously alert man, and all you have to do is read the whole of the text to see the extent to which the symbolic structure of the story far surpasses the scope of this reasoning, so attractive for a moment, but excessively weak, and whose sole function here is as a booby trap.
I would like those who have read The Purloined Letter since I mentioned it to raise their hands - not even half the rooml
Even so, I think you know that it's a story about a letter stolen in sensational and exemplary circumstances, which is narrated by a hapless prefect of police, who plays the role, classic in this kind of mythology, of someone who has to find what is being sought after, but who cannot but end up losing the thread. In short, this prefect asks a certain Dupin to get him out of this tangle. Dupin, for his part, represents the character, more mythical still, who understands everything. But the story goes well beyond the register of comedy tied to the fundamental images which make up the genre of police detection.
The august figure whose outline is to be discerned in the background of the story seems to be none other than a royal personage. The scene is set in France, under the restored monarchy. So the authority is certainly not invested with the sacred aspect which can keep at a distance the hands of the bold as they make an attempt on it.
A minister, himself a man of high rank, of great social facility. who is in the confidence of the royal couple. since he is to be found discussing affairs of State in the private quarters of the King and the Queen, notices the discomforture of the latter, who is trying to dissimulate from her august partner the presence on the table of nothing less than a letter. whose superscription and meaning the minister immediately remarks. A secret correspondence is at stake. If the letter is there, thrown indifferently on the table, it is precisely so that the King won't notice it. The Queen is banking on his inattention, maybe even his blindness.
The minister, for his part, keeping his eyes skinned, realises what is going on, and plays a little game, which consists in first diverting the company, then in taking from his pocket a letter which happens to be on him, and which vaguely resembles the object - from now on we can call it the object of litigation. After having waved it around, he casually places it on the table next to the first letter. Then, profiting from the inattention of the main character, all he has to do is gently take the letter, and put it in his pocket without the Queen, who hasn't missed a single detail of this entire scene, being able to do anything but resign herself to watching the disappearance under her very eyes of this compromis- ing document.
I'll skip the rest. At all costs, the Queen wants to recover this instrument of pressure, if not of blackmail. She calls in the police. The police, whose destiny it is to find nothing, find nothing. And it is Dupin who solves the problem, and discovers the letter, in the minister's apartment, in the most obvious place, within reach, scarcely disguised at all. To be sure, it would seem that it shouldn't have escaped the notice of the police, since it was included within the orbit of their microscopic examination.
In order to lay his hands on it, Dupin gets someone to fire a shot outside. While the minister goes to the window to see what is happening, Dupin goes to the letter, and quickly substitutes another for it, containing the following verses:
- . . . un dessein si funeste,
- S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste. ['. . . so infamous a scheme/ If not worthy of Atreus. is worthy of Thyestes', - Act V, Scene V.]
These lines are taken from Crébillon the elder's Atrée et Thyeste, and have a far greater significance than just being an excuse for our re-reading the whole of this rather curious tragedy.
This episode is quite odd, if one includes in it the note of cruelty with which the character who seems the most detached, impartial, the Dupin of the tale, rubs his hands and gloats over the thought of the drama which he is bound to have triggered. At this point, it isn't only Dupin speaking, but the storyteller, the mirage of the author. We will see what this mirage signifies.
The drama will come to a climax as follows - the minister, when challenged to show his strength, because from then on he'll be resisted, one day will pull out the letter. Show me - he'll be told - Here it is - he will answer. And he'll be covered in ridicule, if not caught up in tragedy. So that is how the tale unfolds.
There are two great scenes - not in the sense in which we say primal scene - the scene of the letter purloined and the scene of the letter recovered, and then some accessory scenes. The scene in which the letter is recovered is duplicated, since, having discovered where it is, Dupin doesn't take it straightaway - he has to set the trap, prepare his little cabal, and also the substitute-letter. There is also the imaginary scene at the end, in which we see the enigmatic character of the story meeting his end, this ambitious character, so singularly etched out, of whom one wonders what his ambition actually is. Is he simply a gambler? He gambles with a challenge, his aim - and that is what would make him an ambitious man - seems to be to show how far he can go. Where he goes is of no importance to him. The aim of his ambition is dissipated by the essential fact of its exercise.
Who are the characters? We could count them on our fingers. There are the real characters - the King, the Queen, the minister, Dupin, the prefect of police and the agent provocateur who shoots in the street. There are also those who do not appear on stage and make back-stage noises. These are the dramatis personae, in general one has a list of them at the beginning of a play.
Isn't there another way of doing lt?
The characters in question can be defined differently. They can be defined beginning with the subject, more precisely beginning with the relation determined by the aspiration of the real subject through the necessity of the symbolic linking process.
Let us begin with the first scene. There are four characters - the King, the Queen, the minister, and the fourth, who is it?
M. GUÉNINCHAULT: The letter.
Yes, of course, the letter and not the person who sends it. Although his narne is given towards the end of the novel, he has only a fictional importance, whereas the letter is indeed a character. It is so much a character that we are completely entitled to identify it with the key-schema we came upon, at the end of the dream of Irma's injection, in the formula for trimethylamine.
The letter is here synonymous with the original, radical, subject. What we find here is the symbol being displaced in its pure state, which one cannot come into contact with without being immediately caught in its play. Thus, the tale of The Purloined Letter signifies that there's nothing in destiny, or causality, which can be defined as a function of existence. One can say that, when the characters get a hold of this letter, something gets a hold of them and carries them along and this something clearly has dominion over their individual idiosyncracies. Whoever they might be, at this stage of the syrnbolic transforrnation of the letter, they will be defined solely by their position in relation to this radical subject, by their position in one of the CH^3s. This position isn't fixed. In so far as they have entered into the necessity, into the movement peculiar to the letter, they each become, in the course of successive scenes, functionally different in relation to the essential reality which it constitutes. In other words, to take this story up again in its exemplary form, for each of them the letter is his unconscious. It is his unconscious with all of its consequences, that is to say that at each point in the symbolic circuit, each of them becomes someone else.
That is what I am going to try to show you.
Every human drama, every theatrical drama in particular, is founded on the existence of established bonds, ties, pacts. Human beings already have commitments which tie them together, commitments which have deter- mined their places, names, their essences. Then along comes another discourse, other commitments, other speech. It is quite certain that there'll be some places where they'll have to come to blows. All treaties aren't signed simultaneously. Some are contradictory. If you go to war, it is so as to know which treaty will be binding. Thank God, there are many occasions on which one doesn't go to war, and treaties continue to hold good, the slipper continues to circulate amongst people, in several directions all at once, and sometimes the object of a game of hunt-the-slipper encounters that of another game of hunt- the-slipper. Subdivision, reconversion, substitution take place. Whoever is engaged in playing hunt-the-slipper in one circle has to hide the fact that he is also playing in another.
It's not for nothing that we see royalty appearing here. They become symbolic of the fundamental character of the commitment entered into in the beginning. Respect for the pact which unites a man and a woman has a value essential to the whole of society, and this value has always been embodied to the greatest extent in the persons of the royal couple, who are playing. This couple is the symbol of the major pact, which reconciles the male element and the female element, and it traditionally plays a mediating role between everything we don't know, the cosmos, and the social order. Quite rightly, there's nothing more scandalous and reprehensible than something which threatens it.
To be sure, in the present state of interhuman relations, tradition has been pushed into the background, or at least it is veiled. You remember the saying of King Farouk, according to which there are now only five kings left in the world, the four kings in a deck of cards and the King of England.
What, after all, is a letter? How can a letter be purloined [volée]?4 To whom does it belong? To whoever sent it or to whoever it is addressed? If you say that it belongs to whoever sent it, what makes a letter a gift? Why does one send a letter? And if you think that it belongs to the recipient, how is it that, under certain circumstances, you return your letters to the person who, for a period in your life, bombarded you with them?
When one considers one of those proverbs attributed to the wisdom of nations - the wisdom of which is thus denominated by antiphrase - one is sure to light upon a stupidity. Verba volant, scripta manent. Has it occurred to you that a letter is precisely speech which flies [vole]? If a stolen [volée] letter is possible, it is because a letter is a fly-sheet ^Ueuille volante]. It is scripta which volant, whereas speech, alas, remains. It remains even when no one remembers it any more. Just as, after five hundred thousand signs in the series of pluses and minuses, the appearance of ÿ, ß , u,
