Intro
Poe's writings were translated into French by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who single-handedly established Poe's international reputation and made him readable by our two favorite Jacques, Lacan and Derrida. "The Purloined Letter" is the third and final tale in a trilogy of short detective stories—the first detective stories ever written in English, no less!
Well before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle started churning out the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Poe gave us the cigar-puffing, book-loving C. Auguste Dupin: super-brain extraordinaire. In this story, he helps track a compromising letter stolen from the Queen of France (not your typical private-eye client) and ingeniously figures out it's hidden right under everyone's nose.
Now, if we know anything about psychoanalysts, it's that they love to search for clues. You say there was a talking dog in your dream last night? Clue. You say you tried to say the word "bump" on your date last night but it came out "hump"? MEGA CLUE.
So it's no wonder Lacan took to "The Purloined Letter" like a dog to a bone. Not only is the story all about solving a tricky mystery through sheer cleverness and smarts, it's also full of all kinds of shady schemes and dirty dealings. And, most importantly, it tells us a little something about signification too. Hey, structuralists, are you paying attention?
Quote
At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery fillagree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D—-— cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D—-—, the minister, himself.
Analysis
Poe's story has a full cast of characters, but for Lacan, there are just three major players: the Queen of France, the corrupt Minister D—, and our hero, Dupin. Here's the basic info: the Minister has stolen a letter from the Queen. The letter was sent to her by an unnamed person, but we know it wasn't the King. Feisty!
So. The Queen knows the Minister has the letter, and he knows that she knows. In fact, he's using it to blackmail her. But where is it? That's where Dupin comes in. In the end, he manages to get the letter back by outsmarting the Minister. He figures out that because the Minister is so slick, he'll have hidden the letter in his home, in plain sight. Everyone's expecting him to hide it, and he's expecting them to search his crib for the letter and look for secret spots. But they won't look right on his desk.
Seems simple enough, in a pretty complicated detective-story sort of way. But here's what Lacan points out about the story: as the letter changes hands from person to person, the characters repeat one another's actions. The letter goes from one to the next to the next, and each character acts in a certain way when he/she has it. Like the letter has more power than the actual people.
Lacan calls the letter the "pure signifier." Just like the signifier in Saussure's linguistics, it doesn't have real value of its own. We poor readers never even get to know what it says, for crying out loud! But that actually doesn't matter at all, according to Lacan: for us, the letter's power is still perfectly obvious, because it comes from its function—what its secret could mean for the characters—not what's really inside.
The characters' responses to it are predictable because they're all moving around in the same system, taking each other's places like teammates moving around a baseball diamond. Who has the letter, who's on third...it's those positions that matter to Lacan. And according to him, language positions each of us in just the same way. From the moment we learn to identify ourselves by the things people call us—i.e., boy, girl, white, black, good, bad, detective, thief—we're trapped in the game.