Page 178 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes metaphor cannot be produced or reproduced without metonymy, but once it has crossed over that
bar, it is free from the shackles of servitude.
We shift now from this essay to the essay "The Purloined Letter," to see how these principles or
concepts figure in the way that Lacan reads this short story by Poe. Fairly early on, Lacan makes
this rather mysterious assertion: this sign is indeed that of woman, in so far as she invests her very
being therein, founding it outside the law, which subsumes her nonetheless, originarily, in a
position of signifier, nay of fetish.
For we know that Lacan believes the letter, that literal letter of the story, to be the signifier, and
this passage just quoted, which aligns the woman (the Queen) with the sign (in the position of
signifier), recasts the discussion in a complex way. Moreover, Lacan introduces in the same sentence
the sexual concept of the fetish, and places it in intimate proximity to the woman and the signifier.
It seems that Lacan has double-sexed the signifier in metonymic fashion. The "straight" or obvious
reading traces the letter in the story in its function as the letter of the signifier; but the chain
woman-signifier-fetish, once introduced, cannot be left behind and thus we are forced to read it
alongside (or behind) the first reading. So that when Lacan maintains that destroying the letter . . .
[is] the only sure means . . . of being rid of what is destined by nature to signify the annulment of
what it signifies we also read letter-as-signifier doubled over with woman-as-signifier-as-fetish. So
we read, in fact, "destroying the woman is the only sure means of being rid of what is destined by
nature to signify the annulment of what she signifies," and "destroying the fetish is the only sure
means of being rid of what is destined by nature to signify the annulment of what the fetish signifies."
And if this "reading under" seems unjustified, or to be based on insufficient evidence, we are then
confronted with this explicit metaphor: Just so does the purloined letter, like an immense female
body, stretch out across the Minister's office when Dupin enters. But just so does he already expect
to find it, and has only, with his eyes veiled by green lenses, to undress that huge body.
The letter, the signifier, is here explicitly female and explicitly sexual. Not only that, but its
sexuality is contagious - Lacan repeatedly refers to the "feminization" of the Minister once he has
stolen the letter. He "is obliged to don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of femininity
and shadow, so propitious to the act of concealing". When the signifier alters its proximity, or is
altered, from Queen to Minister, the Minister "follows the Queen" in attributes and character.
Lacan writes,
the Minister . . .. came to forget [the letter] . . . But the letter, no more than the neurotic's unconscious,
does not forget him. It forgets him so little that it transforms him more and more in the image of
her who offered it to his capture, so that he now will surrender it, following her example, to a
similar capture.
And now we have yet another complicating association: woman is now not neatly equated with
the signifier, but adopts a position of giving it up, "offering" it, as he puts it. We notice how Lacan
implies the Queen's active role in the loss of the signifier/letter, how he does not see it so much in
terms of a theft but as a quasi-voluntary act of surrender on the part of the woman. The Minister
adopts that feminine surrender in his own relation to the letter, "offering" it, as it were, to Dupin
in his turn.
And where is Dupin in all of this? We know that Lacan finds an analogue of the analyst in the
figure of Dupin; so then his implication in this chain of signifiers is certain to be key. And we do
not have to look long for Dupin's metaphorization: he is the "hand of the ravisher", maintaining in
a very specific fashion the sexual metaphor of the letter/woman.
And the editors of the essay have added this footnote as a clarification:
[this] might be read as follows: analysis, in its violation of the imaginary integrity of the ego, finds
its fantasmatic equivalent in rape (or castration. . . ) But whether that 'rape' occurs from in front or
from behind (above or below the mantelpiece) is, in fact, a question of interest for policeman and
not analysts.
Let us read this again: analysis is analagous to rape insofar as it "violates" the "imaginary integrity"
of the ego. Rape is a metaphor - the chosen metaphor - for psychoanalysis. The justification for this

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