Eça, Author of ‘The Purloined Letter’: Narcissism and Imitation in O primo Basílio

Abstract

This article contends that Eça de Queirós’s O primo Basílio (1878) draws on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), which gained prominence in poststructuralist thought following Jacques Lacan’s renowned seminar on the tale from 1966. Seeking the harmonies between these three texts, the analysis focuses on the significance of intercepted letters in the novel which, as in Poe’s story, bestow delusions of power that end when arriving at their rightful, or deserved, addressee. Lacan’s psychoanalytic reading is thus used retrospectively to consider the novel’s detailed exploration of narcissism and its role in mobilizing and proliferating the ideology of Portugal’s bourgeoisie, whose rise at the time — in contrast to its French and British counterparts — heralded the nation’s increasingly diminished role on the world stage. Drawing further on Silviano Santiago’s reading of O primo as a comment on cultural marginality, the article therefore attempts to link the novel’s structure to its broader social context, whilst demonstrating how many of Lacan’s insights into Poe’s tale were uncannily pre-empted by Eça a century earlier.