The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida

Abstract

A literary text which both analyzes itself and shows that it actually has neither a self nor any neutral metalanguage with which to do the analyzing, calls out irresistibly for analysis. And when that call is answered by two eminent French thinkers whose readings emit an equally paradoxical call-to-analysis of their own, the resulting triptych, in the context of the question of the act-of-reading (-literature), places its would-be reader in a vertiginously insecure position. The three texts in question are Edgar A. Poe's short story The Purloined Letter, ' Jacques Lacan's Seminar on The Purloined Letter,2 and Jacques Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading of Poe, The Purveyor of Truth [Le Facteur de la Verite]. I In all three texts, it is the act of analysis which seems to occupy the center of the discursive stage, and the act of analysis of the act of analysis which in some way disrupts that centrality. In the resulting asymmetrical, abyssal structure, no analysis-including this one-can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is thus not a stable sequence, but which nevertheless produces certain regular effects. It is the functioning of this regularity, and the structure of these effects, which will provide the basis for the present study.