Although most of Poe’s major characters have long been diagnosed as neurotic, today’s perspective enables us to redefine their sensibility as paranoid. Roderick Usher, Prince Prospero, and the narrator of “The Black Cat” are all intimidated by the impending threat of a secret design entrapping them. The best example could well be noticed in the mental state of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1943). Despite the success of his skillful murder of an old man, he starts wondering if it is the police officers who skillfully entangled him in the meshes of a plot. “It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And the still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they hear not? Almighty God! ---no, no! ---they are making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think … I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! (Levine 262). The more self-conscious a criminal gets, the more paranoid he becomes. Thus, I find it high time to reread “The Purloined Letter” as one of the most paranoid stories, with the help of Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Before developing my interpretation, let us be aware that while the 1920s saw the Melville Revival, the 1970s saw the Poe Revival. As Barbara Johnson pointed out, the poststructuralist controversy between French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida over “The Purloined Letter” (1844), a tribute to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), resulted in a renewed interest in the Dupin trilogy; in his 1971 article “The Purveyor of Truth,” Derrida performed a deconstructive reading by attacking Lacan’s text “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” composed in 1956. What matters here is that Derrida’s nemesis Paul de Man gave a lecture entitled “The Purloined Ribbon” in 1976, focusing not on Poe’s detective story but on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography. At first glance, the texts Derrida and de Man grapple with seem to have nothing in common but the act of stealing. In consequence, critics have scarcely discussed Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” along with de Man’s “The Purloined Ribbon.” Nonetheless, de Man and Derrida were equally fascinated by the very act of purloining for a reason: the Watergate scandal that induced them to feverishly talk about the purloined tape in the early 1970s. What makes the Watergate scandal more interesting now is that while Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” dramatized the movement of the letter as the signifier lacking the signified, President Richard Nixon’s tape also functioned as the signifier lacking the most important signified. Therefore, Derrida and de Man became intrigued with the Watergate scandal featuring the break-in as the act of stealing and the cover-up as the act of depriving the tape of the true signified. In the post-Trumpian era that naturalized post-truth and alternative fact, rereading “The Purloined Letter” will provide us with a clue to comprehending the essence of paranoid space haunted by a number of conspiracies.

Purloined Voices, Paranoid Spaces: Poe, de Man, and Nixon

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发表日期：

2025年

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Takayuki Tatsumi

摘要

Although most of Poe’s major characters have long been diagnosed as neurotic, today’s perspective enables us to redefine their sensibility as paranoid. Roderick Usher, Prince Prospero, and the narrator of “The Black Cat” are all intimidated by the impending threat of a secret design entrapping them. The best example could well be noticed in the mental state of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1943). Despite the success of his skillful murder of an old man, he starts wondering if it is the police officers who skillfully entangled him in the meshes of a plot. “It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And the still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they hear not? Almighty God! ---no, no! ---they are making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think … I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! (Levine 262). The more self-conscious a criminal gets, the more paranoid he becomes. Thus, I find it high time to reread “The Purloined Letter” as one of the most paranoid stories, with the help of Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Before developing my interpretation, let us be aware that while the 1920s saw the Melville Revival, the 1970s saw the Poe Revival. As Barbara Johnson pointed out, the poststructuralist controversy between French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida over “The Purloined Letter” (1844), a tribute to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), resulted in a renewed interest in the Dupin trilogy; in his 1971 article “The Purveyor of Truth,” Derrida performed a deconstructive reading by attacking Lacan’s text “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” composed in 1956. What matters here is that Derrida’s nemesis Paul de Man gave a lecture entitled “The Purloined Ribbon” in 1976, focusing not on Poe’s detective story but on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography. At first glance, the texts Derrida and de Man grapple with seem to have nothing in common but the act of stealing. In consequence, critics have scarcely discussed Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” along with de Man’s “The Purloined Ribbon.” Nonetheless, de Man and Derrida were equally fascinated by the very act of purloining for a reason: the Watergate scandal that induced them to feverishly talk about the purloined tape in the early 1970s. What makes the Watergate scandal more interesting now is that while Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” dramatized the movement of the letter as the signifier lacking the signified, President Richard Nixon’s tape also functioned as the signifier lacking the most important signified. Therefore, Derrida and de Man became intrigued with the Watergate scandal featuring the break-in as the act of stealing and the cover-up as the act of depriving the tape of the true signified. In the post-Trumpian era that naturalized post-truth and alternative fact, rereading “The Purloined Letter” will provide us with a clue to comprehending the essence of paranoid space haunted by a number of conspiracies.