In his essay ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault explores the relationship between author and reader, offering a critique on what he terms the “author function”, or the role of the author and the implications of this on readers.1 One crucial point he makes is that the desire for singularity of meaning imposed by the readership onto texts is realised in the figure of the author, and that this singularity – and by extension the author figure – is limiting to our experiences of reading. Through its exploration of the limitations of a singular methodology in crime detection, Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ illuminates Foucault’s argument with crime detecting acting as analogous to our reading of a literary text.
While Foucault acknowledges the benefits of the author as a figure who helps readers to identify and categorise texts through genre and style, he identifies that the most problematic aspect of the author figure is its disenfranchisement of the reader. He outlines that by relying on authorial intentionality often founded on biographical knowledge of the author, we attribute unnecessary authority to the author and they become the owner of a text’s ‘true’ meaning, closing the text off to other possible readings. For Foucault this desire for authorial intentionality degrades the significance of the reader in the construction of a text, shifting the focus to the process of trying to decipher rather than engage with it. In ‘The Purloined Letter’, Poe demonstrates this through the dynamic between the Prefect of the Paris police, and the amateur detective Dupin who in their seemingly binary methodologies of crime detection respectively represent the ‘decipherer reader’ and the ‘engaging reader’. In his aim to find the letter, a form of deciphering meaning, the Prefect uses a procedure composed of preconceptions and focuses solely on the deep investigation of small details, boasting that he has “investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed”.2 Most prominent in his reasoning is his surety in understanding the thief’s mindset:
Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in the same way. (Poe, p. 979)
Through the parallels between the small details of the thief’s room’s and the details within texts, Poe’s depiction of the Prefect’s detection process adds to Foucault’s suggestion of the limitations that the author figure has on meaning. By following a long sentence with a short one to reiterate the first, Poe demonstrates the Prefect’s conviction in his method based on his knowledge of thieves’ patterns, mirroring the way in which readers project meaning based on their understanding of the author’s life. This is emphasised by the heavy use of punctuation and connectives to emulate natural rationalisation, giving his opinion the impression of irrefutability. Thus, because the Prefect’s projection of a singular ‘meaning’ is rooted in the author figure, Poe demonstrates how through its entanglement with the notion of authority, the figure of the author can often limit the proliferation of meaning.
By contrast, the experience of evading the author figure is represented by Dupin’s method of detection which privileges the power of the reader in creating meaning. Critically, at the end of the story, Dupin explains that more significant than the letter being found was the process of opening oneself up to multiple possibilities. By doing this, not only does he discover one form of ‘meaning’ through the physical letter, he also discovers nuances that alert him to the letter’s falsity by exploring aspects that the Prefect failed to notice in his blinkeredness, giving rise to the proliferation of meaning. His orchestration of the outdoor scuffle symbolises a turning point for the author-reader relationship, transforming the process of reading from one of passive acceptance of the author’s ‘truth’ to a collaborative process which culminates in the contribution of the reader to the text’s ownership. This is shown by Dupin’s final note to the thief which establishes him as on equal footing with the author, demonstrating literally the power of the reader in the meaning-making of a text if the author is surrendered.
However, Poe’s story in relation to the author figure equally posits a paradox characterised by Dupin’s ego as the discoverer of the letter. In his explanation of his reasoning, which is of equal intricacy to that of the Prefect’s, his pomp is highlighted, demonstrating the same conviction and belief in the superiority of his method as the Prefect. Despite criticising the Prefect’s reliance on “one set of principles” based on “one set of notions regarding human ingenuity”, Dupin equally relies on principles, stating that “the more I relied on the daring, dashing and discriminating ingenuity of D—… the more satisfied I became that, to conceal the letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all” (pp. 985, 990). Albeit in a way oppositional to the Prefect’s, this also demonstrates a reliance on the author figure as Dupin’s conclusion is grounded in his evaluation of the thief’s character. The attribution of adjectives such as “sagacious” and “daring” to the thief demonstrate the tendency to ascribe genius to the author in a way that may appear objective but is in actuality our projection of their motives. Thus while Dupin and the Prefect perhaps initially seem to represent opposing mindsets and approaches to reading, they are not entirely dissimilar, demonstrating the wide-reaching power of the author figure over our engagement with textual meanings.
An element of the text of great significance in relation to Focualt’s essay is the actual author of the letter. The fact that she is unknown and moreso unknowable contributes to the assertion of the author as the marker of meaning. As readers, our focus is centred on the mystery of the letter, a mystery firstly navigated by knowing its origin. Because of our perception of the letter’s meaning as bound with its author, our inability to know the author becomes a constraint on our ability to engage with even the wider text of the story itself; while we are happy enough to theorise about the letter, we expect that there is one true meaning that surpasses any we could ever conjure: the truth of the author. This, Foucault argues, ultimately degrades the autonomy of the readership as not only is it possible to engage with a text without the author figure, it is more liberating for the reader to do so, as Dupin demonstrates to an extent. While the letter’s belonging to a member of the royal family is precisely the origin of its bargaining power and ‘meaning’, the Queen’s namelessness could be interpreted as the obsoleteness of the author figure, aptly serving Roland Barthe’s assertion of privileging the words on the page rather than their origin.3 In his discussion of the author as a subject, Foucault echoes Barthes and Stéphane Mallarmé’s sentiment that the author is merely a vessel through which language performs, writing that writing is “a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears”. (Foucault, p. 206) Therefore instead of experiencing discomfort at the absence of the author in the form of our knowledge of the Queen, we should embrace this as a means to the reader’s construction of meaning.
While the Prefect and Dupin represent different methodologies of approaching texts, the conflation of meaning with some aspect of the author from both characters demonstrates the wide-reaching power of the author figure over a reader’s arrival at meaning. Similarly, the enigmatic, ever present figure of the queen suggests an intrinsic link between author and meaning which in itself further demonstrates this belief in authorial intentionality. This is emphasised by Poe’s antithetical depiction of Dupin and the Prefect which suggests that no amount of difference in approach can transcend the author as an ideological figure, demonstrating Foucualt’s argument that ultimately, as the representation of a supposed singularity of meaning, the author is indeed the figure through which we fear the proliferation of meaning. ‘The Purloined Letter’ illuminates this fraught author-reader relationship, strongly suggesting in its depiction of the inescapability of the influence of the author in shaping meaning that the abandonment of the author figure is necessary for the proliferation of meaning to thrive.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142-48
Foucault, Michel, ‘What is an Author?’, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York, The New Press, 1998), pp. 205-222
Poe, Edgar Allen, ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Kopley, Richard, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2008), pp. 974-993
- Michel Foucalt, ‘What is an Author?’, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. by James Faubion, trans. by Robert Hurley et al (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 211
↩︎ - Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2008), p. 978
↩︎ - Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p.143
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