Chapter 13: Experiments in Criticism: Desire in Interpretation

We see what we want to see.  This isn't because we are boldly narcissistic; rather, this tendency reflects the force of our unconscious desires over which we have no control except by becoming conscious of them.  On the one hand, this idea provides one reason why different people read the same story differently or why we might each read the same story differently at different times.  On the other hand, it suggests why it is that there may be no such thing as an "objective" reading.  Our desires affect us more than we may think.

Consider the following passage:

I would give you a million dollars if you read this sentence properly.

What did you think the sentence meant the first time you read it?

Reread the sentence?  Can you see how it might mean something else?

The process of reading, especially reading complex, multivalent, or ambiguous texts, is very much like looking at an optical illusion like the one above.  For some reason we see what we see when it is equally possible to see other things.

This same principle works in criticism, as "The Purloined Letter" suggests.  And perhaps predictably, criticism of the story "The Purloined Letter" itself reflects the ways desire influences vision.

Compare the following interpretations of "The Purloined Letter."

            Duplicity versus self-reference as artistic modes form the very substance of "The Purloined Letter" when one chooses to read it in terms of narratorial authority, and as a text concerned with its own illocutionary situation [circumstances within which it tells us it is being told].  The narratorial mode of Dupin and that of the narration itself represent a range of possibilities . . . . 

Ross Chambers, "Narratorial Authority and ‘The Purloined Letter'"

Chambers is focusing on the ways the narrator gains authority in the story, an important issue in relation to the relative authority of Dupin and the somewhat incredible circumstances of the tale.  Note also the kind of narrative authority Chambers himself undertakes when he writes about the narrator.  This is an example of an interpretation based on narrative theory.

Therefore, I do not really believe the basic premise of Poe's story.  I believe there is a mechanical solution to the Minister's problem of concealing the letter that would make Dupin's oh-so-clever strategy useless.  In the same way, I disbelieve that, in the Prefect's incredibly expensive and time-consuming searches, someone would not have examined the letter in the card case.  One's secrets are always found out by the sheer bigness and brute force of governmental power.
Norman Holland, "Re-Covering ‘The Purloined Letter': Reading as a Personal Transaction"

Holland's approach traces his own interactions or "transactions" with the text.  It focuses on the ways the story reproduces the same kind of economy of openness and hiding in the ways it invites readers to read it as it recounts.  Holland's essay is an example of Reader Response Criticism.  Note what Holland chooses to focus on.

Poe's insistent use of doublings in the story considerably exceeds that which is necessary for presenting Dupin';s method of investigation, which in this case stresses detection through psychological identification with an adversary.  Rather, the prominent pattern of doubles suggests that the protagonist and his foil are moral duplicates and may ultimately be two phases of the same mind.
Liahna Babener, "The Shadow's Shadow: The Motif of the Double in Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Purloined Letter'"

Babener has identified one of several possible structures in the story: the double.  It would be equally possible in this story to see the triangle as significant.  In fact seeing the pattern of hiding and finding as occurring between two characters and events or three characters and events produces entirely different readings of the story.  Babener's essay is an example of both Structuralism and Psychological Criticism.

No interpretation can take account of everything.  Every interpretation is premised on leaving something out and that something becomes a blind spot whose discovery reveals what stake critics have in seeing the story the ways they do.

What drew your attention in "The Purloined Letter"?  Consider why and what that might say about your interests.