Clear-Cut Definition between Literature and Psychoanalysis - Coursework Example

There is no longer a clear-cut definition between literature and psychoanalysis. Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” uses a new technique where the author rambles and finds reasoning for crimes and delivers a narrative investigation of it until the crime is solves. Thus the reader is taken into an entire journey of psychological and imagined journey of manifold interpretations of characters, situations and events. Nevertheless, more importantly, this is the story that employs most effectively the principle of ratiocination; this story illustrates the clever use of intuitive and empirical methods at work together to assist the intellect at work as it strives to solve a given and prepared problem logically, at least apparently so. Poe used a narrative technique almost always to uphold a general impression of continuity or non-stop flow of the fiction. Again his short stories try to uphold such unity with a delightful zooming in and zooming out of situations that act as thought catalysts for readers. He also includes a lot of thought and explanation of extreme behavioral perspective that marked an important ingredient in crime fiction. His investigation of the crime in “The Purloined Letter” demands a faithful participation from readers, which is quite modern. "The Purloined Letter" also stands as a descriptive analysis of the socio-historical condition of the age—the political condition of France, new experiments in poetry, new inventions in clinical psychology and mathematics. However, this story contains a historical interest in the origin and revelation of psychological detective fiction and the remarkable achievement of the age thereafter. Dupin and the Minister are the two main entities that represent two sides to approaches in thinking and thus get involved in a battle of the wits. “The Purloined Letter” is chequered like a chess game. The whole scheme that the Minister manages to use against the Inspector, in which the moves were only calculated without consideration for something called the subconscious. It was thus calculated and assessed almost clinically and without scope for greater imagination. It was almost studied beyond practicality. However, Dupin actually manages to beat the Minister quite beyond his reason because he uses imagination to psychologically make greater assumptions about another person’s bent of mind. He forecasts the nature of crime by thinking about the thought process of a criminal person and thinking creatively and logically from that point of his character traits. Thus the character traits become important signifiers that help him to reveal more about the ideological position of the person. Thus Dupin understood that the Inspector might use clear and even stereotypical logic (based on studied and not innovative experimentation) in his search for the letter. He even knew that the Minister would act quite imaginatively to come up with something ordinary to do the extraordinary letter. Both Minister and Dupin reveal an excess understanding of the human mind. Whereas the Minister can typify the inspectors search as one that is dutiful, and having no scope for individual thinking, almost an extension of his academic training exercise, Dupin applying the same logic to the inspectors background states that he must be part of the search group in the Minister’s house. The letter thus becomes a search for a lost sign whose actual meaning can only be revealed when the reader/thinker only get inside the mind of the sign maker. The letter thus represented two things to him at once: important enough to be hidden well, but especially well from the police search (ideologically they represent academic and trained thought process), but the letter must also be quite in a convenient place for the Minister to use it (and the Minister is a clever man). Dupin enters into a narrative with the narrator before the search begins and talks about psychological understanding with the use of the simile of a schoolboy who managed to win all marbles in a game, just because he managed to intrude within the mental space of the others. The schoolboy knew his playmates’ well and also knew how each of them thought. Thus his information about them helped him to use it against them by getting to know their acts and rationalizing about their acts while playing. He guesses their thoughts and wins all the marbles. Dupin analyzes the Minister and all information about him to get inside his mind and understand him from his point of view which is very much reminiscent of all the detective shows that are aired in television and how the detectives use the mind game to understand the criminal through their criminal acts and their next moves. Poe used the term ratiocination, when he said in a letter to James Russell Lowell: “The Purloined Letter, forthcoming in the Gift, is perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination”. At another occasion, he related that term to ‘truth,’ when he said: “But Truth is often and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination”. Later Poe became skeptical, and in a letter of 9 August 1846 (by that time he had lost interest in the genre, and in “Thou Art the Man” had even poked fun at the very genre, which he had supposedly invented) he said: “These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious – but people think them more ingenious than they are – on account of their method and air of method…the reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.1 Poe’s taste for close observation and the minute details within the narrative of the story and in many of the his power of ratiocination are revealed through the distractive and inventive descriptions that constitute the setting of the tale and also act as extended objective reality of the main characters’ mind. Logic and carefully handled Reason (of the Cartesian type) has the force of empirical truths and yet possesses inherent symbolisms, encouraging feats of thought for the reader (which later detective fiction came to exploit) who is sucked up into the story and its dialogism that help him unravel the cryptography that he attributed to Legrand and Dupin. He clouds his writings with a pathological or horrific duality that apparently abandon reason for a morbid psychology that creates an unrelenting plot that arrests the mind as much as it reveals the rational and irrational workings of it. Thus Poe introduces the understandings of the unreason through reasoning, which is metaphorically embedded within the story and where the plot of unreasonable acts is explained. His contributions for attributing greater labyrinthine mystery to the human mind reveal the processes of a gothic era meeting a new age of understanding those psychic processes not with negligent disgust but with scientific system of classifying them into a phylum of case studies. Representations of the subjectivity of horror and madness reflect the psychology of the artistic creativity that intuitively expresses its cognitive challenges into attractive and educative appearances using or being represented through the use of diverse media and forms of expressions. What then the artistic subject brings to general understanding of abnormal thoughts from the depths of human experience and cognition with or without their knowledge, is revealed even imperceptibly and reconstructed or deconstructed, enjoyed, reflected upon, and partly captured in general rules by others at various points of reading the text. The sensory reflection of reasoning Poe’s story creates an area of reflection in which a discussion about mentality history perspectives of thought and cognition become part of a literary and psychological revolution that actually help make sense of Freud due to availability of various examples already put down in complicated stories and their symbols. He projects himself into his characters, dreaming aloud, and we witness the extraordinary adventures, which he took pleasure in inventing multiple possibilities of living a world illusory but nevertheless real. The Readership of a present generation is problematic when they read a text in isolation. It becomes almost impossible especially in the era of post-Freudian, deconstructive and postmodern era, where the reader is conscious of the presence and complexities of the subconscious, to not read them with greater effect and depth of meaning that surpass the narrators intention. To Poe the workings of the mind were uncertainties found a great critique in him to reveal with great curiosity the introspection and assessment of one’s mind, which becomes an important narrative exercise of the deductive method itself. Secrets hidden behind narrative symbols designed by the narrator act as observational clues in Poe’s short story where one cannot deduce anything by given data and deducible facts worked out like an algebraic mathematical problem. Poe asserts that the human mind is far too cavernous (gothic understanding) and less logically shaped that what appears to civilized and trained eyes of scientific schools. Nevertheless, such assumptions can actually help one study the mind more logically - logic more fit for understanding such complex subject as the human mind. Poe thus became an advocate of a practical school of psychology that applied logic but with an eye for practical reality and empirical practicality and much more shaped by imagination and creative lateral reasoning. Poe’s art of making observations and inferences based on such sparse symbolic indicators, or concrete traits that give way to abstract reasoning is a new ground breaking narrative that includes the inner mind of the other party and that of the reader in a way that is even practiced today in the psychological thrillers and sensational novel. Thus noticeable and observed reality gave way to an enquiry into the nature of reality itself. Imagination comes into play whenever one presupposes drawing a creative inference within a plot, and the role of private eye who observes attentively gives way to so many issues of gaze, character analysis and adds to the study of criminal behaviour massively, as much as human response to raised issues. Since the Romantic era was all speculation about the romantic imagination of the mind, one cannot escape Poe’s artistic causes as well. Poe distinguished between the assumptions about the merely ingenious and what was to him a truly imaginative mind (like Coleridge’s Primary and Secondary Imagination and those advocated by Wordsworth2). Where the first concerns the workings of the unconscious level of imagination and goes beyond being just fanciful, the secondary imagination is only a fancy and does not give the true perception about humanity. In his detective stories, Poe made Dupin focus on things that were beyond something just analytic and include within his mind through the force and perception of primary imagination, the irregularities of human behaviour get a whole picture on the motives of the Minister. Dupin thus transported himself in his imagination, to seek for symbols that acted as revelatory answers to a whole jigsaw puzzle, which within the working of the imaginative space became unfixed and uncertain signs, which he first loosened from the clasp of stereotypical assumptions and added them into a free playing field of association. This subdued reference to the theory of probabilities within the use of imagination, again deconstructed purely positivist knowledge of the probability theory. Poe emphasized in a footnote to ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’: “The ‘Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded…much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities…the confessions of two persons ... made at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained.3 Uncertainty is the issue that Poe wants to address. Uncertainty that relates to human intentions however, have problems by analysis through pragmatism also, because it requires a thinking that is either driven by skepticism to convention or by opposition to it. Research is put into narrative practice and the unexplainable factors that guide human mind are laid bare through authorial intervention and is thus much more befitting to the authors choice of subject-matter and story where these factors help to make the story more effective, but is nevertheless an exercise in written and fictive ratiocination. In Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter”, the police fail to find the stolen letter because they start hunting for a good hiding place rather than the letter without any relation to the criminal itself and how he can actually manipulate the meaning of hiding place in the first place itself. What they should have been searching for, says Dupin, was a particular kind of criminal practice, a practice of concealment (Brown, 2002, p.2)4. It is insufficient when detectives’ just study the crime, the event, and everything related to it with independent and aloof interest. No event stands alone- all are interrelated. One must advance a reason that shall help to provide a conceptual link between the event of a letter when it was stolen and the context in which the event occurs (Brink, 1996, citing Williams, p.274).5 Poe brings an interesting debate between many intellectual schools of existing era that reflect the state of the cognitive sciences and methodology warring with artistic imagination. His methods echo Foucault’s opus magnum on “Madness and Civilization” and Freud particularly with his penchant for the unconscious workings of the human mind and the newer assumptions about the deconstruction of fixity of sign systems in linguistics that followed afterwards. Poe’s contribution is about his greater inclusion of erratic randomization and uneven characteristics of the human mind and behaviour that almost stand in opposition to a methodical ideology of American Society conceived then. Work Cited 1. Brown, N.C. (2002). Concealment of Reality in the Practice of Design, Working Papers in Art and Design, Volume 2, . 2. Brown and Carroll, 1998. Brown, N.C. & Carroll, J.S. (1998). “An Ethnographic Study Of Art As A Discipline Concealed In The Beliefs And Practices Of Two Artists”. Australian Art Education, 21:1, 21-35. 3. Poe (1994). Selected tales. London; New York, Penguin Books (pp. 350). 4. Reimers, Walter. “Zur Funktion des analytischen Verstandes in Edgar Allan Poes Kurzprosa,” Diss. Kiel 1971 5. Wordsworth, W. (1969). “The prelude or growth of a poets mind” (text of 1805). Oxford, Oxford University Press. Read More