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Shosuke KINUGAWA 5 Shosuke KINUGAWA Taking Yet Mistaking: Puns in “The Purloined Letter” owards the end of Edgar Allan Poeʼs “The Purloined Letter” (1844), the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin draws an analogy between T the method by which Minister D── hid the stolen letter and a “game of puzzles . which is played upon a map” (379). In the game, one player “requires another to find a given word - the name of town, river, state or empire - any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart” (379). A novice of the game, Dupin explains, will give “the most minutely lettered names” to find, whereas the adept “selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other,” because “[t]hese, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious” (379). In other words, the letters (alphabet) on the map, the letters (alphabet) on the street signs and the letter (epistle) that D──hid in his room all evade detection by virtue of being displayed in an “excessively obvious” manner. The significance of this analogy lies in the fact that in explaining D ──ʼs method of concealing the letter (epistle), the analogy simultaneously draws an equation between the hidden “letter” (epistle) and hidden “letters” (alphabet). The equation, I argue, implies that what happens to the letter (epistle) in the tale is also happening to the letters (alphabet) composing the text of the story itself. Just like how the letter (epistle) in the story is stolen and hidden right under the observant eyes of the queen and the police, “The Purloined Letter” has letters (alphabet) that are being stolen and hidden under the eyes of its readers. The search for the purloined letter (epistle) by Dupin, then, must be replicated by its readers in the form of a search for hidden letters (alphabet) in “The Purloined Letter,” a search that should ultimately lead, as the map analogy hints, to the revelation of a hidden The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan, No. 14, February 2016. Ⓒ 2016 by The American Literature Society of Japan 6 Shosuke KINUGAWA name. But how can letters of a text be hidden from its readers? The method of con- cealment is also hinted at through the map puzzle analogy. The equation of D──ʼs hiding of the letter (epistle) with the hiding of letters (alphabet) among “over- largely lettered signs and placards” hanging in the street, evokes the fact that D── had hidden the queenʼs letter among “five or six visiting cards” in a “card-rack” (380) hanging from a mantle-piece in his room. In other words, the hiding places of the “letter” (inside a “card”-rack) and alphabetical “letters” (amongst pla“cards”) are equated through a pun on the words “letter” and “card.” Within the analogy explaining D──ʼs method of hiding a letter in plain sight, then, Poe sneaks in an explanation of how alphabetical letters can also be hidden in plain sight: clandes- tine puns. Punning is a form of language use in which a word is intentionally made to sig- nify two or more meanings at the same time. A pun can be made obvious or ob- scure depending on the intent of the author, and therefore be used as what Walter Redfern describes in Puns (1986) as a “kind of code which the reader, spectator, hearer, is invited to crack” (82). An author of a text encrypted with puns will situate the punning word within a text where the word will at first glance seem to have only one meaning but upon closer inspection turn out to conceal two or more. A clandestine pun, then, is a mode of encryption in which a word is made to have multiple meanings but presented so that all but one of its meanings are hidden, a hiding that is a kind of hiding in plain sight in that the punning word and the text around it are always there in front of the reader, unchanged. As the third story in Poeʼs Dupin trilogy often cited as the origin of the modern detective story, “The Purloined Letter” is frequently discussed in terms of its contribution to the development of the detective fiction genre.1 Stephen Rachman, for example, states that the story demonstrated how the genre could “traffic in private (as opposed to public) representations and mysteries” by “shifting from murder to theft and making a private text the object of crime,” a shift which had the further effect of emphasizing the “game-like structure of the speculation involved in detection and analysis” (26). “The Purloined Letter,” however, is equally known as a commentary on the mechanism of language and of the act of reading. John T. Irwin is exemplary of this critical tradition when he states that the “object called the purloined letter . is a self-included linguistic representation of the textʼs own representational status,” and that the hiding of the letter in plain Taking Yet Mistaking 7 sight symbolizes the “principal mystery of writing - that letters (written characters) on the surface of a sheet of paper somehow physically ʻcontainʼ or ʻconcealʼ something metaphysical (thought)” (22).2 Few, however, have pursued the possibility that the theft/concealment of the object called the purloined letter should also be seen as the theft/concealment of the alphabetical letters of “The Purloined Letter.” After stating that the letter symbolizes the mystery of linguistic representationality, Irwin goes on to note that this mystery is symbolized “even more explicitly by Poe in another form of writing he was obsessed with, the encrypted message” (22). In referring to encryp- tion as “another form of writing,” Irwin implies that “The Purloined Letter” does not directly reflect Poeʼs obsession with encrypted messages, a view echoed by James Guthrie, who concludes that the story “lacks a cryptogram per se” even while reading the letter (epistle) as a kind of “encrypted poem” (92).3 On the contrary, I argue that the method by which the object called the purloined letter is stolen and hidden is first and foremost a metaphor for punning encryption, and that the story itself is one long cryptogram composed of smaller crypts made of puns. The concealment of the letter in plain sight represents the concealment of alphabetical letters from readers by virtue of clandestine wordplay, a method of concealment in which the concealed object is hidden right in front of the readerʼs eyes, physically visible yet semantically invisible. The tale is an encrypted “map” upon which Poe is playing a “game of puzzles” with the reader, challenging them to find words and letters hidden within and across its surface that will ultimately lead to the discovery of a hidden name. What name, then, shall appear on the surface of this story when we piece together the “words as stretch . from one end of the chart to the other”? * * * In The Cryptographic Imagination (1997), Shawn Rosenheim outlines the “constellation of literary techniques concerning secrecy in writing” undergirding Poeʼs literature, techniques which include “private ciphers, acrostics, allusions, hidden signatures, chiasmal framing, etymological reference, and plagiarism” (2). Among these techniques is also wordplay, particularly puns. Early examples of Poeʼs punning puzzles can be found in the form of conundrums that Poe published in the Alexander Weekly Messenger between 1839-40. In the first essay of the 8 Shosuke KINUGAWA installment, “Enigmatical and Conundrum-ical” (1839), Poe challenges his readers to send him ciphers that he cannot solve while also introducing conundrums of his own making along the lines of this: “Poor Maryʼs dead! why is she a many-sided figure? Because sheʼs a Polly gone.─polygon” (14). Punning becomes more explicitly linked to encipherment in his short story, “The Gold-Bug” (1843). As Richard Hull shows, the design of “The Gold-Bug,” a story delineating the protagonist William Legrandʼs hunt for Captain Kiddʼs treasure, rests on the “overarching pun of its title,” by which he means the creation of a story “out of literalizing the titleʼs figure for obsession with wealth (getting bit by the gold bug), in having a gold-colored bug bite Legrand” (1). Within this punning frame Poe includes other pun ciphers, the most obvious being the “kind of pun- ning” (“The Gold-Bug” 341) between the name Captain “Kidd” and the image of a goat “kid” on a piece of parchment which turns out to be the clue to the hiding place of Kiddʼs treasure. Readers of this tale, then, are asked to engage in a lin- guistic treasure hunt through the decoding of hidden puns, a hunt paralleling Legrandʼs hunt for Kiddʼs treasure via his decryption of pun ciphers. This paralleling is a feature of Poeʼs detective stories as well, a feature that is there from the first of Poeʼs Dupin tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). According to Irwin, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” uses punning as a tool for the “battle of wits between the writer and the reader” (195). In the process of revealing the identity of the murderer, an Orangutan, Dupin first explains to the narrator the train of thought by which he became convinced that the suspect had escaped from the window, pausing at the nail in the window as the place where he initially lost track of his deductive thread: “I had traced the secret to its ultimate result, - and that result was the nail . here, at this point, terminated the clew” (257). As Irwin notes, Poe here is “testing the readerʼs linguistic skill and atten- tion” (196) by making the nail the terminus of the clew.
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