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 concealment 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: clandestine 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 encryption 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”?

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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 punning” (“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 linguistic 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. Prior to this passage, Dupin repeatedly mentions the nail in the window. Since Dupin is French, and his fluency in the French language implied by his residency in Paris, we can assume that the conversation between Dupin and the narrator originally took place in French, and thus that the English text is Poeʼs “translation” of their conversation (Irwin 196). When we consider the fact that the French word for “nail” is “clou,” and that the English word “clew” means both clue and a “ball of thread,” it becomes evident that the repetition of the word “nail” is “Poeʼs way of giving the reader a linguistic clue (hint) that the clew (thread) will ultimately terminate at a Taking Yet Mistaking 9 clou (nail)” (Irwin 196). The fact that punning is to be seen as a key element of Dupinʼs reasoning is explicitly hinted at when Dupin deciphers the content of the narratorʼs thought through the half-homophonic pun on the words “stereotomy” and “atomies.” Ob- serving the narrator mumble “stereotomy” while staring at the stone pavement upon which he fell, Dupin concludes: “I knew that you could not say to yourself ʻstereotomyʼ without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus” (245-46). Stereotomy is the art of cutting stones and other solids, while Epicurusʼs theory of atomies refers to his idea that all things, both physical and metaphysical, can ultimately be divided into particles called atoms. This seemingly far-fetched punning association turns out to have correctly guessed the narratorʼs chain of thoughts, beginning with his fall on the stone pavement and ending with musings on an actor named Chantilly. What Dupinʼs successful analysis of the narratorʼs mind through half-homophonic punning suggests is that half-homophonic and other far-fetched puns should be taken into account as valid clues. And so if the narrator cannot say to himself stereotomy without being brought to think of atomies, then the theory of atomies by Epicurus surely cannot be raised without bringing the reader to think of Georges Cuvier, a zoologist and authority of comparative anatomy who wrote Lessons in Comparative Anatomy (1800-1805), and to whose “anatomical . . . account” (261) Dupin later turns to in order to show that the hand print of the murderer is that of an Orangutan: “ʻRead now,ʼ replied Dupin, ʻthis passage from Cuvier.ʼ / It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fuvulous Ourang-Outang” (260-61).4 Poeʼs game of wits is at play here again: if stereotomy (dividing solids) reminds of Epicurusʼs theory of atomies (dividing into particles), then Epicurusʼs atomies should hint at Cuvierʼs comparative anatomies (dividing animals into species) which attempt, among other things, to divide men from apes. And if deciphering the punning chain of thought (stereotomy to atomies) is Dupinʼs key to solving the mystery of the narratorʼs mind, then the punning chain leading from atomies to comparative anatomies should be a hint for the reader in solving the murder mystery plot as a whole, for the mystery plot is itself also a “mystery” of the narratorʼs mind in the sense that the plot consists en- tirely of the narratorʼs reflection.5 And as the story goes on to show, it is precisely because Dupin correctly distinguishes between an ape and a man (as opposed to the police and the newspapers who assume that the criminal has to be a human) 10 Shosuke KINUGAWA that he is able to decipher the identity of the murderer as an Orangutan. “The Purloined Letter” continues the use of clandestine punning as a formal device for fair play while also developing it into the taleʼs thematic crux. As explained, the principal hint that the object called the purloined letter and the text called “The Purloined Letter” are in correspondence is the pun on the words “letter” and “card” conveyed through the map puzzle analogy. It is worthwhile to note, however, that there is another pun equally significant for understanding this form/content equation: the pun on the words “hand” and “matter.” Poe reminds his readers twice, once when the mystery of the purloined letter is first introduced and again at the end when it is resolved, to remember that what they have in their hands (the text called “The Purloined Letter”) should be equated with what D── has in his hands (the letter he purloined). At the end of the tale when Dupin uses the map puzzle analogy to equate the act of hiding a letter (epistle) in the open with hiding letters (alphabet) on the surface of a text, Dupin goes on to state that the purloined letter “must always have been at hand” (379) with D──. At the same time, he also states that the letter in the hands of D── has been altered so that it is “turned, as a glove, inside out” (380), a symbolic representation of the letter being extremely close at hand, that is, worn like a glove. With this layered reference to the letter being at hand, Poe takes us back to the beginning of the story where the Prefect G── of the Paris police first visits Dupin to seek advice. G── laments that they are a “good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether” (368) to which Dupin asks: “And what, after all, is the matter at hand?” (369). The “matter” (puzzle) that is “at hand” (under his responsibility), G── answers, is that the “matter” (object), the letter, is literally in the “hands” of D──. And by highlighting the materiality of the letter (epistle) through the play on the words “hand” and “matter,” Poe reminds the readers, at the beginning and at the end, to ask themselves: what, after all, is the matter in your hands? “The Purloined Letter,” the story, a material surface made of letters. So then there must be something hidden across this surface. The story must also be a puzzle consisting of hidden letters, that is, letters made invisible by virtue of excessive obvious- ness, of their being too much on the surface. The link between the letter (epistle) and letters (alphabet) is further hinted at through another analogy that Dupin introduces in the process of revealing how he recovered the letter. Upon Dupinʼs advice, G── searches D──ʼs house again. G──, however, returns to say that he found nothing. Hearing this, Dupin offers Taking Yet Mistaking 11 to give him more advice using an analogy consisting of a punning dialogue between a “ʻcertain rich miserʼ” and a physician by the name of Abernathy: “ʻWe will suppose,ʼ said the miser, ʻthat his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?ʼ / ʻTake!ʼ said Abernathy, ʻwhy, take advice to be sureʼ” (373). Applying the analogy to his present conversation with Dupin, G── states that he is “perfectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it” (373) at which point Dupin has him sign a check for fifty thousand francs and gives him the letter. G──, shocked and ecstatic, leaves the premise without hearing Dupinʼs explanation of how the letter was recovered. Since G── here obtains the letter he is looking for, it seems, on the surface, that G── has correctly understood the point of Dupinʼs analogy. This, however, is not the case, for what the puns within the analogy suggest is that G──ʼs way of taking the letter is mistaken. The point to take note here is the discrepancy between what G── actually does (take the letter) and what the analogy prescribes (take advice). The analogy contains both explicit and hidden puns, the former leading to the latter. The explicit pun is on the word “take”: the miser cuts to the chase and asks what medicine to “take” (ingest), to which Abernathy says, no, “take” (receive) advice first. The hidden puns are on the words “mistake” and “recovery.” Abernathy is saying to the miser that medical advice must be taken before medicine, that he is “mistaking” the order of importance. The doctorʼs point is that it is more important to understand why the illness occurred than to merely fix the symptom with medication because if the patient knows how the illness occurred then he may be able to prevent it. In other words, the analogy is Dupinʼs way of hinting to G──, and Poeʼs way of hinting to the reader, that what is truly valuable for “recovery” (getting well/taking back) is not the physical solution (medicine/letter), but the metaphysical explanation (advice) that explains the logical pathway to reaching the physical solution. To put it differently, the analogy suggests that what is important is not the letter itself but Dupinʼs story about the letterʼs recovery. To take only the former without the latter, Dupin warns, is to mistake. That G── has made a mistake by taking only the letter and not Dupinʼs advice/explanation about its recovery, is further emphasized by the fact that Dupin takes the letter out from inside the locked drawers of his “escritoire” (374), that is, his writing desk. Immediately after giving G── the letter that he took out of the desk, Dupin goes on to explain that G ── and the police had failed to find the 12 Shosuke KINUGAWA letter precisely because they had assumed that the letter would be hidden in a place like a locked drawer, in “some out-of-the-way hole or corner” (376) or “nooks for concealment” (378). Places, in other words, which can hide things by virtue of physical depth. The letter, however, is found on the surface, out in the open. And so by taking the letter out of the drawer and giving it to G──, Dupin is effec- tively saying that G── is making another mistake, that heʼs taking the letter in the wrong way. In doing so, Dupin is pointing out why it is a mistake to take just the letter and not Dupinʼs explanation: without understanding how the letter was hidden, G── will repeat the same mistake over and over again. The point of the analogy, then, is to say that the surest way to take the letter, to recover it for good, is to take it along with the explanation of how the letter was hidden so that G── wonʼt be duped by the same trick, just like how the surest way to get well, to recover health for good, is to take the advice of the doctor along with the medicine so that recurrences of the illness, the theft of health, can be better prevented. This analogy, then, is another way of saying to the reader that the object called the purloined letter (epistle) and the letters (alphabet) constituting the story called “The Purloined Letter” must be “taken” together. For the explanation of how the letter (epistle) was hidden and recovered is inseparable from the letters (alphabet) constituting the story itself. The pun is a pertinent medium and symbol of this linkage of the purloined letter (epistle) with the letters (alphabet) of “The Pur- loined Letter” because the decipherment of puns itself requires the taking of two meanings at once: it is when readers “take” the double meaning of punning words that they are then able to “take” both aspects of the short story, that is, the story about a hidden letter (epistle) and the letters (alphabet) hidden within the text of the story. By using puns to present the difference between the advice (how to recover from illness/how to recover the letter) and the solution (medicine/letter), and then pointing out that the miser/G──ʼs taking of only the medicine/letter is a mistaken way of taking, Poe signals to the reader that the correct way to fully grasp the “The Purloined Letter” is to decipher the double meaning of punning words and to follow the pairing that the puns reveal, that is, to understand that the letter (epistle) and the letters (alphabet) written about the letter, must be taken as a pair. If the theft of the letter (epistle) by D── is to be seen as the theft of the letters (alphabet) constituting “The Purloined Letter,” then the method by which Dupin recovers the letter should be seen as the hint for solving how to recover the Taking Yet Mistaking 13 stolen letters of the text itself. In other words, the way in which Dupin deciphers the location of the purloined letter should be showing how the reader can decipher “The Purloined Letter.” The map puzzle analogy becomes important here once again because in the analogy Dupin not only shows that clandestine punning is the method by which alphabetical letters are hidden but also points the reader to the specific location where the most important letters in the tale are hidden. To reiterate, the analogy draws an equation between the letters (alphabet) of the name written across the surface of a map, the letters (alphabet) of street shop names, and the letter (epistle) inscribed with the letters (alphabet) of D ──ʼs monogram and the address of his room. All of the “letters” escape detection by being displayed on the surface of the visual field of observers who assume that hiding necessitates physical depth. The pattern that runs through the equation of map─street signs─epistle is that they all have names of places written on its surface, and that the names become progressively specific, moving from the name of a place that covers an entire map to names of shops on streets, and finally to a name and address of a single home written on a single letter. Through this nesting box-like progression from macro/abstract to micro/specific spaces, combined with the idea that the name written across the surface of the map in large characters is more on the surface of the surface, so to speak, than names written in smaller characters, Poe emphasizes the idea that a map, while physically a flat surface, is nevertheless “motley and perplexed,” that is, a surface with varying degrees of depths. This illustration of how a two dimensional surface (map) can still have depths is meant to hint that the flat letters constituting the names of places on the map also contain depths, not physical depth but depth in the sense of semantic plurality made possible by the hermeneutic oversight of its readers. These depths, as weʼve seen, are created in the form of clandestine puns, that is, words that seem to have only one meaning but hide more. And by having Dupin point to the letters of the name on the map as the answer to a puzzle game of hiding names, and then equating this name with the letter (epistle) upon which D── inscribes the letters (alphabet) of his own name, Poe guides the reader to D──ʼs name as where the final answer to the puzzle game of “The Purloined Letter” lies, that within the surface of the “D── cipher” (380) lie hidden depths. When Poe locates the letter inside D──ʼs room, he describes the letter thusly: “It had a large black seal, bearing the D── cipher very conspicuously” (380). He then goes on to take the letter back in this manner: “I stepped to the card-rack, 14 Shosuke KINUGAWA took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings─imitating the D── cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread” (381). There are six interrelated puns here. First is the triple pun on the phrase “D ── cipher.” First and foremost it is a pun on the word “decipher,” suggesting “very conspicuously” that the reader must decipher something.6 The imperative to decipher the “D── cipher” then suggests that the “cipher” (monogram) of “D──” is also a “cipher” in the sense of a cryptogram. So then “D── cipher” reads: decipher the “D──” cipher (monogram) as a cipher (cryptogram).7 The other two puns are related to the material of which Dupinʼs replica of the D── cipher is made: bread. As Servanne Woodward notes, the bread is a pun on Dupinʼs last name (42). In French, “bread” is “pain,” and “of” is “de.” So a seal formed of bread is a seal formed “de pain” (pronounced “du pan”), and thus the seal “of Dupin.” In other words, the seal of D── is also Dupinʼs seal in that it is made of material that signifies “Dupin.” This leads to the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this essay: what are the letters of the name purloined from the eyes of the reader? What has been purloined are the letters of Minister D──ʼs full name: Dupin. D── and Dupin share the last name. They are brothers. And with this revelation we see the last pun in play: Dupinʼs “du,” equated with “de” (of), also corresponds to “deux,” the French word for “two,” pointing to the fact that Dupin is actually “deux.” That Minister D── and Dupin are brothers is obliquely hinted at in several other ways. In the process of analyzing Dupin and D──ʼs duality, Liahna Klenmen Babner speculates on the fraternal nature of their relationship based on evidence such as the shared first letter of their names, close intimacy, and the quote from Crébillonʼs Atrée.8 For example, when the narrator claims that D── is only a mathematician and his brother the poet, Dupinʼs response reveals his intimate knowledge of D──: “You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both” (376). Dupinʼs subsequent reference to the “evil turn” (382) that D── had once made on Dupin also speaks of their past involvement. But the clue that most directly refers to their brotherhood comes at the very end of the story when Dupin reveals the content of the letter that he left in lieu of the queenʼs: “──Un dessein si funeste, Sʼil nʼest digne dʼAtree, est digne de Thyeste” (382). The quote from Atrée, in French, translates as, “So malevolent a plan, if unworthy of Artreus, it yet worthy of Thyestes” (382). Artreus and Thyestes are twin brothers in Greek Taking Yet Mistaking 15 mythology. Thyestes sleeps with Artreusʼs wife, and Artreus gets revenge by killing Thyestesʼs children and serving them in a stew to Thyestes which he unknowingly eats. And so the quote, which is itself a cipher for those unversed in French, not only makes Dupinʼs intent of revenge clear, but also implies that he is D ──ʼs brother. The deciphering of the clandestine puns leading to the decryption of the “D── cipher” as “Dupin” and of D──ʼs identity as Dupinʼs brother, is therefore verified by the final quote.9 The quote, in fact, further specifies the relationship between the brothers: they are twins, two identical men who not only resemble each other in terms of thought but also in terms of form, a form/ content identity that mirrors that of the story itself as well as its medium of encryption, puns. If the equation between the purloined “letter” (epistle) and purloined “letters” (alphabet) is central to the taleʼs overall narrative design, then the “recovery” of the purloined letters in D──ʼs name at the moment the letter (epistle) is physically recovered should be seen as the climactic end to the punning “game of puzzles” that Poe engages the reader in. So the letters purloined from the readers of “The Purloined Letter” are the letters of D──ʼs name, leading to the fact that D ── and Dupin are twin brothers. Dupin, the punning name that is repeated across the entire story, the name that “stretch[es] . . . from one end of the chart to the other,” is the name that was hidden on the surface of the text, there, all along, in plain sight. But looking back across the tale with this conclusion in mind, it becomes clear that the importance of punning in this tale, that Dupinʼs name is a pun, and that we are to keep our eyes on his name, is already made obvious from the first sentence of the tale, the most obvious place in the story, the place where everyone looks. The opening sentence is where Dupinʼs full name is first presented, and already the key is there: “C. Auguste Dupin” (368). “See” Auguste Dupin, see Dupin. Watch it. And do what? “Do pun.”

Notes

1 See for example Haycraft 4, Symmons 35, Rachman 17. 2 For perhaps the most well-known thread of inquiry on this critical perspective, see Jacques Lacanʼs “Seminar on ʻThe Purloined Letterʼ” (1957), Jacques Derridaʼs critique of Lacanʼs essay in “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975) and Barbara Johnsonʼs response to both in “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” (1978). 16 Shosuke KINUGAWA

3 For a reading of “The Purloined Letter” in relation to encryption, see also Joseph Riddel who reads Poeʼs works as encrypted repetitions of past texts, that is, works which feature “crypts” (cryptograms) that disclose, when deciphered, the textʼs self-awareness as a “crypt” (tomb) of other texts. In “The Purloined Letter,” the cryptogram is Dupinʼs handwritten quotation from Crebillon inscribed on the replica of the letter that Dupin leaves behind in lieu of the original. The quote is ostensibly intended as a sign of Dupinʼs authorship of the copied letter. Riddel, however, claims that for those who are able to decipher the intertextual implications of the quote, the quote reveals itself to be a metaphor of the idea that all writing, including “The Purloined Letter,” is an act of plagiarism (137-40). Though “The Purloined Letter” is touched only briefly, Louis A. Renzaʼs discussion of encryption in Poeʼs works must also be noted. Focusing on the disguised anagrammatical signatures that Poe leaves in his texts, Renza argues that the presence of such signatures “indicates a secretly withheld autobiographical subtext” and therefore that Poeʼs tales should be read as “autobiographical cryptograms” (63). Neither Riddel nor Renza, however, discusses the significance of punning encryption in “The Purloined Letter.” For an alternative analysis of puns in Poeʼs detective stories, see also Lawrence Howe. 4 As Robert W. Mitchell notes, Poe translated portions of Cuvierʼs The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization (1831) while editing The Conchologistʼs First Book (1839) (32). 5 Considering the fact that Epicurius is a Greek philosopher, Poe may also have had in mind the fact that the prefix “ana” heading the word “anatomy” derives from the Greek αʼν αʹ, meaning “back, again, anew” (“ana-, prefix”), perhaps a hint that we are to see “atomy” repeated (back, again) inside the word “anatomy.” 6 Samuel Kimball points to this pun in the title of his article, “D-Ciphering Dupinʼs Fac-simile Signature.” 7 For an interpretation of the letter D in relation to the Greek letter delta and as a “nodal point to link the subject of algebraic analysis . . . to that of Platonic/Pythagorean mathematics” (391), see Irwin (389-410). 8 Babner 28-30. 9 For an extended analysis of the Dupin/D ── duality, see also Jean Claude Milner 9-19. For an interpretation of the Dupin/D ── fraternity as the representation of Poeʼs ambivalent attitude towards snobbism, see Kiyohiko Murayama (122-43). For an analysis of the duality in relation to punning, see Hal Blythe and Christopher Sweeney, who briefly suggests that “Dupin” is a play on the southern pronunciation of “duping,” Taking Yet Mistaking 17 and that this, among others, is a clue towards the fact that Minister D── is actually Dupin in disguise, and that Poe is “duping” his readers (312-13).

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