American and British Studies Annual (Dec 2015)
Poe’s Strategies of Seduction: Transference, Incongruity and the Undecidability of Meaning
Abstract
What makes readers, particularly critics, revisit Poe? One of the objections that can be brought against most psychoanalytic interpretations of his life or work is its omission of “the why.” Why write about Poe? What compels us to return to an author already surrounded by, to use Susan Sontag’s words, “thick encrustations” of criticism and theory? There seems to be an undefined “something,” a certain element “X” in Poe that irresistibly attracts (our) critical commentary. Designating this elusive quality “X” as textual “seduction,” the following article attempts, in a sense, to define the undefinable: that is, to identify and describe some of the Poe-esque characteristics that continue to keep readers and critics glued to his work. Drawing principally from Jacques Lacan’s model of transference, Roland Barthes’ “erotics of reading” and Pierre Bayard’s theory of “applied literature,” this paper posits that some of Poe’s strategies of literary seduction include, on the one hand, anticipated textual effects that operate similarly to transference in their double fulfillment of the analyst’s role of S.s.S and S.s.R and, on the other, carefully constructed thematic incongruities that result in an ultimate “undecidability” of meaning.
