Invisible space in the story of ‘The Purloined Letter’. Focused on the relationship between events, characters and the signifier
When we read a book, we can easily find out that the story doesn’t stay on one-dimensional line. Sometimes context that located at the end of the book could be a ground of context in the front, and sometimes one’s identity revealed in the end of the book. They are not only just a context located behind, but also they are originally existed like that from the beginning, but reader just didn’t realize the meaning behind it. So they could be located at the beginning of the book on the spatial structure.
I intended to eliminate meaning of the text -emotional figural context- and remain just three important elements -events, characters, and signifier- as symbols on the spatial structure. What I am going to show you ultimately in this project is that, the storyline of the book doesn’t exist on the flat structure. It has complicated invisible three-dimensional structure. I am going to visualize every event and relationship between each character spatially.
The story that I selected is [The Purloined Letter] by Edgar Allan Poe. I consulted ‘Jacques Lacan’s Seminar’ which reinterpreted [The Purloined Letter] to proceed this project.
Story of ‘The Purloined Letter’ is very simple. There are three important things, which are five characters, the plan and the letter. There are the king, queen, minister, police and Dupin for five characters.
The letter which doesn’t show It’s content until the end of the book, it was belonged to the queen at the beginning and the queen felt threat by opening it to public so she hided it with her own plan. However, minister found out the plan and stole the letter from queen and hide it just as queen’s plan, police failed to find it because he didn’t know the plan, and finally Dupin found the letter and fooled minister by using same plan and the letter went to queen again.
I paid attention on character’s inversion in every scene; they shift their position continuously with the letter as the center. Each of five position has their role every time, first position is for the one who doesn’t know anything about the event or plan, second position is for character who knows the event but not the plan therefore he fooled again, third is for the one who knows about the plan so he gains the letter, forth and fifth positions are for the people who don’t intervene in the event. Every character seats on these five positions every scene differently because the letter goes to here and there. I thought I could figure out three-dimensional space in their complicated but uniformed figures of relationships so I divided this story into 8 scenes and tried to symbolize their characters and relationships to visualize it.