Dreams for Dead Bodies by Michelle Robinson

Author:Michelle Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Fretful Self-Refection

What is of special interest to us in Poe’s analysis is the notion that the difference between mind and machine, between a human and nonhuman organization, is that a human organization possesses, or is capable of producing, “a marked and radical difference” within itself, a difference that creates the possibility of “parts” in the self, the possibility of physically representing the self’s relatedness to itself.

—John Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution

When Poe’s treasure hunters depart the mainland to return to Sullivan Island with sack loads of gold, they leave two gaping holes, like enormous eyes, in the landscape. Shortly afterward, Legrand confesses that a proliferation of “money-seekers” and a dearth of “money-finders” informed him of the existence of Kidd’s treasure. He reasons, “It seemed to me that some accident—say the loss of a memorandum indicating its locality—had deprived him of the means of recovering it, and that this accident had become known to his followers, who otherwise might never have heard that treasure Page 129 →had been concealed at all” (221). It is paradoxically this absence of evidence that confirms the presence of buried treasure. Rumors are launched, put in circulation; they are “given first birth,” Legrand explains, “and then universal currency” (221). But this chain of association turns to imaginative identification in the final moments of the tale when Legrand reflects upon Kidd’s homicidal predilections and its human cost.

By contrast, Jupiter’s last words in “The Gold Bug” are spoken, it seems, to himself:

And dis all cum ob de goole-bug! de putty goole-bug! de poor little goole-bug, what I boosed in dat sabage kind ob style! Aint you shamed ob yourself, nigger?—answer me dat! (214)

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