Mapping Michel Serres by Abbas Niran;

Author:Abbas, Niran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

THE PREFECT AS PERFECT SQUARE

The prefect in Poe's story is portrayed as a square, the voice of official reason and the embodiment of a Cartesian positivism. The prefect conceives of space as empty, three-dimensional, and isotropic, and objects in that space as rigid figures. Mathematically speaking, the prefect lives in a world of Euclidean geometry governed by congruence. Here, the metric properties of “geometric structures are considered independent of their position; theorems about the square or the circle do not depend on where these figures lie in the plane or in space. If we restrict ourselves to plane geometry, then propositions are independent of translations and rotations in the plane; the square always remains the same square, the circle the same circle.”13 Translated into Poe's tale, this means simply that the prefect looks for a letter that remains the same object, independent of its position. He searches for a space that could contain the object, by dividing up the minister's furniture and apartment into a series of compartments. Poe conveys the conventional nature of the prefect's scientific mind-set through several punning allusions: when the prefect looks through the minister's papers, he searches in “volumes” that are treated not as a space of writing (where a “purloined letter” would inhere) but as objects with “thickness” that can be “probed, longitudinally” (336). Dupin ridicules the prefect for reflecting the ingenuity of “the mass,” a pun linking the mechanics of mass and volume with a common intellectual ability. The prefect has no “variation of principle”; his fault is the “exaggeration of the application of the one principle” of a search in which “the reward is of magnitude” (341). In short, the prefect places the letter in a coordinate geometry where it has a certain magnitude; he holds to the generalizability of his analytic methods, unable to conceive of space and objects in terms of location and transformations.

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