Optiques by Goulet Andrea;

Author:Goulet, Andrea;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Le Presbyte; or, Bad Guys Can’t See Straight

Some of the pleasure in reading Le Mystère de la chambre jaune comes from the narrator’s ignorant position vis-à-vis his friend Rouletabille. Like Holmes’s Watson, Sainclair observes with stunned incomprehension the results of Rouletabille’s ingenious methods, including his dramatic use of a key “Open Sesame” phrase to gain intimate entry into the Stangerson estate. Having previously overheard Miss Stangerson read to her fiancé the phrase, “The presbytery had lost none of its charm, nor had the garden lost any of its beauty,” Rouletabille repeats it word for word to the stunned Darzac, who imagines that the young detective knows something about the phrase’s threatening origin (39). But of course the cleverness of the investigative gimmick resides in Rouletabille’s actual ignorance of the phrase’s content and context: he knows nothing either of the phrase’s meaning nor of the origin of the letter from which it was taken; he only knows that its use will produce desired effects. As such, the “presbytère” sentence functions as placeholder, or “pure signifier,” in the sense that Lacan uses to describe the purloined letter in Poe. One might even see the distance between the phrase and its letter of origin as a further “dematerialization” of the signifier. But as with the charred remnant of the letter—for Miss Stangerson, it turns out, has succeeded only in partially burning evidence of her earlier liaison with the killer (53)—a material trace remains to connect the “presbytère” phrase with the wider network of proof that identifies Larsan as the guilty party: its homophonous echo with the “binocle de presbyte [presbyopic eyeglasses]” that Rouletabille discovers as material evidence of the killer’s presence and identity.

Although the “presbytery” of Larsan’s letter and the “presbyopia” exposed by his spectacles share no etymological link,16 they function similarly, through incremental revelation, to identify the guilt of Rouleabille’s investigative rival. The “presbytery had lost none of its charm” phrase, as Rouletabille eventually explains to Sainclair, refers to Larsan’s secret marriage to Miss Stangerson years earlier in America; almost touchingly, the criminal yearns for a return to ancient affection through a return to the site of that affection. While Rouletabille had long inferred the killer’s passionate claim to Mathilde, he remains unable to prove Larsan’s guilt until he finds an identifying physical marker: the binocle (pair of eyeglasses) that exposes the criminal’s visual defect. Upon finding the incriminating object, Rouletabille “literally threw himself on the eyeglasses, his fingers stroking the convexity of the lenses” (139), for it is that convexity that identifies the anomaly of vision that he had already attributed to the criminal: farsightedness. Having witnessed the killer hunched over a writing table, Rouletabille had deduced that the man had trouble seeing close up. Later, when trying to imagine what “tangible mark of his having been there” might compel the killer to return to the scene of his crime, Rouletabille remembers a candle on the floor and the hunched-over posture as key to connecting Larsan, whom he has by now suspected for a while, with the man in Miss Stangerson’s room (255).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.