Once he has decoded this message, Legrand heads out with Jupiter — and their neighbour, who narrates the tale —to unearth the treasure, whose exact location he determines by ordering Jupiter to drop the bug through the left eye socket of a skull nailed to the end of a tree branch.
He promptly gives a systematic explanation, several pages long, of how he discovered and decoded the secret message. First, Legrand says, he determined the language of the message English , before proceeding to ascertain the most and least frequently used characters. In doing this, Poe was not trying merely to wow people with his genius for solving ciphers; he was also trying to make a case for the primacy of logic. Poe left his newspaper readers, in December , with two final cryptographs, which he credited to one Mr W.
As far as anyone can tell, no one was able to solve these cryptograms until the s, when American literature professor Terence Whalen and Canadian software engineer Gil Broza finally cracked their codes. Yet one question remains unanswered even today: Who was W. Poe himself? Or the rare cryptographer who could out-cryptograph Poe? Arguments on either side abound, as seems appropriate. However logical Poe may have preferred to be, he was no stranger to mystery. Explore our selection of fine art prints, all custom made to the highest standards, framed or unframed, and shipped to your door.
Pay by Credit Card. Pay with PayPal. Click for Delivery Estimates. Search The Public Domain Review. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Eventually, Poe was — as he wrote the poet John Tomlin — obliged to swear off ciphers:.
Like the cryptogram within the cryptogram in the tale, the text of The Gold-Bug, contains a series of readings embedded within readings. In fact, this is something which is hinted at from the very beginning of the text. This assumption creates the premise on which and from which the narrator develops his reading of Legrand and of the events which follow.
In other words, it is not because of the events or the facts the strangeness of the bug, the inconsistency between the bug and the drawing , that the narrator believes Legrand is mad. This belief, as shown earlier, already manifests itself as a pre-existing premise which the unfolding events of the story will only serve to reinforce and strengthen. It may be observed, throughout the text of The Gold-Bug, that almost everything Legrand does is analyzed by the narrator in light of this initial suspicion of madness.
In other words, coming with an assumption of madness, everything that Legrand does translates back as madness. Jupiter then hands him a note from Legrand. Complying with the request expressed in the note, the narrator leaves with Jupiter in order to meet Legrand. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy Ibidem: Interestingly enough, we learn that the the narrator is also a physician Ibidem: Keeping this in mind, it may be observed how his reading starts from a pre-established premise, or a diagnosis, which is subsequently projected onto everything that Legrand does.
The madness of the text is thus transferred onto the madness of the interpretation. As Shoshana Felman points out: whenever it explains literature, particularly when it locates madness in literature, psychoanalysis is in danger of revealing nothing more than its own madness: the madness of its interpreter Felman Both the narrator and the psychoanalytic critic follow but one direction: that of the supposition, of the premise of madness.
I was sure you were mad. And why did you insist upon letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull? Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification Poe Kronick Joseph G.
Renza Louis A. Literature and Psychoanalysis: Whose Madness is it anyway? By Lorelei Caraman.
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