Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

DENNIS A. FOSTER Re-Poe Man A Problem of Pleasure Ordinary fucking people. I hate them.—Repo Man The plots of poe's stories are too shallow to bury the bodies he needs to cover up. The bodies return, a tell-tale part always there to betray the alibis of his narrators. Roderick Usher's friend happily buries the blushing Madeline; Dupin's sidekick believes the police would really overlook the filthy letter; Legrand's friend in "The GoldBug " listens wide-eyed to a story ofan ancient cryptographic note found fluttering on the beach. The narrators insist on their own reason and sanity, but they readily put common sense aside. Luckily, we are not such fools. We see the lapses, the riddles, and diddles, and we work at them until we find some way to cover over the limbs that still stick out—or we dig them up. We like our fictions to end with all accounts squared, in marriage or death, though Poe leans toward the latter. Many of his tales end in imminent death—or even in posthumous narration as in "Ms. Found in a Bottle" and The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym—apparently demonstrating the claim made by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that all life tends toward a return to an earlier, inanimate state. Our lifelong struggles for knowledge, power, satisfaction, and certainty lead inevitably to the dust from which we arose. Or as John Irwin says of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "we see the quest for fixed certainty . . . for what it is—a death wish" (235). But whether we see this quest as the meaning of a story, or the impossibility ofmeaning, there is someArizorui Quarterly Volume 46 Number 4, Winter 1990 Copyright © 1 990 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 16 1 o Dennis A. Foster thing too closed in this formulation. Freud at least knew he was in trouble throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Why is the death drive so slow? Why is the arousal (called "unpleasure") produced by repetition sought so much more fiercely than satisfaction, the extinction of "unpleasure"? The pattern in Poe's stories seems to suggest, contrary to Irwin's reading, that desire is divorced from truth and "unpleasure" is its own reward: characters pursue paths with a perverse insistence that has little apparent motive. Pursuit and perversity: following and turning away, digging up what was buried. For Poe, the move toward death leaves nothing squared. In the film "Repo Man," the old pro—old con, rather—sits with his protege watching people arguing in a parking lot and comments, "Ordinary fucking people. I hate them." He hates them because they are always trying to get out offense situations—not your repo man. He has an interest in tense situations that we would have to call perverse. Jean Clavreul, noting that "on the whole, erotic literature has been made up of writings by perverts," comments on the banality of ordinary people fucking: "from the point of view of eroticism, the 'normal individual' is presented, next to the pervert, as an inept yokel unable to raise his love above a routine" (216). The pleasure of perverts begins where ordinary people's imaginations stop dead. It is as if some pleasure we traded in long ago for the practical adult model were suddenty repossessed and we were offered one more spin, one more peek into childhood's crypt. In Jacques Derrida's exploration of the crypt, he says some things that could help explain this unsettled nature of buried pleasures. "The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead" (xxi). The crypt, that is, is not a place to be finally rid of something, but to preserve it where it will remain safe, neither dangerous nor endangered. In the particular case of Freud's "Wolf Man" that inspires Derrida's analysis, the thing encrypted is a word that preserves a dangerous pleasure that rests in the Wolf Man's presymbolic past: "It is the very tombstone of the illicit, and marks the spot of an extreme pleasure [jouissance], a pleasure entirely real though walled...