Henri Justin
“The Gold-Bug” Is True to Its Title
The title of a tale is the only part of it for which the writer must take unmediated responsibility. Poe is not Legrand, is not Jupiter, is not even the unnamed narrator; the whole textual body is a matter of subtle mediations—but not the title. And yet, here is a title that cannot be taken at face value. Living bugs are not made of gold, and the one in the tale is only accidentally ancillary to the plot proper. The title could be a hoax,[1] but my contention is that it is not. I intend to show that it points to the dual structure of the tale. Indeed, as a rare linguistic “bivalve”[2] hinged on its hyphen, it is an emblem of Poe’s art itself.
On a first reading, the discovery of the beetle starts the whole story, but when Legrand, having lent it, wants to draw it for the benefit of his friend the narrator, he does so on a scrap of something found in his pocket—and the narrator sees a death’s head. The differences and the strange similarities between the two drawings generate some misunderstanding. In Legrand’s mind, there soon occurs a transfer of interest from the Scarabaeus to what he finally understands as a piece of parchment marked with the well-known pirates’ emblem. At this point, very early on, the treasure hunt has started, and the beetle has nothing to do with it. But narrator and reader are kept in the dark.
A month later, Jupiter comes to town to buy a scythe and three spades, and to hand the narrator a letter from Legrand asking him to “come over” (813). We know Jupiter already, and the value he attaches to the bug—a bug of solid gold, in his view (809). Now, being alone with the narrator, he explains to him that his master has fallen into a gold craze, which he, Jupiter, can only account for in terms of the bug.[3] So the reader is kept suspended between two interpretive stances: Jupiter’s, which is very vocal but irrational; and Legrand’s, which is rational but kept secret. Indeed, Legrand, pretending to go along with his servant’s fantasy, dangles the beetle at the end of a piece of whip-cord, and off they go, an improbable trio, till the whole venture, somewhat surprisingly, proves a success. At this point, Legrand offers the narrator a detailed explanation. It develops as a skillfully concatenated sequence, from the beetle to the parchment, to the marks on it, to its message as a line of coded characters, to the common alphabet and the division into words, to the further division into consecutive semantic units, to the route to the treasure. What is brought to light is a series of contiguities, from one thing to the next, each new step making the previous one obsolete, and all ending with the treasure. But then the narrator poses two further questions. The first one concerns the role Legrand gave the beetle in the treasure hunt. Answer: he used it for “a little bit of sober mystification” (844). And because the reader is told this only now, he has been mystified too. At this point, the title appears clearly as a mere false clue, and Legrand’s triumph seems complete. He is the hero of the tale, and the text should conclude on his reinstatement in his family possessions, the restoration of his identity as a Louisiana aristocrat. Toni Morrison, in that case, would be right; Poe could be characterized by his “pretensions to the planter class”[4] and the reader would leave the hero bathing in “Southern comfort.”
But then comes the ultimate question about the presence of skeletons on top of the pirate’s chest. The obvious answer is given, and then, there emerges the absolutely new—an extra sentence, unasked for, and not clearly addressed. Legrand is now speaking to himself: “Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen—who shall tell?” (844). Read as Legrand’s personal musing, the question gives a frightening depth to his character. Legrand is suddenly far from the present time, blind to his splendid future, sunk back, in fact, into a past situation—Kidd’s, ostensibly, but his own too, surely, at some point. The reading rebounds on these last words; the reader feels he must retrace his steps. What, in fact, was said of Legrand when, the treasure chest having been opened, he could be tempted to do away with his “coadjutors”? One reads that he “appeared exhausted with excitement, and spoke very few words” (826). He appeared exhausted. In fact, we now understand, he was in the grip of a murderous trance. The narrator actually had to “arouse” him from it (826). And the words that were then suppressed come out at the very end of the tale, when they are innocuous, though not innocent. They come out in disguise, bringing along a lexical term that is utterly new in the text, and so, begs interpretation: Legrand imagines Kidd’s instrument for the murders to have been a “mattock.” Now, a mattock has a long handle with, at one end, a double tool: on one side a pick, and on the other an adze. Such a tool appears as a conflation of the large Spanish knife found alongside the two skeletons and probably used by Kidd to stab his victims, and the spade Legrand had at his disposal; the two words had even come into close contact in the sentence: “One or two strokes of a spade upturned the blade of a large Spanish knife” (825). Legrand’s unconscious is at work here. Deep down, he shares Kidd’s criminality. Like Dupin, he has a “Bi-Part” psyche,[5] half brilliant analytic intellect, half murderous drives. But this he cannot read.
Legrand cannot read duality. He can recognize coded equivalence, as when he understands the death’s head on the parchment as the emblem of the pirates, or the kid as the “punning or hieroglyphical” signature of Captain Kidd (833). Such identifying logos point in one direction. They suit Legrand’s intellectual tendency, which is overwhelmingly toward linear concatenation. In his account of his first interview with the narrator, he insists on his amazement at the “similarity” between the two drawings.[6] It is a “singularity” he can make nothing of (829). One sees how Poe is playing with the conflicting notions of equivalence and contiguity at the expense of his character. In such cases, Legrand concludes, “the mind struggles to establish a connexion—a sequence of cause and effect—and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis” (829). Legrand shakes it off, as he goes on explaining, by recalling the circumstances of his coming by this scrap of “paper.” Then, he concludes, “I had already established a kind of connexion [emphasizing the word]. I had put together two links of a great chain” (831)—and again, Dupin-like: “My steps were sure, and could afford but a single result” (831). Indeed, Legrand can afford but a single meaning; he cannot read symbolic values and see into the far depths of his brilliant intellect, where gold is equated with murder. Reading the decoded message, he narrows “the bishop’s hostel” down to “the devil’s seat,” with no sense of the latter as part of the former. The local imagination had given the devil a seat in the residence of the man of God, but Legrand does not take the symbolic hint. He is blind to that logic, which is Poe’s.
So the tables are now turned on Legrand, the reader sensing that Jupiter and his “goole-bug” could well be the key to deeper meaning. The whole thing started when Jupiter picked up the scrap of parchment to wrap the beetle in it, making the unrecognized parchment work as an indifferent envelope to the precious beetle, and unwittingly bringing beetle and death’s head into contact. After this moment of potential revelation, beetle and parchment go into different pockets! The second moment is when the two drawings appear to Legrand, back to back, but then again, only the clear switch from one to the other can start the treasure hunt that, after all, gives the tale its storyline, the more visible part of its plot. But now that we are on the alert for duplications, we see more of them. To mention a main one right now, we see that the chest, as it appears during the telling pause, is an inflated image of the bug: the two skeletons answer the suggestion of a human skull on the bug’s back; the mineralization of the chest corresponds to the metallic aspect of the bug; its heaviness recalls the abnormal weight that made Jupiter believe the bug was solid gold; lastly, the three rings of iron on each side give it six legs, insect-like. More exactly, Poe puts the six legs on, as it were, by adding that the rings could give “six persons” a firm hold of the chest (826). These six persons make no sense in terms of contiguity—in terms of the storyline—but they make a lot of sense in terms of equivalence. First, they can appear as the six pallbearers of a coffin. And then, just imagine them lifting up the chest and walking off—you see the bug on its six legs, exactly.
With this second reading, the interpretive authority has moved from Legrand to Jupiter because the latter is the one who thought it all came “of the bug” (814). Richard Hull, in his remarkable article on puns in “The Gold-Bug,” sums up a trend in the interpretation of the tale when he says: “We must reject the widespread view that Legrand’s way is the correct way to interpret. . . . We must read for meanings Legrand can’t afford.”[7] The key to these meanings is the bug, as Jupiter insists it is, in his way. The only thing is, one must not fall into the other extreme, now placing Jupiter on a level with Poe himself. The manumitted slave has the deep humanity of a man with the experience of suffering and death, but his language is often as one-sided as Legrand’s. Although there are striking exceptions,[8] most of the puns present in his lines are not his. When he says “goole” for “gold,” he does so in a stereotyped Black English that Poe bends to his own ends. Jupiter feels the duality of the bug—he is both fascinated and frightened by the strange insect—but only Poe conflates “gold” with the “ghoul,” the legendary being that feeds on corpses (812–13). Or again, when Jupiter, being asked whether he thinks his master has been made sick by the bug’s bite, answers “I don’t think nothing about it—I nose it,” he just means “I know it”.[9] Only Poe’s play on words turns this superstitious knowledge into an intuitive impression. For full effect, these words of Jupiter must not simply be decoded (as Legrand decoded the message) nor simply translated, “gold” simply replacing “goole” (even if with the gain of a touch of humor); the two must (and do) linger in the reader’s consciousness as “gold” and “ghoul,” echoing each other. They function very much as rhymes in a poem, creating a submerged effect, a meaning under the meaning.
As a character, Jupiter remains a humorous figure. Very human, emotional, prerational, open to superstition and myth (“I’ve heard about them gold-bugs before this” [813])—even open to magic, as when he feels sure the bug is of solid gold, or when he is terrorized by the insect itself, even once it is dead. Magic, confusing as it does the sign with the thing, is a failure of the sign-system; it pushes equivalence to the point of identity, and Jupiter is not immune. But by being alive to the dual quality of the insect, and so establishing it as a living and ambiguous presence in the tale, he unwittingly points to its deeper textual structure. It is in this function, forced on him by Poe, that he reverses the balance of interpretive power that appeared so much in favor of Legrand at first reading. It is his function as Jupiter, the law-giving god. One could say that, in the guise of an old uneducated servant, Olympian Jupiter keeps alive the axis of equivalence, the source of symbols.
A critical remark by Poe could well be applied to his handling of Jupiter’s character. In his review of the first installments of Barnaby Rudge (two years previous to the publication of “The Gold-Bug”), he expresses the opinion that the ravings of the idiot young man, Barnaby, together with the croaks of his raven, “are intended to convey indistinct glimmerings of the events to be evolved”[10] —or, more precisely, of the withheld solution to the bloody riddle. And again: “Every word spoken by him [Barnaby] will be found to have an undercurrent of meaning, by paying strict attention to which the enjoyment of the imaginative reader will be infinitely heightened.”[11] Typically, when Poe, now reviewing the completed Barnaby Rudge, found that Dickens’s intentions, as he had understood them, had not been strictly carried out, he added with smiling authority that they should have. But, he went on, the form used by Dickens, the novel, and the serial novel at that, works against such intentions. “In tales of ordinary sequence he [Dickens] may and will long reign triumphant,” but he has “no positive genius for adaptation.”[12] “Adaptation,” here, is the capacity to build a “plot,” in the sense of a formal structure. Poe enlarged on the word when, in 1845, he came to consider “the Divine system of adaptation.”[13] The beauty of it is “the complete mutuality of adaptation,” the “reciprocity between cause and effect,”[14] or as Poe would come to express it, the “really essential symmetry” of the two opposite principles of attraction and repulsion.[15] It was in order to approach such symmetry in prose that Poe developed his own practice of the “brief prose tale,” a form that he placed on “a table-land” between the poem and the novel.[16] By projecting telling equivalences onto the story line, he creates an object of special value, a value that, as he wrote to his closest correspondent, Frederick Thomas, in February 1849, he would not let go “for all the gold in California.”[17]
At this point, it is worth making clear that the present study, though prompted and encouraged by a close reading of Poe’s text, has been shaped, too, by a long-standing familiarity with “Linguistics and Poetics,” the famous essay by Roman Jakobson.[18] The reader will remember that in this paper the great linguist offers a definition of the poetic function, using as his foundation de Saussure’s diagram of the speech-act, with its virtual axis of selection (ruled by various degrees of equivalence) and its actual axis of combination (ruled by syntactical contiguity).[19] The poetic function, Jakobson argues, consists in the projection of the principle of equivalence from its own virtual axis on to the actually spoken or written line, or “on to the sequence.”[20] Jakobson takes his cue from Gerard Manley Hopkins, extending the argument from rhythmic to semantic units, and then comes, secondarily, to Edgar Allan Poe, quoting from “The Raven” and “The Philosophy of Composition.” He could also have found in Poe the assertion that “equivalence” is the unique “rationale of verse”[21] (just as “ordinary sequence” can do very well for the traditional novel).[22] Poe often contrasted poetry and prose as clear opposites, the better to establish his own aesthetic of the brief prose tale, a highly artificial construct interweaving equivalence with contiguity.
This explicit interplay between the two main orientations of language was so much part of Poe’s intention in “The Gold-Bug” that when he reread his story in his copy of Tales, sometime after 1845, he added an exchange between the narrator and Legrand that was designed, it seems to me, to heighten the reader’s awareness of what was at issue in the tale. He inserted it precisely at the end of Legrand’s explanation proper, just before the last two very pointed questions. “I presume,” then proposes the narrator:
I presume the fancy of the skull—of letting fall a bullet through the skull’s-eye—was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag. No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through this ominous insignium. (843)
“Perhaps so,” answers Legrand. As we know, Legrand can read a coded image, “an emblem” as he called it before (831). But he prefers a justification of the skull that does not belong to the axis of equivalence:
“Perhaps so; still I cannot help thinking that common-sense had quite as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency. To be visible from the Devil’s seat, it was necessary that the object, if small, should be white; and there is nothing like your human skull for retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all vicissitudes of weather.” (843)
This addition clearly pits common sense (on the side of the one-directional chain of causality, the prose line, leading to the earthly treasure) against poetical consistency. Note how unexpected the adjective “ominous” is, in this context. To Kidd, this “insignium” could only be of good omen. To Legrand, the emblem of the skull (as drawn on the parchment, mentioned in the message, and confirmed in the tree) has only brought good news. But the narrator keeps alive the duality intended by Poe to the point of suggesting a symmetry of opposites in the phrase “recovering his money through this ominous insignium”—“money” being anagrammatically contained in “omin(ous).” The careful reader is now prepared for the rebound triggered by Legrand’s final question to himself.
If, at long last, we turn to the title, we can see how much it is an image of the deep structure of the tale. Although Legrand is the ostensible hero of the plot, the “undercurrent of meaning” tips the balance in favor of Jupiter, whose figure then splits into old manumitted slave and lawgiver; typical of this is the distribution of the word bug in the text.[23] Dictionaries say that bug is often used in America for beetle, but the distinction bears another meaning in Poe’s tale. A word count shows that bug occurs thirty-eight times and is used almost exclusively by Jupiter or in the context of Jupiter’s perception of things, while beetle, which occurs twenty-three times, is used only by the two white friends.[24] Jupiter uses only bug. So the word belongs to him. It is Jupiter’s, just as the whole notion of a gold bug is Jupiter’s.[25] We now see that the title points, beyond Legrand, to a richer adventure than the treasure hunt. Indeed, if we add to the immediate meaning of “gold bug” the figurative meaning of “gold enthusiast,” Legrand is pointed at as the comic figure of the tale. But the title does not belong to Jupiter either. By turning “goole-bug” into “gold-bug,” Poe clearly appropriates the phrase for his own ends. The form is totally absent from the text proper; it belongs to Poe alone, and, as such, it is well worth our close attention.
I see it as a rich locket, open, there, at the top of the page, with its two halves, its hinge, and its clasp. The open hinge is the hyphen. On each side of it, the two syllables are slightly palindromic, with initial and final “g.” Fold the thing; the small “g” veers and clicks into the capital “G”—and the locket, closed, looks like the bug, with its image of a skull folded up on its gold. And so the title, with its hyphen, is a perfect emblem of the text, with its double reading hinged on its last sentence.
There can be little doubt that this hyphenated form is authorial. First, it is unusual. Gold (or golden) beetles, jewel (or jeweled) scarabs exist in nature, and if you look for them in dictionaries, you will find them without the hyphen. To be more particular, when the Dollar Newspaper announced, on June 14, 1843, that the tale that had been awarded the prize of $100 was Poe’s, they called it “The Gold Bug,” without the hyphen, confirming that it was the expected spelling. But when the first half of the tale appeared, on June 21, the hyphen was there, of course, and this original form was adhered to through the several printings by the same paper. Similarly, when publication of the tale was announced in other papers, its title was consistently printed without the hyphen, whereas after publication the practice varied.[26] Moreover, when Evert Duyckinck decided to republish the story as part of Tales (1845), Poe had an opportunity to introduce a few revisions, but the idiosyncratic form was respected. And it was left untouched again when he penciled in additional revisions, including the exchange quoted above, in the copy of Tales that Thomas O. Mabbott used as his copy text. Last but not least, on the first four occasions when Poe referred to his tale in his letters, in 1844 and 1845, he transcribed the hyphen.[27] Only in January 1848, in a long letter to a friend going over personal matters in a casual way, did he revert, typically, to the normal spelling.[28] So, gold bugs exist (and Chrysina [plusiotis] resplendens and Chrysina aurigans are of an incredibly golden yellow),[29] but there is only one “gold-bug.” I have come to see it as a tiny, almost private, but insistent emblem of Poe’s art.
This emblem is strictly linguistic. Another one was planted in the text—casually, as it were—in the form of an unnecessary detail. It had stuck in my memory as a version of the beetle, and yet—strictly, prosaically speaking—it is not. Indeed, the way it is proposed to the reader makes it the richest emblem of all. When Legrand and Jupiter reach their hut that first night and find the narrator waiting for them, Legrand is in one of his fits, we are told, because he “had found an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus, and, more than this, he had hunted down and secured, with Jupiter’s assistance, a scarabaeus which he believed to be totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on the morrow” (808). Now, as a narrative sequence, particularly by Poe’s standards,[30] the text is faulty. The first find should have been a mildly interesting one, simply designed to bring in a realistic touch and serve as a springboard to the fabulous beetle. On the contrary, the balance between “unknown . . . forming a new genus” and “which he believed to be totally new” is, at best, uncertain. So much so, that the reader is liable to merge the two finds into one. Unconsciously, the bivalve, too remarkable to be simply forgotten, yet never mentioned again, will lurk in the reader’s mind as a version of the “Scarabaeus caput hominis,” the strange beetle, half gold, half death’s head (810). Again, in a bold stroke of genius, equivalence has been projected onto the narrative sequence. The comparable duality of “gold-bug” and “bivalve” is striking, with the hyphen of the one as adductor muscle in the other. Each offers an image of the tale itself, with its final sentence (down to the ultimate “Who shall tell?”) as the “muscle” closing and opening the text. Indeed, the literary form Poe was elaborating, tale after tale, could, in 1843, have been greeted precisely in these terms: “an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus.”
Like “Mesmeric Revelation,” a tale in which mesmerism is only used as a fictional setting.
Edgar A. Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap 1978), 3:808. Subsequent references to “The Gold-Bug” will cite this edition and be given parenthetically in the text and the notes. This seashell, found before the Scarabaeus, will be returned to.
As the narrator concludes, Jupiter’s “whole intellect seemed to be absorbed by ‘de bug’” (814).
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 58. I deal with Poe’s attitude toward race, slavery, and democracy in Avec Poe jusqu’au bout de la prose (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 149–76. Let me only insist here on Poe’s meticulousness in the use of words. Morrison, having put forward the idea that Poe’s imagination could accidentally escape his (white) control, writes that Jupiter “is said to whip his master” (ibid., 58). But that is inaccurate. Poe never uses the word “whip” in that context: he has Jupiter use “beat” (812) and the two white men, “flog” (812, 843). Granted, “flog” and “whip” are near synonyms; but the instrument to be used is “a big stick” (812), “a huge stick” (813), not a whipping instrument. The slip might still seem trivial if the word “whip” itself never surfaced in the tale. But it does, once. Typically, it surfaces in Legrand’s world—as a harmless, grammatically subordinate element in the “bit of whip-cord” on which Legrand dangles the beetle (817). Far-reaching conclusions are not in order here, except that Poe is a master—of words.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Mabbott, Collected Works, 2:533.
The word “similarity” occurs twice and is followed by the verb “resemble.” The words “amazed” and “stupefied” are echoed by the noun “surprise” (829).
“Puns in ‘The Gold-Bug’: You Gotta Be Kidding,” Arizona Quarterly 58 (Summer 2002): 1–18. Quotation on p. 7. This trend against Legrand as master interpreter was vigorously launched by Daniel Kempton in “The Gold/Goole/Ghoul Bug,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33, no. 1 (1987): 1–19.
One instance when he does use the process of symbolization beautifully is when, having seen his master bitten by the beetle, he feels “certain,” a month later, that he “has been bitten about the head by that gold-bug” (812—I standardize Jupiter’s English). Another instance is as telling and much more moving: when Legrand asks him to find “the left eye of the skull,” Jupiter expresses his horror by a conscious pun, saying: “Hum! Hoo! That’s good! Why, there ain’t no eye left at all” (821). That is not “stupidity,” as Legrand is prompt to call it, but full humanity.
813—I partly standardize Jupiter’s English.
Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 221.
Ibid., 222.
Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 366.
Ibid.
Eureka, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan R. Levine (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 96.
Thompson, Essays and Reviews, 585 and 573.
“Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a littérateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.” The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, rev. Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye (New York: Gordian Press, 2008), 2;770.
The full title is “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics.” It was published as a chapter in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s teaching was published posthumously in 1916 as Cours de Linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1973). The Swiss linguist distinguishes, in his own words, “le rapport syntagmatique (in praesentia)” from “le rapport associatif (in absentia)” (ibid., 170–71).
Sebeok, Style in Language, 367.
“The Rationale of Verse,” Thompson, Essays and Reviews, 26–70. Poe’s ruling principle is “equality” (of rhythmic units) and, as second best, “equivalence” (passim).
Thompson, Essays and Reviews, 244, in Poe’s review of Barnaby Rudge quoted more fully above.
For the following word count, I have used the electronic text available on the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website, http://www.eapoe.org.
Legrand uses the word “bug” twice in his own name (808), and the narrator, twice too (810, 844). The two white friends resort to “scarabaeus” when they discuss genus, and occasionally, to “insect.”
There are eight occurrences of “goole (-) bug” (with or without the hyphen).
See Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 414–16 and 417–29. Also, out of six reprints in other papers during Poe’s lifetime, of the two that omit the hyphen, one is a pirated reprint in pamphlet form (London 1846–1847) and the other is titled “The Gold Bug; or, the Treasures of Kidd,” showing little concern for authenticity (Salem Gazette, November 1849). See http://www.eapoe.org, “The Gold-Bug,” “Reprints.”
Ostrom et al., The Collected Letters, 1:441, 450, 451, and 505. The same tendency to omit the hyphen when attention relaxes might explain why, in the tale, “goole-bug” appears without a hyphen in two instances out of eight.
Ibid., 641.
I have seen fine specimens at Deyrolle’s, Paris, and at “Paradisea,” Bligny-sur-Ouche, France. They are of a uniform, metallic, golden color. The black spots suggestive of a human skull belong only, as one would expect, to the specimen found by Legrand.
Poe explains, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” how he took care to “graduate the stanzas” of “The Raven,” adding: “Had I been able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas [than the one bringing the repeated ‘nevermore’ to a climax], I should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect.” Thompson, Essays and Reviews, 20.