The inadequacy of language to represent reality in Edgar Allan poe’s “Ligeia”

Abstract

[eng] Literary criticism of the works of Edgar Allan Poe has very often taken a biographical approach to analysing his short stories and poems. Aspects of his personal life are used to explain or interpret his plots. This element of Poe criticism can be seen in his obituary, and how poets have responded to Poe over the following years and decades. Psychoanalytical criticism also focused on biographical details in Poe’s life to interpret his works. This paper takes a different approach, analysing one of Poe’s most famous short stories, “Ligeia,” without any reference to Poe’s personal life in order to discover alternative readings which do not depend on salacious biographical details. Therefore, a language based approach was adopted. The analysis in this paper used three textual concepts to analyse “Ligeia.” These are: intertextuality, the Archive and différance. The analysis reveals that these concepts are at work together in the famous short story, and that Poe played with these ideas, although he did not use those specific terms. It could be argued that “Ligeia” anticipates some of these textual concepts. At issue in particular is the concept of deferral of meaning as defined by Derrida in his essay “Differance,” a concept which one can notice in “Ligeia” very clearly. “Ligeia” reveals the inadequacy of language to represent reality, and this is what ultimately accounts for the effective ending of “Ligeia.”