64 Kitchen questions: in translating "coincidence" by "analogie " at the beginning of the tale, at the very moment of the reference to the two other "affairs" (the Rue Morgue and Marie Rogêt ), Baudelaire misses not only the insistence of this word but also the fact that The Purloined Letter itself is presented in a series of these coincidences, as one of them, the coincidences whose network is elaborated before this third fiction. One detail from among all of those that now can be analyzed in an open reading of the trilogy: the epigraph to the Mystery of Marie Rogêt , a citation from Novalis both in German and in English translation, which begins: "There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide . . ." Baudelaire purely and simply omits the last three words. The word coincidences then appears three times in two pages, always underlined. And the last time it has to do with the intersection of the three affairs: "The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECELIA ROGERS at New York." The subtitle of the Mystery of Marie Rogêt : "A Sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue ."
These reminders, which could be multiplied endlessly, are to make us attentive to the effects of the frame and to the paradoxes of parergonal logic. The point is not to show that "The Purloined Letter" functions within a frame (a frame that is omitted by the Seminar, which thereby can assure itself of the tale's triangular interior by means of an active and subreptitious limitation on the basis of a metalinguistic overlay), but that the structure of the effects of framing is such that no totalization of the bordering can even occur. The frames are always enframed: and therefore enframed by a given piece of what they contain Parts without a whole, "partitions" without unification: this is what checks the dream of a letter without partition, a letter allergic to partition. On the basis of which the linguistic unit "phallus" [le sème "phallus" ] wanders, begins by disseminating, and not even by disseminating itself .
The naturalizing neutralization of the frame permits the Seminar, by virtue of its imposition or importation of an Oedipal contour, finding (itself within) this contour in truth--and, in effect, it is there, but as one part, even if a precisely central part. within the letter--to constitute a metalanguage and to exclude the text in general in all the dimensions that we began here by recalling (return to the "first page"). Without even going further into details, the trap of metalanguage--which in the last analysis is used by no one, is at the disposition of no one, involves no one in the consequences of an error or a weakness--is a trap belonging to writing before the letter, and shows and hides itself in the shown-hidden of the feigned title: ''The Purloined Letter" is the title of the text and not only of its object. But a text never entitles itself, never writes: I, the text, write, or write myself. It causes to be said, it lets be said, or rather it leads to being said, "I, the truth, speak." I am always (I am still following) [Je suis toujours ] the letter that never arrives at itself [s'arrive ]. .And right up to its destination.