Jan 11, 2022 - Daniel Handler joined the Beyond the Trope podcast to chat about writing, humor, kissing, and Poison for Breakfast (interview recorded Oct 2021). Starts at 1m30s, and the first 15 minutes offer some topics not extensively covered before.

Duality in The Beatrice Letters

Beatrice Letters was precisely designed to present several possible interpretations.

Unfortunately, the tendency of some fans to accept the most obvious interpretation as the only possible interpretation has overshadowed the beauty of the work for many people. The best known case of this is the question of whether the Baudelaires died shortly after leaving the island or not. For a long time, I argued that the only possible interpretation for what is written in TBL is that the Baudelaires survived long after leaving the island, as Beatrice claims that she remembers Sunny on a radio show. However, Dante showed me that there is another way to interpret this: the fact that Beatrice Jr may be mistaken. I have to admit that I really like this type of argument, because that is exactly what I say (now) about Beatrice's death. Assuming this possibility, we are saying that Daniel Handler planned the existence of characters who are mistaken about facts in ASOUE.

Thus, we cannot fully rely on Lemony Snicket's claim in some books about Beatrice's death for the simple fact that Lemony may be mistaken about her death. (Similarly, we cannot rely on the Baudelaires' survival on the island, because Beatrice Jr may be mistaken about this).

And as I have previously published, Daniel Handler left tips that indicate that Beatrice may have survived the fire at her home, and that he decided that Beatrice survived at some point between the publication of TAA and TPP. These tips were left in LSTUA and the Snicket File. 

I also believe that in TSS, Daniel Handler used a resource used by Agatha Christie in her books: disappointment about a prime suspect due to forged clues or coincidences, so that in the end Agatha would reveal to the reader that the prime suspect was really the murder . It would be a very specific type of Red Haring. I'm going to call this feature "Smoke Cloud". From my point of view, Quigley's TSS revelation is a well-planned Smoke Cloud, made to hide the revelation (which was already becoming very obvious since the publication of LSTUA) that Beatrice had survived her house fire. We found evidence that Quigley's revelation was a Smoke Cloud when we realized that Daniel Handler was keen to point out that Olaf was surprised to find that Quigley was alive after Olaf had read the Snicket File. If Daniel Handler's intention was to confirm that the fire survivor named in the Snicket File was Quigley, this scene would not make sense.

As Hermes and Dante explained, perhaps that was left as it was so that some plot change or new ideas were possible in the next books. I remember this feature being used at the end of the second season of Prision Break, where a scene is shown in which a major character is being taken inside a truck surrounded by police, and then a group of armed men assault the truck and the camera shows them shooting. But the camera angle does not show whether they shot the prisoner or the police. Evidently, it was recorded that way, so that both realities could be used in a possible future season. I will call this feature "Flexible Roadmaps". The use of "Flexible Roadmaps" allows the author to write a story without knowing exactly all the details of the sequel. The existence of an intensional Flexible Roadmap in ASOUE is the fact that the bodies of Beatrice and Bertrand have never been described as being found by anyone. Someone (Dante) can argue that describing the bodies of the parents of the main characters would be too shocking for readers who are children (and I agree). But not even a funeral? Furthermore, in LSTUA it was clear that Daniel Handler resorted to this aspect of the Flexible Roadmap by stating that the bodies of the Baudelaires' parents were not buried in two of the places where photos are displayed. The Flexible Roadmap exists due to the fact that the reality in which the bodies turned to ash and the reality that they survived co-exist at the same time.

And then we come to the end of TPP full of Flexible Roadmap spread throughout the work. A conventional author would choose some of the possibilities of his Flexible Roadmaps and present them to the reader. But I think we all agree that Daniel Handler is not a conventional author. Instead of clarifying the truth about Beatrice's survival or not, he publishes TBL and then TE. I think we all agree that at least TBL and TE were written together. It is important to understand that one of the goals of TBL is to leave some of the Flexible Roadmaps open.

I disagree with the statement that all the mysteries contained in TBL have been solved, because I see evidence that the mysteries contained in TBL were not created to be solved, but to be identified.

To refuse the existence of these unsolved mysteries is actually to overlook the hidden beauty that TBL possesses. I will try to publish some texts indicating the existence of these mysteries, and of course I know that solutions to these mysteries have been proposed over the years. But none of these solutions are really definitive, because TBL was designed to be a great anagram. Just as you can form multiple words from a set of letters, and each word will have a different meaning, TBL was designed to be understood in different ways depending on the premises adopted by the reader when reading each letter.

@snicketstrange​ provides another good article.

Literal and conceptual anagram in TBL

This is the great theme of Beatrice's letters and it is clear that this derives from the multiple meanings of the word "letter".

The two main meanings are:

1 - a symbol usually written or printed representing a speech sound and constituting a unit of an alphabet

2 - a direct or personal written or printed message addressed to a person or organization

Daniel Handler's idea was to create a work in which these two meanings of the word letters could be used to form anagrams, literal and conceptual anagrams. We see that this was his idea when we read BB to LS # 2:

"The wooden box on your desk marked" letters "is full of letters. But all the letters are jumbled together, and I cannot determinie what the letters would spell if I put them in the proper order. The only letter missing is the one I sent you. Either it never arrived or you took it with you. "

I think these are one of the coolest parts of TBL. Beatrice Jr logically uses and takes advantage of the multiple meaning of the word "spell" in line with the multiple meaning of the word "letter". This is beautiful. Note these two definitions of "spell" that I would like to highlight:

1 - to make up (a word).: What word do these letters spell?

2 -: to add up to: mean; to communicate or convey (as an idea) to the mind. .: "Crop failure was likely to spell stark famine." .: "That summertime combination of hot temperatures and equally hot tempers can spell trouble."

In other words, Beatrice could be saying that she was unable to spell out the different possible literal anagrams formed by a set of letters (A - Z) in a box, or she could be saying that there were several messages written in a box, which could mean several different things depending on the order and premises you decide to adopt. And the fact that Daniel Handler chose these words for Beatrice Jr to write, only highlights his intention to create multiple meanings for TBL.

Now, note Lemony's letter to the Editor. Lemony wrote:

"... The Beatrice letters could explain the beatrice letters and even the letters of Beatrice, no matter which letters they are, and no matter what order the letters are in. I immediately began work on the file."

When quoting the order of letters, Daniel Handler makes a clear allusion here to anagrams. After that, Lemony wrote:

"For many years I thought if I collected all thesse letters and their accompanying ephemera - a phrase witch here means" documents and items which I feared had vanished, and may soon vanish again "- I could put all of them in the proper order, as if solving anagram by putting all of the letters in the right order.But letters are not letters, so the arrangement of letters is not as simple as the arrangement of letters, and even if it were, the arrangement of these letters could spell more than one thing, just as there is more than one Beatrice, and so the mystey could become two mysteries, and each of these mysteries could become two mysteries, until the wole world is engulfed in mysteries, as it is now. "

(It is interesting that after this passage I found a message from Daniel Handler for me. He said to me:

"No matter what documents you investigate, and what objects you retrieve, you NEVER ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT ARE MOST IMORTANT TO YOU." )

This consideration shows that the beauty of TBL is to try to form literal and conceptual anagrams, and not to discover which of the meanings is right.

A good symbolism analysis by @snicketstrange​.