Thursday, July 26, 2018

THE BLACK CAT (1843)

The justly famous BLACK CAT is particularly amusing for its inversion of the rational mode of Poe's own detective Dupin. Poe knows that no one reading the story will credit the narrator's opening statements:

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror — to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place — some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

Obviously, though Poe never shows the reader a literal ghost, any more than he did in METZGERSTEIN, he surrounds his titular feline with so many weird coincidences that no reader seriously believes that the cat can be explained by "very natural causes and effects."


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