HOP-FROG (1849)

Though HOP-FROG was apparently published a little before a few other 1849 stories, I chose to focus on the earlier story for my final post of THE POE PROJECT. Though Poe's forays into pure humor and philosophy are not entirely worthless, there's no question that his true genius appeared in his works of the macabre-- of "the grotesque" rather than "the arabesque," so to speak.

HOP-FROG takes place back in an indeterminate medieval period, when the king of an unspecified country takes great pleasure in tormenting his jester Hop-Frog, a misshapen, crippled dwarf. Hop-Frog's sole delight is in his female companion Tripetta. During one of the king's raucous gatherings, the monarch amuses his obsequious underlings by forcing Hop-Frog to drink wine that makes him instantly drunk. Then, when the dwarf can't think quickly enough to suit the king's fancy, the monarch abuses Trippetta. The dwarf then devises an infamous revenge. He tricks the king and seven of his retainers into donning the costumes of ourang-outans-- the better to terrify other members of the court-- and then sets them all on fire. The dwarf and his companion escape without harm.

This colorful revenge-fantasy doesn't seem to have been adapted to film very often, aside from its use as a subplot in 1964's THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO (1846)

In the twilight of his career, Poe produced this bizarre-crime story, in which an obsessed narrator-- one who's actually given a name this time-- lures the object of his hate into a catacombs. After  making the victim Fortunato drunk on Amontillado wine, narrator Montresor imprisons Fortunato behind a wall of bricks and leaves him to die.

Unlike some of Poe's other murderers, apparently no "imp of the perverse" moves Montresor to confess his crime, though it's been suggested that the text of his story is his confession of his deed to either a priest or some official of the law.

THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE (1845)

Whereas in THE PURLOINED LETTER Poe gave his readers a definite crime, followed by a lot of windy philosophizing, before revealing the crime's solution.

In THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE, though, Poe spends half the story having a monologist explain his theory that the human possesses a hitherto unacknowledged "principle of human action," which he calls "perverseness," which exists to make the subject act against his best interests.

The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. It is our safeguard against injury. Its principle regards our well-being; and thus the desire to be well, is excited simultaneously with its development. It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists.

The monologist gives three examples in which the principle of perverseness interferes with the subject's self-preserving actions: a speaker's tendency to talk around his subject, thus irritating his listener; general procrastination about needed tasks; and finally, a tendency to want to throw oneself into an abyss no matter how aware one is of the physical threat-- which might be used as Poe's justification for writing about horrific subject matter:

 And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Finally, after all these ruminations-- strangely dependent on the supposed revelations of phrenology-- Poe finally has his monologist reveal that he is the best example of perverseness, because perverseness has placed in him in prison, waiting for the hangman. In order to secure an inheritance, the monologist used a poisoned candle to kill his intended victim. The crime went undetected for some time, until at least the speaker could no longer stand holding the secret, and revealed all to the authorities-- not out of guilt, but just for the perverse pleasure of plunging into the abyss.

The murder is certainly a bizarre crime by any reckoning. And though the narrator is not a "psycho" in the usual sense of the word, he does commit one psychologically unstable act, even though only he is harmed by it.

THE OBLONG BOX (1844)

The unnamed narrator of this story is sort of an anti-Dupin. On a sea-voyage, he notices some odd behavior in the party of a well-to-do man, who happens to have a large "oblong box" in his luggage. The narrator attempts to suss things out and comes to completely wrong conclusions. The truth only comes out because the ship takes on water and sinks, which causes the man with the oblong box to reveal its entirely mundane contents.

The title was the only thing the 1969 movie had in common with Poe.

THE SYSTEM OF DR. TARR AND PROF. FETHER (1844)

I'm surprised that this story has never been very popular in cinema and TV. Perhaps its "big reveal" would seem too obvious to many modern viewers, that of "the inmates running the asylum."

Another unnamed narrator chooses to take a tour of a modern asylum, and finds that all of the members of the staff, including director Monsieur Mallard, seem to act strangely at dinner. The narrator even notices that the people's clothes don't fit them well, but at no time does he tip to the solution. By chance the normal asylum-staff-- who have been tarred and feathered by the reigning lunatics-- manage to break free and re-take the madhouse, though the tarred-up employees look like "big black baboons from the Cape of Good Hope" to the befuddled narrator.

Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether are merely figments of Mallard's imagination, his joking reference to the torments he and his fellow nutcases have visited on the asylum-staff. By story's end the unusually thick narrator still thinks that the fictional authorities still exist, so maybe he's had his own mental breakdown.  

THE TELL-TALE HEART (1843)

This is of course one of Poe's best known stories today, focusing on the viewpoint of a "perilous psycho" who becomes obsessed with killing an old man who has never done him any harm. The madman does kill his victim and conceals the body. When police investigate the resultant commotion, the killer seems to be pulling off his crime, until he imagines that the dead man's heart is still beating, thus forcing the madman to confess his crime.

An odd touch: the madman becomes obsessed with his victim's "vulture-like" eye, but never states outright that the old man even has more than one.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1842)

PIT AND THE PENDULUM is another one of the Poe-stories that focuses almost entirely upon the setting in which the character finds himself. However, whereas a setting like the House of Usher has become monstrous simply by dint of absorbing the nature of the corrupt Usher family, the prison-cell that encloses both the Pit and the Pendulum has been designed to be monstrous by its creators, the torturers of the Inquisition.

As with many Poe narrators, the narrator remains a nugatory presence, even when he shows more cleverness than most Poe characters in escaping the peril of the descending pendulum.

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1840)

If one accedes to the general view that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is the first detective story, it's interesting that it's also a prime example of an *uncanny* phenomenality, one in which the author conjures forth an irreducible strangeness, despite the fact that the author tries to stay within the bounds of materailistic causality, where no transgressions of natural law take place. The source of the strangeness is, as most readers will know, the culprit in a Parisian double-murder, whom detective Dupin flawlessly deduces to be an out-of-control ourang-outan.

I have to imagine that generations of Poe readers have probably to vault over the first four or so pages of the story, in which Poe subjects readers to a philosophical lecture on his theories of "ideality," by which he seems to mean something like Kant's idea of reason. This lecture in turn leads one to a prelude in which Dupin first demonstrates his peerless ability to divine his roommate's inward thoughts by external observation of the man's physical responses and verbal communicaitons. It's almost beyond question that Conan Doyle copied aspects of Sherlock Holmes from Dupin, even if Dupin was not the only influence on Holmes. But it seems Poe, unlike Doyle, really considered the "mind-reading" trick a bagatelle, since Dupin doesn't even make a point of emphasizing this skill in his last two stories.

BERENICE (1835)

As I think I've said, I'm no expert on Poe's career, so I have no encyclopedic knowledge of what stories, poems, and essays the author wrote first, as opposed to their order of publication, for which my only source is THE UNABRIDGED EDGAR ALLAN POE.

All that said, "Berenice" is a quantum leap past all of the other stories, including the one to which I gave the greatest praise, "Ms. Found in a Bottle." It's as if in all of his earlier stories, Poe was dimly imitating some admired model who specialized in both burlesque and insufferable erudition. (Voltaire maybe? A lot of people think ZADIG could've influenced the Dupin stories...)

With Berenice, though, Poe is finally drawing upon themes and symbols that have some intense, however mystifying, personal significance for himself. 

"Berenice" is nearly a catalogue of story-tropes that Poe would use again and again. There's a strangely obsessed narrator-- for once given an actual name, "Egaeus"-- who also suffers from a strange malady. He dwells in a secluded mansion and interacts with almost no one except his female cousin (note: Poe married his 13-year-old cousin the next year). Because of his malady, which causes Egaeus to focus his attention irresistibly on mundane things, he forms a bizarre fixation on Berenice's teeth, though he claims that he has no romantic interest in her (though she has some sort of feeling for him). She has her own malady, a catalepsy that can mistaken for death, but somehow when she apparently dies, no one bothers to check closely to make sure she's really dead (perhaps "Loss of Breath" prefigures this obsession with "living death" scenarios). Though Egaeus sees his cousin buried, he can't get over his obsession with her teeth, and so robs her grave so that he can pry all 32 teeth out of her mouth. To be sure, he performs this act in a trance, and only becomes aware of what he's done shortly before learning that the poor girl, surprise, isn't really, merely, or sincerely dead.

This is an amazingly perverse story for 1835, and it duly shocked the readers of the magazine where it appeared. Poe pleaded that he was just trying to garner readers, but since he kept coming back to these themes, plainly there was some personal interest in them; an exorcism of his personal demons, so to speak.

It's also pleasing that since I consider Poe one of the foremost innovators in crafting stories of "the Uncanny"-- a phenomenological term I explained here and in many other ARCHETYPAL essays-- that what appears to be his first venture into this territory is so much more complex than all the naturalistic and marvelous prose works that preceded BERENICE.