Death of the ‘I’: Double-Suicide in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’
Colin Dray (University of Sydney)
Cite Article: Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.1, January 2008
I
From the moment that a writer first places a word upon the page a fundamental literary relationship is reiterated and reinforced. One can disregard plot within a text; one can ignore description; there are ways to thwart and fragment the passage of time; but the most enduring and primal element of any creative work lies within the relationship between the author, the character they construct, and the reader to whom both these figures speak.1 Innumerable great (and some distinctly poor) writers have sought to interrogate and exploit the mechanics of this textual relationship. Camus’ absorbing first-person seduction in The Fall is able to draw the reader from a seemingly innocuous meeting in a bar into a direct intellectual interrogation of his or her morality, culminating in the narrator’s admission that it had been his intention all along to craft such a searing textual reflection (even announcing the manner in which his pronoun usage subtly shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’: ‘When I get to “This is what we are”, the game is over and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together’2); James Joyce’s ‘Clay’ offers an intensely focussed moment in which narrator, character and reader are intimately united in a manner rarely achieved in fiction, each blind, and reliant solely upon the tactile sensation of Maria’s fingertips meeting wet sod; and certainly Proust’s lengthy meditations upon narrative and biographical fiction in Remembrance of Things Past have succeeded in blurring the lines between author and narrator until they are almost indistinguishable.3 No writer, however, has managed to perform so radical an interrogation upon the ramifications of this narrative bond than Edgar Allen Poe in his diminutive story, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, a work in which the absorbing rhythms of the narrator, the self-reflexive awareness of Poe’s style, and the significant contradictions and lapses of description that the reader must overcome, ultimately lead to the complete dissolution of any division between author, narrator and reader. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to conduct a close reading of the manner in which Poe deconstructs these boundaries, and to offer a possible interpretation for the deeper intellectual horror that emanates from the vacuum this text creates in the reader’s ultimate ascension, through an act of complicit textual murder, to the roles of both narrator and author.4
II
The very first word that explodes from Poe’s narrator immediately disrupts any attempt to approach this character as a reliable source: ‘True! –’ he cries, ‘nervous – very, very dreadful nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’5 As even a superficial reading reveals, to begin with the declaration ‘True!’ instantly alerts the reader to the necessary bipolarity of subjective interpretation; in order for us to need to be convinced of the narrator’s truth, there must be a reasonable suspicion of his being untrustworthy, a notion that we have held, the text presumes, even before the narration begins.6 Significantly, this first sentence therefore declares itself part of a direct, present tense dialogue with the reader: ‘why will you say that I am mad?’ It is either a response or a pre-emption: response, either to a comment or a look that the reader has presumably made moments before the text began, or a request not to dismiss, after hearing the tale, the narrator’s actions as lunacy. Poe has already expanded the story beyond the boundaries of the words upon the page, inextricably linking his audience and narrator in a conversation that both precedes and follows the act of reading. Consequentially, the reader is continually regarded by the narrator as though participating in a debate: propositioned, questioned, animatedly instructed to take heed: ‘How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story.’7 Barely a sentence into the tale and already the reader has been woven into an intimate embrace by Poe’s engaging (already very likely irrational) narrator, shocked out of the comfort of a straightforward relation of events, and invited to judge the veracity of this first-person voice, and by extension, the entirety of the text that he relates. And it now becomes clear that the title of the work is a self-reflexive pun in even more ways than are immediately apparent. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart is not just the beating organ that gives him away at the end of the story; the heart, in fact, is the story. Poe is inviting his reader to deliberate upon the mechanics at the heart of telling a tale.
In the very next sentence Poe’s narrator again gives the reader cause to doubt his reliability. ‘The disease’, he says, ‘had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them’, but significantly, the senses to which he is referring are not the mental senses that one would assume (given his concern for our thinking him mad), but rather his hearing. His auditory senses have increased so exponentially, he believes, that he can hear ethereal things, beyond the physical world: “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell” (p.186). This play upon the word ‘senses’ further threatens the reader’s faith in the narrative voice, but it also introduces the concept of grammatical interpretation, the ability to justifiably read the same linguistic sign in two dramatically differing ways. Though the narrator’s ‘senses’ can from one perspective refer to his sensations, from another it regards his mental health, making it evident that Poe’s text is concerned less with the events related within the tale than with the manner in which those events are perceived, again presented in the narrator’s preoccupation with convincing the reader of his sagacity.
This curious duality of interpretation continues as the narrator begins to recount the murder of the old man, similarly exhibiting a differing interpretation of the precepts of sanity than those, one would assume, of the reader:
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded – with what caution – with what foresight – with what dissimulation I went to work.
The narrator’s definition of sanity involves the ability to methodically plan and execute a murder without suspicion, ultimately seeing the skills necessary to cunningly conceal his murderous intent proof of his rationality. Again, however, such an explanation overlooks the only detail that could possibly justify the narrator’s actions: a reasoned motive to kill. Indeed, the narrator does not even exhibit hatred toward his victim:
Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire.
And yet his ability to destroy someone he professes to love does not strike the narrator as a reason his reliability should be questioned. Instead, he argues that it is the old man’s eye that haunts him – it is a ‘damned spot’ that he must eradicate – and thus the old man is merely an unfortunate casualty. Thus, the illogic of this proposed moral distinction between killing the man’s eye and murdering the old man himself, separating the two images into independent identities within the same body, remains lost on the narrator as he recounts the manner in which he ‘very gradually’ resolves to rid himself of the eye forever.
It is this obsession with the eye and not the man to whom it belongs that leads the narrator to postpone his planned slaughter for an entire week:
And this I did for seven long nights – every night just at midnight – but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but this Evil Eye.
Not only must the eye be open, it must be performing the act of observation that so unnerves him before it can be razed; therefore the narrator checks each night, opening his lantern just enough to illuminate the eye and reveal its condition. On the night that he finds the eye open, having accidentally awoken the old man with a slip of his thumb, the beam of light that finally breaks from between the lids of his lantern strikes the eye directly, intimately linking the two figures, murderer and victim, in a penetrative act of mutual scrutiny:
So I opened it – you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily – until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.8
But in this moment narrator and old man are more than just two figures entangled by a symbolic sliver of spider-web illumination: their identities, as delineated by the scope of their perceptions, begin to merge. Both stare intently at the other, both listen for the slightest sound; for an hour they remain locked together, their senses (which the narrator has repeatedly argued define his identity) straining into the dark, each ultimately taking on the other’s powers of observation. The old man struggles to hear with the precision and acuity professed by the narrator (‘He was sitting up in the bed, listening’), while the narrator watches with the vulture-like cunning of the eye (‘I grew furious as I gazed upon it’). The lines between murderer and victim, hunter and prey, become tellingly indistinct. Two eyes (one a lantern, the other an inhuman orb) hover in space, locked in a beam of light that merely results in a reflective cycle of observance, the subjective bodies to which they belong lost in the absolute dark of their surrounds.
Most revealingly, at the exact moment that this unity is reached, the narrator hears the first rumblings of the rhythm that will recur throughout the remainder of the text: ‘a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.’ The sound, the narrator states, is the heartbeat of the old man, and though it seems impossible that he could be capable of either hearing or identifying it – even with his professed acute senses – he claims ‘I knew _that _ sound well.’ The nature of this intimate knowledge of the old man’s inner workings becomes clearer if one considers logically the use of sound – as both Poe and the narrator demand – throughout the text. The heartbeat, attributed to the old man, beats on long after the murder takes place, filling the narrator’s ears and building to its climactic crescendo at the end of the work, despite the old man to whom it belongs being hacked into pieces. If one refuses to take the (at best) questionable perspective of the narrator at face value, this sound, rather than being evidence of the old man’s mortal terror, is more likely the narrator’s own heart, quickened at first by a heinous excitation at the prospect of the murder he is about to commit, and later hastened by anxiety over the presence of the three police officers he has invited into the house. Indeed, such a reading of the noise being solely within the narrator’s own head, beating in his breast, would explain the police officers’ inability to hear anything untoward at the story’s climax. Similarly, the shriek that is heard by a neighbour and reported when the murder takes place is easily explained away as that of the narrator (‘The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream’), and when the murder is about to take place, the narrator describes the sound of the old man’s fear rising up in a manner that intimately links it with his own experience:
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief – oh, no! – it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what that old man felt.9
Here the narrator not only empathises with the old man, he claims to have made the same noise himself. If one follows through with the literal implication of this passage, the narrator has made, not a similar noise, but the exact groan that has escapes the old man’s lips, uniting their moan, and the body from which it emanates, as one: making them the exact same person. It therefore becomes clear how the narrator can claim to be able to know the old man’s thoughts:
I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fear had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.
And how the two figures’ sensations could overlap, their visual and auditory skills mingling in their metaphysical potential: ‘He was still sitting up in bed, listening; – just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.’
The possibility that this story may not be depicting any traditional form of murder is strengthened when the description of the death scene is examined closely. Curiously, in a tale about murder, the description of the act itself remains indistinct:
He shrieked once – once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound.
The narrator does not choke or shoot the old man. No blood is described (‘There was nothing to wash out – no stain of any kind – no blood-spot whatever’), nor is the image of his last breaths dwelt upon. Instead, the method used to dispatch the old man is an act of concealment; the narrator obscures him from sight, dispatching him, like a childish fantasy, under the bed, while he takes his victim’s place atop it. As the sound of the old man’s heart fades to death, it is more likely the beat of the narrator’s own excitement abating, whether woken from the chilling nightmare he has just related (which has caused him, as he explains to the policemen, to cry out), or suffering a psychotic break that leads him to believe that he has ‘murdered’ another personality. Thus when he shows the three policemen around the house as if it were his, bidding them welcome, leading them all around the house and into the old man’s chamber, explaining that the shriek ‘was my own in a dream’ and even conversing with the officers ‘upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim’, he is not considered suspicious because he is in fact the old man to whom the house belongs: ‘The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them.’ His ‘ manner ’ is appropriate, because he is wearing the old man’s face.
If one accepts this interpretation of the text, that the narrator is but exorcising an aspect of his own fractured identity, then it becomes evident why the old man’s eye has so disturbed him. As a closer examination of the description offered reveals, despite his obsession with the old man’s gaze, it is not actually the eye that plagues him, but the ghostly film covering it:
I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.
…
I saw it with a perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow of my bones.
It is this blue film that gives the eye its vulture appearance, and marks a division that prevents he and the old man (he and himself) seeing one another clearly. The barrier that this shroud presents symbolises the psychological impairment that splinters his mind and which consequentially separates the old man’s ‘eye’ from the narrator’s ‘I’. The destruction of the eye is therefore a moment of insight, an acceptance of personal identity (if nonetheless still symbolised by a slaughter), in which the narrator exposes an aspect of himself and assimilates it into his being. As Johann Pillai describes in his exceptional study of Poe’s work in ‘Death and its Moments: The End of the Reader in History’, at the moment that the narrator attacks his victim ‘instead of throwing open the door, he throws open the lantern : coinciding with the yell and the shriek is a flash of light, a blinding moment of sight.’10 By murdering the eye – destroying the boundary between he and the old man – the narrator ascends to his rightful place within the text, at home within the house that has always been his.
The peculiar ending of the work becomes even more confusing in this reading however, requiring an intrusion by the reader in order for the text to make its meaning. If it is to be understood that no physical murder has taken place, that the narrator is instead delusional and paranoid, then his curious actions when talking to the three police officers alter from being a desperate, haunted admission of guilt (the traditional reading of the work), to a moment of patent absurdity. When the narrator’s composure starts to unravel, having led the officers to the scene of the ‘murder’, he starts to hear the familiar sound of the heartbeat that he has already attributed to his victim. As the noise rises, becoming clearer and more intrusive, he is progressively convinced that it is the old man’s heart, stirred again into motion11 (which of course it may well be, beating within his own chest):
The ringing became more distinct: – it continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definitiveness – until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.
The narrator therefore rants and thrashes about, losing himself within the fearful percussion. He paces the floor, foaming, raving and swearing. He even violently acts out upon his furniture: ‘I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards’, and yet in spite of this behaviour the police do not react, instead chatting pleasantly and smiling. This disinterest on the part of the police is only put into context when Poe has his narrator use, not only the same description, but the very same words, italicised for emphasis, to describe the heartbeat that he hears: ‘ a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton .’12 In using this same phrasing, Poe directly parallels the two events, folding the murder and its exposure into one, showing them both to be revelatory (perhaps even delusional) events that must ultimately be defined by the reader’s interpretation and not by the narrator whose perception cannot be trusted. Similarly, when the narrator shrieks maniacally at the officers, tearing up the floorboards of what may in fact be his own house to reveal (perhaps) nothing, Poe immediately ends his work, cutting off the narrative at the most climactic, but obscure moment, forcing his reader to participate in the contextualisation of the events presented. As the dialogue of the narrator explosively falls to silence – ‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!’ – the answers to who has been murdered, what is being revealed, and whether any of what has been relayed has even taken place, are left tellingly blank. In this moment, in which the narrator exposes what may be either a human heart or nothing at all, the nature of the division between the two identities depicted within the work remains paradoxically indistinct; ‘it is the beating of _his _ hideous heart!’13; the narrator and the old man both become one and splinter into two in the same instant, and it is ultimately the responsibility of the reader to decide what is the nature of their relationship, and what the contents stashed beneath those broken floorboards actually are. On a textual level this intrusion by the reader upon the role of the narrator significantly mirrors the narrator’s absorption of the old man, taking his place upon the bed (or within the text) through an act of metaphorical murder, and opening the parameters of Poe’s work further to directly incorporate the role of the reader into the construction of the narrative.
III
Poe consistently interrogates the boundaries that separate the author, narrator and reader within his text, eventually dissolving these limits altogether. Throughout the tale the narrator’s frequent declarations that he must commit murder to be free of the old man’s eye are continuously undercut by his insistence that the reader take heed of his actions. While describing the revulsion of being constantly watched by a dispassionate, disembodied observer (‘with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones’), he ironically demands that the reader view his actions with an equal objective clarity (even through the veil of fiction which separates the real and textual world): ‘But you should have seen me . You should have seen how wisely I proceeded’. Indeed, the manner in which he describes his every action, turning it into a text, is designed solely to ensure that a form of observation continues eternally (the narrator himself acting as the lens, or film, through which these events are relayed). Similarly the reader is also instructed to listen more attentively, thereby exhibiting the sense the narrator proudly proclaims for himself. In the first paragraph, when he speaks of the disease that has sharpened his now metaphysically acute senses, he immediately demands that the reader pay equal attention: ‘Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.’ As Pillai argues, when describing this exchange:
The reader is invited to sharpen his or her senses, to hear what the narrator hears in heaven, earth and hell; in short, to become like the narrator on levels mental, sensory and supersensory, cross the boundary between history and fiction.14
I would argue that the narrator does indeed succeed in making the reader transgress this divide: the reader’s hearing, central to the meaning of this work, so united with the narrator’s that (like the division between narrator and old man) the lines between speaker and listener blur into irrelevance. We therefore share the ‘disease’ (or ‘dis-ease’, as Pillai suggests15) that both sharpens the narrator’s senses and condemns him to madness, and combined with the correlation encouraged between the reader’s vision and that of the old man’s, this expansion of the reader’s perceptions is central to the existential horror that Poe masterfully manifests. The reader must ‘Hearken! and observe’; listen and look; he or she must see with the acuity of the old man but hear with the precision of the narrator, thereby taking upon themself the traits that most potently mark the only two active participants within the tale.16 He or she becomes at once both victim and villain, hunter and prey. In stretching beyond the boundaries traditionally prescribed by the coding of literature, the reader ultimately destroys the author, narrator and self, ascending to an untenable position as creator and created, losing all sense of self or other in a fictional paradox.
The third paragraph of the text introduces an absorbing rhythm that Poe cultivates throughout the remainder of the tale, and which informs the purpose of the entire text. As the narrator begins describing the manner in which he stalked the old man a series of descriptive repetitions, both in the subject matter and word choice used to relate these behaviours, develop into a form of narrative metronome. In one paragraph Poe echoes the same phrase three times: ‘every night, about midnight’, ‘seven long nights – every night just at midnight’, and ‘every night, just at twelve’; similarly the pronoun ‘I’ and an accompanying adjective is frequently utilised, even when they need not be, to mark a stress within each line that is intimately bound to the narrator’s actions and mood: ‘I went’, ‘I killed’, ‘I turned’, ‘I put’, ‘I thrust’, ‘I moved’, ‘I found’, on and on throughout the text. The cadence of these rhythms, and Poe’s masterful control of his sentence structure, charges the narration with an ominous inevitability, and directly impacts the atmosphere of the tale, at times slowing its pace to a glacial crawl:
Never, before that night, had I felt the extent of my own powers – of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.
while at others making the narrator’s escalating frustration, such as during the story’s conclusion, even more intense as he slips into frenzied, paranoid tirades:
Almighty God! – no, no! They heard! – they suspected – they knew! – they were making a mockery of my horror! – this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony. Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! – and now – again! – hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! –
It is through Poe’s carefully tempered beat, which consistently swells and eddies until building to its climactic crescendo, that this slight work, a monologue describing little more than two scenes predominantly located within a single room, is able to feel so epically inflated: for this rhythm, a reflection of Poe’s organising metaphor of the old man’s heartbeat (and it’s sound ‘such as a watch makes when wrapped in cotton’), seeps into the reader’s consciousness, quickening his or her reading, or slowing it for suspense, as effective upon their interpretation of the text as the heartbeat was upon the narrator’s bloodlust.
A similar rhythmic effect is achieved through Poe’s concentration upon the opening and closing of the objects his narrator choses to describe. When the narrator is stalking the old man, both the act of opening the bedroom door and that of opening his lantern are dwelt upon with ghoulish detail:
I turned the latch of his door and opened it – oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head…
….
To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little…
….
without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little – a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it – you cannot imagine how stealthily…
The act of closing too is carefully relayed: ‘I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed’, ‘but I found the eye always closed’. And this theme of openings and closings culminates, of course, in the evil eye, which the narrator demands must be open in order for him to kill the old man; it must be open, or alive, in order to die and therefore close (indeed, when he is dragged to the floor and crushed beneath the bed it is a powerful metaphorical slamming shut of the eye). The usage of these words, open and close, opening and closing, combined with the narrator’s concern with invasion and extrication, in and out, creates a curious pattern that together mimics the physical experience of a beating heart; open, close, in out; he is presenting, through the rhythm of his words, the blood flow, the valves, the chambers, of a human heart. The text itself is a beating human organ, and although its tempo may at first be representative of the narrator mood, in the act of reading it becomes the reader’s heartbeat also; we inexplicably hear that beat in our ears just as the narrator has claimed to do.
And so the narrator’s obsession with space becomes more evident. While the opening of doors, the opening of eyes, and the invasion of the closeted space within which the old man resides is clearly a metaphorical presentation of the overtaking of the old man’s persona – the narrator slips within a dark enclosed space representative of both mind and the heart, the true proponent of life – this motif is also illustrative of the act of reading. When the lines of a fictional work enter the mind, the melody they produce, the ideas and images they conjure remain within the reader’s memory. Though the reader has not personally seen the acts being described, they nonetheless inhabit his or her thoughts, even represented in the first person perspective. When the narrator declares: ‘then I thrust my head in. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in’, the rhythmic, sexual connotation of this penetration is entirely apt. The author, and by extension narrator, has seduced and invaded the reader, blurring the line between speaker and audience in a psychological sex act that strips the preconceived boundaries of narrative bare and makes the reader, ultimately, complicit in the depicted crime. Upon hearing this beat in our ears, losing the division between narrator and audience, the reader’s fictional detachment from the text is erased. Upon hearing the beating of the old man’s heart (‘a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton’) as it is being crushed into silence, the reader too finds himself or herself surrounded by the cloaking, smothering senses of the narrator. Thus, when the narrator says in the second paragraph that he is not sure how the notion to murder the old man came to mind (‘It is impossible to say how first the idea entered by brain: but once conceived, it haunted me day and night’), that chilling pronouncement is also indicative of the reader’s circumstance too. The reader has now been implicated in the crime, and their own lack of a motive is equally as chilling as the narrator’s failure to justify his behaviour.
The narrator wants to kill the eye, but by extension (to revel in the intertextuality that Poe creates in his continual reminders that this is a tale being told), he wants to kill the ‘I’: the literal ‘I’ of the narrator. He wants to tear down the division between the narrator and the reader, not asking us to witness his crime but to participate, to become, in effect, the murderer, and therefore the narrator of the very story being told. In the climactic moments of the text, when the reader finally shares the narrator’s exceptional senses – a fusion triggered by the repeated description of the heart beat that fills the ears of both figures17 – the rhythm of Poe’s language again strikes heaviest upon the pronoun most significant to the tale:
Oh god! what could I do? I foamed – I raved – I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting…
….
this I thought and this I think!
….
I felt that I must scream or die!
By the end of the tale the reader is left literally holding the image of the heart – the text itself, with its pulsing reaffirmation of the reader’s ‘I’ – and is responsible for placing the narrator’s incomplete exposition into some kind of context. Is the narrator in jail, recounting his story and condemned to die? Is he simply deranged? Has the majority of the piece been part of the frightful dream from which both narrator and reader awake? In performing this explanatory function (which in turn places into context whether indeed there is a heart, whether it is beating, whether anything we have just read is as it seems) the reader literally becomes the narrator, he or she ascends literally to the narrator’s position within the text. Thus, just as in murdering the old man, the narrator takes his place upon the bed, accepting the narrator’s role upon the page and filling in the details left significantly unresolved. They ultimately must complete the transitional metamorphosis Poe crafts from Reader, to Narrator, to Author. In a very real sense, the reader allows the heart of the tale to continue its beat.
Through his steady solicitation of the reader’s perceptions the narrator eventually makes them complicit in the crime, however, as with the murder of the old man in which the two figures can be seen to merge into one, when the narrator blends with the reader a comparable destruction of self takes place. ‘Hearken! and observe’; ‘But you should have seen me’; The narrator frequently insists that his reader both look and listen, fulfilling two roles that his narrative ultimately destroys. He reputedly longs to kill the eye that watches him with a veiled stare, but in doing so kills another ‘I’: that of his own multiple personality. In destroying the old man persona rather than resolve his internal identity conflict he compels the reader to take the old man’s place, thereby replacing the evil eye with another observant agent who watches events unfold. In demanding that the reader also take upon his or herself his power of hearing, therefore – utilising the rhythms and melody of the story’s language to place the beat of the heart within their ears – the narrator effectively annihilates the final remaining part himself, resulting in a form of textual suicide in which the ‘I’ of the narrator is supplanted by the eye/‘I’ of the reader. This self-annihilation is apparent when one considers the way in which the he describes the crumbling of his calm façade when confronted by the three police officers. As Pillai notes, when speaking of the parallel between these two ‘murders’, both of which are perpetuated by the narrator and which result in a destruction of self:
This disarticulation, this dis-traction (preceded by a gasp for breath), is an experience on the level of narrative voice, of what has been described by that voice and enacted as the physical dismemberment of the old man.18
Just as the old man’s body, upon being murdered, is hacked apart (‘I cut off the head and the arms and the legs’), so too is the narrator metaphorically torn to pieces upon being supplanted by the reader, even physically losing his faculties in the same order. Upon hearing the ‘low, dull, quick sound’ of the heart again, and fusing his acute hearing with the reader, he starts to lose his head (‘I talked more quickly’), he flashes his arms about wildly (‘with violent gesticulations’), and even finds that his legs have finally slipped from his control (‘I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides’).19 By the end of the passage, the narrator is entirely dismembered, his body no longer under his control, his faculties possessed by another.
When the narrator is speaking to the three officers he is being directly confronted with the three aspects essential to storytelling. The three officers distinctly represent three ‘I’ figures (the frames of their bodies even physically presenting this image when standing in front of the narrator), three identities who have come to judge the veracity of the fiction he offers them concerning the death (or otherwise) of the old man. These three ‘I’ figures, when read at the story level can be representative of the narrator, old man, and listener to whom the story is being recounted; at the textual level, however, they constitute a depiction of the three identities necessary to the communication of any literary work: author, narrator and reader, and as the narrator steadily disintegrates it is obvious that their presence, a reminder of the textual structures required by tradition – by law, in fact, as they are police officers – and which he has disturbed in his ‘murderous’ amalgamation of absorbing the identity of the old man and seducing the reader’s will. This image is further heightened by the imagery of the three planks upon which the narrator and officers sit. Like the upright officers, these three straight planks of wood offer three material presentations of the pronoun ‘I’, and beneath all three of them the same heart beats: that of the text itself. There figures by necessity give the text life, and it is only through their interrelation that any meaning is possible; indeed, the steady rhythm that Poe, as author, loads into his prose only sounds if it has a narrative agent to speak it, and a reader to interpret its beat. Thus in the final moments of the story when the three planks are torn up, this image is a metaphorical presentation of the literal destruction taking place within the parameters of the text. There are indeed three ‘I’s being shattered in this work, but they are the textual constructs traditionally necessary for any literary communication; and the manner in which Poe decimates the conventional divisions between them charges the tale with its cerebral horror. The most successful murder perpetrated within this tale is therefore the slaughter of the narrative ‘I’s that have populated discourse, merging writer, narrator and audience, all into a singularly amorphous and inhuman ‘I’.
In both the murder of the old man and the final blending of the narrator and reader, at the exact moment that the two figures involved perceive each other without obstruction they are destroyed: ‘It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness’, the narrator says of the moment he shares with his victim before leaping upon him, crushing and becoming him. Similarly, when the narrator and reader unite, both hearing the beating of the old man’s heart (their heart) renewed (‘The ringing became more distinct: – it continued and became more distinct’), the narrator is immediately disassembled piece by piece. When two entities within this text meet eye-to-eye they merge and destroy one another, presenting within these moments a sublime revelation. As with the Romantic poets who through meditation and inspiration sought to ascend to a comprehension of the metaphysical, Poe presents an image of the Romantic sublime in which the individual merges with the absolute but is wholly lost within its limitless potential. The narrator becomes the old man; he glimpses spiritual oneness, but is lost within it, and by extension Poe’s text is a means of producing this effect within the reader, teasing him or her out of their established function and having them unite with both narrator and narrated in a boundless textual whole. In becoming the ‘I’ of the tale the reader is confronted with the yawning inexplicability of a text not beholden to the governing parameters of narrative; it is a sublime ascension, but one that, like all Romantic revelations, leaves the observer bewildered, and with no clearer understanding of the metaphysical space that they have glimpsed and which defies rationality. It takes seven days for the narrator to successful commit his murder, just as it took seven days for God to create the earth. And just as God – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – impossibly fashioned the whole of creation (and therefore himself) from nothingness, so too does Poe create a space in which the entirety of the text and the triad responsible for its communication – Author, Narrator and Reader – deconstruct themselves into a paradoxical state of nothingness that nonetheless asserts itself as being.
IV
As the text proceeds it becomes evident that just as the narrator has been dismantled, and the old man before him undone, the reader who has ascended through the framework of the story to take both their places must also, inevitably, be destroyed, ironically at the very moment they ascend to power. The heartbeat, which has passed from character, to narrator, to reader, and merged all into one, is only given beat in the physical action of reading the text. The rhythm of the tale therefore becomes the rhythm of the reader’s own heart, meaning that when the story concludes the reader, logically, dies, their metaphorical life blood no longer propelled by the thrust of the narrative. Thus, in concluding the physical act of reading the words on the page, we murder ourselves, the final suicidal act in this textual murder-pact.
And so then to the ‘spot’, the ‘damned spot’ that the narrator claims must be destroyed in order to be free within the confines of the story. For as it is revealed, when the narrator leaps upon the old man, smothering he and his eye, he takes his place, both literally and figuratively, and once he has assimilated the other into his own identity, no stain remains (‘no blood-spot whatever’) to account for the previous existence of the figure that has been replaced. Similarly the tale, in which the reader must finally ascend to the role of author, ends with a spot – a period at the base of an exclamation mark – a spot which literally designates the demise of the narrator, and which leaves the reader physically and figuratively standing over the resulting corpse, his or her eyes passing over that piece of punctuation, which can no longer be considered the property of either the author or narrator that placed it upon the page. As the text falls to silence, the heartbeat of the work – our heartbeat – ends, the final act of murder within the text our own quiet suicide.
By the end of the work the demarcations that traditionally define fiction have dissolved; it is impossible to know whose heartbeat is being heard, whose ears even register the sound, and ultimately, who speaks the very words that fill the page. By the completion of the tale, after Poe’s cacophony of thumping and shrieking and sprays of punctuation have swelled to its climactic crescendo, the tale (the heart), contradictorily continues, as an amalgam of, and in spite of, the necessary textual participants required to propel its beat. Just as the three planks of wood that obscure the old man’s heart share the same physical appearance (the pronoun ‘I’) while beneath all three beats one heart, so too do the three figures necessary for the creation of any text merge into one. And it is in Poe’s presentation of their amalgamation that the true horror of this text plays out, for in the space of four short pages we are equally reader, writer, and murderer; we create, view and destroy ourselves in a cyclical interrelation without end. Like mirrors, reflecting their images off one another into infinity, both reader and text remain bound to one another in a disquieting evocation of the telling of a tale, reliant upon one another for meaning, but lost in the abyss of their union.
Notes
1 For the purposes of this study I shall be speaking solely of three figures: the ‘Author’, the ‘Reader’, and in this instance, the ‘Narrator’ (or focal character). Clearly when this study refers to the ‘Author’ (even when it uses the name ‘Poe’) it should be noted that it is not my intention to speak of the living, physical identity known as Edgar Allen Poe, but merely the linguistic shadow the notion of ‘Authorship’ casts over his work. Similarly, when I speak of the ‘Reader’, I do not refer solely to myself but rather to any potential audience who may take up this work. Throughout the study of Narratology numerous other, at times contradictory, frameworks have been offered for the division of the narrative agents at work in any text, from Chatman’s conception of six participants: Real Author, Implied Author, (Narrator), (Narratee), Implied Reader, and Real Reader (Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978, p.151), to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s revision of this structure down to four participants: Real Author, Real Reader, Narrator and Narratee (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London, New York: Methuen, 1983, p.89), among numerous others. For the purposes of this study, however, the divisions to which I am alluding are perhaps best outlined by Wayne Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), as, in this sense, my study works under the presumption of an ‘Implied Author’, ‘Implied Reader’, and the Narrator who mediates between them.
2 Camus’ wonderful description in this revelatory moment is such that I shall include more: ‘I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we”. When I get to “This is what we are”, the game is over and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden’ (The Fall, by Albert Camus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, pp.102-3).
3 Leading Barthes to famously content that it was the author’s life that was the real secondary text: ‘Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it I clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou – in his anecdotal, historical reality – is no more that a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus’ (‘The Death of the Author’, by Roland Barthes. Image Music Text. London: Fontana, 1977, pp.142-148, p.144).
4 This paper owes much to the exemplary analysis of Poe’s work conducted by Johann Pillai in ‘Death and its Moments: The End of the Reader in History’ (MLN 112.5, 1997, pp. 836-75). Many of the themes presented in this paper consequentially parallel this fine work, and hope to further its interpretation of the text.
5 Throughout this paper I shall refer to this narrator as male, however it should be noted that the gender of the character remains tellingly indistinct throughout the text; Poe intentionally leaves any such identifying details unreported, resulting in a narrator who is nothing more than a disembodied voice for the reader to contextualise.
6 See Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961) and The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974) for a full discussion of the unreliable narrator (their fallibility or untrustworthiness) and the textual irony that propels such a method of storytelling.
7 And tellingly, here, the control required for the successful relation of a story is this narrator’s only barometer for psychological stability, a complete surrender of psychology and identity to fictive logic.
8 Again, the narrator is not attributing the eye to the old man here. The word ‘vulture’ is not in reference to the victim upon the bed, it is merely a descriptor of the eye itself (‘I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person’), leaving the image of the eye effectively floating in space, disconnected from any contextualising detail.
9 My emphasis.
10 Pillai, ‘Death and its Moments’, p.850.
11 Which of course it is, beating within his own chest.
12 And if one should attempt to interpret this heartbeat as the narrator’s own merely mimicking the old man’s at the moment of his death, then ironically this repetition only serves to further enhance the argument that they are two minds in the one body.
13 My emphasis.
14 Pillai, ‘Death and its Moments’, p.840.
15 Pillai, ‘Death and its Moments’, p.839.
16 But while the reader is being lured into drawing parallels between his or her role within the text and that of both the narrator and old man (whom the narrator is intent upon destroying, potentially making the reader a victim of the very murder they are witness to), the narrator is likewise striving to assume a role outside his traditional purview, effectively usurping the role of the reader. By positioning himself as the most fervent and attuned listener possible, able to hear to the events of the story in a manner that even the reader cannot hope to achieve, he ruptures the fundamental division between the speaker of a text and those to whom he speaks. Consequentially, the narrator invites the reader to take his place within the fiction by assuming the role (through the ironic action of being a better audience) of the narrator.
17 Again: ‘And now – have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton’ and ‘Yet the sound increased – and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.’
18 Pillai, ‘Death and its Moments’, p.854.
19 This extraordinary passage, in which the narrator carves himself apart, reads in full: ‘I talked more quickly – more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men – but the noise steadily increased.’ As the narrator slips into an uncontrolled frenzy it is the two sensory perceptions demanded of the reader, and which are central to the meaning of the tale, that define his status: observation and noise; seeing and hearing.
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