Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (103 page)

50
(p. 384)
“You are young yet, my friend.... Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”:
These comments are ironic. The narrator does learn for himself what is going on within the mansion, although his unwitting perceptions are like those of many other Poe protagonists. Maillard’s counsel about hearing and seeing, notably the latter, make him near literary kin to Dupin (in “The Purloined Letter”), who sees through what mystifies others, and who is thought mad by some, according to his companion.

51
(p. 386)
Upon the whole ... all sorts of conventional customs:
This sentence is similar to one in “The Masque of the Red Death,” as are some other features in the tale. Poe may have intended “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” to function, in part, as a parodying of “The Masque of the Red Death,” as it is of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Such comic purpose also gives this late tale affinities with “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” because both suggest that Poe is having fun at the expense of his own methods and themes.

52
(p. 389)
“then there was Bouffon Le Grand ... Cicero ... Demosthenes ... and Lord Brougham’s from the mouth to the chin”: Bouffon Le Grand
literally means “The Great Clown” in French; some Poe specialists think that Poe may also allude to Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a renowned French scientist who published a 44-volume work on natural history. Cicero refers to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106—43 B.C.), the renowned Roman orator and statesman.
Demosthenes
(384?—322 B.C.) was an impressive Greek public speaker who practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth, standing near the sea, to develop his oratorical talents.
Henry Peter Brougham
(1778-1868) was an English politician and writer who was a founder of the
Edinburgh Review,
an influential nineteenth-century periodical. The combination of clown attributes with those of grave thinkers and orators carries along the theme of deception and grotesquerie that has already been established.

53
(p.390)
“Madame Joyeuse was a more sensible person, as you know”: Joyeuse
is French for “joyful”; that she is joyful and high-spirited becomes evident in her imitation of a crowing cock. Madame Joyeuse may derive from an episode of similar comic cock-crowing imitation in
Charles O‘Malley
(1841), by Irish novelist Charles Lever, which Poe reviewed in
Graham’s Magazine
(March 1842). As in some of his earliest tales, Poe here insinuates a jibe at a popular author.

54
(p. 390)
“but there was really much sound sense, after all, in the opinion of Eugénie Salsafette”:
This last name comes from
salsify,
or oyster plant, an edible root vegetable. Given the dinner-table context, it may hint of human identity blurring with that of food, thus enhancing the aura of craziness central to the story. A link with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which Roderick is preoccupied with interconnections between animal and vegetable life, is also possible, as is a backward glance at the food-drink motifs permeating most of the “Tales of the Folio Club.”

55
(p. 391)
My nerves were very much affected.... I now ventured to inquire the cause of the disturbance:
This paragraph, in which intrusive noise frightens the assembled company, who are, excepting the narrator, all posing or masking, recalls the kindred effect of the clock’s appalling striking in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

56
(p. 393)
“I am happy to acknowledge as belonging of right to the celebrated Fether”:
Finally, the title is explained, and the peculiar name spellings only point up the off-centeredness pervading the tale, which the narrator doesn’t comprehend. In some respects, his deadpan stance resembles that of Huckleberry Finn.

57
(p. 393)
pandemonium
in petto: That is, chaos in secrecy
(in petto
is Italian for “in the breast”). The lunatics give way to their deranged emotions within the walls of the remote asylum, where nobody is likely to discover them. Pandemonium, in English poet John Milton’s epic poem,
Paradise Lost
(1667), is the palace of Satan in Hell, a natural locale for uproar and confusion. Pandemonium does indeed ensue, once the real keepers break in upon the mad revelers.

58
(p. 396)
“Yankee Doodle,” which they performed, if not exactly in tune, at least with an energy superhuman, during the whole of the uproar:
Frenchmen playing “Yankee Doodle,” once America’s most widely popular national song, may signal another example of the craziness occurring before the unwitting narrator.

59
(p.399)
“Old Charley Goodfellow”:
This is another example of Poe’s wordplay: Charley is anything but good; as a colloquialism,
fellow
defines a person as a lowlife.

60
(p. 404)
crack novels ... Ainsworth:
“Crack novels” are excellent, superior novels; Poe uses the phrase ironically, as the subsequent remarks and names demonstrate. Catherine Gore was the English author of
Cecil
(1841), a fashionable novel that she was accused of pilfering from
vathek
(see note 43 of
Tales).
Three popular English novelists in Poe’s day (and well beyond) were Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882).
Turnapenny
is Poe’s comic name for one who writes principally for money.

61
(p. 413) In
looking around me for some subject ... resembling those of John Randolph:
Poe invented most of the names or situations mentioned in this paragraph—for example, M. Ernest Valdemar, “Bibliotheca Forensica,” and Issachar Marx.
Wallenstein
( 1798-1799) is a play by German author J. C. F. von Schiller.
Gargantua
(1532) is a book of legends about a giant by French author François Rabelais. John Randolph (1773-1833) was a gaunt Virginia politician from Roanoke.

62
(p. 423)
But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing was the representation of a
Death’s Head, ...
as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist:
This insect resembles the imaginary beetle in “The Gold-Bug.”

63
(p. 424)
one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History: A Synopsis of Natural History,
by Thomas Wyatt (based on a work by Céron Lemonnier), was published in Philadelphia in 1839; some thought that Poe himself had written the work. The description of the insect that follows unmistakably comes from Wyatt’s book.

64
(p. 426)
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge:
We never learn the precise nature for Montresor’s animosity, although if he is a devout Roman Catholic and Fortunato is a Mason, there would be sufficient ground for his feelings. The Free and Accepted Masons, known as Freemasons or Masons, is a secret fraternal society that originated in fourteenth-century England. During the later eighteenth century, when the type of cloak known as a roquelaure came into fashion, animosities developed between the Roman Catholic Church and the Masons. For
tunato
is Italian for “fortunate” or “fated.” Each or both may apply here, given the outcome of the story.

65
(p. 427)
“Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry”:
Interestingly, Amontillado is a variety of sherry. Perhaps Montresor implies that Luchesi cannot distinguish Amontillado from lower-grade sherry. Just as interesting, the name Luchesi may sound in English as “look hazy,” thus characterizing Fortunato’s perceptions. For that matter, despite his seeming thinking to the contrary, Montresor likewise has misperceptions. That is, later in the story, when he has nearly completed the walling up of Fortunato, he appears to be almost on the verge of admitting that the task sickens him; second, his later boast that for fifty years nobody has discovered his crime may be no genuine boast after all, but rather a confession that this long-past episode has attained a fixity in his life—that is, that it bothers his conscience.

66
(p. 429)
He laughed and threw the bottle upward with a gesticulation I did not understand. I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement—a grotesque one:
Here and in the following short sentences are allusions to the fraternal brotherhood of Masons, whose rituals and symbols have typically been surrounded with mystery. Neither Fortunato’s nor Montresor’s actions are of genuine Masonic origins. If a Roman Catholic-Masonic opposition is a primary motif in this tale, then Montresor’s method of executing Fortunato represents a devout Roman Catholic’s ironic meting out of justice to a heretic. Such an attitude would make the “love of God” interchanges toward the end of this tale highly ironic—because Montresor felt that he was acting for the love of God, and that his ridding the world of a heretic demonstrated such love.

67
(p. 430)
“He is an ignoramus,” interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels:
Montresor’s phrasing recalls the design on his crest of arms—a foot crushing a serpent whose fangs are embedded in the heel; in this case, ironically, he is the serpent at the heels of his enemy, and the attention he devotes to detailing his story of these long-past events represents his being emotionally “crushed” by such “heels,” in these circumstances the emotional effects occasioned by his subsequent murder of Fortunato, such that he cannot forget them.

68
(p. 432) In pace requiescat!: “May he rest in peace!” (Latin). We are left thus with a final irony; for whom does Montresor invoke peaceful rest: Fortunato (whose remains have rested in peace for fifty years) or Montresor, whose guilt has dogged him for that same number of years? The open-endedness of this tale makes it a forerunner to much that subsequently has been called “modernist” or “postmodernist” literature.

69
(p. 433)
He would have preferred Rabelais’ “Gargantua” to the “Zadig” of Voltaire; and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones: Gargantua
(1534), by the French humorist François Rabelais, is a satirical narrative about a giant, peace-loving prince; Zadig (1748), by French satirist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), is a witty but nevertheless savage satire. The point made in this paragraph is that the king is coarse and bawdy (as Rabelais’s writings often were thought to be), and that anything refined was unlikely to suit him. Thus, in this tale, Hop-Frog’s gruesome “joke” partakes of flagrancy, albeit it is “practical” from his point of view—after all, the king “loved his practical jokes,” and the dwarf takes him at his word. Hop-Frog’s jester’s costume suggests that of the hapless Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado,” but his final method of treating his antagonists reminds us more of Montresor, the protagonist in that same tale. Hop-Frog may be the court “fool,” but such figures were often thought to be endowed with more genuine perception than their masters.

70
(p.436)
“we stand in need of characters”:
That the king and his ministers need “characters,” or, as a dictionary would cite as one definition, “moral excellence and firmness,” is obvious. Hop-Frog’s ultimate joke indeed casts them as the very sorts of beings they are, as manifested in the descriptions of them and in the blurring of seriousness and joking.

71
(p. 436)
“Endeavoring!” cried the tyrant.... “Drink, I say!” shouted the monster, “or by the fiends—
”: The king’s being a “tyrant” and a “monster,” who invokes “the fiends” reveals his dehumanized state, and it aligns him with the narrator in “The Black Cat,” whose emotional makeup is similar. In both tales, too, a disdain for the feminine is evident among those destined to come to bad ends.

72
(p. 438)
“the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts
—
and of course, they will be
as
much terrified as astonished”:
The masquerade motif will, of course, enhance the understandable confusion over who is human and who animal, but Hop-Frog is sure about the “real beasts” nature of the king and ministers, an understanding borne out in a following paragraph, where the “beast-like,” “hideous” qualities of the eight orangutan masqueraders bear out “their truthfulness to nature.”

73
(p. 441)
The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light:
The climactic scene, in which the “brilliance” of Hop-Frog’s jest concludes, represents the ending of his enduring the garish artificial lights of the king’s “world” in which masquerading is all. The escape of Hop-Frog and Tripetta through the skylight symbolizes their removal to the freedom of their own, natural world.

1
(p. 445)
The Narrative... To Which that Distressing Calamity Gave Rise:
Within the title of Poe’s novel we may sense a deft shift from
Narrative,
which term may be part factual, part imaginative, on through terms like
Details
and
Account, to Incredible Adventures
and
Gave Rise.
This shift signals a gradual movement from everyday realism or credibility to increasingly fantastic experience, which may parallel a dream-nightmare structure, which begins in reality and moves on into nonrationality. The “Preface” and the text of the narrative proper continue the counterpointing of truth versus fiction and appearance versus reality. The ironies in such discrepancies are thus early established, and they continue throughout.

2
(p. 447)
detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties:
Poe seems here to employ a pattern, also used in “The Purloined Letter,” of placing clues to alternations of realism and fantasy directly before readers, along with suggesting that such alternations may trigger imagination—which stimulation in turn may account for the increasing fantastic qualities in Pym’s adventures.