The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [199]
“D——,” replied Dupin, “is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni;6 but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum,7 an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms ‘a certain personage,’ he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack.”
“How? did you put any thing particular in it?”
“Why—it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank—that would have been insulting. D——, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words—
—Un dessein si funeste, S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.8
They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée.’ ”
Grotesqueries
Poe considered the “grotesque” a less serious mode in which disfiguration or repulsiveness usually signals satirical purpose. Of course he sometimes used deformity to make a character seem dangerous (“Hop-Frog”) or horrifying (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”). But as if mocking his own anxieties about death, decay, living entombment, mutilation, or dismemberment, Poe created a number of farces in which grotesque transformations become laughably outrageous. In an early satire—not included here—a protagonist’s “loss of breath” causes him to be thrown from a coach (fracturing his arms and skull), jolted by an electrical charge, hung as a robber, and buried alive. In another tale, a hapless fellow loses his head—literally—in a wager with the devil. Poe’s comic imagining of unthinkable atrocities perhaps sustained an illusion of authorial control over human frailty. Yet his grotesque tales sometimes point to deformities in the nation itself.
Poe’s first truly “American” tale, “The Man That Was Used Up,” subtitled “A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,” evokes the controversy of Indian removal as it alludes to the mysterious condition of General John A. B. C. Smith. In quest of the legendary Indian fighter, the narrator receives tantalizing hints about the indefinable oddity of Smith’s appearance. The general’s friends invariably blame his condition on those “terrible wretches,” the Indians, yet by conflating the Kickapoos (a real tribe) with bugaboos (groundless fears) Poe hints that Smith has been victimized by his own genocidal hatred of Native Americans. Ironically, a black servant assembles the prosthetic devices that now constitute the artificial American hero.
Caught between regional loyalties and national ambitions, Poe was more equivocal on the subject of slavery and sometimes (as in “The Gold-Bug”) caricatured African Americans. But in “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,”