The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [98]
Poe philosophizes further on compulsive self-destruction in “The Imp of the Perverse,” which begins as an essay on the impulse to defy reason and morality. This reflection leads to a brief narrative, which (as in “The Black Cat”) proves to be the confession of a condemned criminal. Having committed an undetectable crime, murdering a man to inherit his estate, the narrator becomes consumed by an irrational, irrepressible need to confess his homicidal ingenuity.
Another story of doubling, “The Cask of Amontillado,” presents a more intricate “perfect crime,” Montresor’s entrapment and living entombment of Fortunato. Spurred by his rival’s insults, the narrator vows to punish with impunity and walls up his enemy among the bones of the Montresors, signaling an odd bond underlying their rivalry and thus explaining his obstinate need to confess. Poe wrote this tale in the midst of a raging feud with writer-editor Thomas Dunn English.
In Poe’s last tale of antagonism, “Hop-Frog,” a spectator recounts the jester Hop-Frog’s revenge against the cruel king for humiliating Trippetta, another dwarf “forcibly carried off” from her home. Composed for a Boston antislavery newspaper, the tale alludes crudely to the threat of slave revolt in Hop-Frog’s ploy of dressing the king and ministers as “ourang-outangs” before putting them to the torch. The story unfolds, however, from a perspective sympathetic to the jester, who exposes the true character of his longtime oppressors by carrying out his deadly masquerade.
METZENGERSTEIN
Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero.
MARTIN LUTHER1
Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity (as La Bruyère says of all our unhappiness) “vient de ne pouvoir être seuls.”*2
But there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity. They—the Hungarians—differed very essentially from their Eastern authorities. For example, “The soul,” said the former—I give the words of an acute and intelligent Parisian—“ne demeure qu’une seule fois dans un corps sensible: au reste—un cheval, un chien, un homme même, n’est que la ressemblance peu tangible de ces animaux. ”3
The families of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein had been at variance for centuries. Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly. The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy—“A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.”
To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning. But more trivial causes have given rise—and that no long while ago—to
*Mercier, in “L’an deux mille quarte cents quarante,” seriously maintains the doctrines of Metempsychosis, and I. D’Israeli says that “no system is so simple and so little repugnant to the understanding.” Colonel Ethan Allen, the “Green Mountain Boy,” is also said to have been a serious metempsychosist. [Poe’s note] consequences equally eventful. Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government. Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into