Poe the tale-tell heart

The tale-tell heart by E.A Poe :

   A cursed 19th century poet, author of famous fantasy and detective stories, a relentless literary critic, much appreciated in France since the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, but an unloved writer in his native Puritan America, where he was disliked for his dissolute life (drunkenness, marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, gambling debts, death from alcoholism in the Baltimore gutter), his criticism of American democracy and his aesthetics that were the antithesis of positive thinking.

   Fascinated by madness, crime and evil in all its forms, he belongs to an equivocal literary genre, dark romanticism, and stages perverse monsters with dark and destructive passions in gloomy and anguished atmospheres. The tale-tell heart, published in 1843, is a good illustration of Mallarmé's formula: "Poe is the absolute literary case": between artistic mastery and madness, ambiguous games of reality and imagination, polysemy (the title for ex) and even irony.

   Denis Gauer in an article for FRENCH JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES says that Poe's tales, among which The Tell-Tale Heart, have long been classified as « gothic ». Yet Poe was not merely concerned with satisfying (however brilliantly) a craving for this sombre genre. Thus in The Tell-Tale Heart (as in numerous other stories) he uses the « gothic » conventions to (albeit discreetly) express his own conceptions of fear and of the literary process, through the use and manipulation of various themes : time, darkness vs light, madness vs sanity, concealings vs revealing, being the most prominent ones.

🡪 His literary strategy turns out, beyond the apparent smoothness of the narrative, to be a very modern one which anticipates the latest theories about the text.

  The narrator-protagonist of the short story occupies the central place in the plot and gives a meticulous account of his perfect crime. The focus of the story is « the perverse scheme to commit the perfect crime ». One author, Paige Bynum, asserts that Poe wrote the narrator in a way that "allows the reader to identify with the narrator".

• The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is generally assumed to be a male. However, some critics have suggested a woman may be narrating; no pronouns are used to clarify one way or the other.
• The relationship between the old man and the narrator is ambiguous. Their names, occupations, and places of residence are not given, contrasting with the strict attention to detail in the plot.
• He’s symbolically killing himself just like in William Wilson (cf « the uncanny »)
• The chronology runs over seven days with the crime taking place on the 8th

   It all begins with a phobia of a veiled eye ('a pale blue eye... covered with a hideous veil... a vulture's eye') that obsesses him ('every time that eye fell on me my blood froze'). With the help of a veiled light, he enters the closed room of the one-eyed old man to free himself from the evil eye, murders him, and then hides the body under the floor. In a mirror effect, the victim's heartbeat merges with that of the executioner, blurring the opposition between innocence and evil that traditionally characterises the « noir novel ».

   The story is striking in its rigorous formal construction and could be a perfect illustration of the theory of the "unique effect" that Poe develops in Philosophy of composition. We enter the morbid tale vividly, in the midst of a kind of conversation, 'in medias res' as in Homer's Odyssey. All the elements are organised towards total concentration and the text is tightened up as much as possible, without any digression, around an axis of coherence built around the horrifying scene of the murder at midnight, the time of the crime. This gloomy midnight colours the whole text with its dark tone unifying the theme (evil and the moral opacity of the world), the aesthetics (darkness) and the psychology (the instincts of death). The play of contrasts and parallels around sounds and light, the frequent repetitions, contribute to the beautiful harmony of the text.

...