"Here the wicked mob, unappeased, long cherished a hatred of innocent blood. Now that the fatherland has been saved, and the cave of death demolished; where grim death has been, life and health appear."
According to Baudelaire, the great romantic French poet and author, the Marché St. Honoré, which was built on the site of the old Jacobin Club, had no gates, and certainly no inscription. The Jacobins were the political club of the French Revolution, responsible for the Reign of Terror (1793), but who fell with their leader, Robespierre, in July of 1794.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 121.
The Spanish Inquisition was begun to discover and punish converted Jews (and later, Muslims) who were not true believers. The notorious Inquisition of 1483 reputedly saw two-thousand persons burned at the stake.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 121.
Compare with "MS. Found in a Bottle": "As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder I was startled with a loud humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a millwheel." There is also the suggestion of the sensation often experienced when a person loses consciousness as if one were on a huge wheel, spinning down, down, and around, with a loud humming or vibrating sound.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 121.
Poe may have in mind the seven candlesticks in the midst of which sits God the Judge, in Revelation 1:13. In "Shadow" he also speaks of the "flames of the seven lamps." The number seven has many interpretations, but, among others, it is a symbol for pain.
In Blackwood's, July 1826, Poe may have read: "This was a large apartment under ground, vaulted, hung round with black cloth, and dimly lighted by candles placed in candlesticks fastened to the wall. At one end, there was an enclosed place, like a closet, where the Inquisitor in attendance and the notary sat at a table; so that the place seemed . . . the very mansion of death, everything being calculated to inspire terror." (Compare with the rooms of "Ligeia" and "Masque of the Red Death.")
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 121.
". . . to swoon and awake in utter consciousness of any lapse of time during the syncope would demonstrate the soul to have been in such condiition that, had death occurred, annihilation would have followed. On the other hand, when the revival is attended with remembrance of visions (as is now and then the case, in fact), then the soul is to be considered in such condition as would ensure its existence after the bodily death the bliss or wretchedness of the existence to be indicated by the character of the visions." (Poe, "Marginalia," CCIX)
Thus, for Poe, a fall into utter unconsciousness would indicate that the soul itself was near death, a perilous state. But when some traces of consciousness are left, as the narrator here clings to, there is still sufficient strength for the person to recover.
Note the parallel with astral projection the idea that the soul can leave the body during unconsciousness.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 122.
According to Jung, the language of dreams is archaic, symbolic, and prelogical in other words, it is the key to the subconscious. "The dream cannot be explained with a psychology taken from consciousness. It is a definite functioning which is independent of willing and wishing, of the intentions and conscious aims of the ego. It is involutnary, like everything that happens in nature." (Psychology of C. J. Jung, Yale, 1943; p. 73)
Thus the narrator does not understand his dreams and wonders why he has them, because they stir up the "forbidden things" of the unconscious.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 122.
Auto-da-fé is often translated as "act of faith," perhaps referring to the age-old demonstration of faith or truthfulness in which one places a hand in a fire. But in Portuguese auto means a public ceremony, so that a better translation would be "A public ceremony of faith."
Although the word originated in Lisbon, it is most often applied to the ceremony of the Spanish Inquisition at which, after a procession, Mass, and a sermon, sentences were read and the convicted person executed. Heretics were dressed in the ceremonial San Benito, a yellow penitential garment with a red cross on the front and back (grotesquely embroidered for the unrepentant), and they wore a yellow miter. Those sentenced to death were handed over to the civil authorities for execution within five days, usually by burninng. The Church itself did not execute anyone.
Most of the great autos-da-fé took place when Tomàs de Torquemada was head of the Inquisition, between 1483 and 1498. The last in Spain was at Seville in 1781, although there was one in Mexico as late as 1815.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 123.
Toledo is the capital of Toledo province, in central Spain, and stands on a granite hill surrounded on three sides by a gorge. An important commercial center for centuries, it declined in the sixteenth century but gained as the spiritual capital of Spanish Catholicism.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 123.
i.e., to be buried alive. Actually, the Inquisition was involved in only two major tasks: to force an admission of heresy or sin from the accused (by torture, if necessary) and to save his or her soul by the purification of death by fire.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 123.
In Chapter 16 of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799), the hero finds himself in a pitch-black cave, and details his sensations as he attempts to find his way out.
Brown (1771-1810) is one American writer who should be better known than he is, especially among the readers of Poe, Hawthorne, and Gothic fiction in general. His Wieland (1798) deals with hypnotism, spontaneous combustion, and a murdering religious fanatic. Ormond (1799) tells of a woman who murders the man who tried to rape her. Arthur Mervyn (1800) chronicles a case of mistaken identity wrapped around a yellow-fever epidemic. Edgar Huntly may be the best, involving a hero who walks in his sleep, marauding Indians, and some effective Gothic touches all Brown's own.
Shelley, Scott, Keats, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe all admired Brown's work, and Van Wyck Brooks calls him a precurser of both Melville and Henry James. His most immediate importance, however, is that he led the way away from "puerile superstitions, Gothic castles and chimeras," as he phrased it, translating the European Gothic tradition into American terms.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 123.
The narrator has literally circumscribed his world. This is important, for it shows he has both brains and imagination, and that he can combine "trivial" discoveries with creative thought and come up with solutions to his predicament, as does the narrator of "A Descent into the Maelström."
He is an example of Poe's "passive" narrators, whose survival in a hostile environment is based on their willingness to forgo old assumptions and meet a new world on its own terms.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 124.
The image of the pit has, for centuries, been connected with Hell and destruction, as in Psalms 73:18-19: "Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment!"
These lines are also part of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," that remarkable tract by Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), the last apostle of New England Puritanism. While Poe was an alien to the New England tradition, there is a strong parallel between "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
According to Edwards, the quotation from Psalms implies that snnners "were always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he can't foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once, without warning. . . . Another thing implied is that they are liable to fall of themselves, without being thrown down by the hand of another. As he that stands or walks on slippery ground, needs nothing but his own weight to throw him down. . . . That the reason why they are not fallen already, and don't fall now, is only that God's appointed time is not come. For it is said, that when that due time, or appinted time comes, their foot shall slide. . . . God won't hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands in such slippery declining ground on the edge of a pit that he can't stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost. The observation from the words that I would not insist upon is this,
"There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of Hell, but the mere pleasure of God."
Poe, of course, is no Puritan, but if we substitute "fate" for "God" or even Poe's concept of the Godhead the similarities become clearer. Man, both writers say, is a passive element in the universe, kept from destruction only by the whim of God/Fate. The narrator escapes the pit this time. But Poe, like Edwards, suggests that there is an appointed time, as there is for the narrator of "MS. Found in a Bottle."
Despite his Puritan theology, Edwards was a highly original thinker who moved "out from an intense and sometimes fatalistic subjectivity to construct a vast, metaphysically ambitious correlative of the soul," says Daniel B. Shea, Jr., in Major Writers of Early American Literature (Wisconsin, 1972; p. 200). His words could just as easily refer to Poe, who is "Calvinistic" in his belief that the universe was created by a "fall" from unity and that man is estranged from God's ideal world.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 124-125.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 125.
The abyss is associated with nothingness, chaos, and annihilation. Writers after Poe have continued to use it in this manner. "An immense river of oblivion is sweeping us away into a nameless abyss," writes Ernest Renan in a memorable passage from Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1883), and President Kennedy in 1962 said, "However close we sometimes seem to that dark and final abyss, let no man of peace and freedom despair."
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 125.
His sleep "like that of death" ends, and he awakens in something very much like Hell. By "wild, sulphrous lustre," the narrator alludes to the burning of sulfur (brimstone), although that flame is usually blue and yellow, not the red that one would expect of hellfire.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 125.
Like the narrator of "A Descent into the Maelström," it is this "wild interest in trifles" that saves him.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 125.
Compare with the bedchamber of "Ligeia." Poe may have also been inspired by a description in Chapter Six of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin: "I started up with horror . . . on perceiving myself surrounded by demons, who, clothed in fire were breathing forth clouds of it around me. . . . What I touched was cold . . . and I comprehended that these were hideous figures scrawled in phosphorous to terrify me." Poe mentions Melmoth in a letter of July 1836 and in a review in Graham's of January 1842.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 126.
A belt or girth around the body of a horse to keep a saddle or pack on the animal's back, but also the girdle, or cincture, for a priest's cassock.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 126.
The figure of Time, as we now know it, is actually that of Saturn, who, according to tradition, carries an hourglass and a scythe. The scythe is the instrument by which Time "cuts down" all things according to their allotted span. Time can also be seen as a sort of sword of Damocles, which hangs over our heads.
Here the scythe is a pendulum, so that two symbols of Time are combined, with the pendulum adding the idea of slow, steady marking off of one's lifetime.
Poe no doubt borrowed the idea from the preface to Llorente's History of the Inquisition (1826), repreinted in a review in the Philadelphia Museum, April 1827:
"One of these prisoners had been condemned, and was to have suffered on the following day. His punishment was to be death by the Pendulum. The method of thus destroying the victim is as follows: the condemned is fastened in a groove, upon a table, on his back; suspended above him is a Pendulum, the edge of which is sharp, and it is so constructed as to become longer with every movement. The wretch sees this implement of destruction swing to and fro above him, and every moment the keen edge approaching nearer and nearer: at length it cuts the skin of his nose, and gradually cuts on, until life is extinct. It may be doubted if the holy office in its mercy ever invented a more humane and rapid method of exterminating heresy, or ensuring confiscation. This, let it be remembered, was a punishment of the Secret Tribunal, A.D. 1820!!!"
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 126.
The end of the world, the last extremity. Thule was the most northern point known to the ancient Romans. Pliny, Solinus, and Mela take it for Iceland, while others, like Camden, consider it to be Shetland, Bochart says it is a Syrian word and that the Phoenician merchants who traded to the group called it Gezirat Thule, or Isles of Darkness. Its etymology is unclear, but it could be the Gothic Tiule, meaning "the most remote land," and connected with the Greek telos, "end."
Poe mentions it again in his poem Dream-Land, where it is to be pronounced "Thuly," not uncommon in previous centuries.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 127.
Avails or profits (obsolete usage)
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 127.
Compare with Thomas Mann's (a pseudonym for William Maginn) "The Man in the Bell" (1821). In that tale, which Poe pokes fun at in "How to Write a Blackwood Article," the narrator tells how "Every moment I saw the bell sweep within an inch of my face." "To look at the object was bitter as death," but he cannot keep his eyes from it. "The bell pealing above and opening its jaws with a hideous clamor" seems to be "a ravening monster raging to devour" him. At the same time, the cavern in which he is trapped seems to be full of hideous faces, which glare down on him"with terrifying frowns, or with grinning mockery, still more appalling. At last the devil himself, accoutred, as in the common description of the evil spirit, with hoof, horn, and tail, and eyes of infernal lustre, made his appearance. . . ."
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 127.
He seems to be mesmerized by the moving, glittering object.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 127.
Lethargy caused, no doubt, by lack of food and water.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 127.
"Because of the limitations imposed upon him by an inquisitionary force, every act of balance or sanity only leads to a worsening of his situation; this paradox suggests that while Poe ordinarily remained true to his conception of the torture of the disordered personality, he did not overlook the possibility that sanity can be more terrifying than madness" (James Lundquist, Poe Newsletter, Vol. 2, 1969; p. 25)
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 128.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 129.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 129.
A poem published in Knickerbocker Magazine of November 1837 tells the legend of Archbishop Hatto II of Mainz, who was supposedly eaten by mice in the tower he had built as a refuge. Poe may have had this in mind, as well as Robert Southey's verses "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop."
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 130.
Rats are traditional symbols of infirmity and death, and so the rat's kiss is horrifying beyond mere sanitary reasons. The animal also represents plague, decay, and appropriately here the underworld.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 130.
The narrator does not escape unscythed.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 130.
He apparently sees the light from the furnace that heats the iron. This torture device is not only elaborate but fantastic, since heat would have to be provided on all four sides and somehow not interfere with the movement of the walls.
"How to Write a Blackwood Article" mentions a tale entitled "The Involuntary Experiementalist," about a man working inside a boiler who is trapped when someone, not knowing of his presence, fires the thing up.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 131.
The room has truly taken on the aspect of Hell.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 131.
What he sees is, of course, only a pit, but what he comprehends is annihilation.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 131.
Griswold, in his memoir of Poe (1850), accuses Poe of plagiarism, charging that the moving walls are stolen from "The Iron Shroud," by William Mudford (Blackwood's, August 1830). There, however, the room is built of blocks that are removed a few at a time, quite unlike Poe's. It is typical of Griswold's obsessive degrading of Poe that he trumps up this criticism but says nothing about the countless other borrowings that can be found in Poe's works (all of which have been thoroughly reworked).
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 132.
The narrator would rather die by the red-hot walls then be cast into oblivion, to lose once and for all his sole claim to existence.
"Feeling, intellect, and will function together, and the hero escapes the pendulum but he escapes into a more restricted and horrible situation. 'I had but escaped death in one form of agony, to be delivered into worse than death in some other,' he says as he enters the third and most horrible crisis. Even though the three faculties are perfectly unified when the glowing walls begin to close in, sanity can no longer help the hero. Through his feeling, his intellect, and his will, he comprehends the predicament and wants to escape, but there is no alternative left. He is completely limited in time, for no adjustment of the faculties can help him. His previous escapes have worsened his condition to the point where he gives up hope and yields at last. . . ." (James Lundquist, Poe Newsletter, 2, 1969: pp. 25-26)
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 132.
It is only when we think about it afterward that we realize that the sudden, swift retreat of the walls just in time to save the narrator is impossible. However, within the context of the tale, it works beautifully.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 132.
General Antoine Chevalier Louis Colbert, Comte de Lasalle, entered Toledo during the Peninsular War of 1808. His arrival parallels the announcement of the Second Coming in Browning's Childe Harold: "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." The man who wants to enter Heaven must first go through Hell (or at least Purgatory).
Harry Levin sees the tale as an existential parable: "The hero is not less heroic because he suffers rather than acts; nor is he less contemporary in an epoch which has so vastly multiplied the sentence of political imprisonment, and which has visualized the ordeal of ife itself through the apprehensive eyes of Franz Kafka as an arbitrary trial, an unjust imprisonment, and an unjustified condemnation. For Poe the will is constrained to choose between evils which, upon confrontation, seem worse than their alternatives: the pit or the pendulum, the frying-pan versus the fire. . . . His climactic adventure, "The Pit and the Pendulum," abandons him to the existential dilemma: the agony of the prostrate individual, isolated and immobilized, surrounded by watchful rats, threatened by an encroaching mechanism, and impelled toward a gaping abyss." (The Power of Blackness, Vintage, 1958: pp. 153-54)
Marie Bonaparte sees Poe as being caught between the male force (the pendulum) and the female (the pit), and recoiling from both. This, she says, is indicative of Poe's suppressed homosexual nature. He cannot let the scimitar "enter and split his heart the scimitar replacing the phallus," and he cannot enter the pit the female sexual organ either. His escape is "the supreme wish-phantasy of Poe, for, in effect, he was always to be tossed between these poles of his bisexuality with never a hope of escape" (P. 592)
In Jungian analysis, the pit or hole is seen as symbolic of the passage from temporal to nontemporal existence, and for Poe that is frightening merely because we do not know what lies beyond. While physical death by the pendulum is terrifying, the death of the self, as symbolized by the pit, is even more so. Yet the Jungian self does at least have a hope of saving itself: "Whenever a human being genuinely turns to the inner world, and tries to know himself not by ruminating about his subjective thoughts and feelings, but by following the expressions of his own objective nature such as dreams and genuine fantasies then sooner or later the Self emerges. The ego will then find an inner power that contains all the possibilities of renewal." (M.-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, p. 234)
Still another interpretation can be stated in purely Christian terms: only when the narrator admits that his predicament is beyond his power to escape, ad surrenders himself completely to God, can he be saved.
Thus "The Pit and the Pendulum" can be read as a simple tale of terror, a parable of man's existence, a representation of the emergence of the self, an unconscious reworking of Poe's ambivalent sexuality, or as Christian allegory. Poe seems to offer something for everyone.
The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stephen Peithman (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 132-133.
