Frantic forensic oratory: Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2001 by Brett Zimmerman

Poe also displays knowledge of rhetorical "dogma," both ancient and modern. In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin suggests to the narrator that "some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description" (6: 47; see also 10: 143-44). And that Poe was knowledgeable about both ancient and modern rhetoric is shown by some remarks he makes in his Marginalia:

We may safely grant that the effects of the oratory of Demosthenes were vaster than those wrought by the eloquence of any modern, and yet not controvert the idea that the modern eloquence, itself, is superior to that of the Greek. [...] The suggestions, the arguments, the incitements of the ancient rhetorician were, when compared with those of the modern, absolutely novel; possessing thus an immense adventitious force--a force which has been, oddly enough, left out of sight in all estimates of the eloquence of the two eras.

The finest Philippic of the Greek would have been hooted at in the British House of Peers, while an impromptu of Sheridan, or of Brougham, would have carried by storm all the hearts and all the intellects of Athens.

(16: 62; see the nearly identical remarks in a Poe review [10: 58-59])

Elsewhere in the Marginalia we find a reference to Cicero's speeches: "The best specimen of his manner [Professor Charles Anthon's] is to be found in an analysis of the Life and Writings of Cicero, prefacing an edition of the orator's Select Orations. This analysis [...] is so peculiarly Ciceronian, in point of fullness, and in other points, that I have sometimes thought it an intended imitation of the Brutus, sive de Claris Oratoribus" (16: 103). In fact, Poe reviewed Anthon's Select Orations of Cicero for the Southern Literary Messenger in January, 1837 (9: 266-68). In "The Man of the Crowd," the narrator refers to "the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias" (4:134), the fourth-century Sicilian rhetorician and chief adversary of Socrates in Plato's Gorgias. The forensic oratory of Gorgias employed "highly musical forms of antithesis, involving isocolon, homoioteleuton, parison, paramoion and--above all--abundant paranomasia" (Cluett and Kampeas 33)--figures Poe himself uses on occasion in his own prose. Poe sh ows his familiarity with another ancient rhetor in his discussion of the mystical Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Quintilian mentions a pedant who taught obscurity, and who once said to a pupil 'this is excellent, for I do not understand it myself' (15: 260). At any rate, Allen Tate, after acknowledging Poe's "early classical education" (and Christian upbringing), is certainly wrong when he goes on to say that Poe "wrote as if the experiences of these traditions had been lost" (49).

We do not have to be denouncing bitterly the King of Macedon or carrying on in the British House of Peers to engage in the art of persuasion, however, for we employ rhetoric every day of our lives, usually for the most ordinary of needs and unconsciously; nor do we need to have all our mental faculties in good working order to exploit rhetoric--as Poe demonstrates through the desperate narrators in his tales of criminal homicide. In, for instance, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Imp of the Perverse," the mentally disturbed murderers want to convince their auditors of the reasonableness of their crimes--to make their audience understand that these things are comprehensible according to ordinary motives of human behavior and psychology. The profound irony, of course, is that these protagonists employ the traditional, the classical, language of reason (and primarily the Aristotelian appeal to logos) to justify and defend the actions of unreason. Readers should adopt the same stance of ironic detachment as Poe him self enjoys; that is, we should be aware of the discrepancy between his narrators' irrational actions, motives, and their techniques of rational argument, their forensic oratory. Like another American literary psychologist, Herman Melville, Poe recognized that victims of mental diseases do not appear to be psychologically ill all the time--that hysterical ravings and incomprehensible babblings do not always identify the insane (also the lesson in "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" [especially 6: 72]). Poe would have appreciated Melville's psychoanalysis of John Claggart: