Recomposing "Valdemar": Graham Greene reweaves a tale by Poe - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

Style, Fall, 1993 by Brian Diemert

Despite his relatively short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe has left an indelible imprint on a vast range of writers from Baudelaire to Borges to Barth. Graham Greene, too, sees the footsteps of Poe before him, as allusions to Poe's work in several short stories and in A Gun for Sale demonstrate.(1) Nowhere, however, is Greene's debt to Poe more obvious than in Greene's early short story "Proof Positive" (1930), which takes as its model Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845). Both stories concern themselves with suspension in that both Valdemar and Weaver exist within a space between life and death. However, Greene's handling of the subject differs markedly from Poe's in many ways. In "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" the narrator is ostensibly concerned with presenting the truth of a fantastic situation. His narrative is written to correct "a garbled or exaggerated account . . . |that has become~ the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations" (1233). This narrator thus claims for himself an authority, supported by his position as a scientist, which, as a number of critics such as G. R. Thompson and Michael Williams have noted, he cannot sustain because Poe's ironic perspective consistently undermines him. Also undermined is the narrator P-----'s belief that he can control language so as to render it unambiguous and fully adequate to the representation of a single univocal interpretation of events. Greene's story is equally ironic in that the circumstances of Weaver's address distance it from the supposedly empirical and fact-based account of Poe's narrator. "Proof Positive" tells the tale of Weaver's attempt to explain the unexplainable to a gathering of the "local Psychical Society" (538), and in this respect the narrative foregrounds Weaver's struggle "to surmount enormous obstacles to speech" (538). That is, in Greene's story the empirical bias of Poe's first-person narrator, P-----, is abandoned for a third-person narration, focused through the skeptical Col. Crashaw, that takes as its subject the inability of language to make present an absent mystery. However, both stories figuratively present models of narrative that reflect their own telling. As I will argue, Valdemar and Weaver can both be read as inscribed figures for their narratives' own discourse: each of the characters is central to his respective story and each story ends with the rapid decomposition of the character. Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is both the model for and the precursor of Greene's story, but Greene's reworking of Poe's tale is highly suggestive insofar as it reveals several properties of narrative itself.

The most obvious point of contact between the two stories is in their endings, both of which involve the sudden dissolution of the subject of the narratives. How we interpret each of these endings fundamentally alters our sense of the stories. Walter Benjamin tells us that "|d~eath is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death" (94). In the moment of death "a man's knowledge or wisdom . . . his real life . . . first assumes transmissible form" (94). Frank Kermode and Peter Brooks have seen this insight as advancing "the ultimate argument for the necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality" (Brooks 22).(2) Certainly, both "Valdemar" and "Proof Positive," like many other stories such as Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," have endings that startle us and abruptly send us back into the text. Poe's story announces its retrospectivity from the outset, but its sudden conclusion, like the end of Greene's story, urges the reader to reconsider the story, to look back on it ironically so as to find those hints of explanation that the story's conclusion seems not to possess. In Poe's text this action undermines the narrator's confident assurance that he will explain the "facts in the case." The story's final paragraph describes only the dissolution of Valdemar: no further explanation is forthcoming. Since the "case history" is without conclusion and since the metalanguage of the opening paragraphs is not reinvoked, we also see the collapse of a discourse that seeks to provide a "true" or correct, univocal account. As J. Gerald Kennedy argues in a slightly different context, "the grotesque final scene betrays the limitations of human efficacy and reaffirms the sovereignty of death" (62).(3) The reader understands at the story's end that Valdemar's suspension between life and death is complicated by an inner decay that occurs despite his mesmerized state.

While mesmerized, Valdemar exists as both a presence and an absence. His paradoxical utterance, "I am dead" (1240), which Barthes finds so suggestive ("Textual" 153-54), fully exposes the gap between the signified and the signifier and between the event and the narration of the event, since the self-cancelling nature of the utterance evades lexical certainty. For Barthes, this "language serves no purpose . . . it is nothing but itself," affirming an essence that is not in its place ("Textual" 153), The utterance opens onto "the paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard of category: the 'true-false,' the 'yes-no,' the 'death-life'" ("Textual" 154). However, this utterance also establishes Valdemar as a cypher for the text itself. As the site of suspension between life and death, he corresponds to the "'dilatory space' of postponement and error" (Brooks 96) that is the space of writing wherein narrative perpetuates itself, through mechanisms broadly identified with repetition, while always moving towards its end (Brooks 102-03). The model for narrative that Brooks invokes here, though he casts it in Freudian terms, is similar to that of Barthes, who in the essay on "Valdemar" and in S/Z sees in narrative an abundance of codes, one of which--identified in S/Z as the hermeneutic code--sustains the narrative by announcing the presence of an enigma in the narrative and then delaying the movement towards its resolution by providing obstacles that disrupt the straightforward linearity of the narrative. The life of the narrative is thus preserved while the reader's pleasure is heightened by the hermeneutic code's creation of suspense. Anything that delays the solution to the enigma--from a hesitancy about the meaning of a single word, to intrusive passages of description or narrative commentary, to, in longer narratives, the presence of a subplot--creates suspense. In this way all narrative exists as a site of suspension since suspense occurs at all levels of the narrative's discourse.