Poe's "The Black Cat" as psychobiography: some reflections on the narratological dynamics - Edgar Allan Poe - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Ed Piacentino

Published initially in the United States Saturday Post on 19 August 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" remains one of his most mystifying and horrifying tales. The narrator's motive for murdering his wife, as one might expect, has elicited much commentary and speculation from critics. Few critics seriously accept the narrator's own dubious rationalizations for the cruel murder either of his pet cat or of his wife, that being what he has done, so he confesses, he attributes to the "spirit of PERVERSENESS ..., one of the primitive impulses of the human heart ..., to do wrong for wrong's sake" (Poe 852); or his claim at the end of the tale that the cat, which he calls "a hideous beast had seduced [him] into murder" (859). In short, the retrospective narrator, who is actually two personsaethe man who killed his wife and the retrospective teller of the taleae is an untrustworthy and unreliable authority. What J. Rea has observed about Montresor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," also seems applicable to the unnamed narrator of "The Black Cat": Montresor reveals certain things to the reader, Rea states, "in order to divert attention from the real reason for the crime" (57). Kenneth Silverman has offered a similar observation, but with more psychological suggestiveness, indicating that tales like "The Black Cat" "dramatize failures of various defenses, the protagonists' futile attempts to conceal from themselves and others what they feel" (209). The narrator's motive for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime is not consciously premeditated. Nor is the narrator able to understand rationally or to persuade convincingly why he has done this terrible deed, though he repeatedly offers explanations--actually untenable rationalizations--for his former actions.

James W. Gargano, in what many Poe critics regard as the premier essay on "The Black Cat," may have been the first commentator to offer a cogently and logically convincing explanation to show that what the narrator "assigns" to the "spirit of perverseness" and the "Fiend Intemperance" (Poe 851) may, in fact, "be reduced to ordinary psychological and moral laws" ("Perverseness" 172). Viewing the narrator as a case study with an abnormal personality, Gargano perceives what he calls the narrator's "sentimental excesses, his extreme happiness in feeding and caressing his pets," as an indication of "an unhealthy overdevelopment of the voluptuary side of his nature" ("Perverseness" 173). And Poe's narrator does substitute this manner of behavior for normal relationships with human beings. Many of the subsequent critical views of "The Black Cat" have attempted to explain the narrator's bizarre behavior, especially his murder of his wife, within a psychological or psychoanalytical framework. (1)

While details of Poe's life offer some fertile ground for examining probable autobiographical sources for "The Black Cat," we will heed the warning of James W. Gargano, who has cautiously advised the tale's readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of "The Black Cat" as "identical literary twins" ("The Question" 165). (2) Instead, the emphasis here will be to focus on the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat" and to apply selected methodology of French critic Gerard Genette, whose book Narrative Discourse provides an engaging systematic study of narrative theory. (3)

Before proceeding to the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat," I would like to give a brief overview, describing some of Genette's concepts that will form the basis for my examination of the narratology as it relates to the psychobiography of the narrator of Poe's tale. Drawing on a notion addressed initially by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, that narrative, in contrast to dramatic depiction, is illusory because "no narrative can `show' or `imitate' the story it tells," Genette calls narrative the "illusion of mimesis" (164). Moreover, narrative serves as a device the author uses to tell or suggest to the reader information that may be unknown to the characters in a work of fiction, information actually outside the story time the narrator is recounting. Even so, as Genette further notes, "narration always says less than it knows, but it often makes known more than it says" (198). This particular dynamic in which the narrative "makes known more than it says" seems especially relevant to first-person narratives, often uninterrupted monologues presented in a single, sustained voice. This narrator, who may relate events principally about himself, presenting an autobiographical narrative (Genette calls this an "autodiegetic" narrative), may also sometimes narrate what he has learned or realized subsequent to the action he is describing. And thus what the narrator recounts may consist of perceptions, sometimes subtle and elliptical and therefore tantalizingly elusive, about his past experience (particularly how events may have affected him) of which he may have been consciously unaware before he tells the story. Genette uses the term "focalization" to indicate the narrative perspective, the character who, in a first-person narrative, tells the story or through whom the story is focalized. In first-person narration, the narrative is focalized, according to Jonathan Culler in the foreword to Narrative Discourse, either "through the consciousness of the narrator at the moment of narration or through his consciousness at the time in the past when the events took place" (10). In the case of "The Black Cat," what information readers receive comes exclusively through the autobiographical narrator, who is also the protagonist, "at the moment of narration." In other words, the information received is restricted to the knowledge the narrator has, which, according to Genette, is "the information the hero has at that moment in the story as completed by his subsequent information, the whole remaining at the disposal of the hero-become-narrator" (Narrative Discourse Revisited 77). Finally, Genette establishes the functions of the narrator or focalizer. Among those that will be of concern here are: the "narrative function" or telling of the story; the "directing function," the focus here being on the narrative text, the narrator's manner of telling the story, providing, in Genette's words, an "internal organization" for the text, establishing "its articulations, connections, interrelationships" (Narrative Discourse 255); the "narrating situation" or "function of communication" "whose two protagonists are the narrateeaepresent, absent, or impliedaeand the narrator," the latter's function being to establish a communicative link with the narratee (Narrative Discourse 255-56); the "testimonial function" or "function of attestation," which shows the narrator's relationship, "the one accounting for the part the narrator as such takes in the story he tells, the relationship he maintains with it" (Narrative Discourse 256); and finally and the "ideological function," whereby the narrator may perform such extranarrative activities as directly or indirectly digressing from story time to give "organization to the narrative by means of advance notices and recalls ... [or] memory-elicited attestations," or to interrupt the story time with abrupt and direct intrusions, which may or may not represent a justification for his actions or may or may not become a form of didacticism, "an authorized commentary on the action" (Narrative Discourse 257). This last function is exemplified frequently in "The Black Cat."