Death and telling in Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse." - Edgar Allan Poe

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Arthur A. Brown

But why shall be say more? To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless! - but where? (832)

The murder is the tale's first death. The narrator's "swoon" prefigures the tale's second death, his imprisonment and hanging, which in turn prefigures the tale's third death - at once its transformation into writing and the end of the written tale, the moment of transference itself. As long as the narrator remains in chains, or fetters, we are with him. At the end of the tale, the narrator dissociates himself from us and displaces us at the same time. Speaking of chains and fetters, he may as well be speaking of the signifying chain and his existence in letters. To ask, "Why shall I say more?" is to show contempt for an existence dependent on our own - and for our existence, which is dependent on his. But when the tale ends, we are neither in fetters nor dead. Perceiving our non-existence, we have no choice but to recover our mortal being - our position outside of the tale's signifying chain and, if only for a moment, outside of language.

More than half the tale is taken up by the narrator's general discussion on the nature of the perverse, that "irreducible sentiment," which "in the pure arrogance of reason, we have all overlooked" (826). The narrator is "here" - that is, in prison - and we are "here" with him, as a result of that "paradoxical something" that can be neither named properly nor comprehended. The tale is presented as a reply to the question asked by the imaginary listener. The narrator states,

I have said this much, that in some measure I may answer your question, that I may explain to you why I am here, that I may assign to you something that shall have at least the faint aspect of a cause for my wearing these fetters, and for my tenanting this cell of the condemned. (830).

But perverseness, like "literality," cannot be explained; it can only be acted out. We have entered into a personal relation with the narrator and into the present tense of the telling of the tale. It is in letters, not fetters, that the narrator actually appears, and reading the tale we must share responsibility for that appearance. "That I may assign to you" is a strange way of putting it. In the first place, the narrator seems to be assigning to us a certain blame for this tenanting the cell of the condemned. Whether the cell is a metaphor for the tale or vice versa becomes impossible to say - each constitutes the space of the other. And of course language is the world in which we "assign" things to each other. It is a world, too, of assignation, a time and place where lovers meet and where all who meet are lovers - if we understand lovers to be, like the Marchesa Aphrodite and the stranger in Poe's "The Assignation," persons who are willing to meet in undying death. And perhaps it is language itself that is but the "faint aspect" of its own cause and of the cause of our fettered existence - the signifier of our "radical . . . primitive impulse" (827) to annihilate being in pursuit of it.