Lecture 38- Short Story in the Modern and Post-modern Era III

Good morning and welcome back to the lecture series on Narrative Modern Fiction. We are talking about short story in the modern and postmodern era and this is in continuation with our previous discussion on Edward Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. So this is a short story we were discussing in our previous class. We have spoken about the setting. The setting is key to the mood of horror. It creates the mood of horror, suspense and disbelief, the disbelief, the state of disbelief in which we find Fortunato till the end where he cannot believe that a close friend has walled him and left him and is about to leave him, desert him to his lonely death. Poe was known as a dark romantic of the twilight which means that he was one of a group of authors who focused on their work of the dark side of humanity. We were talking about this motive of revenge, of a very calculated revenge that Monticello plans against Fortunato and he is looking for the right moment to get back on all the injuries that have been hurled by Fortunato on him earlier. So we see that evil sin and the capacity within every human being, the dark side of human, the shadow inside us is something that Poe is really interested in, something that makes us do the terrible things and we see how calculated Monticello is. He says on the very day he decides to kill Fortunato in, he has dismissed all his servants. So he has no one in the house, he wants to escape with some kind of impunity, he wants to wash his hand off this heinous act once it is done. He dismisses his servants like I said and we also, so therefore we see that in a way this character Monticello is also, he is coward, he cannot you know head on collide or conflict with anyone. There is cowardice, there is a lot of scheming, he is very Machiavellian character so to say. He cannot confront a haughty, supercilious man like Fortunato and so he stabs him from behind at his back and the act of walling someone in where we know that in the deep dark alleys where he has left, in the deep dark store where he has left Fortunato, he will decay and die. He has left him to rot and die because no one will even know that a living being is there. It is very serpentine and danger ridden journey to the catacombs and no one, no human will reach there to help him you know come out of that wall. Fortunato is left, he is damned with a very slow process of death that is going to come and you know overcome him after a point. So the capacity of doing something dreadful, like I said Poe was, has focused on this in several of his works. The focus on the catacombs is there but this, I mean the focus on the catacombs shows us how it functions, the function of the catacombs. So the focus and the symbol of the catacomb, focus on the catacomb and you know the symbol of the catacomb as a you know part of one's psyche. The catacomb as a psychological symbol for the state of mind of the narrator, the narrator murderer as understood in the opening sentences. The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best as I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You who so well know the nature of my soul will not suppose however that I gave utterance to a threat, at length I would be avenged. This was a point definitely settled, but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. The setting of the story is during a carnival, like I said there is a Dionysian mood, a dominant Dionysian mood in the story with the way it opens and the carnival is taking place probably in Florence, Italy when characters wear masks and you know fine clothing. It is irony that in this you know go as you like kind of a setup, we see that Montress chooses to dress up like a clown. So, it when we dress up as someone else we in a way it reveals our inner, it reveals our inner self. He dresses up like a jester and he makes fun of himself by choosing to pursue Montressor. He is and the names are also very symbolic. The name Fortunato he is probably from the aristocratic background. This could also be seen, the story could be seen as a kind of vindiction you know at the level of class because they originally had a class difference too. We see that Montressor is from a masonry background. So he had a struggling past. He is not an aristocrat. He is not traditionally a very rich man. Today in the current time of the story, he has gone on to become wealthy. But the kind of you know the sense of injustice that Montressor feels against Fortunato could have a class dimension. But everyone wearing mask, it is also symbolic of the two selves, the dual selves or the several selves that each individual carry within himself. So the question of indignation when someone who is more privileged keeps you know humiliating the other that is not as privileged also comes into existence. That is a kind of question that surfaces when Montressor is planning to take revenge. The symbolic function of the catacombs is something we may want to discuss. So the story goes like this. We had passed through walls of piled bones with casks and functions intermingling into the inmost recesses of the catacombs. As Montressor leads Fortunato on into the deeper depths of the labyrinthine, catacomb is very labyrinthine. It is a serpentine and you know a very complex mapping of the catacomb that we find in description. One realizes that once one enters this kind of a labyrinth, it is very difficult to exit it. And so as readers as we are part of this dangerous voyage, it is also a psychological journey, the psychological state of Montressor that is exposed, that is revealed to the readers. The deeper we get into Montressor's psyche as readers, the more his devilish, sadistic and horrific aspects are revealed. His thoughts and actions become very very clear to the reader what he is up to. And he knows, he has studied Fortunato very well. And so he knows how his, you know Fortunato is a proud man, he is extremely haughty. So he is referring to Lucchese who might be a better connoisseur of wine than Fortunato. And he challenges him, which goads, which kind of prods him to go further and further follow Montressor to his own death, to his own coffin. So it is the key that Montressor commits his heinous crime once they have penetrated the depths of the catacombs. So once they penetrate the depth of the catacombs, they have also penetrated, the reader has penetrated the deep, dangerous, dark side of Montressor's psyche and once one reaches the end, one is able to express the extreme, extremely disturbed, perverse side of Montressor's psychology that is revealed to the reader. Now when a person is walled in, when he is bricked in, it could be a representation of the psychological repression of Montressor's evil desires and actions. One can guess that after this cold-blooded sealing, sealing of Fortunato and abandoning him there to die, rot away slowly, Montressor is able to put on a mask of respectability of a very normal social being and operate in a Venetian society once more. So the question of mask, how mask is symbolic, what kind of a person lurks behind this mask When we are merrymaking in a carnivalesque situation, there could be a murderer, a cold-blooded murderer like Montressor among us. So Montressor could be anyone among us, how, it is a kind of introspection that puts us into, any of us could be, I mean could harbor that possibility of, that murderer instinct of Montressor in us. Maybe we, all humans, you know, merrymaking and fun-loving, going to parties and doing the normal things, being the social self, have this murderer's instinct in them. We are constantly, we are all constantly wearing a persona that suits us. So having buried his unacceptable psychological side, just like burying Fortunato, he has buried his unacceptable psychological side and now after doing that, Montressor can freely partake of normal society again and the labyrinthine catacombs therefore represent the mood of terror and horror. Poe himself seems to have had this morbid fear of premature burial and this theme keeps coming back in, you know, recurrently in several of his short stories such as The Premature Burial, The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, Ligia and Morella, all of which reverberate this claustrophobic terror of being walled in. One also finds the case of walling up a victim in The Black Cat. The fear lies in the buried person still being alive, still being conscious and aware of the horror folding him in, horror enveloping him. The cask of Amontillado belongs to the Romantic movement in art and it is part of the Romantic sub-genre of the Gothic, a tale of horror with the Gothic, you know, paraphernalia. We have all the props that support the larger, you know, movement or the larger discourse of the Gothic through dungeons, through catacombs and cadavers, right. We have skeletons, heaps of skeletons. So maybe this is the kind of place where not only wine is stored but lot of secret has been stored for generations. So many cadavers, dead bodies have rotten, decayed and turned into heaps of bones. It is a very grisly, a very bone chilling kind of ambience that Poe has successfully depicted through words. However, Poe transcends the genre of the Gothic as he observes that his horror was not of Germany or part of the larger Gothicism, Gothic movement. He is not drawing it from any particular movement or cultural repertoire, pre-existing cultural repertoire but he draws on his own soul. So Poe was a pioneer in writing psychological fiction and they often dealt with, struggled with extreme neurosis. So if not abnormal personalities, we could very well say that a man like Montresor is perverse, he is mentally skewed. So we see that Poe was also an early advocate of the movement of art for art's sake. However, unlike his contemporary writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, he did not write moral allegories. He was not interested in writing moral allegories. In the story, the murderer gets away with his crime. Like he wanted, he escapes with impunity. For once, we might want to think what happened if Fortunato escaped this death. In terms of socio-economic position, Fortunato is definitely more powerful, more entrenched in social power than Montresor. So Montresor has arranged the situation in such a way that it does not look like a murder till he has ensured that Fortunato is indeed trapped. He cannot be blamed later on. Should Fortunato escape his death, he cannot blame Montresor. Montresor does his bit. He keeps warning Fortunato and thereby provoking his pride by saying that it is a very dangerous place, the catacombs are dangerous, it is very cold and damp inside, not many people can go. So it becomes a kind of adventure for Fortunato. He all the more wants to go there because he has been, precisely because he has been forbidden. But then Montresor is doing his bit, should Fortunato stay alive and is able to come out of the catacombs, he cannot be kind of implicated for any kind of crime or offence. As a backup, he has dismissed his servants. So there are no eyewitnesses. So Poole was a pioneer in writing psychological fiction. This is a vivid exploration of the criminal's psyche, how the mentality, the way of thinking of the avenger works and such a thought process is extremely neurotic most often and if not abnormal like I already said. In the story, the murderer gets away, he is caught free. Whatever meaning the tale offers lies in the portrait of Montresor and it is contained in his own words. So the neurosis is almost like he is giving away through writing after so many years. He is confessing to the reader the dark side of him, something that lay buried just like Fortunato's body. D. H. Lawrence in studies in classic American literature says that Montresor is devoured by the lust of hate which destroys his soul just as he destroys Fortunato. He may be the ghost of Fortunato, the phantasmal presence of Fortunato comes to haunt him back later. So critics have pointed that Montresor resembles Fortunato's unpardonable sinners who suffer from an intellectual pride and monomania that destroy their human dimension, their humanity. So his revenge echoes a passage from Thomas Nash's Renaissance novel, The Unfortunate Traveller. We see a grain of The Unfortunate Traveller in Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. I quote, nothing so long of memoir as a dog, these Italians are old dogs and will carry an injury a whole age in memory. I have heard of a box on the year that hath been revenged thirty years after. The Neapolitan carrieth the bloodiest mind and is the most secret-fleering murderer. Whereupon it is groin into a common proverb, ill give him the Neapolitan shrug when one intends to play the villain and make no boast of it, unquote. So the nature of the injuries and offense that Fortunato had caused to Montresor however remain unrevealed. We are getting only the version of Montresor. So he, according to him, Fortunato has caused him several injuries and offenses, they could have a class dimension like I have mentioned earlier. Montresor appears to be telling his story to someone who has more knowledge than Poe's reader. So at one point he says, you who know me so well, you know the nature of my soul and who may be assumed to know something of Fortunato's past conduct before this fateful night, something that led him to his own death. So unlike Montresor's audience however, Poe's audience, like the readers that are reading the story have no basis for judging the extent to which Montresor has been humiliated or how far Montresor's actions are reasonable. So the focus therefore is not on the reason for revenge but on the revenge itself, not on how Montresor behaves as he does but only on what he does. So we do not have the before and after of revenge, the entire story highlights and centers on the revenge, the act of revenge and how well, how shrewdly, how cold-bloodedly it has been all planned. Just as Montresor does not reveal his motive for the crime other than identifying it as a crime of revenge, it is self-avowedly a crime of revenge. Neither does he share with his audience's response when the deed is done. So what does he feel like after killing? Does Montresor feel better after Fortunato has been warned and he has paid for his insult Does Montresor feel vindicated? He has been avenged adequately. Does he celebrate the death of his rival? Does he smile inwardly years later at the thought of his deed and how he also escaped? It was a very clean act of murder. He escaped punishment, he escaped law with impunity. So on the contrary, we could also ask as readers, has the dead Fortunato's laughter stayed on ringing inside Montresor's mind which makes him write the story. The reader never gets to know all these details, it is left to the reader's imagination and understanding. So 19th century audiences scan the story for hints of negative feelings. Is Montresor sorry or penitent for committing a murder? Does he regret his actions as he nears the death, as he nears the end of his own life? Does he look to God for forgiveness? Why is he making this act of confession through writing, through narration, although as though he is sitting in a niche with a friend that knows both him and Fortunato for long and he is confessing it to his act, hateful act to his friend. So there is no hint of any purgation or probably there are just barest of hints. Poe's intention is rather to focus his story very tightly and that is once again going back to the form of short story, that is how it is considered as a very successful story. One could sit and read it at once, there would be no requirement for two sittings in terms of the space and time that has elapsed in the story and he does not explore, Poe does not explore the events leading up to the crime nor the results of the crime but focuses vividly on the grisly bloody act of the religion itself. So the question of atonement and forgiveness, although the action of the story revolves mostly in almost entirely around the deception and killing of Fortunato, the preparations towards killing him. The questions in readers' minds have revolved around Fortunato's thoughts and deeds before the crime and Montresor's thoughts and deeds afterward. While the time between their chance meeting in this carnival and the laying of the last stone would have taken only 5 or 6 hours. So the entire story is happening within a span of, the entire act of murder is happening within a span of 5 to 6 hours and there is then revisiting, we are moving 50 years ahead and looking at this hateful incident in our hindsight, in retrospect. Montresor, what happened in the due course of time in 50 years is Montresor deceiving himself or his readers, his audience when he attributes his momentary sickness to the dampness of the catacombs, that is very striking. So he says that at the point of narrating the story, he is sick, Montresor is sick and you know, he ascribes the sickness to the dampness of the catacombs. What has happened to Montresor over these intervening years and why is he telling the story now after 50 years? Is he hoping for some kind of forgiveness? Is he carrying a piece of this gruesome incident of the deadly catacombs in him? Is he carrying the ghost of Fortunato inside of him? So the dampness of the coldness of the catacombs, is he carrying a chunk of it inside him and through all these years, he could in fact never get rid of them. So for forgiveness to occur, there must first be guilt and then atonement or remorse. Now there is no question of Montresor to ask for forgiveness because Fortunato is long dead, there is no way of reconciling with the dead rival and no mention is given of Montresor's paying any reparations to Fortunato's family that survived him like Lady Fortunato. So atonement must be with God alone, reconciliation with God alone. So who is this listener? Is he telling, is it a kind of monologue? Is he telling the story to God? God who knows Fortunato as much as he knows Montresor. So knows every aspect of these characters. At the time of the murder, Montresor hears and rejects Fortunato's appeal again and again and he does not stop wanting him. So Fortunato is very helpless, he is drunk. The bells ring, it makes him feel like a cattle, a lesser than human kind of a figure. He has been dragged to his death without him being aware. He wakes up to the situation at a very last moment when it is already too late. He cannot go, you know, he cannot escape. For the love of God, Montresor, the murderer replies yes for the love of God. But he does not stop building his wall. Surely he does not imply that he is acting for the love of God. He is in fact at that moment of, you know, at that hateful moment, he is so full of envy and other negative emotions. He is blatantly defying and rejecting godliness in every sense of the term. So Poe keeps the idea of the Christian God in the foreground in different ways. Fortunato is chained to the wall and if one look at, if one imagine the picture of the chained Fortunato absolutely unsuspecting and in a merry mood coming straight from a carnival, his position, his standing position reminds us of the, you know, the crucified Jesus. The story's last words, in past requires scape. So rest in peace are taken from the Roman Catholic funeral ritual that are spoken in Latin. So critic Jean Grosse believes that Montresor tells the story of his crime as it presumably lies on his deathbed. So there are different interpretations of the story. Critics like Grosse would read this as a confession in deathbed and he might be talking to an old friend, the you that we find, the person that Montresor addresses as you in the story's first paragraph and this you could perhaps be the priest. It could be a priest, it could be God, it could be a monologue within himself. Clearly Montresor's guilt is established as not just an earthly legal guilt, but guilt in the eyes of a God that both the victim and the murderer recognize. So at the moment when Fortunato was dying, he pleaded mercy in the name of God, he pleaded to be set free in the name of God, but that never happened. Was Montresor ever sorry? Who does not appear interested in answering this kind of a question, although he surely knows that he is raising such a question in the minds of the readers. That is the masterpiece that Poe produces, he provokes certain questions, the readers are intrigued to know further, to discover further facts about the story, but some of the ends are left open. He does not try to tie those ends. And so the answer to these questions remain tantalizingly out of reach of the reader. Hardin-Craig would say that the first paragraph of the story itself contains the kernel of the theme of revenge. Dorothy Norris notes that revenge is not only the motive of Montresor's burying Fortunato alive, but also his motive in telling the story since he failed to make sure that Fortunato understood at the time that he was the victim of revenge and since revenge is not revengeable, the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who had done the wrong. So Robert Fossum further suggests that Montresor acts out of revenge for a wrong he thinks Fortunato had done to him in the past and that his sense of guilt sickens him and finally brings him 50 years from the point of action to tell the story to someone. So I would like to conclude with reading some excerpts, especially from parts where they are travelling, they are walking deeper, deeper into the catacombs and then in the end when the act is done and the confession happens, what happens in the end? Let us see. The nighter, I said, I hear being Montresor. See, it increases, it hangs like moss upon the walls. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back. Ever it is too late. Your cough. So Montresor is warning Fortunato. It is nothing, he said. Let us go on. But first another drop of the middle. I broke and reached him a flagon of the grain. So the name of what they are consuming at that moment, the grain. Right. He emptied it at a drip. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He is completely tipsy and he is stoned. He is so drunk. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand. I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement. Grotesque one. A man dressed like a clown making grotesque movements, moving towards his death. In a drunken state. You do not comprehend, he said. Not I, I replied. Then you are not of the Brotherhood. How? You are not of the Mason. Yes, yes, I said. Yes, yes. You? Impossible. A Mason. A Mason, I replied. A sign. It is this. I answered, producing from beneath the pores of my roculaire, trowel. You jest, he exclaimed, recalling a few cases. But let us proceed to the Amontillado. Amontillado becomes the weakening sign that almost, you know, attracts him to his death. So the trowel all symbolizes the weapon. He does not show a knife. The moment Montessor takes out the trowel, which is a sign of his masonry background, you know, Fortunato recalls, he cannot believe. And this is going to act as the final weapon. So a moment more, and I had petted him with a granite. It was the end of the story we are here. In his surface were two iron staples, distant from each other, about two feet horizontally. From one of these deepened a short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key, I stepped back from the recess. Pass your hand, I said, over the wall. You cannot help feeling the night air. Indeed, it is very damp. Once more, let me implore you to return. No, then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power. The amontillado, ejaculated by friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment, I had scarcely laid the first tire of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had, in a great measure, worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moaning cry. The cry also has some kind of raw animality about it. It is almost a bovine cry, an animal crying, a helpless animal that is tired and cannot move from the depth of the recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tire and the third and the fourth. So the details and description, that is the masterpiece of Poe. Then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. That is when he has woken up to the reality and he wants to escape. But it is too late. Noise lasted for several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with more satisfaction, I seized my labors and sat down upon the bones. So think of the grotesque inside a man, a man that has, after this act, roamed in a free society like a normal social human. He's sitting on a heap of bones and enjoying the last cry for help of a man who is going to rot and decay and, you know, lie there forever. And he will give up his ghost, crying and, you know, inside a wall. So I sat down there to enjoy the mourning, the helpless crying. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the travel. The travel is a weapon, the travel is a symbol. All of these symbols, I mean, help the story establish this motive of revenge very well and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth and the seventh tire. So this intricate detailing of the act of murder, the act of walling in, it is, I mean, the detail of Montresor is present through his act, his character. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused and holding the clam books over the mason work, few feeble rays upon the fever within. So we see that there is a lot of, you know, crying, laughter following crying. And the story blurs out in the end, the way it is narrated by Montresor, we never know who is laughing and crying. And the reader might want, might think, the reader might think that a piece of, you know, Fortunato has lingered, has stayed on with Montresor. It never quite left him alone. So the haunting, you know, the crying, laughing kind of hysteria, there is a kind of hysteric tone we get in the end. So we know that the ghost, the phantasmal presence has ever since been there with Fortunato. It has perhaps driven him mad in a state of hysteria, he is recounting the story after so many years. Thank you. And I am going to meet you again with another round of discussions in another lecture.