10 - “This Hideous Drama of Revivification”: Poe and the Rhetoric of Terror

Summary

THE NARRATOR OF “BERENICE” (1835), surely one of Edgar Allan Poe's most horrifying tales, presents himself as a man afflicted by a pathological “intensity of interest” so acute that he is utterly taken up “in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.” Among the activities symptomatic of his peculiar condition he notes the following:

To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire, to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind. (PT 20)

He goes on to say that his condition, though perhaps not unprecedented, seemed to defy “anything like analysis or explanation.” This rhetoric of negation is surely meant to awaken the imp of the perverse that sleeps in every reader and to provoke an attempt to produce the very explanation that the narrator forecloses.