THE KINDRED ARTIST; OR, THE CASE
OF THE BLACK CAT

John Harmon McElroy

An essay on Edgar Allan Poe in an academic journal devoted to American humor is to be expected.¹ But the focus of this essay, which is on "The Black Cat" as a species of humor, will, I suspect, appear surprising, and therefore requires some introductory comment.

The story that the axe-murderer tells in the first person in "The Black Cat" is distinctly unfunny from his perspective. He pens his manuscript from a "felon’s cell" on the day before his scheduled execution ("to-morrow I die"), having been caught, the second time the police searched his house, in possession of undeniable-evidence of his crime (his wife’s head-cloven corpse carefully concealed in the cellar) and having been tried on that and other evidence and found guilty of murder in the first degree. He announces a wish to tell a "homely narrative," of "mere household events." But the reader of "The Black Cat" discovers that the story includes, in addition to his murder of his wife with an axe, his maiming and strangulation of a cat and the nearly fatal destruction by fire of the first home he shared with his wife. An ordinary reader, amidst his or her shudders, is likely to feel in reading a tale of so much violence that its only amusing feature is the narrator’s unawareness of what properly constitutes a homely narrative.

The reason for categorizing the story as comic is that dramatic irony is its sine qua non. "The Black Cat" has two simultaneous perspectives: the narrative and the authorial. The discovery of these puts the reader at a distance from the narrator’s concerns, places the narrator in a garish comic light, and completely dissipates that sympathetic feeling for the narrator which is the inevitable accompaniment of reading "The Black Cat" as if it had only the narrative perspective. The doomed felon appeals to our sympathies as readers. But the joking author, Edgar Allan Poe, appeals to our reason. The joke, as is so often the case in Poe’s brand of humor, is intellectual.

A proper understanding of this story illustrates rather exactly one of Poe’s most important strictures about the well-wrought short story, which he expressed in his reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, the first of which was published the year before "The Black Cat." This stricture stipulates an artful, careful reader:

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A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.²

 The stipulation of readers possessed of skills in reading commensurate with and responsive to the skill and care of the creative artist ("a kindred art") has perhaps not been fully appreciated in assessing Poe’s theory of the short story.

"The Black Cat" (1843) is formulated on the same principle as A. B. Longstreet’s "Georgia Theatrics," which introduced Longstreet’s humorous collection Georgia Scenes (1835). In both of these short fictions, humor depends on seeing what the talking voice of the story is really talking about. There can be no evident joke in reading "Georgia Theatrics"—only the amusement of comically distorted grotesque language—until we reach the point of finding out that the talking voice is pretending a furious fight with another person. Similarly there can be no evident joke in "The Black Cat" until we find out that the talking voice is only pretending remorse for what he has done, despite his protests of sincere recognition of his heinous crimes. In both cases the humor is dependent on a visual recognition of discrepancy between assertions and deeds. We hear what is being said and see what is or has been done.

The great difference between the two stories lies, of course, in how their authors structured the reader’s discovery of the pretense which constitutes each story’s authorial joke. Longstreet does it simply and directly. He creates a framework, and within this framework has visual discovery of the talking voice’s pretense occur naturally and climactically. The dual perspectives and comic distancing of this story are straightforward. Poe, however, constructs a manuscript containing physical anomalies and relies entirely on the kindred artistry of the reader to spot these anomalies as such, and thus to see, beyond any reasonable doubt, the difference between the narrator’s assertion of his spontaneity and the proof of his premeditation. In sum, Poe’s "The Black Cat" is designed, and can

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only be read because it was so designed, as a hoax or diddle on sentimental readers who too readily pity criminals proclaiming their innocence of malicious intent.³

We may be quite certain of Poe’s intention in "The Black Cat" because his well-known theory of the short story consistently emphasizes the importance of each and every detail in constructing the effect that, in his opinion, an author of a short story has to have clearly in mind before beginning the task of composition. Plot serves effect in Poe’s theory, and no detail of plot can be allowed to be merely ornamental in a skillfully wrought story. Each has to bear its proper amount of stress in building toward the effect of the whole composition.⁴ Therefore, we may be sure, when we find in the text of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe two instances of dead bodies concealed in freshly plastered walls, that such a coincidence must be deliberate parts of a meaningful design.

The reader who thinks and feels that the singularity to note in "The Black Cat" is the narrator’s insanity may never make the connection between the narrator’s first victim (a pet cat) being immured in a freshly plastered wall and the second instance of the same thing (his immurement of his wife’s corpse in another freshly plastered wall). Indeed, it may surprise some who have studied the text of this story that there is such a coincidence in it. Yet it is this detail of two freshly plastered walls concealing the bodies of two victims of the narrator’s insanity that unequivocally distinguishes the authorial perspective from the narrative for those who contemplate Poe’s design in "The Black Cat" with requisite kindred art.

The dramatic situation of the speaking voice must never be overlooked as being what may be thought of as the stage for the theatrics in "The Black Cat." This situation is that the narrator has been lawfully tried and found guilty of premeditated murder. This stage, or implied framework, is evident in the fact that he has not only been detected in the crime of murder but condemned to die for it. The question inherent in his condemnation for murder in the first degree is, on what evidence did the narrator’s jury find him guilty of willfully planned cold-blooded murder? The answer is. on the evidence of the coincidence of fresh plasters and what was concealed in each freshly plastered wall.

The narrator admits to killing a cat (by hanging it "in cool blood"). and the carcass of this cat was immured in a freshly plastered wall behind his bed, the night before the house in which he was then living burned to the ground. But the narrator denies agency for this

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immurement. He sticks to the cock-and-bull explanation that he first gave impromptu to the crowd of witnesses who saw the immured cat’s image in the wall. This explanation obscures the fact of the dead cat’s body having been placed inside the wall and, as much as possible, the fact that this wall was freshly plastered shortly before the fire. The narrator’s explanation of this first publicly known instance of the immurement of a victim of his insanely violent ways is full of tell-tale discrepancies. These make it finally incredible except to someone whose sympathies have been too thoroughly aroused to permit precise observation of its laughable flaws.

The particulars and sequence of details in this explanation are crucial to understanding "The Black Cat." The narrator admits that he hanged the cat in cold blood in the garden of his house. Immediately after this admission he reports the fact of the terrible conflagration that destroyed his house that night, taking particular pains to deny a connection between the hanging of the cat and the conflagration. This denial is itself meaningful because it implies his fear that someone could link these two events, which no one would normally understand as having any common link. It is also important to notice in his description of the killing of the cat his report of extreme remorsefulness over the deed. This emphasis includes the asseveration that he wept while he killed the cat. The narrator thus claims tenderness of heart even while describing the commission of a cruel deed. Also, he claims the forgiveness of both God and the reader for the deed because of his sincerity. Moreover, he claims with laughable dramatic irony that he (not the innocent cat) is the victim, specifically the victim of an implacable force he calls "Perverseness." From his perspective the innocence of the cat caused him to kill it, as earlier the cat’s unoffensiveness had caused him to maim its face.

It is necessary to review the entire sequence of this passage in order to be in a position to see, believe, and discuss its designed meaning. The sequence begins with the narrator’s self-justifying idea of perverseness:

Of this spirit [of Perverseness] philosophy takes no account.Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it

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as such? This spirit of perverseness. I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence of its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood. I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree:—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart:—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire—a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words "strange!" "singular!" and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if in has relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck.

When I first beheld this apparition—for I could scarcely regard it as less—my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd—by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber, This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of

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my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.⁵

This crucial sequence contains several features that comically reveal the narrator’s deliberate interpretation of the evidence against him in order to exculpate himself. His self-serving interpretations here, as elsewhere in his manuscript, occur despite the assertion in his introductory paragraph that "My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events" [italics added].

Despite his disclaimer, the narrator is obviously not presenting a plain, succinct chronology without comment. Rather, he is busy accounting each step of his way for the unaccountable fact that he, the intrinsically innocent victim, is a convicted felon awaiting execution. He attributes this woeful fact to the spirit of perverseness, and the reader who accedes to the legitimacy of this explanation accepts the narrator’s point of view completely. The reader who can muster his common sense will, however, laugh at this idea as it deserves to be laughed at, and laugh, too, at the narrator’s preposterous account of how the bas relief of the cat with the rope around its neck came to be where it was without the narrator’s agency. Throughout his manuscript, the narrator pities himself and appeals for sympathy; the filament of feeling that he spins to trap the reader is his doctrine of the perverseness of human nature.

The narrator identifies perverseness as a primitive impulse inherent in the nature of man, which moves all mankind, the reader included, "to do wrong for the wrong’s sake." He would also have us believe, that, like him, any of us would commit "a vile or a silly action" just for the sake of the wrong and because we knew we should not; and that moreover each of us has done so "a hundred times." The common sense of the reader ought to prompt him to ask the honest question, When was the last time I committed a vile action just because I knew it was against the moral law of mankind to do so? The answer will be immediately clear. Far from being universal, such cruelties as gouging out the eyes of small animals or strangling them with halters is rare, although it is quite true that all men and women have at some time probably committed some silly act just for the sake of violating one of the lower-echelon social taboos. But the inhibitions of civilized decorums are, thankfully and definitively, too powerful to justify belief in universal vileness motivated by a spirit of perversity, however latent the potential for such "primitive" behavior may theoretically be.

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The real point of the narrator’s doctrine of perverseness, of course, is to justify his own sadism, and to get the reader to identify with him. The narrator wants the reader to excuse his behavior, not absolutely but comparatively, by seeing it as a type, perhaps extreme, but recognizable, a type of behavior that the reader has himself been guilty of "a hundred times."⁶ He instinctively knows that he can have the sympathy of the reader only by obscuring the great moral distinction between silliness and vileness, and by obscuring also the evidence of his own premeditation and planning of mayhem. It would seem that in too many cases he has succeeded.⁷

In reporting his hanging of the cat, the narrator states that what he did would have jeopardized his soul "if such a thing were possible." This is an important statement. It suggests that forgiveness is, theologically speaking, due the narrator. He has established to his credit that his behavior is of a kind no worse than that of other men, and now he hints to the reader that God forgives his behavior because fundamental Christian theology teaches us that God will not condemn the penitent for their sins. And the narrator was, by his own account, so penitent that he wept while he committed his "cruel deed" against the cat. The impression left on the reader by the narrator is that of moral sensitivity and deep regret over his perversity. He readily admits that what he did was a great "sin," but he committed it only as the thrall of an implacable metaphysical force. The innocence of the cat caused it. He personally was sorry all the while it was happening.

With regard to the narrator’s account of the fire, we should notice that there is no apparent need for him to make reference to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in reporting that the hanging of the cat preceded the fire. This seemingly unwarranted denial of causality should arouse suspicion.

Specifically, the reader should notice and ponder the significance of the witnessed fact that the one wall of the burned down house that remains standing has been recently plastered, and that on it is the perfect image of the cat with the rope around its neck. The narrator muffles as much as he can the fact of this fresh plaster by removing the word "plastering" as far as he can from the tell-tale phrase "recently spread." ("The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire—a fact that I attribute to its having been recently spread.") The alert reader will also notice that this is an inner wall ("a compartment wall") and therefore "not very thick," The location of a thin wall in the part of the house that would be hottest in a conflagration calls the reader’s particular attention to

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this wall having resisted the action of the fire.

The morning following the fire the narrator visited the site and found a gathering of people crowded around this unique wall, with its bizarre image of a cat with a rope around its neck. These witnesses to the existence of such a wall are justifiably exclaiming "‘strange!’" and "‘singular!’" Anyone familiar with Poe’s famous theory of the short story, and his requirement that all details have to contribute to the designed effect of the story, should recognize the authorial stress that is being placed on the importance of this singular wall. Poe could hardly have been more accommodating of the reader within the restrictions of his design for "The Black Cat."

The sight of this wall with its cat image fills the narrator with "wonder and terror," as well it might. For it is damning evidence against his pretended innocence of premeditated mayhem. There can be no mistaking the image, because the rope around its neck identifies it as the cat the narrator hanged the day before the fire in a garden adjacent to his house. The narrator perforce admits it is the same cat. His explanation of how its image got where it was on the wall without his agency is the funniest thing in "The Black Cat."

He would have us believe that an onlooker in attendance the night his house went up in flames did the following: perceiving the deadly danger to the house’s sleeping inhabitants and spotting the carcass of a cat hanging from the limb of a tree in the garden, this Unknown cut that down and dexterously whanged it through an open window to arouse the people of the house to the fire. But wait, dear reader, there is more: this charitable finger of cats, according to the narrator’s account, hurled the carcass in a nice trajectory so that it landed (thud) and lodged between the narrator’s bed (the headboard) and the freshly plastered wall against which it stood, without waking him. (It was not the feline fire-alarm that woke him, he says, but "the cry of fire." Never does he claim to know that anyone hurled the cat through his bedroom window. He merely supposes, upon "reflection," that this "must have" happened, given the indisputable image of the hanged cat where it is, an image which cries out for explanation as a uniquely baroque detail in an otherwise perfectly commonplace nineteenth-century occurrence: a house fire.) There is still more, however, to this hypothesis. Once so nicely located between the headboard and the freshly plastered bedroom wall, the hanged cat must them have been pressed, by the action of "falling walls" (gently falling?), into the fresh plaster of this "not very thick" intertor wall, whereupon the intense heat generated by the fire must have combined with the chemical action of the lime of the plaster in

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