Mesmerization with the Lights On: Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect.

Poe’s Myth of Self: A Structural Barthesian Reading on “The Black Cat” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

“…Poe's stories describe the tension between the Self and the Other, which is illustrated by the Orang Utan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the cat in "The Black Cat." In this light, this paper agrees with Taylor (2012), Fugate (2012), andTindol (2021) in the sense that it finds that the two tales suggest the existence of an irreducible gap between the Self and the Otherto the point that each can be a threat to one another. Quick to do things out of emotional impulses, as in the case of the narrator in "The Black Cat," toward the Other can result in the diminishing power of subjectivity, mental derangement, and physical destruction.…”

“…This is also to say that the tension in itself is fiction for the sake of self-preservation (and capital accumulation), but it comes with a cost: mankind's enabling kinship with nature will end in vain (see also Fugate, 2012). What is left between human subjects and the environment is, for Taylor as well as for Tindol (2021), the Self's irresoluble fear of its environment. This conception of Self, as bleak as it is, actually implies Poe's love for natureand this is why Crosby (2014) says that Poe is an ecophilia.…”