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

As the instrument of murder, the poisoned candle tells upon its victim, but it does not tell, or give away, the murderer. "Of the remains of the fatal taper," the narrator tells us, "I had myself carefully disposed" (830). It is in the absence of the poisoned candle, in its undetectability, that the confession and the tale of the confession take place. In the same way, the silence of the purloined letter - its concealment by the Queen and then the Minister - necessitates the tale of detection. The tale of detection displaces (by displaying) the letter's concealment. In narrative, the death that does not tell is endlessly displaced by the death that tells. By calling his tale "The Imp of the Perverse," rather than, say, "The Poisoned Candle," Poe is naming not the signifier materializing the agency of death but that agency itself - or better, the very desire, or need, to put that agency into play, which is to say, to tell.

As in "The Purloined Letter," two scenes in "The Imp of the Perverse" establish a structure of repetition determined by three viewpoints: first, the scene of the crime and the confession, and second, the scene of the dramatized narration, in which the discussion of perverseness and the re-telling of the murder and the confession take place. In scene one, the "glance that sees nothing" belongs to the murder victim and the Coroner. The murder victim does not see he is being murdered any more than the Coroner sees a murder has taken place. They are both readers who do not see what there is to be read: the poisoned candle.

The "glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides" belongs to the murderer. The murderer, of course, knows he has murdered his victim, and he believes he can keep the act secret: "The idea of detection never once entered my brain" (830). But as we have seen, he becomes "haunted" by the thought of his own security, by the phrase he repeats to himself perpetually, "I am safe." It is the act of speech itself that betrays him: "One day, whilst sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud, the customary syllables. In a fit of petulance,I remodelled them thus: - |I am safe - I am safe - yes - if I be not fool enough to make open confession!'" (831). Nothing could be more ironic than to say, "I am safe," for the moment we name ourselves in speech, we have committed what Blanchot calls that "deferred assassination" that language is (43). The phrase that haunts the murderer seems to be the very "ghost" of his victim: "And now my own casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered - and beckoned me on to death" (831). As Felman says of the letters and the ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw," the "customary syllables" and the "ghost" of the murder victim in "The Imp of the Perverse" become "the operative terms of the very movement of death within the signifier" (243). Speech takes the place of the poisoned candle, itself becoming a pure signifier. Poe is once more putting into practice his theoretical conviction, stated in "The Philosophy of Composition," that "effects should be made to spring from direct causes" (16). The phrase "I am safe" is the ghost of the murder victim and, in advance, of the murderer. Speech is the direct cause of the movement of death within the signifier.