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

The glance that "sees that the first two glance leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it" belong to the Imp of the Perverse. The Imp of the Perverse seizes the murderer's secret, even as the murderer is seized by the policeman in the crowd:

Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have don it, but a rough voice resounded in my ears - a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned - I gaped for breath. . . . [And] then, some invisible fiend, I though, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul. (831)

To make a confession that leads to one's own execution is to seize what language attempts to hide but every act of telling leaves exposed: the destruction of being in the act of naming.

In scene two, the scene of the telling, the "glance that sees nothing" belongs to "the rabble," who suppose the narrator to be "mad," and to all scientists who fail to acknowledge perverseness as "a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt" behind human actions (827). "Had I not been thus prolix," the narrator tells his confidant, "you might either have misunderstood me altogether; or with the rabble, you might have fancied me mad. As it is, you will easily perceive that I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse" (830). The narrator and the imaginary listener see that the rabble do not see the Imp of the Perverse, but delude themselves as to the secret of what they hide - the tale itself as a further manifestation of perverseness. The glance that "sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it" belongs to the author and reader, to Poe and to us.

As for those of us who seize, or comprehend, the perverseness of our own literary act, and who see, too, that seizing it only furthers the act, Poe, though he traps us in the act, has provided a warning:

To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at though, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed. (829)

How often do we read within reach of a friendly arm? Our greatest hope is to suddenly close the book. But then - like the unfettered narrator - where would we be?

Blanchot compares literature to

a silence that talks even in its dumbness, a silence that is speech empty of words, an echo speaking on and on in the midst of silence. And in the same way literature, a blind vigilance which in its attempt to escape from itself plunges deeper and deeper into its own obsession, is the only rendering of the obsession of existence, if this itself is the very impossibility of emerging from existence, if it is being which is always flung back into being, that which in the bottomless depth is already at the bottom of the abyss, a recourse against which there is no recourse. (50-51).