Superego Evil and Poe's Revenge Tales

6XSHUHJR(YLODQG3RH૷V5HYHQJH7DOHV Magdalen Wing-Chi Ki Poe Studies, Volume 46, 2013, pp. 59-77 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/poe.2013.0013 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/poe/summary/v046/46.ki.html Access provided by username 'Maddie Ki' (9 Oct 2015 13:51 GMT) Superego Evil and Poe’s Revenge Tales MAGDALEN WING-CHI KI ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes the differences between traditional and Kantian retributivism. Poe’s revenge tales not only highlight the intricate links between the Law and superego evil but also lay bare the agenda of the perverse subjects of the Law. Vengeance is often justified on legal grounds: law-preserving violence, lawmaking violence, and law-bending violence. And the avenger can hide behind the Law to reap surplus enjoyment in practicing evil and executing boundless revenge. I f Poe is famously drawn to madmen and miscreants, he is also deeply interested in sane but radical subjects of the Law. Retributivism often justifies itself by recourse to the Law of “an eye for an eye”; however, Poe is fully aware that revenge seldom stops there. A personal element tends to take hold—a desire to vanquish the enemy, to follow the motto “Living I have been your plague, dying I shall be your death.”1 In “X-ing a Paragrab,” Poe tells us that an “o” for an “o” quickly gives way to the infinite “x” for the “o.” Boundless revenge is frequently preferred in the name of what Walter Benjamin calls “law-preserving violence,” “law-making violence,”2 and somebody—often not the revenger—is to take the blame. To investigate Poe’s revenge tales, this paper first examines the dynamics of revenge, that is, the different faces of the Law and the different phases of the avenger—the subject as a servant of the Law or as a self-legislating lawgiver. Second, it highlights the perverse revengers in Poe’s stories, considering how the self can hide behind the impersonal Law to discard all norms and reap surplus enjoyment in vengeful acts. Third, it reveals how superego evil can be the worst of all evils. Poe’s demented or wicked heroes often suffer punishment, but most of his “avenging angels” go free. The “happy” endings in “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and “X-ing a Paragrab” reveal that retributive justice can condone injustice. In fact, Poe had firsthand knowledge of how unjust retributivism can work in the real world. Poe incurred large debts by drinking and gambling at the University of Virginia, and his foster father, John Allan, quickly stopped financing his education. Allan, having made a promise to his wife Frances, Vol. 46 (2013): 59–77 © 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press and Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 46, 2013 59 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I helped Poe by sending him money and getting him into West Point—but Allan’s parsimony kept Poe in a state of poverty. Poe objected to Allan’s infidelity toward Frances, and the foster father subsequently provided an inheritance for his illegitimate sons but did not mention Poe in his will. As a sergeantmajor who was unable to leave West Point (unless Allan gave his consent) but too poor to stay (unless Allan paid his expenses again), Poe aimed to get himself punished by the Law. He was duly court-martialed and expelled in 1831. As a professional writer, Poe was also well versed in the real-life drama of vengeful literary wars—which seldom worked along the principle of “an eye for an eye.” When Lewis Gaylord Clark, an editor of Knickerbocker Magazine, attacked Poe’s work, Poe not only wrote back but also physically attacked Clark on the street in 1845. Ever alert to imaginary or real cases of plagiarism, Poe was inclined to criticize both friends and foes, and to retaliate when others struck. Having accused Longfellow of a love of “imitation” and “downright theft,” prompting an anonymous letter of defense from “Outis,” Poe followed up in 1845 with five articles that actively prolonged the “Longfellow War.” On one occasion, Poe actually received money because of a literary feud. When he mocked a poem by his friend Thomas Dunn English in “The Literati of New York City,”3 English returned the favor by vilifying Poe in the New York Mirror in 1846.4 Poe later sued English for libel and obtained $225 in damages. In 1848, he quarreled openly with James Russell Lowell, arguing that the latter plagiarized Wordsworth. Lowell quickly sided with Longfellow, describing Poe as “three-fifths . . . genius” and “two-fifths sheer fudge.” In literary battles, revenge is sweet: it allows the revenger to embark on a “wholesale mangling of victims without rhyme or reason.”5 It can also make all involved parties famous, if not notorious. Poe further understood that revenge can be a very profitable game: the sales of Graham’s Magazine leaped from 5,000 to 52,000, and the Southern Literary Messenger from 700 to 5,000 (although some say it was from 500 to 3,500) copies.6 Poe had good reasons to believe that human psychology works in accordance, not with the law of “an eye for an eye,” but with the law of escalating “ire for ire.” T he dynamics of revenge thrives on the links between lawfulness and lawlessness. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Slavoz Žižek defines superego evil as evil “accomplished in the name of fanatical devotion to some ideological ideal,” principle, or Law.7 Revenge and superego are inextricably related because the drive to take revenge on a transgressor arises when the subject internalizes certain Laws. Traditional or institutional law has two 60 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S sides, and problems can occur in either direction: The public (Apollonian) Law-of-the-Father can be too “moral,” negating the spirit of humans and the Law. Meanwhile, the way of the Law can also be obscene, indicating the triumph of Dionysian lawlessness. In the first case, once the Apollonian Law sets in place a group of moral or retributive principles for the regulation of social relations, it can easily become a set of self-legitimizing master signifiers. Words such as “rights,” “duty,” “fairness,” “right,” and “wrong” come with various degrees of “law-making violence,” thereby empowering law enforcers to give verdicts in accordance with these values. The Law may emphasize a fair system of punishment, but legal precedence (such as “$225 in damages” in the case of libel, or “a million dollars for the defamation of character”) can be “nonsensical,” “with no rhyme or reason,” according to Bruce Fink, and yet, we know that the rule “must be obeyed—not because we’ll all be better off,” but because the Law “says so,” or else be damned.8 Eventually, legalese is like the Word’s revenge upon humankind: it holds on to its own logic, ignoring the contexts of application. The quarrel between the scribes and Jesus about healing a woman on the Sabbath clearly shows how the idol of the Word can override any concern with the mystical Logos or with mitigating circumstances. The scribes’ fanatical retributivism is a classic case of Apollonian superego evil grounded in the absolute Symbolic. The moral superego sees a wrong where there may be no actual wrong, for it cannot tolerate transgression in any circumstances. In the second case, the moral superego can become obscene—Dionysian—in scenarios where, for example, revengers justify the excessive application of Laws (such as only allowing prisoners five minutes in the lavatory) or the use of cruel, extralegal measures (such as physical, emotional, psychological abuse) in order to punish the wrongdoers. Interestingly, the “obscene superego” is considered by Žižek to be the supplement, and not the enemy, of the Law. The purpose of Dionysian superego evil is to achieve a kind of “law-preserving violence”: as “public rules do not suffice, so they have to be supplemented by a clandestine ‘unwritten code.’” The occasional transgressions of “the public law are inherent to” or a part of the “social order.”9 Žižek’s example is that, when disciplining a prisoner, a Nazi soldier can indulge himself in “the obscene, publicly unacknowledged surplus-enjoyment provided by executing orders, manifested in the ‘unnecessary’ excesses in this execution.”10 To understand why good people can become diabolical torturers, Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist, emphasizes in The Lucifer Effect the institutional sanction of Dionysian legality. In the famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, the systematic practices were so strong that even college students role-playing guards immediately identified with underhanded methods and became abusive H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 61 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I or inhuman persecutors. As lawlessness is a part of effective law enforcement, in a liminal zone, deindividuation—the removal of all prisoners’ identities— further encourages normally sane men to indulge in insane acts.11 Justice becomes obscene because it aims not at the retributive logic of “getting even” but at the lawless joy of crushing the “transgressors,” making everything more uneven than ever. Perhaps we ought to remember that such traditional revenge tragedies as The Merchant of Venice (1600) or The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) already illustrate the shift from the moral superego to the obscene superego, the blurred boundary between Law and lawlessness, the tension between legitimate punishment and the illegitimate demand for a pound of flesh. The good news is that, as long as people value the traditional legal framework, the endings of these stories eventually indicate a return to the (Apollonian) public Law. As the court is based on interpreting the written Word rather than the unwritten rules, all transgressors must admit their wrong and accept their downfall. On the other hand, modern ethics—grounded in Kant—promotes a selfgiven, superegoic Law that can be ethical and at the same time evil. To maximize the sovereignty of the enlightenment man, Kant’s move is to replace the absolute Law with a set of formalistic ideas. He reconstructs ethics on two grounds: one is the condition of universalizability; the other is the question of intentionality. As Kant rejects external authorities for guidance, he argues that modern man must formulate the categorical imperative for himself and act only according to the maxim by which he wills that it should become a universal law. In addition, to be ethical is to be impersonal, to perform duty for its own sake, and not for such “impure” intentions as personal pleasures, vanity, or altruistic sympathy (these are “pathological” reasons according to Kant). We can see that Kant’s self-given, universalizable Law actually puts heavy emphasis on the Ego-Ideal, and this can give the revenger a great deal of room to formulate arbitrary maxims (I see that this way is the universal way; I will make it my duty to follow it). Having defined what is for him an impersonal duty, the enlightened revenger may pursue justice through an “anti-legal morality,” seeing that he is but acting in conformity with pure duty and for the sake of duty. It is no wonder that Lacan openly links Kantian ethics to the Sadean paradigm, for the Sadean maxim is formulated in a very impersonal and “universalizable” manner, highlighting a pure notion of duty or rights. In the eyes of Lacan, Sade is Kant’s uncanny double, for Sade suggests, “‘I have the right to enjoy your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body.’”12 The Sadean logic implies that libertinism can be universal, and 62 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S a libertine can be “ethical” as long as he is not after any personal pleasures or interests. In a way, Kantian ethics fully reflects the problem of superego evil grounded in the Imaginary Symbolic. Even though the self tries to put itself in the Other’s place, the hidden agenda is that the self can only imaginarize the “discourse of the Other” and stick to its own understanding of the Other’s Law. As noted by Alenka Zupančič, at best, a Kantian subject’s “attitude” is “‘perverse’ in the strictest clinical meaning of the word”: “The subject has here assumed the role of a mere instrument of the Will of the Other.” In the worst scenario, he lives in an ethical fantasy that has no ethical content. A manipulative person can easily make his maxims seem universal, hence justifiable. Moreover, if acting without personal incentives is to do good, Zupančič notes that there can hardly be any differences between good and evil.13 As long as a person thinks he is doing what the Other wants, and he is not after any personal gain or happiness, even a sadist, a Nazi, or a terrorist can argue that he is an “ethical” subject, a “larger-than-life” hero. In the words of Žižek, such a “larger-than-life” individual is characterized by his ambiguous relationship to morals: he nonchalantly violates common moral norms and disregards the Good of his fellow-creatures, ruthlessly exploiting them for his own purposes, yet he is also thoroughly dedicated to his goal and generous, the very opposite of a petty calculating utilitarian attitude, so that he cannot be said to be simply unethical—his acts irradiate a deeper “ethics of Life itself” that does not bother with our narrow-minded considerations.14 The difference between a traditional and a modern revenger is thus clearly discernable: the latter does not acknowledge that he can ever act lawlessly, while the former knowingly stoops to substandard ways to bring about the “greater good.” The story of Michael Kohlhaas is a case in point.15 For the sake of a few maltreated horses, he gives himself a universalizable “Law” to commit atrocious deeds, creating far more evil than the wrong he experienced. He never admits that he could be wrong, hence he dies unrepentantly and triumphantly, highlighting the surplus-jouissance of the revenger. I n Poe’s revenge tales, his characters often welcome the kind of radical retributivism that says “your life for my eye!” They also hide behind the (family or self-given) Law to do things their own ways, thereby warranting themselves to act like angels/devils. “The Cask of Amontillado” was written H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 63 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I when Poe was pursuing a libel case against Hiram Fuller and Augustus Clason. T. O. Mabbott argues that this story mirrors Poe’s feelings at the time (Works, 3:1252). D. H. Lawrence says the tale is about “perfect hate”: “The lust of Montresor is to devour utterly the soul of Fortunato,” leading to “the dissolution of both souls, each losing itself in transgressing its own bounds.”16 Kennedy, however, reads the story in terms of a psychological warfare: Montresor dooms Fortunato, but his story demonstrates the fact that he is doomed; he is a “psychological captive of his own perfect strategy.”17 My emphasis is somewhat different: I see Montresor as a transitional figure between the traditional and modern ethics of revenge. He sticks to both the written Law and the self-given Law of the superego. He is faithful to the family’s Law, but he also formulates maxims for himself to perform perverse acts of revenge; however, his joy is finally marred by his acknowledgment of the legalistic Word. In the first place, Montresor’s high regard for the (family) Law gives him reason to think that Fortunato has done him a “thousand injuries.” Adhering to the (Apollonian) Word, he may see a wrong where there is no wrong. Instead of putting things in context, Montresor simply emphasizes the traditional “family duty” to punish an offender, acting on a categorical imperative through which he “can at the same time will that it should become a universal Law.”18 Montresor is following the family’s written Law of retribution—“Nemo me impune lacessit” (“No one provokes me with impunity”)—also a motto of “the Scottish Order of the Thistle” (Works, 3:1264 n. 13). However, such a Law is potentially problematic, for it can be empty of ethical content. It does not ask the punisher to ponder what constitutes an offence, or what should be the right (proportionate) level of punishment; instead, it stands on a “no-mercy” approach, insisting that whoever offends the self—for whatever reason—must be paid back to the furthest degree. What makes this story interesting is that Montresor revises the family’s written Law to suit his needs and gives himself a new obscene Law. According to his (unwritten) supplement, a punisher—regardless of whether his conduct is rightful or criminal—can be above the Law, so that he “must not only punish, but punish with impunity” (Works, 3:1256). The two conditions in Montresor’s maxim are neatly defined: “A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong” (Works, 3:1256). These epigrammatic statements give Montresor boundless right to act, and boundless room to carry out disproportionate punishment. As the punisher feels justified in making the offender suffer, Montresor duly tricks Fortunato into accompanying him to the family’s vault. The carnival and vault settings have been read as symbols of Montresor’s mind—that is, topographical disorientation echoes Montresor’s monomaniac 64 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S disorder, and the carnivalesque “Mardi Gras effect” activates his bloodlust.19 James Gargano suggests that the masquerade gives rise to lawless unreality and violence in the story.20 However, as Žižek points out, the seasonal “suspension” of the Law does not necessarily mean anarchy but an institutionalized ritual that invites “law-preserving violence.” Such a sanctioned “form of transgression” is the result of careful planning, and it can actually reinforce the Law in the long run.21 In a similar way, Montresor’s carnivalesque discourse may not be the same as lawlessness, but a Dionysian performance that goes “beyond good and evil.” Through lies, he is defending impersonal family duty and his self-given Law, for an offender must be punished, and a punisher has impunity. Arguing thus, Montresor feels entitled to bypass the state’s Law and murder his enemy. Hiding behind the discourse of friendship, he lures his drunken enemy to the vault. He apparently pays deference to Fortunato and insists that the latter should go back, but what he gets is double satisfaction: he has the sadistic joy of manipulating Fortunato and titillating the latter’s desire; he has even greater joy in securing Fortunato’s active consent to be led to the “execution ground.” “You asked for it, not me,” is Montresor’s clever superegoic device to convince the world and himself that he is but obeying the duty of friendship. The story also shows how the revenger manipulates different Laws to his advantage. The Law of the father (family motto or coat of arms) is superegoic, mandatory, and open for public display; but the codes of the brother can be secretive and private. In his intoxicated state, Fortunato twice throws “the bottle upward with a gesticulation” that puzzles Montresor. Fortunato immediately suspects that the latter does not belong to the “brotherhood,” but Montresor deceptively signals that he is “a mason” by “producing a trowel from beneath the folds of [his] roquelaire” (Works, 3:1260). Montresor is eager to assert his place in the brotherly Symbolic, displaying a short circuit between sign and meaning. He simply shows his trowel and expects Fortunato to understand. Lacking a public code of recognition, Fortunato is taken aback and accepts the idea that Montresor is one of the brothers. The irony is that the trowel is not for forging a new brotherhood but for sealing his death. The trowel is the result of Montresor’s duty to the family motto “Nemo me impune lacessit,” as well as an essential tool to execute the murder. The miscommunication between Montresor and Fortunato symbolizes the victory of the written Law over the unwritten code. The brother’s way depends on mutual recognition. However, holding onto the Law of the father, Montresor can ignore all human interference, follow the Law to the letter (the jouissance-in-the-letter), and savor the obscene surplus-jouissance of implementing the Law his own way. “All offences must be repaid” quickly becomes a retaliatory imperative that says “you must H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 65 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I die for having injured me.” Montresor does not need brotherly confirmation, for his Law is self-validating. The final irony is that, if Montresor mingles the written Law with his selfgiven Law, he is also conquered by the Word. Montresor out-yells Fortunato and quickly reduces the latter to just another set of bones in the crypt. However, the story fails to end on a triumphant note because, through the act of entombment, Fortunato has become a member of the family. Revenge is no longer sweet because, according to the Montresors’ Law, all wrongs in the family must be dealt with. Montresor’s joy suddenly gives way to a “sick” heart. He has twice done wrong, and the Law must judge and condemn him. He duly writes a confessional piece and says the proper words: “In pace requiescat.” Daniel Hoffman believes that the confessional story is a sign of guilt, showing that “Montresor walled up himself in this revenge.”22 However, Bettina Knapp suggests that the story has no moral message: Montresor does not “distinguish between good and evil,” nor does he feel “remorse or guilt.”23 My reading argues that his “law-abiding” spirit must now lead him to violate himself. Montresor cunningly pretends to be Fortunato’s “brother” and subsequently turns him into a “family member,” so he has the duty to say “rest in peace” to the man. He must suffer for his double roles as a revenger and a wrongdoer. The traditional “law-preserving” outlook gives Montresor grounds to kill, but it also kills his triumphant joy. If Montresor is capable of feeling regret, “Hop-Frog” tells a different story, dramatizing the problem of “law-making” normlessness in modern (Kantian) ethics. The problem of “Hop-Frog” has been studied in the light of theatrical traditions,24 anti-aristocratic sentiments, and, in particular, Poe’s attitude to abolitionism.25 My interpretation, however, highlights Poe’s criticism of unrepentant, normless punishers in modern retributivism. I see that “Hop-Frog” foregrounds the lawgivers’ cancellation of all norms, leading to the rise of excessive retributivism on the part of the state, or creative BDSM retributivism on the part of the ethical subject.26 In the first place, Hop-Frog’s split subjectivity perfectly mirrors the duality of the Kantian ethical subject. Promoting human autonomy, Kant’s motto is “Sapere aude! [Dare to know!]” Practical reason, then, asks the subject to think for himself, formulate his maxim, and act in accordance with his idea of duty. As discussed before, these formalistic procedures can in no way safeguard the ethical custom. And Hop-Frog’s violent “acting out” has but his own rationale to justify itself. Until that conclusion, however, Hop-Frog consistently obeys the king. Reflecting his deference to Frederick the Great, Kant always asserts, “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!”27 In the public domain, Kant declares, all citizens should suspend moral judgment and 66 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S obey the king unconditionally—even if they know the king is a despot. If Kant dislikes political paternalism, he rejects the citizen’s “right to revolution”: “It would be ruinous if an officer, receiving an order from his superior, wanted while on duty to engage openly in subtle reasoning about its appropriateness or utility; he must obey.”28 In addition, in Lecture on Ethics, Kant observes that all “punishments imposed by sovereigns are pragmatic; they are designed either to correct or to make an example.”29 As a result, Kant sees “no right of sedition, much less a right of revolution, and least of all a right to lay hands on or take the life of the chief of state when he is an individual person on the excuse that he has misused his authority.” “It is the people’s duty,” he declares, “to endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme authority.”30 In “Hop-Frog,” Poe sets up a double-bind situation: If Hop-Frog is faithful to his practical reason, his revolt against the king can mean “illegitimate justice” as well as evil in Kant’s eye. If he acts like the seven courtiers and obeys the king, it means the perpetuation of “legitimate evil” and injustice. Both ways issue in crimes against humanity, and the shocking truth is that there is no exit for the enlightenment man. Regarding the problem of resistance, Poe does not agree with Kant’s view that humans must forfeit their right to revolt—especially if the leader is corrupt and obedience brings only evil. However, Poe highlights the idea that sedition seldom leads to positive results, for things always go from bad to worse. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, for example, knowing that the Grampus has been seized by a group of bloodthirsty mutineers, Pym and his gang stage a revolt. The mutineers kill many seamen, but Pym and his friends end up killing all except Richard Parker. The right to revolt and the dangers it entails are even more apparent in “Hop-Frog,” where the king’s Law is obviously unjust. The regime of the king, whose will-to-jouissance becomes the foundation of his will-to-Law, satirizes the Kantian ideal that equates the sovereign’s will with the general will. As he “seem[s] to live only for joking” (Works, 3:1345), he takes masquerades and pageants as serious business and turns the court into a playhouse. The king’s “practical reason” begets “practical jokes,” for he expects everyone to “be merry” for him. He demands the constant creation of “novel” characters (Works, 3:1347). Because Hop-Frog is a “fool,” “a dwarf, and a cripple,” the king takes great pleasure in dehumanizing or punishing him, deeming his fool “a triplicate treasure in one person” (Works, 3:1345). In these circumstances, Poe anticipates Hannah Arendt’s criticism that the Kantian “good” can lead to superegoic “banal evil,” as blind obedience to a superior means total abandonment of absolute right or wrong. Banal evil is exactly this: a subject does not think and simply carries out his duty unquestioningly and impersonally. From the later standpoint of Arendt’s analysis of H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 67 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I Nazi Germany, the king’s generals and ministers embody “real horror”—a modern atrocity with none of the bestial attributes reserved for “men who really belon[g] in mental institutions and prisons.” As “perfectly normal men” are “trained to be full-fledged members” of a persecutory regime, the myth of “bestiality g[ives] way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction” of justice.31 When law enforcers internalize abduction and abusive measures as a good, evil loses “the quality of temptation.”32 In the story, noting the king’s love of jokes and jokers, his “ever-victorious” generals justify the exploitation of the dwarves. Hop-Frog and Trippetta are “forcibly carried off” from some “barbarous region” by the generals to become “presents” to the king (Works, 3:1346). This is just as Alenka Zupančič says: The type of discourse where I use my duty as an excuse for my actions is perverse in the strictest sense of the word. Here, the subject attributes to the Other (to the duty or to the Law), the surplus enjoyment that he finds in his actions: “I am sorry if my actions hurt you, but I only did what the Other wanted me to do, so go and see Him if you have any objections.” In this case, the subject hides behind the law.33 The seven ministers are thus men of banal evil who take pleasure in their “impersonal” duty. They never challenge the king but “abet” him in his physical or emotional abuse of Trippetta and Hop-Frog (Works, 3:1354). Evil thrives because they gladly forfeit humanity to follow the king and allow themselves to be disguised as ourang-outangs. If Kant argues that forgoing personal incentives is related to ethics, “HopFrog” shows us that self-renunciation can be the ground of violence. Seeing self-love as the root of all evil, Kant argues that an ethical subject should negate personal inclinations and do either what the king asks or what the superego thinks is proper. However, a prolonged repression of the self can lead to new issues: the dutiful mind becomes inhuman, and the suppressed body returns to perform more inhuman acts. “Hop-Frog [is] not fond of wine” (Works, 3:1347), but he drinks according to the king’s wishes. Trippetta intercedes on behalf of Hop-Frog: “Without uttering a syllable, [the king] pushe[s] her violently from him, and [throws] the contents of the brimming goblet in her face” (Works, 3:1349). As the king has the right to execute punishment, and people must obey the king, Hop-Frog’s words always deny his body: “How could it have been me?” “I fancy it was the parrot at the window, whetting his bill upon his cage-wires.” However, Hop-Frog cannot stop making a “low,” “harsh and protracted grating sound” (Works, 3:1349; emphasis original). Chance eventually allows Hop-Frog to heal the “enlightened” gap between his private use of 68 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S autonomous reason and his public duty to the king, as well as to reconcile the gap between the lawless body and the duty-bound mind. As the king asks for a new costume, Hop-Frog cunningly obeys the Other’s order to do things his own way, serving his duty to cancel his duty. Hop-Frog’s logic of retribution is impeccable, adhering strictly to the universal formula of “an eye for an eye.” The king sees the dwarves as animals; Hop-Frog turns the king and his ministers into animals. If Hop-Frog looks like “a squirrel, or a small monkey,” he dresses up the king to resemble a captured chimpanzee “in Borneo” (Works, 3:1351). Hop-Frog is dragged to the court by the king, and he presents an enchained king to the court. The king loves to give people a fright, making them feel “terrified” and “astonished”; Hop-Frog treats the king in kind (Works, 3:1349). The doubling between Hop-Frog and the king mirrors a tit-for-tat reciprocity: the king is the master, but Hop-Frog is the mastermind of the masquerade. Hop-Frog is a slave, and the king also becomes a slave. The king loves theatricality, and Hop-Frog promotes a “theater of cruelty.” Hop-Frog’s “law-making violence” eventually prompts him to reinterpret the idea of a sadistic act for a sadistic act, taking sadism to a new level. Having taken the Law into his own hands, Hop-Frog is something of a Michael Kohlhaas, a sadistic “larger-than-life” hero. Both behave like punitive legislators, showing how “a rightful, justified claim when pursued rigoristically turns into its opposite: an unjustifiable action.”34 Their deployment of superegoic violence also demonstrates how easily the new Law can “run amok.” Knowing the king’s sadistic bent, Hop-Frog proposes an “animal play party” with a hidden agenda that foregrounds bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM). His sales pitch is that, to scare people, the king should try out a new (sadomasochistic) role. Performative masochism—in the form of a chained ape—is merely a means to a sadistic end, for the king can inflict great pain, humiliation, and degradation on his “gorgeously habited” courtiers. “The contrast is inimitable”: the dignified king is in chains, and the king as an ape has even more power to terrorize the crowd. The king is lured to accept the role because his sadistic mind envisions the “fright it occasions among the women.” As female frenzy and male panic delight him, he finds the role-play “exquisite” and simply must “enact” it (Works, 3:1349; emphasis original). The double games of domination and submission begin. Hop-Frog pretends it is all about the king’s domination and his people’s submission, while his true plan is to dominate, tame, humiliate, and finish off the king and his seven ministers. As in standard D/s activity, Hop-Frog becomes the master in charge, a “dominant top” with the only set of (phallic) keys in his hands. In H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 69 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I the meantime, he lures his enemies to accept consensual slavery, to take up the role of “submissive bottoms.” He further persuades them to consent to such borderline (kinky) activities as bondage, animal role-play, and chained arrangement in a semi-dark room, plus the use of flax and tar on the body. The king is happy with these objectifying practices, for he fails to know that he is a “sub,” thinking that the scene is going to be “safe, sane, and consensual.” Everything goes according to plan: the king is at first a dominant character and greatly enjoys wearing costume and chains, or reeling about “the hall in all directions” to abuse and torture his subjects (Works, 3:1352). In the culture of BDSM, the king’s “sensation play” is the key of D/s fun: the dominant can induce psychological (or physical) pain without true injury, while the submissive feels the release of endorphins that leads to euphoric fear or happiness. The irony is that the king’s “submissives” have never agreed to play their part. The climatic sensation expresses itself in swoons and failed escape attempts. Many women pass out, but the rest are forced to face more psychological torture because the room is locked. The reversal of power happens when Hop-Frog drags the ourangoutangs together. When the master appears, these wild animals are chained up as “pets” and so further reduced to a state of de-individuated anonymity and subordination. Given that Hop-Frog alone talks, his retributive sadism reaches new heights: the king is not allowed to speak any (safe) word to stop the game. Hop-Frog’s “punishment scene” effectively blurs the boundary between a risk-aware consensual game and an abusive, murderous project. His ultimate design is to make the king’s purportedly safe, sane, and consensual activity anything but safe. The final act of Hop-Frog’s BDSM retributivism features bondage and discipline, ending in a fiery spectacle that models a disastrous “wax play.” In the world of BDSM, discipline refers to such physical punishment and psychological humiliation as chaining and flogging. Hop-Frog, however, prefers a hotter game. A standard wax play decrees that the top is to coat the (bound) submissives with hot wax, and there are usually a number of safety precautions about the type of candles used and the temperatures of wax. Since Hop-Frog wants to kill the eight men he deems unfit to live (let alone to rule), he holds the torch close to the “flaxen coat” of the eight apes and deliberately burns them to death. The problem with Hop-Frog’s self-given Law is that it echoes the king’s governing style: it is all a horrible “jest.” Hop-Frog’s retributivism “prohibits what it formally permits” and permits what it formally prohibits.35 If Hop-Frog dreams of a rational society that respects the weak and the deformed, his master/slave activities do not promote any genuine change of social relations. His 70 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S adoption of the “kill, kill, and spare not” approach can only destroy all grounds for mutual respect and rational communication. When justice means the celebration of a courtly inferno, Poe anticipates Zupančič’s distrust of Kantian logic: “What is most intriguing in Kant’s conception of ethics is that, strictly speaking, there is no reason (or necessity) for the good being good. The good has no empirical content in which its goodness could be founded.”36 Hop-Frog negates the “beastly” king and his ministers; then he and Trippetta simply negate themselves from the social scene and disappear into thin air. Given that the self alone determines everything, the motto—“I have the right to subjugate you, you have the right to subjugate me”—leads to an extremely biased result. Poe’s revengers can be perverse punishers; however, Poe does not lead his readers to prefer the way of non-revenge. The first thing is that both traditional and modern views defend retributivism. In “Metzengerstein,” punishment goes with the formula “a life for a life.” Baron Frederick Metzengerstein burns the stable of Count Wilhelm Berlifitzing, indirectly leading to the latter’s death. The count comes back as a horse and quickly hounds the baron to death. In “Mystification,” the self-given formula is “one-up.”37 Johann Hermann insults Baron Ritzner Von Jung once, but the baron humiliates Hermann twice. Hermann consults regular books, but the baron directs his enemy to a book of nonsense. These tales dwell on different retributive principles, but the importance of revenge is never in doubt. The second thing is that Poe lays bare the mechanism of what Lacan will later call jealouissance in revenge. In Seminar XX, Lacan coins the term jealouissance to describe the combined state of jealousy and jouissance. He links it to the mirror stage because the presence of the Other can strongly affect the narcissistic ego, invoking a strong, jealous hatred of the Other.38 Similarly, once hurt by another (superior) person, the injured self sees the destruction of the Other as the best way to restore the ego. Revenge is good because reason demands it. Revengers are driven to act because they are bound by impersonal reasons (or master signifiers such as family duty or universalizable ideas of justice). In addition, payback is mandatory because the ego loves it: the injured self demands the right to regain its sense of wholeness. Revenge can produce an enjoyment beyond lust because it is about the cancellation of a lack introduced by the Other. The ego’s repeated attempts to undo—and out-do—the Other’s castrating act also means that the revenger is bound to relinquish the logic of “an eye for an eye.” In “X-ing a Paragrab,” Poe further reveals to readers that self-legislating retributivism can begin with small-scale personal evil and end in large-scale H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 71 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I group evil. For one thing, retributive jealouissance implies that, if the revenger cannot find the offender’s eye, anyone’s eye will do, hence a single incident can lead to a vicious circle of escalating violence. In Evil, Roy F. Baumeister describes how revenge “proceeds not just in a single episode but through a series of episodes.” And “a major reason for this escalation is the magnitude gap between perpetrators and victims. . . . Just when one side thinks things are even, the other side thinks it has been the victim of an outrage that cries out for retaliation.”39 Soon, perpetrators, victims, and observers will all get involved in the vendetta. When Poe wrote “X-ing a Paragrab,” he was involved in the bitter quarrel with Lewis Gaylord Clark. In fact, Mr. Touch-and-go Bullet-Head, “of Frogpondium,” can refer to Clark himself, as Poe once said that Clark’s “forehead” was, “phrenologically, bad—round and what is termed ‘bullety.’”40 In the story, John Smith (editor of the “Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis Gazette”) and Bullet-Head (editor of “The Nopolis Tea-Pot”) are likewise engaged in a literary feud. This tempest in a teapot soon leads to outrageous behavior on both sides, and wider society takes an active part in accelerating chaos. The fanatical debate on an aesthetic ideal (in this case, “o” or no “o”) leads two editors and everyone around them down a road that no one foresees at the start. Bullet-Head’s signature style foregrounds his love of “o,” that “beautiful vowel—the emblem of Eternity”: “Oh, no doubt! The editor over the way is a genius—O, my! Oh, goodness, gracious!—what is this world coming to? Oh, tempora!” (Works, 3:1371, 1370). John Smith retaliates by parodying Bullet-Head. His piece is based on the principle of an “o” for an “o”: “Why, the fellow is all O! That accounts for his reasoning in a circle, and explains why there is neither beginning nor end to him, nor to anything that he says. . . . Wonder if this O-ing is a habit of his? . . . ‘O! it is pitiful’” (1370). To counter John’s revenge, Bullet-Head composes a yet more audacious text in which almost every word contains an “o”: “Oh, John, John, if you don’t go you’re no homo—no! You’re only a fowl, an owl; a cow, a sow; a doll, a poll; a poor, old, good-for-nothing-to-nobody” (Works, 3:1371). Before this text can be set, the “Gazette” changes its tactics: Bob (the printer’s devil of the “Tea-Pot”) reports to the foreman that someone from the “G’zette” has been “prowling bout [the room] all night” and “cabbaged” every letter “o.” The foreman advises strict retributivism—an “i” for an “o”: Bob should “go over the first chance” he gets and hook “every one of their i’s.” Bob happily agrees, for he will “let em know a thing or two” (Works, 3:1373). For the time being, the foreman directs the printer’s devil to replace the missing “o” with another letter, assuming that “nobody’s going to read the fellow’s trash, any how.” And Bob, following custom, chooses “x.” Of course, “x” is a common “filler” letter associated with lack, or a letter that denotes excess, infinity, mystery, or the 72 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S unmentionable. The foregrounding of “x” in the story implies that revenge leads to lack as well as excessive deviance on both sides. If unchecked, it can create a downward spiral that culminates in unexpected (semantic and behavioral) disorder. In the story, revenge leads to group evil and the “diffusion of responsibility”—taking an action because “everyone else is doing it.”41 Incensed by the “cabalistic article” that results from Bob’s “x-ing,” readers want to wreak vengeance by riding Bullet-Head on a rail or lynching John Smith. They do not care what is right, or good, or appropriate to the situation. Strictly speaking, unless one can prove that John Smith has a hand in the theft of the letter “o,” Smith is in no way responsible for what happens later. However, anything can happen as people switch from “the right to revenge” to “revenge is right,” or “revenge for the sake of revenge.” In the story, people not only like the idea of persecuting John Smith but also prefer the use of illegal violence—lynching. S uperego evil is the worst type of evil, arising from a convergence of id and superego in which the subject can manipulate the love of good so that it becomes the ground of evil. A fanatic can create a seemingly “universalizable” Law and make it his “duty” to crush all violators of this “Law.” On the one hand, the beauty of the superego is that the “Law” can cause a person to metamorphose into a different character, one who is prepared to topple the existing order in order to build a “higher” one. To execute the family’s Law or their own Law, Montresor and Hop-Frog both gain new voice and become stronger characters. On the other, revengers are fundamentally perverse subjects wrought by two “self-deceptions.” The first is that they usually “deceive” themselves as to their Law, for their ultimate intention is “to hurt [their] fellow man.” But “this deception,” according to Zupančič’s commentary on Kantian ethics, “is only possible on the basis of another, more fundamental one.” A revenger is perverse because he gives himself the grounds to act then “justif[ies] his actions by saying that they were imposed upon him by unconditional duty,” which allows him to “hide behind the moral law and present himself as the ‘mere instrument’ of its will.”42 The opposite of revenge, therefore, is not forgiveness but the traversing of the perverse, superegoic fantasy. Revengers are quick to cast the first stone, for they over-identify with certain “imaginary order[s] and symbolic fiction[s].”43 Poe’s revenge tales show how humans will act when they think they are dead right, and others dead wrong. Other than Montresor, almost all Poe’s avenging angels are gleeful creatures because, once their “ethical” judgment H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 73 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I gives them the right to kill, they become full of sadistic desires to overkill. If their acts unleash a spiral of revenge, they feel they should not be held responsible because “somebody” has started it first, and everybody is doing evil anyway. Retribution has a momentum of its own: in the framework of traditional Law, the Apollonian Law is quick to locate a wrong where there may be no substantial wrong; and the Dionysian mode of punishment enjoys making things uneven and triggering future revenge. Moreover, the Kantian self-given Law grants the subject the full right to execute his “universalizable” maxim. On the interpersonal level, revenge can mean one-upmanship. On the social level, domestic squabbles can develop into family feuds, or bar brawls into gang wars. On the international level, revenge can mean boundless conflicts, purges, terroristic trials, and dirty wars. In the 1970s, one general simply gave himself a new Law that would take state retributivism to a new level: “first we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then . . . their sympathizers, then . . . those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid.”44 Hong Kong Baptist University Notes 1 “Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero”: these words of Martin Luther become an epigraph for “Metzengerstein.” See Works, 2:18, 30 n. 1. 2 See Walter Benjamin, “Critiques of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 287. 3 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Literati of New York City,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 33 (July 1846): 17–18. 4 See Works, 2:252. See also Dawn B. Sova, Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 325. 5 Quoted from Sova, Edgar Allan Poe, 359. 6 On these conflicting circulation figures, see Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 59. 7 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), 70. 8 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), 131. 9 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 55. The unwritten, obscene Law is actually a well-known and institutionalized tool for “effective” administration. Žižek points to the Law of “Code Red” in the Navy (the “clandestine night-time beating of a fellow-soldier” who has “broken the ethical code of the Marines”) and the police’s tolerance of the “nightly terror of Ku Klux Klan” in the 1920s American South (54–55). 10 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 54; see also Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 56. 74 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S 11 Philip Zimbardo particularly mentions the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 (a project he designed and executed) and the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004. To give the imprisoned murderers, terrorists, and insurgents their just desserts, law enforcers (in role play or in real life) automatically become sadistic torturers who defend the Law but also use the Law for fun and games. The “parallel universes in Abu Ghraib and Stanford’s Prison” disclose similar scenes: “naked, shackled prisoners with bags over their heads, guards stepping on prisoners’ backs as they [do] push-ups, guards sexually humiliating prisoners, and prisoners suffering from extreme stress.” See The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), 19–20. 12 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (New York: Norton, 2006), 648. 13 Alenka Zupančič, interview by Christoph Cox, “On Evil: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič,” Cabinet 5 (2002), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/ alenkazupancic.php. The elimination of the personal factor has long been a controversial subject. Schiller famously satirizes Kantian morality in this way: “I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it by inclination. And so often I am bothered by the thought that I am not virtuous.” To do good means that “you must seek to despise” your feelings, “and do with repugnance what duty bids you” (Schiller, Xenien, “The Philosophers,” quoted in Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999], 28). 14 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 66. 15 “Michael Kohlhaas” is a true story from the sixteenth century, retold by Heinrich von Kleist in 1810. Michael Kohlhaas is a horse dealer who comes into conflict with Junker von Tronka, the new master of a castle. As Kohlhaas fails to produce a pass for allowing his horses to cross the border between Brandenburg and Saxony, he leaves behind two of the best. When he later reclaims the black horses, he discovers that they can hardly stand up due to starvation and maltreatment. He demands that von Tronka restore the health of his horses, but neither von Tronka nor the court takes his requests seriously. Kohlhaas’s desire for vengeance prompts him to burn down the castle of Junker von Tronka and several towns that offer him shelter. The end of the story is that Kohlhaas’s desire is fulfilled—his horses return to health—but he is to die for his outrageous conduct. For a detailed discussion of Michael Kohlhaas, see J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 80–104. 16 D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” quoted in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 251. 17 J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 142. 18 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Herbert James Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 88–89. 19 Zimbardo explains the “Mardi Gras effect” in this way: It involves “temporarily giving up the traditional cognitive and moral constraints on personal behavior when part of a group of like-minded revelers is bent on having fun now without concern for subsequent consequences and liabilities.” It is “deindividualization in group action.” See Lucifer Effect, 306–7. H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 75 M A G D A L E N W I N G - C H I K I 20 See James W. Gargano, “‘The Cask of Amontillado’: A Masquerade of Motive and Identity,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 120. 21 See Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 55. 22 Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Anchor Press, 1973), 221. 23 Bettina Knapp, Edgar Allan Poe (New York: F. Ungar, 1984), 152–53. 24 See Mary Lucas, “Poe’s Theatre: ‘King Pest’ and ‘Hop-Frog,” Journal of the Short Story in English 14 (1990): 25–40; and Bruce K. Martin, “Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Retreat from Comedy,” Studies in Short Fiction 10 (1973): 288–90. “Hop-Frog” probably relates to a “historical incident involving Charles VI of France and five of his nobles, who dressed in similar disguises and chained themselves together to amuse a wedding party in 1393”: “A curious noble accidentally set the chained party aflame when he brought a torch too close to the costumes while seeking their identities. Four of those men died, but the king and one other survived. The story has been chronicled in history, but an account entitled ‘Barbarians of the Theater’ also appeared in the February 1, 1845, issue of Broadway Journal, edited by Poe.” See Sova, Edgar Allan Poe, 81. 25 Joan Dayan believes that this story implies Poe’s rejection of institutional slavery. “Hop-Frog” is the “most horrible tale of retribution,” conjuring “revenge for the national sin of slavery.” However, Paul Christian Jones argues that Poe opposes the abolitionist movement, for Hop-Frog is even more brutal than the king. See Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (1994): 258; and Jones, “The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pathos,” Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 241. 26 BDSM is an acronym that signifies such perverse relationships as bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. 27 See Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 58. 28 Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 55–56. 29 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (New York: Century, 1960), 55–56. 30 Immanuel Kant, quoted in John R. Silber, “Kant at Auschwitz,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Kant Congress, ed. Gerhard Funke and Thomas Seebohm (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and Univ. Press of America, 1990), 186, 189. 31 Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review 15 (July 1948): 758. 32 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Vintage, 1965), 150. 33 Alenka Zupančič, “The Subject of the Law,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 49. 34 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, “Evilness and Law in Heinrich von Kleist’s Story ‘Michael Kohlhaas,’” in Understanding Evil: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Margaret Sönser Breen (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 204. 35 See Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 66; emphasis original. 76 POE STUDIES S U P E R E G O E V I L A N D R E V E N G E T A L E S 36 Zupančič, interview by Cox, “On Evil.” A young gang member, describing a retributive style that would seem to follow the Law of the Other, gives himself this “universalizable” maxim: “If you slap me, I’m gonna hit you with my closed fit. If you stab me, I’m gonna shoot you. An eye for an eye doesn’t exist—it’s one-up. One-up is what it is in gang life.” See Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 284. 38 See Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 90–91. 39 Baumeister, Evil, 283, 294. 40 See Levine and Levine, eds., Short Fiction, 436 n. 2. 41 See Baumeister, Evil, 299. 42 Zupančič, “Subject of the Law,” 50, 51. 43 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 75. 44 These are the words of General Iberico Saint-Jean, governor of Buenos Aires during the first junta regime in Argentina. He declares that this is the right approach to fighting the nation’s enemies—the armed, leftist guerrillas. See Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, “A Grammar of Terror: Psychocultural Responses to State Terrorism in Dirty War and Post-Dirty War Argentina,” in The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, ed. Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 235. 37 H I S T O RY , T H E O RY , I N T E R P R E TAT I O N 77