SOURCE: Cantalupo, Barbara. “The Lynx in Poe's ‘Silence.’” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 27, nos. 1-2 (June-December 1994): 1-4.

[In the following essay, Cantalupo discusses the symbolic significance of the lynx in “Silence—A Fable.”]

Poe chose the lynx as the final image in his tale “Silence—A Fable.” Quite simply, the lynx functions as a symbolic figure: it supersedes the Demon narrator and has the “last word”—the silence of its lynx-eye stare—effectively drawing the “moral” of the fable into its purview, not the Demon's.¹ The lynx figures significantly in Benjamin Fisher's argument that “Silence” be read not as parody but as fable.² He suggests that the lynx as a “classical symbol of perfidy … more closely associated with the vague ‘tomb’ rather than a realistic habitat for an actual animal … moves us deftly into the regions of fable.”³ Aside from being a pivot that helps define the form of the narrative, the lynx, as the final image, calls attention to itself not only as animal but also as word, pointing, in this sense, to its homophone “links” and thereby, indirectly, to the construct that informs the “moral” of the fable which paradoxically invokes “the power of words.”

This emphasis on language and writing complements a link that Alexander Hammond makes to Poe's comment that “Silence” and the other tales in the Folio Club collection “were originally written to illustrate a large work ‘On the Imaginative Faculties.’”⁴ This description, Hammond suggests, provides a possible framework for reading these tales: “the creation and interpretation of fiction.” Within this frame “the basic analogue between world and text” is explored, and “fiction and the literary process itself [become] central concerns.” Hammond reads “Silence,” in particular, as “an allegory radically extending the boundaries of fiction. Reality itself is seen as a kind of text.”⁵

Poe published three versions of this tale. In the 1837 version published in The Baltimore Book,⁶ he uses an epigraph taken from “Al Aaraaf”: “Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call / Silence—which is the merest word of all” (Works [The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe], 2:195; subsequent references to this edition cited parenthetically by volume and page number). This epigraph suggests the encompassing nature of words—that they not only describe our world but are our world—or, in the biblical sense, made our world. It also points to what Poe calls the “merest” word, silence. In this case, as in many other of Poe's stories and poems (e.g., Eureka),⁷ “mere” takes on the definition “pure, unmixed; absolute, entire, sheer, perfect” rather than the more common use of the term, “having no greater extent or range.” As such, using “mere” as an adjective modifying silence implies the absolute nature of silence.

In the 1840 version in The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe replaced the epigraph from “Al Aaraaf” with a popular quote from Alcman: “‘The mountain pinnacles slumber; valleys, crags and caves are silent’” (2:195). Poe also changed the title. Fisher argues that the change from “SIOPE” (that is, from the Greek word for silence, siope, and also perhaps the anagram, IS POE)⁸ to “Silence” and the new epigraph quoting Alcman rather than his own poem erase the obvious self-referentiality and move the tale away from its function as a parody in the style of the psychological autobiographists to its function as fable or, in Fisher's words, “dream fiction.”⁹ Another reason for these changes may be, simply, Poe's penchant for perplexing his reader.

The 1840 epigraph effectively eliminates what the earlier provides, that is, a frame for reading the “moral” of the fable. The popular quotation from Alcman obscures in its simplicity; it merely describes the landscape of silence while the passage from “Al Aaraaf” prescribes a particular perception: “Ours is a world of words.” The earlier epigraph is too easy; it too clearly sets the parameters of the fable, and it seems logical that Poe would remove this clue in his revised version.¹⁰ Also, choosing Alcman would be appropriate not only because the Greek reference demonstrates Blackwoodian “erudition” but because, as David Campbell suggests, Alcman was known for making “no concessions [in his poetry] to foreigners or posterity. … [he] was fond too of references to obscure foreign tribes, real and fabulous, to the perplexity of scholars.”¹¹ Like Alcman, Poe “made no concessions” in his work and, in fact, enjoyed burying the implications of his tales.

The 1840 “Silence—A Fable” obscures through omission. Material in the 1837 tale plumbs (in Poe's own words) “the profound undercurrent” that informs the later versions. The long descriptive passage eliminated from the first paragraph of the revised version sets the Demon's tale within the province of the dream, a setting that, in the 1845 version is obliquely referred to in a poem that precedes it.¹² It seems no mere coincidence that Poe, as editor of the Broadway Journal, where this version appears, placed “The Valley of Unrest” immediately before “Silence: A Fable.” The poem describes a dream space similar to the setting of the Demon's tale and calls it a place of “magic solitude.” The setting in the end of Poe's tale where he locates the lynx, then, becomes neither dream nor reality, but that no-place in between. This border-ground territory makes particular sense if we consider the lynx as not only animal but also word.

Guided by the claim in the 1837 epigraph that “[o]urs is a world of words,” the word lynx calls attention to its homophone “links,” which in turn points to the function of language, that is, to link. In Marginalia, Poe considers the easier function of words as linking thought to logic, a conscious operation. In the more difficult task, Poe sees the potential of language to link that “point of blending between wakefulness and sleep … [that] border-ground” of fancy to “the realm of Memory” (Writings, 2:259) so that this fancy can be held as thought and, thus, through language, linked to logic, then to expression. As Poe notes, no thought is beyond expression in words since “thought is logicalized by the effort at (written) expression.” He does note, though, the exception: “a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts” that “arise in the soul … only at its epochs of most intense tranquility … at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dream” (Writings, 2:258; latter emphasis added). He goes on to claim, however, that his “faith in the power of words” will enable him, at some point, “to convey, to certain classes of intellect, a shadowy conception” of these moments of fancy (Writings, 2:258-59; latter emphasis added).

The settings at the beginning and end of “Silence” depict two stages—one of the dream and one of fancy. The Demon's story begins in “a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies … [that] sigh one unto the other … and nod to and fro their everlasting heads” (2:195) and ends when the lynx emerges from “the shadow of the tomb” (2:198; emphasis added). The Demon creates a world of words out of dream, a world that frightens the man in his tale and that makes the Demon laugh at his frailty and fear. In the end, the lynx, in that “shadowy” world of fancy, overcomes the Demon's derision with a silent stare. Both settings suggest that the “moral” of this fable is interdependent with the mode of its presentation, that is, with where and how expression and, thereby, narrative come into being—with the links that words provide. Although the Demon overpowers the man in his tale with his curse of silence and overcomes the narrator with his awful words, the lynx, in the end, overpowers the Demon with “the merest of words,” providing a hopeful ending to the tale,¹³ suggesting the realization of Poe's faith in the “power of words,” especially that “merest” of words, silence.

As often with Poe's stories, narrative is displaced through a series of narrators; in this case, the tale is told to a man who has heard the tale from a Demon who participated in its plot. The narrator's story begins as he recounts the way he came to know this tale. He is accosted by a Demon who commands, “Listen to me,” as he “place[s] his hand” (2:195) on the narrator's head in a gesture meant both to hold the narrator's attention and signify the Demon's power. In the 1837 version, the Demon begins his story by suggesting that his listener has never seen the place he will describe except, he admits, possibly

in one of those vigorous dreams which come like the Simoom upon the brain of the sleeper who hath lain down to sleep among the forbidden sunbeams … which slide from off the solemn columns of the melancholy temples in the wilderness … [in] a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zäire.

(2:195)

In a place such as this, the Demon recalls, he once finds himself, and as “the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist,” he sees in the distance a rock with “characters engraven in the stone” which, at first, he could not decipher, but as “the moon shone with a fuller red,” he sees “the characters were DESOLATION.” He then sees on top of the rock a man, “tall and stately in form … wrapped … in the toga of old Rome … [and having the] features of a deity” (2:196). The Demon hides himself in the water-lilies to see what the man will do in this place where “grey clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon. But there is no wind throughout the heaven,” and rain, “having fallen, … was blood” (2:195-96). The man “trembled in the solitude” (2:197) but does nothing but observe the desolation.

The Demon, angered at the man's mere observation, begins his provocations, first by causing a tempest with “the curse of tumult” described thus:

And the heaven became livid with the violence of the tempest—and the rain beat upon the head of the man—and the floods of the river came down—and the river was tormented into foam—and the water-lilies shrieked within their beds—and the forest crumbled before the wind—and the thunder rolled—and the lightning fell—and the rock rocked to its foundation.

(2:197)

But the man still only “tremble[s] in the solitude.” The Demon, outraged by this passivity, “grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence.” And with this curse, the man was “wan with terror … [and] shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off” (2:197-98). The Demon's tale ends here.

The narrator prefaces the ending of his story by comparing the Demon's fable to the “fine tales in the volumes of the Magi,” to the “lore … in the sayings … [of] the Sybils,” to the “holy, holy things … heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona,” and concludes, “as Allah liveth, that fable which the demon told me … I hold to be the most wonderful of all!” (2:198). Although judging the tale “most wonderful,” the narrator cannot commiserate with the teller by joining in his laughter.

As the Demon returns to the “cavity of the tomb” (2:198), he curses the narrator as he had cursed the man in his tale. Both men remain detached at the sight of desolation and destruction, unable to participate in their worlds except as observers whose awe never breaks into action. The narrator's despairing confession could, in fact, have ended the tale. But, with a dramatic sense of staging, “the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face” (2:198-99).

In this way the lynx is set apart. As it confronts the Demon's derision at man's inability to articulate his fear or withstand the imposition of death's absolute silence or challenge the elusiveness of that world which threatens to evade the power of words to own and hone a world, the lynx can be read as a symbol of possibility rather than perfidy. With its powerful stare, it shows the narrator that the Demon's derision and portrayal of man's impotence need not be the last word. Yet Poe's endings could never be that hopeful. The turn of the screw emerges when we look at the lynx not merely as animal but as word. Not only does the homophone “links” point to the function of language, as suggested earlier, it also suggests connections to “lynx-eyes” in other Poe stories and notes.

In Marginalia, for example, this hopeful valence is affirmed. Here Poe attributes man's ability to overcome the indignity that often befalls his fate to man's ability to perceive his world through the lynx-eye of philosophy: “It is only the philosophical lynxeye that, through the indignity-mist of Man's life, can still discern the dignity of Man” (Writings, 2:379).¹⁴ Even though, as in the Demon's fable, man often is impotent in his despair, in “the indignity-mist” of his life, and, like the narrator, is alienated from his world, hope emerges in the form of the lynx whose stare breaks through the Demon's mocking laughter like lynx-eye perception breaking through the indignity of man's despair. “Lynx-eye” commonly means “keen sighted” (OED): “[T]he ancients attributed to this animal among other fabulous properties, that of extraordinary powers of vision.” Yet ironically, twentieth-century science has proven that this attribute is a myth, that though the lynx is a keen predator, its vision is no more acute than an ordinary housecat's.¹⁵ This irony extends, coincidentally, to another link, a reference in another of Poe's tales written after “Silence” called “Thou Art the Man.”

In “Thou Art the Man,” the unsuccessful avenger, “‘Old Charley,’ whom everybody knew to have the eye of a lynx” (3:1048; emphasis added), having invited the townspeople to a sumptuous banquet after the death of his benefactor, keeps silent about the case of Château Margaux which was to be the highlight of the dinner. Near the end of the party, “Old Charley” in his drunkenness asks the narrator to “force open the lid” of the “monstrously big box” of wine (3:1057, 1056) so his guests might then enjoy this gift. “After some vociferation, quiet was at length fully restored, and … a profound and remarkable silence ensued” (3:1056-57; emphasis added). The result of this “‘ceremony of disinterring the treasure’” (3:1056) is, of course, the incrimination of “Old Charley” as murderer and as the exception that proves the rule that

whether it is a marvellous coincidence, or whether it is that the name itself has an imperceptible effect upon the character, … there never yet was any person named Charles who was not an open, manly, honest … fellow … with … an eye that looked you always straight in the face, as much as to say, “I have a clear conscience myself; am afraid of no man, and am altogether above doing a mean action.”

(3:1044-45; emphasis added)

It's no coincidence that Charley is described as having a lynx-eye and as being an exception to the rule that all men named Charles are honest and upright and have “an eye that looked you always straight in the face,” just as the lynx who, in facing the Demon, “looked at him steadily in the face.” The question arises, then: is the lynx's stare in “Silence” the stare of Old Charley or the stare of the keen-sighted, truth-seeking lynx who overpowers the Demon's derision?

Can the “power of words” overcome man's frustrated efforts to speak from that “border-ground” between dreaming and wakefulness, or will he, like the man in the tale, run off afraid, following the admonition in Poe's “Sonnet—Silence” to “commend thyself to God!” upon meeting the shadow-side of what Poe calls “that twin entity … a two-fold Silence” (Works, 1:322)?¹⁶ Although the “moral” of this fable seems, thereby, both clear and obtuse—man can overcome his fear and act through language to create his world if, like the lynx, he emerges with the “merest” of words to confront the Demon who has cursed with the curse of silence—the fable conforms nicely to Blackham's notion that “[i]nterplay continues between the thought provoked [by the ‘moral’] and the representation that provokes and aids it.”¹⁷

Notes

1. My use of the term “fable” relates to H. J. Blackham's definition in his introduction to The Fable as Literature (London and Dover: Athlone Press, 1985). He suggests that a fable is “narrative fiction in the past tense” (xi), “a tactical manoeuvre to prompt new thinking …—not a didactic story … [It] will not merely express a truth graphically and memorably, but mainly will generate and store new meaning in the conception it represents” (xi-xii). He goes on to suggest that “the message is not delivered—certainly not in the ‘morals’ tagged to the Aesopic fables: it is embodied. It is in this sense that fable is a conceptual artefact, which remains to be used” (xviii-xix).

2. See Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV's analysis in “The Power of Words in Poe's ‘Silence,’” in Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978), 56-72. He here sets out the various changes Poe made in writing “Silence” and demonstrates that these changes move the tale towards “dream fiction” or fable rather than parody.

3. Fisher, 68.

4. See Alexander Hammond's “Further Notes on Poe's Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (1975): 38-42, and his “A Reconstruction of Poe's 1833 Tales of the Folio Club,” Poe Studies 5 (1972): 25-32.

5. All citations from Hammond, “Further Notes,” 41.

6. Poe's title in this edition is “Siope—A Fable. [In the manner of the Psychological Autobiographists],” The Baltimore Book, ed. W. H. Carpenter and T. S. Arthur (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, 1838). See Works, 2:194-95.

7. The “legitimate” thesis in Eureka begins: “Let us begin, then, at once, with that merest of words, ‘Infinity’” (Complete Works, 16:200).

8. Hammond, “Reconstruction,” 28.

9. Fisher, 61.

10. Fisher suggests just the opposite; he argues that the change makes the epigraph “more functional, reinforcing Poe's objections to mottoes that did not point the way toward the main intent in a tale or poem [Complete Works, 8:125-26]” (62-63).

11. David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 194.

12. See Broadway Journal 2 (6 September 1845): 135-36.

13. Fisher attaches no hopeful valence to the lynx, but rather suggests that the lynx and the Demon make “a deadly duo” that causes the narrator to “sh[y] away,” although he cannot “shake off” the “[t]error of the soul” they inspire (68).

14. In 1969 G. R. Thompson makes an allusion to the lynx-eye in “‘Silence’ and the Folio Club: Who Were the ‘Psychological Autobiographists’?” Poe Newsletter 2 (1969): 23.

15. See Maffei, L., A. Fiorentine, and S. Bisti, “The Visual Acuity of the Lynx” in Vision Research 30 (1990): 527-28.

16. A reprint of this poem precedes the 1845 publication of “Silence: A Fable” in the Broadway Journal by six weeks.

17. Blackham, xix.