SOURCE: DeNuccio, Jerome. “History, Narrative, and Authority: Poe's ‘Metzengerstein.’” College Literature 24, no. 2 (June 1997): 71-81.

It is perhaps fitting that in “Metzengerstein,” his first published tale,¹ Poe explores the authority a writer wields over his narrative. What makes the tale interesting, however, is the strategy Poe employs: he uses a writing character's loss of authority to affirm his own. Poe's strategy hinges on the dual metempsychosis that occurs in the tale. On the surface, of course, the tale strongly implies that the soul of Count Berlifitzing has transmigrated to a horse, thereby exacting revenge on his hereditary enemy Baron Metzengerstein. But a second, less apparent, metempsychosis takes place between Metzengerstein and the narrator. Indeed, in the process of recounting Metzengerstein's obsessive desire for unbounded subjectivity, the narrator enacts a parallel desire for narrative authority. Both, however, overreach, devaluing or ignoring the historical and textual determinants of subjectivity that resist the imposition of intention. Thus, just as Metzengerstein's coercive quest for self-authorization generates its own subversion, so too does the narrator's attempt to present Metzengerstein's story buckle under the weight of his own need to contain and control its meaning. When the dust settles, only Poe himself remains standing.

I

The attitude of the narrator toward “the doctrines of the Metempsychosis” and “the words of an ancient prophecy” he posits as the supposed “origin”(94)² of the hostility between the Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein families reveals both his strategy for artistic control and the source of its subversion. He begins with a curious refusal to date his narrative:

Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to the story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis.

(93)

The narrator invokes history with such phrases as “in all ages” and “at the period of which I speak” but simultaneously brackets it by his unwillingness to assign a temporal origin to his tale or a causative agent to such salient cultural facts as recurrent “horror and fatality.” Time and space, history and locale, are significant only as abstractions, a vague context for characters and events detached from animating and shaping historical forces. In freeing himself from temporal and spatial specificity, the narrator creates a site into which an alien experience can irrupt that will suspend the conventions and relations with which his readers are familiar. In his opening sentences, then, the narrator bridles both the story and its audience.

The narrative begins to slip from his control, however, when he turns to a discussion of metempsychosis. Although he notes its currency as a folk cultural belief, he hedges on the matter of its reality: “Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing”(93). He immediately reverses this careful neutrality, however, by declaring the Hungarian version of metempsychosis—a version he gives at second hand, citing a French translation of a Hungarian text—a “superstition … fast verging to absurdity” in its belief that the soul can be reembodied in an animal. And while he uses a quote from La Bruyere to dismiss even the less objectional forms of the belief as “incredulity”(93), he includes in a footnote three authoritative advocates of metempsychosis. These shifts from anthropological impartiality to outright rejection to qualified concession exhibit the narrator's ambivalence toward the doctrine, an anxious groping for a perspective on a phenomenon that both affronts his reason and attracts his interest. Indeed, the scholarly objectivity by which he seeks to characterize himself through the apparatus of quotation, footnoting, and documentation sets the stage for its own subversion, for while the narrator declines comment on the reality of metempsychosis, the authorities he cites affirm what his tale will go on to ratify: that the transfer of soul from human to animal can, in fact, occur.

The use of citation embroils the narrator in textuality, an interpenetration of texts that results in a polyphonic production of meaning. The irony Poe creates is inescapable: marshaling multiple texts representing multiple voices to validate his credibility and authorial agency, the narrator instead opens himself to an intertextuality that renders all notions of authorial agency tenuous at best. The narrator fails to see, in short, that he is positioned in language, not above it—that language itself enacts a kind of metempsychosis whereby meaning, slipping from one signifier to another, persistently resists authorial intention.

Poe uses the narrator's treatment of the “ancient prophecy”(94) to make clear that the nature of language itself undermines all attempts to constrain and shape its production. The prophecy, seemingly the “origin” of the feuding between the houses of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein according to the narrator, states, “A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing”(94). The narrator scornfully dismisses the prophecy as “silly” words that convey “little or no meaning”(94). Instead, to explain the families' animosity, he offers a list of sociopolitical reasons, ranging from long-standing rivalry in governmental affairs to Berlifitzing jealousy of the more ancient, more influential, and wealthier Metzengersteins. In effect, the narrator rejects the prophecy because of its figurative and oxymoronic manner of articulation. A literalist, he seeks to tie signifiers firmly to signifieds, to make language as referential as possible; thus, his grounding the feud in politics and social status. Only with reference to such realities can the prophecy mean, can word and world connect. But in separating and hierarchizing the literal and the figurative, fact and fiction, the narrator fails to recognize that the figurative is literal. The figurative binds even as it articulates difference, making the absent or inexpressible provisionally present and expressible—in short, making it factual. Thus, the literal is a form and effect of the figurative. For this reason, the narrator's project—an objective, carefully circumscribed and cautiously reasoned account of the nature and strange conclusion of a centuries-long “hereditary jealousy”(94)—is subverted from the start.

The narrator's misinterpretation of the prophecy signals this subversion. Recognizing its basic ambiguity—does the “lofty name” risking a “fearful fall” when “the mortality of Metzengerstein” triumphs “over the immortality of Berlifitzing” refer to Berlifitzing or Metzengerstein?—he nonetheless imposes on it a meaning congruent with the sociopolitical conditions he adduces: “The prophecy seemed to imply—if it implied anything—a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house”(94). This reading instantiates the narrator's authorial power, for it arbitrarily constrains the prophecy's meaning by neutralizing its linguistic ambiguity. However, by concluding with the triumph of Berlifitzing, not Metzengerstein, the tale eludes the narrator's control because he believes that events dictate language and fill it with pre-existent, transparently encodable meaning. In effect, then, the prophecy emblemizes language itself, for, like language, it is without origin and unremittingly figural; thus, again like language, it resists the determinate meaning, the preemptive appropriation, the narrator attempts to impose.

Indeed, the prophecy itself exemplifies a kind of linguistic metempsychosis, for it is a persistence through time and space of what Poe, in “The Power of Words,” terms “the physical power of words”(637), their capacity for shaping events and altering perceptions. In that tale, the angel Agathos explains to the “new-fledged” spirit Oinos that words, “in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe.” This influence “upon all particles of all matter” modifies “old forms,” resulting in “the creation of new” forms” (634, 36). Because words constantly after the “old forms” to which they refer, creating ever new ones in their place, a sign can have no central, stabilizing presence by which meaning is fixed. As signifiers, endlessly modifying their “forms” or signifieds, words point only to an absent origin.³ Similarly, the prophecy posits a false presence, for, as even the narrator acknowledges, its authorizing origin is absent. It is a past in the present which points to further, ever receding, finally unknowable pasts. The narrator's misreading of the prophecy indicates that subjective desire, not inherent or objective truth value, governs linguistic meaning. Meaning is willed, imposed, an arbitrary attempt to corral the play of language, to affix it to an interpretive need. To tell Metzengerstein's story is to try to appropriate it, to embed it in discourse so its meaning can be controlled and coerced. In his treatment both of metempsychosis and the prophecy, the narrator seeks to position himself above the events he narrates. In Roland Barthes's words, he seeks “to make ridiculous, to annul the power (the intimidation) of one language over another” (S/Z 98). Inevitably, such an endeavor falters, for the narrator's words, expressing his situated and interested assumptions, can be no more empirical, no more objectively referential, than any other words. Just as Metzengerstein's desire to dominate the horse reflects his need for uninhibited subjectivity, so the narrator's desire to dominate his tale reflects his bid for an encompassing artistic agency. However, rather than controlling the events that precipitate Metzengerstein's “fearful fall,” the narrator replicates them at the level of writing.

II

Orphaned at 15,⁴ Metzengerstein enters into his father's “vast possessions”: “castles … without number,” land so extensive the “boundary line of his dominions was never clearly defined,” and a “fortune … unparalleled” by any “nobleman of Hungary” (95). The combination of youth, willful temperament, and unlimited resources quickly generates dissolute behavior. During a three day spree Metzengerstein “out-Heroded Herod,” engaging in “shameful debaucheries—flagrant treacheries—unheard-of atrocities” which demonstrate that “no punctilios of conscience” checked “the remorseless fangs of” this “petty Caligula” (95). Seemingly, Metzengerstein is uncircumscribed, his limitless material possessions the trigger, scene, and emblem of his limitless subjectivity. In this first tale, then, Poe creates a character who would frequently reappear in subsequent tales: the aristocrat for whom the historical present means loss and vulnerability, and who consequently engages in massive acts of self-display designed to elevate the self above that historical present. In effect, such characters attempt to turn dislocation into empowerment, to inhabit “an idealized realm” where “specific social contexts” (Leverenz 222) fall before a subjectivity that, like the young baron's property, knows no “boundary line.” But the opening description of centuries-long rivalry with the family of Berlifitzing, as well as the allusions to Herod and Caligula, intimates that Metzengerstein is, in fact, bound by history.⁵ The narrator's rumination on the young baron's age reinforces this point. “In a city, fifteen years are no long period—a child may still be a child in his third lustrum: but in a wilderness—in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, fifteen years have a far deeper meaning” (94). Time differs in the “old principality” because there Metzengerstein is embedded in a context of hereditary history where events, persons, passions are recursive. Childhood, as a time of forging identity, does not exist; rather, identity is bequeathed, intact, from the past. The “deeper meaning,” thus, is that selves are interchangeable markers, revealing the cycles of a recurrent, changeless history.

It is the tapestry, however, which most clearly indicates Metzengerstein's entanglement in history. Because it “represented the shadowy and majestic forms of a thousand illustrious ancestors” (95), it serves as a historical text, a chronicle of the events and characters that have preceded him, the “forms” of which he is a function. Sitting in the tapestry chamber, “a vast and desolate upper apartment of the family palace,” on the night that fire consumes the Berlifitzing stables—an arson “the unanimous opinion of the neighborhood” (95) attributes to Metzengerstein—he finds his gaze has become riveted “without his consciousness” on “the figure of an enormous, and unnaturally colored horse, represented in the tapestry as belonging to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival,” whose “rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein” (96). At first, “a fiendish expression” crosses the young baron's lips as the congruence of the burning stables with the tapestry's text rises to his awareness. Unaccountably, however, his reading of this text induces an “overwhelming anxiety which appeared falling like a pall upon his senses. It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell” (96). Momentarily diverted by the flaring conflagration, his gaze returns “mechanically” to the tapestry only to find, “to his extreme horror and astonishment,” that “the head of the gigantic steed had … altered its position,” extending fully toward Metzengerstein, the eyes fiery red and the “distended lips of the apparently enraged horse” disclosing “his gigantic and disgusting teeth.” Terrified, the baron stumbles to the door where, upon opening it, “a flash of red light” casts his shadow upon the tapestry. The shadow assumes “the exact position, … precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing” (96).

The tapestry text has, in effect, adduced its own power to signify—a power the narrator, in discussing the prophecy, had denied to texts. What, then, generates this power, this capacity to hold its reader spellbound, to transform him from malevolent satisfaction to “stupified … terror” (96)? Berlifitzing, while alive, constantly reminds Metzengerstein of his historical boundedness, his situatedness in time, the intractable relation to an other that has solidified across the centuries. To murder his rival is to erase the ties of history that obstruct the young noble's complete freedom to assert his subjective desire. But as Gregory Jay points out, “to murder or repress … others in the service of one's own identity involves an intense attraction to them as objects, and a repetition of them in reflection that subsequently leaves a resistant trace of the other in the dream of originality” (187). The mutual gaze that locks together Metzengerstein and tapestried horse, the parallel between his Caligula-like “remorseless fangs” and the horse's “gigantic and disgusting teeth,” and, most saliently, his shadow occupying the form of his murderous ancestor attest that Metzengerstein orbits within a looped historical script, doomed to a repetition that dissolves subjective agency, no better off, finally, than his less powerful enemy. This dawning realization provokes first his anxiety, then his terror. He has read into the tapestry text his own latent fear of an imperiled self.

A text's represented forms assume reality, Poe suggests, by virtue of readers who rather than decoding a pre-established and inserted meaning, instead encode themselves into it, and the meaning they contrive springs largely from needs submerged beneath conscious awareness. The tapestry's location in “a vast and desolate upper apartment” suggests, and the baron's “unwitting” fixation on it makes clear, that subconscious elements animate the text he reads, destabilizing its system of signs and binding them to their own, unfamiliar logic. Moreover, when the exact material “counterpart” (96) of the represented horse appears immediately after Berlifitzing's death in his flaming stables, bearing on its forehead Berlifitzing's brand, Metzengerstein quickly forms a “perverse attachment” to it because “the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities” and “intractable audacities so well accorded with his own spirit” (98-99). As the reincarnated Berlifitzing, the horse embodies the “resistant trace of the other” to which Gregory Jay refers—produced from an “intense attraction” to the victim objectified and murdered “in the service” of Metzengerstein's “own identity.” Because Berlifitzing emblemized the lengthy, iterative history he inherited and to which he was bound, the newly orphaned Metzengerstein seeks through his destruction to remove the last barrier to untrammeled selfhood, “the dream of originality.” Berlifitzing's reappearance, however, as a horse which mirrors “his own spirit” revives Metzengerstein's sense of an identity threatened by historical recurrence, for the metempsychosis experience simultaneously involves the loss and repetition of the self. The horse, then, acquires a double otherness, both Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein's externalized fear of and rage at self-dispossession.

To defuse this threat, Metzengerstein withdraws behind the walls of his estate and obsessively devotes himself to riding the horse. In attempting to channel its energy and bend it to his will, Metzengerstein seeks to dominate the other that haunts his dream of independent, autonomous subjectivity. However, he does not ride the horse so much as he is ridden by it. The narrator deftly captures this ambiguity of authority when he remarks that “the young Metzengerstein seemed rivetted to the saddle” (99). Metzengerstein's reluctance to name the horse, despite his having given “characteristic appellations” to “all the rest in his collection” (99), further indicates his inability to gain mastery, for to name is to define, and to define is to control. Ultimately, ambiguity shades into inversion as the horse carries the shrieking Metzengerstein into “the whirlwind of chaotic fire” consuming his own palace, an ironic repetition of the past he sought to transcend. Metempsychosis stands, then, as Poe's figure for history and its capacity for permeating and dissolving identity boundaries. Metzengerstein creates the conditions for his own subversion because, in his arrogance, he fails to realize that, as Karl Marx observed, individuals do not make history “under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (595).

III

Metzengerstein's attempt to hurdle the fault lines of history and assert individual agency is matched, at the level of writing, by the narrator. What begins as an objective account of Metzengerstein's story, with its cited authorities, rational causations, and adherence to established fact, quickly shifts to a different narrative register. Since he did not see Metzengerstein enter or leave the tapestry chamber, how does the narrator know Metzengerstein was there while the fire raged at Berlifitzing's stables? Since he is a first person narrator, how does he know “the Baron listened, or affected to listen,” to the uproar, “or perhaps pondered upon some more novel, some more decided act of audacity” (95-96)? How does he know the baron's “eyes became unwittingly rivetted to the figure” of a horse embroidered on the tapestry (96)? Most significantly, how does he know that the horse alters its position, that Metzengerstein's psychic state spikes from anxiety to horror, and that the baron's shadow assumes the very position of his pictured ancestor? Obviously, the narrator could not see what Metzengerstein sees, feel what he experiences, unless he were deliberately developing a narrative intention, shaping events to conform to a subjective desire.

At this point in the tale, then, the narrator expands his authority beyond the carefully circumscribed bounds he initially established. As Metzengerstein reads the tapestry, the narrator reads Metzengerstein reading, thus arrogating the same kind of controlling agency Metzengerstein himself seeks. Just as the shadow of Metzengerstein fills the contour of a triumphant predecessor, the narrator occupies Metzengerstein, entering and interpreting his consciousness. Indeed, the narrator enacts what he earlier discounted—metempsychosis. Just as Berlifitzing entered the horse to stage his vengeful agency, so the narrator, to accommodate his desire for authorial agency, enters Metzengerstein, using him as a subject position in which to situate his own need for ascendancy. The subject of the tale thus becomes a twofold subjectivity: the desire of Metzengerstein for an authorizing self and the desire of the narrator for an authoring self. At its halfway point the narrator's tale, like Metzengerstein's principality, has become a site for wielding power.

He moves to consolidate this power in the second half of the tale by deploying rationalistic discourse: explanations for the baron's self-imposed isolation and strange attachment to the horse, measurements documenting the horse's prodigious leaping ability, observed instances of its impressive intelligence, affirmations by “all the retinue of the Baron” of his “extraordinary affection” (99) for the horse. Oppositional voices, however, are summarily silenced with an arrogance as callous as Metzengerstein's. He scornfully dismisses criticism of the baron's social withdrawal as the disappointed expectations “of many a manoeuvering mamma.” He ridicules Berlifitzing's widow who, in response to Metzengerstein's insulting refusal of all social invitations, hopes “‘that the Baron might be at home when he did not wish to be at home, since he disdained the company of his equals; and ride when he did not wish to ride, since he preferred the society of a horse.’” Declaring the widow's words “singularly unmeaning,” he ascribes them condescendingly to “a very silly explosion of hereditary pique” and an old woman's desire to say something “unusually energetic” (98). In addition, he marginalizes as hardly “worth mentioning at all” the lone dissenting voice in the baron's retinue, a page who claims that fear and hatred, not “extraordinary affection,” characterize the baron's relation to the horse. His “opinions were of the least possible importance,” the narrator maintains, because he is “an insignificant and misshapen little page, whose deformities were in everybody's way” (99). Such assertions, astonishingly at odds with the rationalism he affects, indicate his thorough absorption into the system of asymmetrical power that Metzengerstein's class privilege affords. Significantly, the conclusion of the tale bears out both the widow and the page; the obviously terrified Metzengerstein is carried into his flaming home—riding “when he did not wish to ride” to a place, presumably, “he did not wish to be.”

The narrator, thus, disclaims the truth his tale tells. Seeking to insulate and empower his discourse, he excludes difference, a maneuver as totalizing in its projection of self as that undertaken by Metzengerstein. In his will to narrative power, he adopts the discourse of Metzengerstein and, thus, is shaped by it, becoming an effect of the language he uses. The narrator has made himself into a figure of speech, a metaphoric replacement of Metzengerstein who himself stands as a metaphor of historical forces. In effect, he asserts the authority of his narrating self by displacing it onto the contingent self of Metzengerstein, a strategy that denies his centrality in the very act of affirming it.

“Language is never innocent,” Barthes observes in “Writing Degree Zero”; words bear their own historicity, “the stubborn after-image” of their past usage. To write is to become “a prisoner of someone else's words and even of [one's] own” (37). And, as with words, so with the texts fashioned from them: “texts are not, after all, autonomous and self-contained,” Gerald Graff notes. Inevitably, “other texts and textualized frames of reference” inhere in them and catalyze their meaning (256). Writing, in short, is historically saturated. It mobilizes previous texts which themselves reflect particular codes and contexts. Writing is certified as writing—is authorized—by conditions that resist an individual writer's narrative intent. Such a narrative impasse requires, first, recognition, and second, a capacity for negotiating the competing claims of subjective desire and textual trace—“freedom and remembrance” (37) as Barthes puts it. And precisely here lies the narrator's failure. Having aligned himself with Metzengerstein, having appropriated his subjectivity for the supposed unharnessed power informing it, the narrator is in turn possessed by it. Having lost the distinction between himself as narrating subject and Metzengerstein as the subject of narrative, the narrator's self collapses into Metzengerstein's, thereby forfeiting the very control he seeks. He suffers, at the level of narrative, the same provisionality, the same contingency of identity, that history inflicts upon Metzengerstein. Thus, the narrator can only watch, in stupefied amazement, his tale sabotage the conclusion toward which it pointed: “a cloud of smoke settled over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of—a horse!” (100). Berlifitzing triumphs; metempsychosis occurs; and Metzengerstein's “fearful fall” from power is also the narrator's.

IV

But not Poe's. John Irwin calls Poe “a master at creating narrators who in the attempt to establish the credibility of their narratives manage to unravel their own efforts. … They add a detail that arouses our distrust, usually a revelation of doubleness” (118). In constructing a text that displays a narrative metempsychosis, a spilling of the narrator's subjectivity into Metzengerstein's, Poe argues for his own literary identity. “A skilful literary artist,” Poe declares in his May 1842 review of Hawthorne, accommodates incidents to intent: “having conceived … a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents … as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect” (572). The narrator, in contrast, permits incidents to dictate intent. He loses, in the collapse of self into other, the critical space, the narrative “outsidedness,”⁶ that allows the design of incidents to accommodate a predetermined effect. Thus, the strange, even horrifying, phenomenon of self-division, of a narrator creating a text that aborts its rhetorical trajectory and undermines him and itself—precisely the effect Poe aims at.

Moreover, the aesthetic distance or “outsidedness” required of the “skilful literary artist” helps explain the oddly historical ahistoricity of many of Poe's tales. Such tales as “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Ligeia,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” share the vague temporality, the indefinite pastness, of “Metzengerstein”; yet, also like “Metzengerstein,” a palpable sense of history strongly suffuses them. A devastating plague, the chaotic carnival, a dilapidated city on the Rhine, the storied palazzos of Venice, the ancient halls and crumbling mansions, the played out lines of family descent—all evoke a historical context never precisely defined, places steeped in a history at once present and abstract, or present but on the verge of absence. The decontextualized historical “feel” of these tales contributes to their decentering effect, especially the discomforting way they invite yet slip away from precise historical appropriation. More importantly, the historical reticence of these tales reflects Poe's engagement with the problematics of literary authority and representation. Situated both out of and in history, the tales become sites where Poe can negotiate the twin demands of authorial autonomy and representational authenticity. Poe does not deny history so much as use it as a rhetorical strategy, a way to orbit historical contexts without surrendering to their gravitational pull, to retain narrative credibility without relinquishing narrative authority. In “Metzengerstein,” the narrator loses both, and in his disappearance from his own tale Poe most clearly appears.

Notes

1. “Metzengerstein” first appeared in 1832 in the Saturday Courier of January 14. Poe revised it for inclusion in the Southern Literary Messenger of January, 1836. Four years later he revised it again for his collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

2. All references to this tale are from Poe's “Metzengerstein.”

3. Agathos does assert that only “a being of infinite understanding” could “trace” the “modifications of old forms” performed by words “onward and upward” to their ultimate origin at “the throne of the Godhead.” Human beings, however, lacking infinite understanding, cannot exercise such “analytic retrogation” (636). They are caught in a continually changing chain of signification over which they exercise no control. Meaning thus is, at best, provisional and arbitrary.

4. Metzengerstein's age is 18 in the 1836 version of the tale.

5. Metzengerstein's immersion in history is paralleled by the narrator's, for his use of Herod and Caligula to epitomize egregious evil testifies to his reliance on cultural codes—always arbitrary—to fashion and convey his meaning.

6. This term is borrowed from Bakhtin, who argues that “creative understanding” requires not a renunciation of self but a location of self outside the object of understanding, so as to surmount “the closedness and one-sidedness” of its “particular” meaning (7)

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