Poe and Toledo

Having just been in Toledo, Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” has been on my mind again. The most prominent feature of this story is that it has, in my opinion, surely the greatest final lines in world literature.

“There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell fainting into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

Considered out of context, it would be puzzling to call these lines great writing. The string of sentences is palpably absurd. They shout with exclamation points. They seem to belong to some work of juvenile historical fiction.

And yet, Poe gets away with it. The entire preceding part of the story sets us up to be able to go along with these final lines, even if with more than a bit of laughter.

Let’s look at it this way. What if there were a competition in which a group of the world’s most gifted writers of all time were shown those final lines and told: “your assignment is to create a literary masterpiece despite using those ridiculous final lines.” If that had been the task, then Poe surely would have won the competition; I don’t think there’s any better way to have salvaged sentences that bizarre than Poe’s story.

Here are Poe’s final lines again:

“There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell fainting into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

In order to win the imagined competition, you need to make these ridiculous lines somewhat believable to the reader. I’ll probably write a whole essay on this some time. But two quick points for now:

1. The character is obviously raving. The only way to make this believable is to put him beforehand into such a series of confining mental and physical tortures that it makes sense to rave and scream immediately afterward. Poe did that, of course.

2. This is the ultimate deus ex machina in literature. Not only is it preposterous that a character on the verge of falling into a pit should be saved at the last instant by the outstretched arm of General Lasalle. Even more absurd is that Lasalle, the French Army, the Inquisition, and Toledo, are never even mentioned in the preceding part of the story. [Mea culpa! Toledo is indeed mentioned explicitly several times, and it’s obvious from that and related facts that the Inquisition is meant. It’s been over a decade since I ready the story in full, and my unconscious was clearly trying to “improve” the story, which in my opinion would be even better if Toledo as well appeared only in the final lines. But the French Army and General Lasalle are good enough for an all-time classic deus ex machina.]

And I want to suggest that the fact of never even mentioning them is the only way to make this work. If you’re going to go with a ridiculous deus ex machina as your conclusion, you have to play it to the hilt and just pull it baldly out of a hat with no warning.

In other words, the bit about Lasalle can’t possibly be made more believable by building it into the plot from the start. Imagine if the narrator had been saying from time to time: “I knew that my only hope was to be saved by the advance of the French Army, which rumor had it was winning rapid victories in its advance on Toledo.” Supplemented perhaps with things like: “And now the walls began to close slowly in. Unless the French were already at the gates, I knew that I was doomed. I prayed to God that Lasalle was already in the vicinity, his forces already searching for me in these catacombs.”

Those would all be failed attempts to render the improbable, probable. But with lines that absurd, I think there is no option but just to lay them on the reader and hope that the bizarre atmospherics of the earlier dungeon scene put the reader in the right frame of mind to give them a pass. And in fact I think they get more than a pass”. I think they are the most daring and most successful closing lines in the history of literature– perhaps because they are among the few true closing lines in literature. By that point most author’s aren’t taking any more risks. You already know what has happened, and they’re maybe just spraying a little bit of whipped cream on top of the story. Poe actually completes his story in those final lines, and I think his risk pays huge dividends.

I also think Poe has one of the best opening lines in world literature. More on that later today.