more Amontillado

There are a few more points that can be made about the opening sentence of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” As a reminder, here it is:

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

It is also worth noting that the narrator never specifies what the injuries and final insult were. Fortunato’s misdeeds are left tacit and vague, and the story is better that way. There is a usual tendency to oppose honest openness and evasive obliqueness, but all powerful intellectual life lies somewhere between these two poles, and there’s no getting around the fact that thinking is more like witchcraft than like robotic calculation. This notion comes to me not from Heidegger, Whitehead, or Latour, but from Plato, and it is time for Plato to be revived.

But more on that later. Let’s look at additional ways in which Poe’s opening sentence could have been ruined by lesser hands. For example, he could have been too specific about Fortunato’s transgressions, as in the following piece of literary hackwork:

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. To be more specific, I had always noticed constant acts of small theft in my house following each of Fortunato’s visits over the years, and this was bad enough. But then he had the gall to flirt openly with my wife in front of a table filled with dignitaries, and that was the final straw.”

You see the problem, I’m sure. No specific grievance against Fortunato is likely to satisfy the reader as much as vague hints already do. The reader is already convinced by the first sentence; as for the rest, silence is golden.

I also think it is a good idea that Poe makes a total and somewhat artificial split between the categories of “injury” and “insult.” (In real life they are often hopelessly intertwined.) In the actual opening sentence, Poe posits injury as something that can be sustained to the quantity of 1,000 and beyond, while insult is so grievous that one case is enough to provoke cold-blooded murder. And that is forceful and clear. Instead of that wonderful decisiveness, he could easily have muddled it badly in the following manner:

“The thousand injuries and insults of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but finally I had had enough of both, and vowed revenge.”

This fails, because here the threshold for offense is treated as somewhat arbitrary. The narrator finally grew sick of it, but we don’t know why now rather than three weeks earlier or later, and the motive is lost in the shuffle. But the artificial positing of an injury/insult “line in the sand” is sufficiently convincing that we can understand and believe the character’s rage.

Now let’s try a subtler transformation, and simply flip the order of the two key words:

“The thousand insults of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon injury, I vowed revenge.”

Does this work? It doesn’t work as well for me. When it is insult that triggers the crime, we can identify with the wounded pride of the narrator. But if by contrast he endures one thousand insults, but then is driven to murder after just one injury, he appears pragmatic to the point of crassness. Much of our interest in his deeds is thereby lost.

I’ve also already said that I think the name “Fortunato” is impossible to top in this sentence. If we try another Italian-sounding literary name, the etymological depth is lost:

“The thousand injuries of Gervasio I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

The same is true even if we use the sort of name usually favored by philosophers when writing dialogues:

“The thousand injuries of Teofilo I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

And even worse, of course, if we simply plug in any random Italian name:

“The thousand injuries of Sandro I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

Or, in a more political twist:

“The thousand injuries of Silvio I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

No, it needs to be Fortunato.

And once you have the name Fortunato (I argued yesterday that this exotic name is needed to counteract the air of necessary cliché lingering about the insult/injury distinction) then you have a great alibi for putting the story in Venice at Carnival time, and all the atmospherics of the tale follow directly from that. Including even Poe’s faked insulting remark about Italians (I’m sure he liked them just fine in real life):

“Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and the opportunity– to practice imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack– but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.”

That last sentence is a nice touch. The narrator is no longer simply making a wild rant against Italians, but is implicating himself in their sincere relation to wines. Poe is not posturing as an omniscient describer of his actions: he too is seduced down into the catacombs by a love of old wines that he shares with his victim.