The Assignation

Last night I foraged among our bookshelves again from a haphazard perch atop one of our folding-chairs, and started a humorous novel about New York society in the 1950s. But I also read another of a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, which (apart from "The Pit and the Pendulum," which my Grade 8 English teacher read out loud to us, and "The Tell-Tale Heart") I first read five or six years ago.

"The Assignation" is set in Venice at an indeterminate date. It begins with a dramatic retrospective lament by the narrator:

Ill-fated and mysterious man! – bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me! – not – oh! not as thou art – in the cold valley and shadow – but as thou shouldst be – squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim visions, thine own Venice – which is a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, and wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters.

I think this is an odd and interesting departure from the detached and relatively unemotional perspective of the conventional narrator, especially if he is not a central figure in the plot. But, given Poe's sensational use of first-person narrative in other stories, the departure is only to be expected. The portrait of Venice, poetic not only in its alliteration, does seem surprisingly understated, though. At the same time Poe's melodramatic exaggerations of em-dash and exclamation mark and "thee" and "thou" are not at all understated, and, as usual, are half moving and half amusing, but as a whole not quite my cup of tea.

Anyway, Poe continues,

Yes! I repeat it – as thou shouldst be. There are surely other worlds than this – other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude – other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?

Maybe it's a stupidly obvious thing to say, but I suspect that the author is addressing his own problems here; he certainly spent many "visionary hours" full of overflowings of his everlasting creative energies, which sundry friends and relations probably thought were a use of time infinitely less worthwhile than working on a real job.

The plot slowly unwinds when a baby plops into a canal from a window in the Ducal Palace, amid a highly romantic backdrop, which is sadly lacking in most such incidents: "the deep midnight, the Bridge of Sighs, the beauty of woman, and the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal" (walking on water, eh?). The mother shrieks; people come running out with torches and quickly fling themselves into the water. These rescuers are "stout swimmers" but infinite idiots, because they only paddle around on the surface of the water instead of diving after the infant. The highly picturesque mother, a Marchesa, has emerged on the marble steps of the palace and "looks on," as the captions of newspaper photos always put it, but is gazing in the direction of the prison of the Old Republic. The father, a Machiavellian figure, is standing further up the steps and beguiling the time by tranquilly strumming on the guitar in between giving orders. This whole procedure must have taken at least three minutes, by which time the child would evidently be dead.

But in Poe's version of things, a cloaked figure then steps out of a shadowy niche at the prison, where he has been loitering, and dives into the water. He is an idiot, too – he keeps his cloak on, never minding that its water-logged weight would drag him down – but he is not an infinite one because he actually dives and rescues the baby. In a jiffy, (or, as Poe puts it, "in an instant afterward") he delivers the baby to the mother, who ignores it; consumed with deep and in my view selfish emotion, she mumbles, "Thou hast conquered," with a Poe-ian love of obsolete pronouns. Anyway, (spoiler alert) the story goes on much in the vein of the death-party at the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, but much more delirious and erudite,* and without a happy end.

As for the characters, I admit that I internally giggled at the way their appearance is described. I am at times in awe of beautiful people, but don't find them sublime, really. Here is the rescuer:

With the mouth and chin of a deity – singular, wild, full, liquid eyes, whose shadows varied from pure hazel to intense and brilliant jet – and a profusion of curling, black hair, from which a forehead of unusual breadth gleamed forth at intervals all light and ivory – his were features than which I have seen none more classically regular, except, perhaps, the marble ones of the Emperor Commodus.

The mother's eyes are described weirdly, being, "like Pliny's acanthus," "soft and almost liquid." I gather from a quick internet search that Pliny used those adjectives to describe the quality of the acanthus's green, but the only state in which I can imagine acanthus leaves being "soft and almost liquid" is if they have rotted away to mush, so that simile is, in my view, unluckily expressed.

At any rate, all poking of fun aside, I like the story. As is typical with Poe's writing, it has a brilliant density and boldness of thought, fervour, and imaginativeness, which I greatly admire despite the excesses. I don't mind histrionics as much if they are a natural mode of expressing unruly feelings; otherwise they antagonize me, be it in literature, theatre, or music (especially opera).

Quotations taken from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 2, at Project Gutenberg.

* The Greek seems completely wrong, though; instead of "Gelaxma", as it appears in the book, the god of laughter was "Gelos." (Project Gutenberg went with '+7!=9!, but this is its amusing fault and not Poe's.)