Murder of the Eye (I): Disruption of Circumscription in “The Tell-Tale Heart”

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A man who is part of the socius has his “body marked under a régime that consigns his organs and their exercise to the collectivity.” The man, then, ceases to be a biological organism and becomes a full body (Deleuze and Guattari 144). The murder in the tale is marked by expectations of the identity the narrator is bound by.

2. 2. They are a complex amalgamation of “objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning” (Parr 18). See The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition (Parr 2010) edited by Adrian Parr for more information on this term.

3. 3. Hypocrisy refers to the character’s comment about the “hypocritical smiles” of the police officers that signify how society was morally compromised and could not shun the character out of civilization because it deemed the character as morally unfit.

4. 4. Critics like Robinson believe that the confession: “Object there was none. Passion there was none” (Poe 303), indicates a lack of normal motive and “psychological confusion” (Robinson 369). Yet, the emphasis on a lack of passion—“Passion there was none”—reveals that the murder is premediated since the narrator had been “haunted” by the idea of the murder “day and night” (Poe 303).

5. 5. Scott Peeples found that Poe was guilty of indulging his reader’s appetite, a practice Poe has satirized in his Blackwood spoofs. See Chapter 2 of Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (Peeples 1998) by Scott Peeples for more information. Another account can be found in “Ejaculating Tongues Poe, Mather, and the Jewish Penis” (Stadler et al. 2014) by Gustavus Stadler. It mentions how Poe gave his protagonist a Jewish name in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) after becoming aware of the increased “Jewishness” (116) in the northeastern regions of America. This move came after he was ridiculed at a reading at the Boston Lyceum. This means that he did have a slight propensity to indulge the popular mass to increase his readership, so it would not be a stretch to assume that he might have also catered to the moral standards of his contemporary society to increase interest in his tale.

6. 6. Rosolowski has commented on how the position of the spectator has changed within psychoanalysis. See the first part of Rosolowski’s “The Chronotopic Restructuring of Gaze in Film” (Rosolowski 1996) for further information.

7. 7. Refer to Princess Marie Bonaparte’s The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (Bonaparte 1949) and Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Quinn 1997) for further information about Poe and his relationship with John Allan.

8. 8. Desiring Production is the “production of production” (Deleuze and Guattari 6) where desire is not understood as a lack. When psychoanalysis examines schizophrenia in terms of psychic repression without any regard to social oppression, desiring production is thwarted because “psychoanalysis forces the desire of a patient into a grid that can then be traced by the analyst” (Parr 203). See The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition (Parr 2010) edited by Adrian Parr for more information.

9. 9. See Gita Rajan’s paper “A Feminist Rereading of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’” (Rajan 2014). She has read the text from a point of view where the narrator is a female victim.

10. 10. This concept implies that free flows are marked such that elements from chains of connections are isolated and made transcendent using the Oedipal triangle. For further information, see Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari 2009).

11. 11. Here, S. Person is referring to Robert Con Davis’s comment about the fear that Poe’s characters harbor of being objectified by the gaze of the other.

12. 12. When an object is removed from the chain of production, it is turned into a transcendent complete object “from whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each link triangulated” (Deleuze and Guattari 73). In the text, the identity of the narrator becomes transcendent such that the entire text seems to emanate out of it.

13. 13. The class that holds the means of production creates lack to organize wants and needs in an economy where there is an abundance of production. Then desire falls victim to this organization (Deleuze and Guattari 28).

14. 14. After flows are freed or “decoded,” new organizing agents code flows again and inscribe them with laws to prevent them from breaking away. See pg. 69 of The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition (Parr 2010) edited by Adrian Parr for more information.