The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Stories

A brilliant, awe-full, awful portrayal of torture taking a man to the brink of the abyss. It’s sensual (the senses - not sexy), visceral, and real - not in terms of historical accuracy, but because there’s no trace of the supernatural: all the evil comes from unseen humans.

I’ve read it before, but had forgotten that it’s utterly ruined by its ending.

The narrator has been sentenced to death by the black-robed, white-lipped Inquisitors of Toledo. Seven tall candles, like “white and slender angels”, burn down as he descends to delirium. His tomb-like cell is dark and damp, smelly, silent, and solitary. His memories blur, as does his consciousness.
“The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The show more intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me.”

He tries to rationalise, remember, and work out the shape and dimensions of his containment. He recalls:
“A thousand vague rumors… too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper.”

The pit he finds is, of course, a metaphor, but absolutely real as well (inasmuch as anything in this is definitely real).
“I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me.”
More than one: sedation, hunger, thirst, restraint, rats, and, of course, the pendulum. Worst of all, helplessly watching, hearing, and smelling the hissing, glittering steel crescent blade getting ever closer to his heart.

Image: The pendulum in the story is like a scythe, but Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration has a Beardsley-esque quality that suits the story well. (Source)

Quotes

• “I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment.”

• “There was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors.”

• “The entire surface of this metallic enclosure was rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise.”

• “I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths.”

• “I had but escaped death in one form of agony, to be delivered unto worse than death in some other.”

See also

• Are you expecting this and this?

• There are several mentions of his heart: the “heart's unnatural stillness” and “the tumultuous motion of the heart”. See The Tell-Tale Heart, which I reviewed HERE, for a spookier slant. I’ve also reviewed Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, HERE.

• Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, also has a condemned narrator struggling to survive, trying to make sense of his surroundings, and questioning his sanity, though in other ways it’s intriguingly different. See my review HERE.

Image: The laser scene, in Goldfinger: “You expect me to talk?”... “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.” (Source) show less

At age twelve I was given my first introduction to the world of literature by my mother who read me Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. I can still vividly recollect living through the horrors of the chamber with the unnamed narrator, wondering why Christian monks would construct such a room and why Christian monks would inflict such torture. I still wrestle with a number of the story’s themes.

SADISM
Why do such a thing? The story’s torture chamber is not a makeshift construction slapped together; rather, with its pendulum descending in mathematical precision and its collapsing metal walls turning red hot, to assemble such a bizarre, intricate room would take sophisticated engineering, huge resources and lots of time, perhaps years. show more What does such a room say about the Western monastic tradition and the mentality of monks?

In The Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century author Barbara W. Tuchman richly portrays the psychology of these chaotic, disorderly times. For example, she writes, “In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain but rather enjoyed it. It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.”

Nowadays, we have a name for “untender infancy”: child abuse. We also have a word for enjoying the spectacle of pain inflicted on others: sadism. Of course, the effects of child abuse and living in a society accepting sadism as the norm would not disappear when men became monks. What undoubtedly added fuel to this psychological fire was a religion and theology giving a central place to guilt and sin and thus turning men against their own bodies and, more specifically, again their own sexuality.

Reaching absolute conclusions about the mindset of peoples living centuries ago can never be an exact science, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand how such a life in such a time would produce a population of dark, twisted people. Poe’s tale takes place in 1820s not the 1350s, but how much did the psychology of the monasteries really change in these years?

ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In the beginning stages of the narrator’s ordeal, he conveys the following, “Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound – the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion and touch – a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought – a condition which lasted long.”

Teachers within the various yoga and Buddhist traditions talk about the "consciousness of existence, without thought," that is, the gap between thoughts. In such a gap between thoughts we are given a glimpse of the ground of being, pure awareness of space. This awareness can be developed through meditation or occasionally experienced through such things as hallucinogens, trance, or, as with the narrator of Poe’s tale, extreme emotional states.

FEAR
Adding to the fear of actual physical suffering, there is the fear we project with our minds and imaginations. The narrator’s imagination is afire: “And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated – fables I had always deemed them – but yet strange and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?” Fear thrives on our projecting into the future: whatever pain or agony we are currently experiencing, there is always the ever-present possibility our plight will become worse.

HOPE AND GOOD FORTUNE
The narrator is forever hopeful and it’s the narrator’s hope coupled with his fear and sufferings that gives the tale its emotional depth and breath. And, as it turns out, good fortune or what we more commonly call ‘luck’ follows the narrator at three critical junctures in the tale. Oh, Fortuna, if we could all have such good fortune and luck at critical points in our own lives!


“I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum show less

A classic of sensational horror, The Pit and the Pendulum is also, for me, one of the Poe stories that most closely resembles (and certainly influences) later writers such as Franz Kafka. Here we have several Kafka-like elements: a judgment pronounced by distant, stern, inhuman judges, with no sense of what crime, if any, may have been committed, and then a devious punishment that gets more devious as time goes on. The narrator is also utterly alone in the world, save the hungry rats, and this loneliness allows him to reflect quite eloquently on his own dream-like consciousness. At the same time, Poe maintains a frenzied intensity that literally kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Amazing how much he packs into so few pages!

At age 12 I was given my introduction to the world of literature by my mother who read me Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. I can still vividly recollect living through the horrors of the chamber with the unnamed narrator, wondering why Christian monks would construct such a room and why Christian monks would inflict such torture. I still wrestle with a number of the story’s themes.

Sadism
Why do such a thing? The story’s torture chamber is not a makeshift construction slapped together; rather, with its pendulum descending in mathematical precision and its collapsing metal walls turning red hot, to assemble such a bizarre, intricate room would take sophisticated engineering. huge resources and lots of time, perhaps years. What does show more such a room say about the Western monastic tradition and the mentality of monks?

In ‘The Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century', author Barbara W. Tuchman richly portrays the psychology of these chaotic, disorderly times. For example, she writes, “In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain but rather enjoyed it. . . . It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.” Nowadays, we have a name for “untender infancy”: child abuse. We also have a word for enjoying the spectacle of pain inflicted on others: sadism.

Of course, the effects of child abuse and living in a society accepting sadism as the norm would not disappear when men became monks. What undoubtedly added fuel to this psychological fire was a religion and theology giving a central place to guilt and sin and thus turning men against their own bodies and, more specifically, again their own sexuality. Reaching absolute conclusions about the mindset of peoples living centuries ago can never be an exact science, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand how such a life in such a time would produce a population of dark, twisted people. Poe’s tale takes place in 1820s not the 1350s, but how much did the psychology of the monasteries really change in these years?

Altered States of Consciousness
In the beginning stages of the narrator’s ordeal, he conveys the following, “Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound – the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion and touch – a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought – a condition which lasted long.” Yogis and Buddhist teachers talk about the ‘consciousness of existence, without thought’, that is, the gap between thoughts. In such a gap between thoughts we are given a glimpse of the ground of being, pure awareness of space. This awareness can be developed through meditation or occasionally experienced through such things as hallucinogens, trance, or, as with the narrator of Poe’s tale, extreme emotional states.

Fear
Adding to the fear of actual physical suffering, there is the fear we project with our minds and imaginations. The narrator’s imagination is afire: “And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated – fables I had always deemed them – but yet strange and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?” Fear thrives on our projecting into the future: whatever pain or agony we are currently experiencing, there is always the ever-present possibility our plight will become worse.

Hope and Good Fortune
The narrator is forever hopeful and it’s the narrator’s hope coupled with his fear and sufferings that gives the tale its emotional depth and breath . And, as it turns out, good fortune or what we more commonly call ‘luck’ follows the narrator at three critical junctures in the tale. Oh, Fortuna, if we could all have such good fortune and luck at critical points in our own lives! show less

"To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me."

Really good, suspenseful little story, told with Poe's deft touch of the macabre. Unlike most of Poe's other stories, though, this one actually ends on a positive note! (I know! Crazy, right?)

I didn't love this too much, though, because it didn't have the sort of moral or philosophical depth that Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher did- then again, those two dealt with show more largely supernatural, abnormal happenings, whereas this is pretty much just an account of Inquisitorial torture. Heinous and terrifying, to be sure, but it didn't make me think or ask me important questions (apart from wondering what the narrator was sentenced to death for), and those are two things that I really want from my short stories. I hold Poe's stories to an even higher standard, as those two mentioned before were amazing and thought-provoking.

I'm off to read Masque of the Red Death now! The Month of Poe continues! show less

Poe was the master of capturing our deepest fears and giving them a stage on which to shine. In Tell-Tale Heart he writes about guilt driving a man insane, other stories focus on the fear of being buried alive, destructive force of greed, etc. This dark tale is about a man being tortured to death and it’s a doozy. One man is trapped in complete darkness and as he slowly begins to explore his prison he realizes just how dire his case is.

“The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. “

3.5 stars

In Masque of the Red Death, Poe excelled at dread through a pronounced description of setting. Here, setting is present but it's mainly dread through the creative viewpoint of the man's internal monologue and desperation.

“I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.”

Emotion is high and strong throughout during the terrible ordeal - The Inquisition has taken place, the man has been sentenced, and he passes out when hearing he will be punished. He awakens in a dark room and feels around the walls, having to use the sense of touch to try and figure out where he is, what's in store for him, if there is a possibility of escape. He ends up show more fainting again, but this time awakens to drink drugged water. He awakes another time strapped down to a series of wooden boards, and this time he can see.

His mind is constantly thinking of all the horrible stories that are told about this place, and he fears what he has in store for him. Really most of the dread and genuine horror Poe conveys in this tale is through anticipation. Fear about waking alone in the room and wondering where you are and what is to happen, then fear about the unknown choice of death that awaits him. Finally he knows how he is set to do, but the torturers have added a new depth - a slow death where he must lay and wait, helpless, for the death to finally come.

At the beginning of the tale the man has a tendency to faint from horror and helplessness. His own terror keeps him prisoner later (or so it appears to him.) Even when the pendulum is slowly coming down, he begins to hope for it to rush down quicker, just to end it and get it over with. Finally, he begins to become crafty and manages to free himself from the impeding doom through calm rationale and a will to survive.

"...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair."

Bleak and cruel, this story was a good one. As with Murders in the Rue Morgue, I do feel Poe was a little awkward with his opening. He seems to ramble slightly at first and fails to grab the attention enough. As with Rue Morgue, I had to keep reading to become engrossed. It's almost as if he is mentally finding his way and the right path to place his steps when the story starts, and once confidence has entered, it's an easier transition for the reader.

I do have to say through the long buildup and everything in so much detail, the ending rush being contained in a single paragraph almost feels cut off. A major thing has occurred - surprise - a few sentences - it is done! I know the point of the story was the horrible dread, the awful hopelessness that must have been experienced during the dreadful Inquisition, a man's fight of survival in overwhelming odds. Still, the jarring ending was almost like a glass of water to the face, interrupting the flow in such a jarring manner that it could have been longer to seem more true to the tale.

As always, Poe writes beautifully, especially after the first few pages and when he has more sure footing with his work. He had a talent for expressing the mournful, horrible bleakness that erupts from darkness to envelop humanity. With words he can make one clearly picture and actually feel being so frightened, so desperate, so surrounding by darkness and despair.

To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direct physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me. show less