On Memory, Forgetting, and Complicity in “The Cask of Amontillado”

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between audience, the motive for murder, and narrative purpose in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” arguing ultimately that the various questions raised by these aspects of the text are far more interconnected than has frequently been acknowledged. It challenges many of the stock interpretations of the story in an effort to open up more fruitful avenues for exploring one of Poe’s most noteworthy masterpieces. The primary focus of the article is on the nature of audience complicity generally in the horror genre, and, more specifically, within Poe’s story, and how that complicity is at the heart of the most effective horror stories.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of reading Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” for the first time is not the gruesome tale that Montresor relates, but the sudden, unpredictable, understated revelation that the murder, recounted in its every lurid detail, occurred not yesterday or last week, but a full fifty years prior to the telling. Every word, every cough, every jingle of the bells that adorn Fortunato’s conical cap and comically sound his death knell, every slight and delicate nuance of the Carnival evening is witchily conjured up by Montresor, whose images materialize before us like the parade of Banquo’s line. His tale is aged as finely as any of the wines in the Montresor family vaults. Perhaps aged even better, at least than the amontillado because amontillado, like all sherries—for amontillado is a variety of sherry despite Fortunato’s twice-uttered pejorative assertion that Luchesi “cannot tell amontillado from sherry”—gains nothing from the process of aging after its fortification.¹ Though the tale has notes delicate and subtle, the flavor is full and bold, and consumption emboldens. The story ought not to be read from the page, but rather swirled, sniffed, swished, and swallowed. It must be savored. The inherent orality of the story, like so many of Poe’s first-person narrations, flows out through the lips as easily as the wine flows in. The language even tastes rather like amontillado: smooth, slightly sweet, and appropriately chilled.² And as Fortunato stumbles and jingles through the Montresor catacombs, drunk from the evening’s earlier festivities as well as the Medoc and the De Grâve, so, too, do we, drunk on the narration, perambulate with the marionette and his manipulator. Which is, of course, precisely what Montresor requires of us as auditors: uncritical imbibition and impaired critical faculties. When Fortunato drinks, we drink. His drunkenness is our drunkenness.

In this drunkenly imperceptive state, we allow ourselves to ignore the important details withheld from us: Montresor’s audience, his motive, and his purpose for recounting the story. Scholars have ostensibly regarded these omissions as discrete, distinct phenomena, traditionally attempting to address only one or perhaps two in efforts to provide a more refined taste of the narrative’s flavor. Those theories that do successfully reconcile more than one of these narrative omissions have tended to do so by reading, sometimes very convincingly, details of Poe’s other works into “The Cask of Amontillado” as the mechanisms that should permit us to clear aside the mound of bones that has so long obstructed our passage into the tale’s deepest, murkiest chambers. Despite the relative success of such theories, and despite their scholarly validity—who among us hasn’t looked to an author’s oeuvre for insight into one particular work—such readings of “The Cask of Amontillado,” though, seem to rely too heavily on the insights gleaned from other of Poe’s works and to ignore more elements of the author’s compositional theory and the story’s formal qualities than they illuminate. Other attempts—equally successful or perhaps even more successful—have tended to replace the question of Montresor’s motives to tell the story with Poe’s purposes. James E. Rocks, for instance, contends, very convincingly, that Montresor regards Fortunato as both a political and a religious enemy and is thus motivated by “a faithful Catholic...