The imp of the perverse
When I was about ten, I had a friend whose parents were both devout Christians. One day, while we were playing in the garden, he told me that if I cursed the Holy Ghost God would never forgive me. Children tend to automatically deny ideas that frighten them and I was no exception. Before long, the argument began to heat up and my friend was forced to appeal to the highest authority he knew. And so we went inside and found his mother, who not only confirmed what her son had told me but quoted a verse from the Bible. I don't remember which one but perhaps it was Mark 3:29, "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin."
The next few moments are very clear in my mind. My friend looked at me with satisfaction. His mother was arranging flowers in a vase. And suddenly, in that sunny kitchen, I was overcome with terror, for I already felt the dark words hatching in my soul. To smother them, I began to praise the Holy Ghost in my thoughts. I rode home on my bicycle muttering feverish praise and begging God to believe that I meant it and to believe that I did not mean what was trying to surface through the praise; words, or shadows of words, which had, in the subvocal darkness of my mind, now transformed from simple curses into a variety of horribly graphic and disgusting execrations. At home I sat in front of the television, still muttering praise, but slowly beginning to forget. Coyote's Acme parachute malfunctioned. I watched him plummet to earth, punching a coyote-shaped hole in the ground from out of which he raised a white rag of surrender. My lips stopped moving and for a moment my mind went blank. In another moment I remembered but it was too late. During that brief interval of inattention, I heard the words spoken, I spoke them in thought, and experienced a moment of sheer panic before hurriedly and sensibly reasoning that in order to be condemned surely one would also have to believe what they were saying and so turned my attention back to the cartoon—almost but not completely at ease. Recalling this naive spiritual crisis two decades on, it is tempting to roll one's eyes, or give vent to a little guffaw of derision. But it should be remembered that I was highly impressionable, ten, and had good reason to suspect that, for a few seconds at least, I had just condemned myself to Hell. I was reminded of this experience while reading about Paul Bunyan, the writer and preacher whose major work, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is one of the most popular Christian allegories ever written. By all accounts Bunyan was what modern neurologists would call a "temporal lobe personality," and men of greater faith, a mystic. "He was governed by strange impulses," writes Hendrickson (The Book of Literary Anecdotes, 1994), "that prompted him to command puddles to be dry, to pray to a broomstick, to the parish bull." But the "overwhelming power" of Bunyan's imagination also had a less quirky, and much darker side. It led him, according to Hendrickson, "to contemplate acts of impiety and profanity. In particular he was harassed by a curiosity in regard to the Unpardonable Sin, and continually heard voices urging him to sell Christ." What moves a man to contemplate and even commit that act he is most resolved to avoid? This is the theme of one of Edgar Poe's greatest stories, The Imp of the Perverse. The story starts out, speciously, as an essay on the very paradox with which we are concerned. "I am not more certain that I breathe," declaims the narrator, "than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us to its prosecution." He continues, "We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss, we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain." We remain, not because we are transfixed by the fear of falling, but rather because, "this fall, this rushing annihilation, for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination, for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it." He is suggesting, to try a metaphor, that the human mind is like a magnet, one pole of which is always attracted to that by which the other is repulsed, and both of which, in moments of intense moral agitation, are capable of being reversed so that we are suddenly compelled to do what we most abhor. And it is our very determination to avoid the act that produces this equal and opposite effect upon our will. And thus, at such times, "to indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot." It is only near the very end of the story that we learn the narrator's purpose is not simply to describe a paradox of human volition. The document we are reading is a confession of murder and the narrator's object to convince us that he too is a victim, "one of the many uncounted victims" of the force that tempts men to their own doom, a force that he calls the Imp of the Perverse. Little is said of the crime itself, which (as we shall see) is beside the point. The man he murdered is not named, though we are told that the motive was a large inheritance, and the method, involving fumes from poison candles, undetected by the coroner who in his report declared, "Death by the visitation of God." Many years pass, during which the narrator frequently meditates with pleasure on his perfect crime and consequent security, putting to rest every qualm with the simple refrain, "I am safe, I am safe." His story concludes, spine-tinglingly, as follows:
As well as being a superb addition to its genre, I think this story contributes an important term to the discussion of moral consciousness.
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