Poe capostipite del giallo psicologico. La narrazione in prima persona. Il punto di vista della vittima o del carnefice. La psiche e il suo lato oscuro nell'opera di Poe. La geometria del terrore. Influenze nella letteratura e nel cinema. Lettura in lingua originale inglese di brani tratti dal racconto The Pit and the Pendulum.
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00:09Music
00:30Music
00:35No way, I stopped drinking six months ago
00:41Do you hear me?
00:46I won't stay here one moment longer
00:49Take a dip for me
00:52You better get used to doing what I tell you
00:57Sit down
01:00Come on big boy
01:06Drink
01:14Drink this, Mr. Poe
01:17It'll do you good
01:20You have a very high fever
01:26Come on
01:28Trust me
01:30Please
01:43Poe's tales, whatever the declination of the Gothic chosen from time to time, the grotesque, the arabesque,
01:50the nightmare, the terror, are all characterized by an unstoppable attraction towards psychological analysis which often sucks into its
01:58I'm going to overwhelm the entire narrative construction.
02:00Everything, the setting, the environment, the character, the action, ends up becoming a reflection of the narrator's analytical ability, which
02:07he is often also the protagonist, revealing the narcissism that is constitutive of every narrative act.
02:12Poe's stories often present themselves as self-analytical tales in a key that anticipates Freudian thought. The subject
02:20attempts to rationally describe what lies beyond the sphere of rationality and will, or, as Freud will say
02:27almost a century later, beyond the realm of consciousness.
02:29The attempt in both cases is to grasp the ungraspable through the story which thus becomes a
02:35valuable investigative tool.
02:37Poe's characters are constructed not so much as traditional characters, that is, as agents and characters, but as diaphanous structures,
02:45transparent, incorporeal,
02:46or, to use the author's own words, so unrealistic that they don't even seem to have physical consistency.
02:53The narrative technique based on the first-person narrative guarantees a strong emotional hold on the reader.
02:59Through the soliloquy, which is an embryo of the interior monologue that will be developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by modernist authors,
03:06like Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Italo Svevo,
03:10the character forces the reader to adopt his point of view, which is often the point of view of the
03:15'murderer or victim.
03:40I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony.
03:44And when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving
03:51me.
03:52The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation, which reached my years.
04:00The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.
04:04I struggled for breath.
04:06The sentence had passed, but where and in what state was I?
04:11The agony of suspense grew at intolerable length, and I cautiously moved forward with my arms extended.
04:18I proceeded for many paces, but still all was blackness.
04:24My outstretched hands at length encountered some solid obstruction.
04:28It was a wall, seemingly of stone masonry, very smooth, slimy, and cold.
04:35The ground was moist and slippery.
04:37I staggered onward for some time, when I stumbled and fell.
04:41My chin rested upon the floor of the prison, but my lips and the upper portion of my head, although
04:47seemingly at a less elevation than the chin, touched nothing.
04:51At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy vapor, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose
04:59to my nostrils.
05:01I put forward my arm and shuddered to find that I have fallen at the very brink of a circular
05:07pit, shaking in every limb.
05:09I groped my way back to the wall, resolving there to perish, rather than risk the terrors of the wells.
05:18The Pit and the Pendulum is certainly one of the stories within the vast literary production of Edgar Allan Poe,
05:25which in a more symbolic, complete and paradigmatic way collects the various themes that characterize its production.
05:33On the one hand we have the great question of time, understood as a passage, a generation, a generative and corrupting capacity
05:42of existence.
05:43And on the other hand we have the great question of space, the space that is lacking, the oppressive space, the complete loss
05:50of a freedom of existence that finds itself oppressed.
05:55This sense of oppression, this sense of the imponderability of time, both appear in an almost synchronous manner, almost united between
06:04of them.
06:05The peculiarity of the Pit and the Pendulum is also the fact that there is a hidden between the lines of the story
06:13sense of hope.
06:14A sense of hope that we don't find elsewhere, we don't find in other stories, a sense of hope that however seems
06:21to be ultimately suspended, never fully realized.
06:25There is a process, a need for liberation which in the end, in the epilogue of the story, remains simply a great hope,
06:35a wish whose debt is never paid.
06:40Hey, hey, look at me, hey, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, and tell
06:47me if you understand, vote weak, honor to the brave, understand, understand?
06:58All that we see, or seen, is but a dream, within a dream.
07:07Listen, listen, come on, hey, hey, vote weak, vote weak, you've got to vote.
07:17Let's go.
07:20Come on, come on, come on.
07:29The narrator protagonist of the story The Pit and the Pendulum, published by Poe for the first time in 1842 on
07:36literary yearbook The Gift, A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843,
07:41he writes that in order to reconstruct an extraordinary event that happened to him a short time ago, he is forced, he says, to follow
07:48the madness of a memory that stirs among forbidden things.
07:51What triggered this crazy agitation was the fact that he found himself locked, without knowing why, in a narrow space,
07:57dark and slippery.
07:59The pretext, therefore, is very similar to that of another famous story by Poe, a premature burial, and also
08:04of many other stories.
08:05Poe always starts from primary fears, which are those of the dark or of the closed, which are all symbolically relevant fears.
08:11to the sphere of death.
08:13Whatever fear is analyzed, it is always used to undermine reason and will.
08:18of the subject and therefore his very identity.
08:20The narrator protagonist of The Pit and the Pendulum writes
08:23Then silence, stillness and night were the universe.
08:27I had passed out, but I wouldn't say all awareness was lost.
08:31I will not attempt to define what remained of it, nor even to describe it.
08:35Of course, it wasn't all lost.
08:37In deepest sleep, no.
08:40In delirium, no.
08:41In fainting, no.
08:43In death, no.
08:45Even in the grave, all is not lost.
08:47Otherwise there is no immortality for man.
08:50Waking from the deepest sleep, we tear apart the web of some dream.
08:55Even moments later, so fragile must that web have been, we don't remember having dreamed.
09:01Poe is interested in exploring the mechanism of fear rather than its object.
09:06How it starts, how it evolves, when it stops.
09:10Poe is also interested in thresholds.
09:12The thresholds between reason and madness, between sleep and waking, between life and death.
09:16His are border stories, they are liminal stories, which make the lability of that border their privileged object.
09:23I must have been drugged as deep sleep fell upon me, a sleep like that of death.
09:29When I opened my eyes, the objects around me were visible.
09:34The general shape of the prison was square.
09:37What I had taken for masonry seemed now to be iron.
09:41In the center yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped.
09:45I now lay upon my back on a species of low framework of wood.
09:50To this I was securely bound by a long strap.
09:54It passed about my limbs and body, leaving only my head at liberty.
09:59And my left arm could, by not much exertion,
10:03supply myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor.
10:07Looking upward was the painted figure of time, as he is commonly represented.
10:13Save that, in lieu of a sign, he held what I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge
10:20pendulum,
10:20such as we see on antique clocks.
10:24I fancied that I saw it in motion.
10:27In an instant afterwards, the fancy was confirmed.
10:30Its sweep was brief, and of course, slow.
10:34I watched it for some minutes.
10:37The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard.
10:41I now observed, with what horror it is needless to say,
10:46that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel,
10:50about a foot in length from horn to horn,
10:53the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.
10:59It was hung to a weighty rod of brass,
11:02and the hole hissed as it swung through the air.
11:07I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me,
11:11by monkish ingenuity and torture.
11:16Fear is an organic, functional, physiological response,
11:21which activates in each of us almost objectively
11:25an acceleration of physiological, cognitive, emotional processes,
11:29because if nothing else it predisposes the person to escape, to avoidance.
11:34And so it has a characteristic, how can I say, objective,
11:38because it can embrace most of us in the same common way.
11:42this however takes on a strong subjective connotation
11:46because of the value we give to the object, which scares us.
11:50Because based on this highly subjective investment,
11:53of this type of fear, which depends on our personality,
11:57it depends on our temperament,
11:58a phobia can also develop in each of us
12:01whereas for another it will never be structured.
12:04Or a person may have a reaction to the same event,
12:08very different from what another person would have.
12:11This is because the subjectivity of fear arises from the interpretation of the fact
12:16and how much that type of fear can actually impact
12:20with our small and large traumas,
12:22within which a more intense response can be formulated,
12:26sometimes exaggerated, even becoming a phobia.
13:00Vibrations of the steel
13:01Inch by inch
13:03Line by line
13:04With an ascent only appreciable at intervals
13:07That seemed ages
13:09Down and still down it came
13:11Down
13:12Certainly relentlessly down
13:15It vibrated within three inches
13:17Of my bosom
13:18I struggled violently
13:21Furiously to free my left arm
13:23The immediate vicinity
13:25Of the low framework upon which I lay
13:27Had been literally swarming
13:29With rats
13:30They were wild, bold, ravenous
13:33Their red eyes glaring
13:35Upon me as if they waited
13:37But for motionlessness on my part
13:39To make me their prey
13:40To what food, I thought, have they been
13:43Accustomed in the well
13:44With the particles of the oily and spicy
13:47Vian which now remained
13:49I thoroughly rubbed the bandage
13:51Wherever I could reach it
13:52Then, raising my hand from the floor
13:55I lay breathlessly
13:58The ravenous animals leaped in hundreds upon my person
14:02The measured movement of the pendulum
14:05Disturbed them not at all
14:06Avoiding its strokes
14:09They busied themselves with the anointed bandage
14:11They writhed upon my throat
14:14Their cold lips sought my own
14:16With more than human resolution
14:18I lay still
14:19Nor had I erred in my calculations
14:22Nor had I endured in vain
14:25I at length felt that I was free
14:28Slide from the embrace of the bandage
14:30And beyond the reach of the scimitar
14:32For the moment, at least
14:36I was free
14:40The main difference between Poe's protagonists
14:42Who are often also narrators
14:44Except in the Metz-Hengerstein stories
14:46And The Masque of the Red Death
14:47And the characters of contemporary fiction
14:50And the partial or total loss of control
14:52Their guilt is often manifested
14:55Through this loss of control
14:57Which happens progressively
14:58Or at the end of the story as a plot twist
15:01Sometimes, the characters in Poe's stories
15:03Whose innocence is evident
15:05They are accused of things they are not responsible for
15:08As will happen almost a century later
15:10To the protagonists of Franz Kafka's stories and novels
15:13Almost a century later
15:14Sometimes they are conscious spectators
15:16But totally helpless
15:17Of their own or others' ruin
15:19Sometimes, just, suddenly
15:21They commit reckless acts
15:22As will happen, for example, to Mersol
15:25Protagonist of Albert Camus's The Stranger
15:27Contemporary novels by Scott, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Manzoni
15:31They all feature third-person omniscient narrators.
15:35Able to control anything of the characters' action
15:39In Poe, the abandonment of heterodiegesis
15:42Which is a narrative regime in which the narrator is strange to the story
15:45In favor of autodiegesis
15:47Which is instead a narrative regime in which the narrator is the protagonist of the story
15:51Not only does it shorten the distance between narrator and story
15:54But it makes the relationship between reader and story much more visceral
15:59Horror fiction certainly responds
16:05It is a strong response to the hypertrophy of rationality
16:12Which has not been resolved, which tends not to resolve
16:16The fundamental problems of human existence
16:19Despite the expansion of technical and scientific possibilities
16:27Despite the new communication models and languages
16:32Man always finds himself faced with what is the fundamental anguish
16:37The death that was not solved in the nineteenth century
16:41As a product of Enlightenment positivism
16:46Nor is it yet resolved in contemporary times.
17:21Nor has it been resolved
17:34Thank you all.
18:05Thank you all.
18:32Thank you all.
19:00Thank you all.
19:12Thank you all.
19:38Thank you all.
21:42Thank you all.
22:18Thank you all.
22:49Thank you all.
22:51Thank you all.
23:42Thank you all.
23:51Thank you all.
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