However, Poe’s story is special in its engagement with the reader’s senses.
There is nothing different about reading PP in that respect. Such is the basic structure of the reading process-it starts with a present experience of the story, of the words perceived and the things imagined, and ends with interpreting the ideas produced along the way. Much like with the reading of any literary text, the reader perceives the words, begins to imagine things based on the words, and then the imagined things start to make sense in the form of ideas. Readings of Poe’s 1842 short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” (PP from now on), originally published in The Gift for 1843 and revised for Broadway Journal in 1845, have attempted to find explanations for what the story is really about and what it tells the reader about life and death. What is specifically compelling about Poe’s story? How does the interaction between perceptions, words, and ideas constitute a distinctive medial dynamic? Sensory studies and affect theory, as well as rhetoric and Burkean aesthetics, will be used as the theoretical framework, to which my three-tier model of mediality designed for the practical criticism of literary and other media texts adds a layer. Whereas previous readings have often searched for the meaning of universal themes such as life and death, I focus on how reading PP enables the search. Some images are only felt, with no particular meaning attached, functioning as hypotypotic cues whose primary effect is to propel the narrative onward, while making the awful milieu tangible. I hypothesize that some images call for explanation, creating ekphrastic anticipation when they lead the narrator or reader on to a course of interpretation, speculating on ideas and searching for meaning. Their functioning is compared to other kinds of sensory images they are joined with in Poe’s story. In this use, the term “literary image” refers to how sensory perceptions and abstract ideas take shape in the form of words, with touch images as the special object of study.
The analysis will focus on the imagined touch perceptions the words mediate, and how they are rhetorically presented as literary images. Along the way, both for the narrator telling his story in retrospect and for the reader responding to his words, there are strange and awful things to be felt-some of which go unseen, others appear in full view. The sense of touch, a less studied aspect of “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), is peculiar to how Poe’s story is experienced.
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