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The Temperance Tale

With its confessional tone, its depiction of misery, and the clear product placement of Madam Geneva, the song feels like a temperance tale in an approximate if not exact way, and I can’t help thinking of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” which features its own hanging (of a cat) and might also be considered a kind of temperance tale, though perhaps not a simple one.

Image courtesy wikimedia

Odd as it is, the plot summary of Poe’s story is easily though perhaps not quickly summarized: a man who claims he was once fond of animals marries a woman who is happy to share a life with him and many animals, including a black cat named Pluto. The cat is the man’s favorite pet, but over time the man grows irritable. He is mean to his wife and to all of the animals except the cat, until one day he also is mean to Pluto. The man has a disease: Alcohol! One night when he is intoxicated, the man seizes the cat, and the cat either scratches or bites the man. The man gets very mad, and a “fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured” overcomes him. He cuts out one of the cat’s eyes with a penknife. Later, he feels horror and remorse, but he keeps drinking. The cat lives but is scared of the man. One morning, “in cold blood,” the man slips a noose about the cat’s neck and hangs the cat from the limb of a tree. That night, his house burns down. The man survives and visits the ruins. The figure of a cat with a rope around its neck appears in something like bas-relief in a plaster wall. On some later/other evening, the man is drinking in a bar when he sees a black cat that looks a lot like Pluto except for the addition of a white splotch of hair. The cat follows him home. His wife loves the cat. They keep it, but the man begins to dislike the creature. This cat also has only one eye, which disturbs the man. The white splotch gradually changes until it forms the outline of the gallows, which disturbs him more. One day the cat and the wife and the man enter the cellar of an old building. The cat nearly trips the man, and the man gets so mad he tries to clobber the animal. His wife interferes, and he gets so mad at her he buries an axe in her brain. She dies. He walls her up in the cellar, restacks the bricks, and prepares an excellent plaster. He accidentally walls the cat in with the dead wife, though he does not realize this until he brags about the strength of the wall to a party of investigating police. The cat shrieks. The police toil at the wall until they discover the corpse and the cat.

In the first paragraph of his story, Poe writes, “My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.” Plainly, succinctly, without comment – that sounds a lot like what we find in the ballad tradition, and we know, of course, that even what is plain, succinct, and without comment can still manipulate. We also know this is a short story – fiction – and the very notion of fiction without commentary may be impossible. Fabricated as it is, all fiction is, in some way, commentary. In the case of “The Black Cat,” concoction and commentary feel coeval. Poe doesn’t even keep his promise: the story is full of “comment,” such as this: “Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart – one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.” Later, he writes, “I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts – and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect.” Ha!

Knopfler’s tale in “Madame Geneva’s” is fairly plain and succinct, but Knopfler’s narrator, like Poe’s unnamed narrator, doesn’t or cannot entirely sidestep the impulse to comment. Both song and story include authorial asides. Ballads, traditionally, emphasize action rather than reflection, but Knopfler’s narrator is both intentionally reflective (confessional) and intentionally repressive – he drinks to escape the reflection upon which he reflects. And neither narrator (Knopfler’s or Poe’s) is particularly impersonal – there is an attempt, in each piece, for the narrator to be known, to expose himself.

Comfort or Calamity, Cause or Complication

Is Poe’s story a temperance tale? I don’t know. The story condemns alcohol in obvious and simple terms, and the narrator commits his first act of violence (gouging the cat’s eye out with the penknife) when he’s drunk. The act is “gin-nurtured.” He commits the second act of violence, though, (hanging the cat) “in cold blood” in the morning, which suggests he was sober. He also kills his wife during the day when he is, presumably, sober, which complicates what may first appear to be an obvious and simple condemnation of alcohol. Maybe Poe’s point is to complicate what many were trying to simplify in nineteenth century U.S. culture.

Is Knopfler’s song a temperance tale, or just a song about a character who inhabits a world in which the origins of the temperance movement stir? This answer seems to spiral into itself. It may be that this song is simply a temperate tale of intemperance. For the balladeer in this song, gin chases the demons away. Alcohol is consolation, but it consoles him from a world damaged by alcohol. Crime, filth, poverty, depravity – in Hogarth’s world (the approximate world of Knopfler’s song) and in the world we share today, these problems were and are exacerbated by alcohol. Hogarth engraved what he said were “the dredfull consequences of gin drinking.” (He juxtaposed this, famously, with the “thriveing Industry and Jollity of beer,” and he drew Beer Lane to illustrate this comparison.)

Was gin the primary cause of poverty? No, but for those mired in poverty, a gin addiction generally complicated life, and consolation and ruin were frequently braided. In Knopfler’s song, solace depends on anesthetization, and Knopfler’s vocal range, a narrow bandwidth in which he often operates, evokes the balladeer’s desire for numbed detachment. The balladeer works to remove emotion from his life, not heighten it. There’s no charisma associated with gin in “Madame Geneva’s.” Maybe it brings mild succor to the balladeer. Maybe it ruins others. Knopfler doesn’t seem to promote or condemn it. In this song, gin is accepted as an imperfect balm.

What Lasts

Hogarth drew Gin Lane in 1751, the same year Henry Fielding published An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and lobbied for more legislation to restrict “diabolical liquor,” and the same year Parliament did enact another Gin Act. (There were many Gin Acts, and the “gin craze” lasted for about a half a century, roughly from 1720 to 1770.) The classic American magazine The Saturday Evening Post published Poe’s “Black Cat” in 1843, more than a century after the first Gin Act passed in England. Warner Bros. Records released Knopfler’s Kill to Get Crimson, on which “Madame Geneva” appears, in 2007. Rotten England is part of Knopfler’s source code, and if he writes about England’s past, maybe it is because that world of rot and peril and inequity is still present. Lovely old England, like lovely (younger) United States, still struggles with questions of morality and poverty and vice. With “Madame Geneva’s,” Knopfler straddles four centuries. Listen to the song again. I wager you’ll hear something of the world today.