The Fillip of the Letter: On Poe’s Devil

Victor Vincent Adam, S Is for Satan, design for a primer, c. 1830.

It is the precision of the Devil’s inconsistency that interests Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe, the Devil is not to be believed, but his phantasmatic presence is no less real for its lack of reality. Poe procures for the Devil a place within modernity, taking full advantage of his purported absence. Poe does not only mark the absent presence of the Devil within modernity; by marking the presence of this absence, he details his continued effects. The Devil is not the other of reason but its interstice: supernatural and natural, immaterial and material, eminently rational and woefully irrational, a daemon that is not not good. This Devil is not the cause of loss, but he who makes it legible. The Devil is a good devil. He is the angel of the odd.

It is in one of Poe’s lesser-known tales, “Bon-Bon,” titled with precision, that Poe recasts the Devil as a being whose cunning does not entail maliciousness. The story in its final form is named for its character, Pierre Bon-Bon, an equally gifted chef and philosopher—or so we are told—for whom “the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach.”1 In possession of a sublimely rotund belly, a diminutively puny head, and “barely three feet in height,” Bon-Bon is a grotesque embodiment of the philosopher who thinks with his belly. Neither a Platonist, Aristotelian, nor Leibnitzian, neither classical nor modern, Bon-Bon, we learn, is not one to waste his energies better spent over “a fricassé, or, faacili gradú” in frivolous speculation. A “metaphysician” who is nonetheless chiefly concerned with “the analysis of sensation,” who reasons “à priori” and “à posteriori,” and whose “ideas” are “innate—or otherwise,” Bon-Bon is a philosophical contradiction (165). Belonging to the schools of the “Ionic” and “Italic”—a school, in short, of its own—Bon-Bon is a philosopher in name alone. A school without need of a school because there can be only one member. “Bon-Bon was emphatically a—Bon-Bonist” (165).

Less a lover of wisdom, however, than a lover of a good bargain and drink, Bon-Bon lets these drives get the better of him while in dialogue with the Devil. So despite being a philosopher of some renown—reputedly responsible for “Kant’s metaphysics,” an assertion that ought in and of itself give the reader pause—Bon-Bon unwisely attempts to sell his soul to the Devil on the cheap. Yet the Devil himself is not interested in a good bargain. Too much the gentleman, too refined in his tastes, having shucked from their shell souls of much greater philosophical acumen, the Devil declines so uncouth an offer, unwilling to take advantage of Bon-Bon’s drunken state—in the Devil’s words, “‘your present disgusting and ungentlemanly situation’” (180). He is no merchant.

This devil is not interested in exchange but in the taste of souls, not the uses to which they can be put but their material qualities. He is not just an epicurean, but as he tells Bon-Bon: “‘I am Epicurus’” (175). However, he is not just a philosopher, he is the source of the most peculiar of philosophical deviations. Not just the thinker of the clinamen but the clinamen itself, the Devil, Poe suggests, is that which causes the “I” in “I am Epicurus” to be italicized. He is what is singular in the proper name. Whereas Bon-Bon himself may be “the most superfluous of metaphysicians,” which happens to be the judgement of Bon-Bon’s own cat, the Devil is metaphysical superfluity in and for itself (174). The source of the oddest and least necessary of ideas, it is the Devil “who told Aristotle that by sneezing men expelled superfluous ideas through the proboscis” and who “bade [Plato] write down that ο νους εστιν αυλος” (174–75). Only readers who read truly to the letter can pick up on the Devil’s joke here. Let me quote the passage in full:

“You knew Plato, Bon-Bon?—ah, no, I beg a thousand pardons. He met me at Athens, one day, in the Parthenon, and told me he was distressed for an idea. I bade him write down that ο νους εστιν αυλος. He said that he would do so, and went home, while I stepped over to the pyramids. But my conscience smote me for having uttered a truth, even to aid a friend, and hastening back to Athens, I arrived behind the philosopher’s chair as he was inditing the ‘αυλος.’ Giving the lamma a fillip with my finger, I turned it upside down. So the sentence now reads ‘ο νους εστιν αυγος’ and is, you perceive, the fundamental doctrine in his metaphysics.”

The Devil’s joke depends upon tracing the Greek letter lambda (λ) and its formal deformation. Like Descartes’s Evil Genius, Poe’s Devil intervenes at the level of the signifier, as the source of error that can go unnoticed and that is typographical. When the Devil prompts Plato to write down “ο νους εστιν αυλος,” he introduces into “αυλος” an oddity. The lambda is inverted. (Since I cannot here reproduce this typographical anomaly, I have chosen to italicize the Greek letter lambda.) If we pick up on this inversion, it is likely only when it is repeated a second time in correct form, “αυλος.” Transliterated, the sentence reads: “o nous estin aulos.” The Devil has Plato write the Greek without accent marks and this has a disastrous effect as far as the meaning of the statement goes. “Aulos,” without its accents to parse its pronunciation, means either “immaterial” or “flute.” The statement can thus read either “the mind is a flute” or “the mind is immaterial.” And, as Anthony Kemp notes in his essay “The Greek Joke in Poe’s ‘Bon-Bon,’” Poe introduces an additional pun, since the statement “the mind is immaterial” can either mean that the mind is not of the same material as the body or that the mind is superfluous—not important or of consequence.2 The complexity of the joke lies in the way in which the Devil says something true because he exposes the false through the transcription of the letter falsely, the inverted lambda. Poe alerts us to this by naming this non-letter a “lamma.”3 The Devil thus corrects this truth by giving the “lamma” a fillip with his finger, turning the inverted lambda into an inverted gamma. The sentence then reads: “ο νους εστιν αυγος.” (As with the inverted lambda, I cannot reproduce here the typographical anomoly of the interved gamma, so I have chosen to italicize the conventional gamma [γ].) “Augos” (αυγος) means “light,” but “αυγος,” when the gamma is inverted, introduces into the word the illegible, a letter without place in the alphabet. The first gives the Devil a bad conscience since he accidentally utters a truth by showing the false. It is false (and thus true) because it was falsely false. The second statement, despite also being false in form, states something true (it signifies the truth of Plato’s doctrine) and is thus false. It is true and falsely stated, thus doubly true and thus doubly false. If the Devil lets the truth slip in the first statement, that is because it is accidental and unintentional, a deviation (a clinamen) that was not itself intended by the Devil and thus needs to be corrected to signify something true and thus false.

“Bon-Bon” is a story riddled with half-truths and flagrant contradictions, and from the outset the narration hints that we are dealing with a storyteller who is a lover of neither wisdom nor consistency. He is, however, a writer, attentive to the shape of words, the form of their appearance (their look on the page), and the sound of their enunciation (the feel they leave in the mouth as they are spoken). This is a language to be seen and heard before being understood—a story to be read with attention to the dough of words, to be read as if masticated. When one chews one’s words, diction is a matter of syllable choice, choosing words for their matter more than their sense. For one who chews and not just chooses one’s words, a word’s meaning is unhinged from its sound and its look.

Such a writer is not an evil genius but a happy devil. One who believes in this devil need not be wretched in being bereft of all hope.