The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

One very important element of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” can be located in the story’s very title—Poe presents the text that follows as consisting of the “facts” of a medical case (albeit a strange one). This can have two effects; it can either 1) help convince readers that this is a true account of a horrible event, or 2) create a striking juxtaposition between this title, which promises Fact and Objectivity, and the impossible events of the story. 

This dynamic—being repeatedly, emphatically told to believe something that seems unbelievable—is central to Poe’s story. This is the prerogative of the Narrator, for very basic purposes of the story he is telling, but it also puts the reader in the position of all of the characters of the story, who witness firsthand Valdemar caught between life and death in The Liminality of Death for over half a year, followed by the dramatic and incredible collapse of his body into a “liquid mass” (103) of rotting material the instant he is brought out of this trance. Unlike some of Poe’s other stories, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is not explicitly supernatural. Rather, the Narrator goes to great lengths to cast the events in a pseudo-scientific light, describing the process of mesmerism, calling his practice of it “experiments,” and surrounding himself with a cast of medical professionals—doctors, nurses, and a medical student—whose actions seem to legitimize his own unorthodox activities. What’s more, the Narrator assures us that the story we are currently reading is copied down directly, at times verbatim, from the notes taken by the trustworthy medical student Mr. L—l. 

Poe, however, uses this framework of seemingly objective observation and factual events to highlight and underscore the parts of the story that bring it more into the realm of horror or fantastic literature and away from the sphere of the medically plausible. These moments erupt violently into the story, both in terms of the narrative’s events (shocking the characters and causing them to react in horror), and in terms of Poe’s language, which becomes notably grotesque, visceral, and descriptive in these passages (for example, the movement of Valdemar’s “swollen and blackened tongue” [101] the “gelatinous or glutinous voice” [101] in which he speaks, or the way his body “shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away” [103] beneath the Narrator’s hands). By switching between these two modes and by adding intense details sparingly, Poe creates an effect intended to shock the reader, but this shifting between two modes or ideas, understood more broadly, is the principle upon which the entirety of the short story is founded and finds many parallels throughout.

For example, the Narrator switches between accurately and unpleasantly describing certain scenes and leaving others deliberately vague (e.g., anonymizing the names of the other characters, or neglecting to provide descriptions of their surroundings, their lives outside the context of the Valdemar experiment, etc.). At other times, the Narrator is unable to properly describe things because he says they are incomprehensible, existing beyond the frame of reference of normal human experience. This shifting between the hyper-specific  and the dreadfully unspeakable in the exploration of Communication and Communicability drives much of the horror in the story. Valdemar is in the process of moving between two modes or planes of existence—life and death—but his natural passage from one to the other is disrupted by the Narrator’s experiment. Valdemar then becomes caught, the mesmeric trance trapping his mind in a dead body, and he begs to be released from this awful condition. In this case, the prevention of normal shifting results in the story’s most poignant and existentially terrifying aspect. Poe’s use of language (including syntax and narrative structure), then, is a reflection of his larger theme of transformation in human life. 

One of the central issues in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is the connection between (or separation of) the body and the mind. Valdemar’s mind, which speaks through an unearthly voice from deep within his mesmerized state, seems to be alive still, even when the body that houses it has died. Once again, it is the disruption, created by the Narrator’s experiment, of the natural connection between body and mind (in which, essentially, the existence of both parts is coterminous, the mind being unable to live on beyond the death of the body), that generates Valdemar’s anguish and the horror of Poe’s story. A central, provocative, and disturbing question cuts through all the scientific vocabulary and the statements of hazy dread: what would happen if our mind were to become stuck in an “immobilized,” decaying vessel? Several of Poe’s most famous stories (e.g., “The Cask of Amontillado” [1846] or “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839]) also deal with The Liminality of Death, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” represents another example of Poe’s lineage of texts dealing with the troubling idea of the hopelessly entrapped consciousness.

Just as the story considers the interconnectedness of the body and the mind and the dangers of forces that can disrupt that link, there is a simultaneous connection and rupture between the two voices of the story—the Narrator, and the author, Poe. The latter underscores the slippery nature of the relationship between a writer and their characters. Poe does this through his exploration of the body-mind dichotomy and his use of sustained tension throughout the story. The story itself, with its Narrator, its characters, its events, and its language—may be considered as the body, fundamentally imbued with the mind of the author who puts this all down on the page. In this way, the short story itself formally mirrors its own subject; while from one angle, it can be read as a “realistic” text describing a strange medical phenomenon, considered from another—that is, as a work of fiction—readers can more clearly discern the author’s voice speaking from beyond the body of the page.