Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
As
his satirical short stories indicate, Edgar Allan Poe has a decidedly
peculiar sense of humor. His lampoons invariably feature grotesque
characters whose actions suggest humorous, if not charitable,
interpretations of the characters themselves.
“The
Man Who Was Used Up” follows this same pattern. The narrator is
determined to learn more about the Kickapoo Campaign (April 1839) and
the part that wounded Brevet
Brigadier General A. B. C. Smith played in this military action.
(Mexican officials had given them land in what would become Texas;
after the Texas Revolution, the Kickapoo were “forcibly
evicted in 1839.”)
Although
some readers believe that Smith is a stand-in for General (later
President) Andrew Jackson, who was wounded during the Seminole and
Creek Indian removal campaigns (1816-1858), critics generally agree
that Smith is a caricature of Jackson's vice-president, Richard
Johnson.
Johnson,
who is credited with having killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh,
was wounded during the Kickapoo tribe's removal. (The Bugaboo tribe
is an invention of Poe's, added, perhaps, because the word sounds
humorous and because “bugaboo” means “object of fear”; Smith
obviously fears having the number and severity of his debilitating
wounds exposed to the public, and, in fact, when his wounds were
discovered, “Johnson was lampooned
when he appeared in public on crutches and tied up in wound dressings
on various parts of his body.”
Brutus
Much
of the description of Smith confirms Poe's intention that he should
represent a grotesque, a figure whose physical or emotional
abnormalities symbolize his or her spiritual condition. His hair is
like that of Brutus,
which was worn short in a “natural” style and “brushed forward
onto the forehead.” However, as the reader soon learns,
“there is nothing at all natural about Smith's hair,” and this
bit of description, like others of Smith, heighten the horror of the
revelation of Smith's true appearance and condition at the end of the
story.
Likewise,
the “stiffness and rectangular precision in Smith's
movement,” accounted for by the story's narrator as deriving
from Smith's soldierly bearing, in fact, may be explained “by other
reasons,” such as those suggested by the story's resolution.
At
the end of the story, Smith is revealed, as he dons the prosthetic
appliances that make him appear to be a normal, even robust man—the
hero he is regarded to be by the general public who admire him
greatly—to be little more than the “a large and exceedingly odd
looking bundle of something” the narrator mistakes him for being.
To appear heroic, Smith needs a
cork leg, a prosthetic arm, artificial shoulders and a synthetic
“bosom,” a wig, dentures, and a artificial eye. As these items
are fitted into place, Smith mentions how he came to lose some of his
original body parts: the “fight with the Bugaboos and Kickapoos,”
he confides, was “a bloody action” in which a participant suppose
he will escape “with a mere scratch.” He lost his hair when he
was scalped. He “swallowed” his natural teeth “when the big
Bugaboo rammed” him “down with the butt end of his rifle.” The
Kickapoos, he recalls, gouged out his eye.
After Smith applies these many
prostheses, his whole appearance changes; he is transformed, his
improved appearance astonishing the narrator:
I
now began very clearly to perceive that the object before me was
nothing more nor less than my new acquaintance, Brevet Brigadier
General John A. B. C. Smith. The manipulations of Pompey [Smith's servant] had made, I
must confess, a very striking difference in the appearance of the
personal man.
There is but one detail
remaining: Smith's voice, a funny “little” voice “between a
squeak and a whistle.” Everyone to whom the narrator spoke as he
sought to information about Smith, the man behind the myth, agreed
that the general's voice was deep, rich, and commanding. The voice
the narrator has heard, however, is absurdly high-pitched and weak.
Once Smith's palate is
installed, however, another miracle of technology occurs, as his
voice changes, resuming “all that rich melody and strength” the
narrator “had noticed” when he'd first met the general. Smith
offers another explanation: the palate compensates for the Indians'
knocking “in the roof of” his mouth and cutting “off at least
seven-eighths of” his tongue.
As
Smith adds these accessories to his person, he identifies the men
whose mechanical magic and technological wizardry have made his
transformation possible: Thomas provided the cork leg; Pettit, the
shoulders; Ducrow, the bosom; De L'Orme's, the wig; Parmly's, the
teeth; Dr. Williams, the eye; and Bonfanti's. The eye.
Smith's
naming of names occasions jabs at various actual “tradesmen
. . . working in Philadelphia during the years Poe lived there” and
suggests that their appliances are not likely to be as effective as
the story suggests. For example, the oculist, Dr. John Williams, was
generally regarded as a quack
who got rich offering “dubious cures” to the desperate. In fact,
Poe seems to summarize the oculist's character when he refers to a
joke about the doctor: “Why is Dr. Williams' cash . . . like a
divorced wife's pension” Because it's all eye-money.—alimony.”
Likewise,
the artificial eye was supplied by “a New York retailer”
known for selling “knick knacks and gew-gaws.”
As usual, there is much more to
a Poe tale than first meets the eye.
According
to one take on the story, in “The Man Who Was Used Up,” “Poe is
saying that Johnson has been 'used up' in the war and is ineffective
as Vice President” (300). this interpretation dovetails with the
epigram with which Poe opens the story: “Pleurez, pleurez, mes
yeux, et fondez vous en eau!/ La moitie de ma vie a mis
l'autre au tombeau,” which Poe himself translates as “Cry, cry,
my eyes, and melt in water!/ Half
of my life has put the other in the tomb.” The first half of
Johnson's life, which he devoted to military affairs, left him
wounded and ridiculed, despite his heroism in action, thereby
destroying the second half of his life, his political career. (“Used
up,” in military slang, meant dead, as Poe implies by rendering the
second part of dramatist Pierre Corneille's quotation “Half of my
life has put the other in the tomb”
(bold added).
The story has other messages,
too. Although Johnson lost much in the service of his country
(however much we might, today, decry his actions—and those of the
United States, which ordered them), and should have been regarded as
a hero, rather than as a target of ridicule and satire, Poe's own,
included, he was lampooned for his sacrifices.
His
public image was intended to disguise and conceal the effects of his
service and suffering and, perhaps, the historical causes of them.
The public did not love, or even know, the true man; it honored and
revered only his heroic persona, the man he appeared to be. Later,
the same public ridiculed and disrespected Johnson himself. As David
Haven Blake has observed, “What we find in 'The Man Who Was
Used Up' is that the publicity surrounding the hero's experience is
ultimately more significant than a narration of his suffering.”