On "Hop-Frog" by Edgar Allan Poe

"Hop-Frog" is a short, brutal little tale of revenge, one that resonates with the same blackly humorous vibe as "The Cask of Amontillado," although the subtext of buried evil is not present here. The evil, on the other hand, is flagrant and openly visible in the form of the corpulent king and his seven advisers, all described by Poe as "oily fat men." He observes that very lean men are not typically thought of as being "funny."

Hop-Frog, so named because of his weird, crippled, "hopping" gait, is a figure who has suffered much through social isolation—he was taken hostage from his native land and brought to the king to be his jester, his "Fool." Symbolically, in terms of the Tarot (and even considering the "Joker" card of the conventional 52-card Aviator playing deck) and its more generally accepted interpretations, The Fool card does not specifically or often refer to the questioner or querent as being "foolish." Instead, it denotes starting on a journey, beginning anew, the initiation of an affair, or the concept of the "Divine Child." It is said that there is a "special God for children and drunks." The Fool in the Tarot, the only unnumbered card of the Inner Veil (the Major Arcana), represents a god-like manifestation—"no beginning and no end"—and thus may stumble and fall along the path of worldly affairs, not being worldly.

Likewise, the "Joker" in a traditional 52-card deck is a "wild card," a character dressed in the motley of a court jester (such as Hop-Frog, such as Fortunato—"Fortunate"—a name used to underscore the fact that Fortunato is both blessed by fate and birth but also to add a blackly humorous irony to the fate that awaits him in "The Cask of Amontillado").

Poe cast himself in the role of the lame dwarf, perhaps, possessed of the forbidden amorous desire for Trippetta, the beautiful dancer whose sympathies he enjoys. Hop-Frog becomes easily drunk, delirious, and insane from wine—symbolically, here the blood-drunk little madman becomes incensed not at the "thousand injuries" bestowed upon him by the fat tyrant, but by the fact that Trippetta, protesting the king forcing Hop-Frog to become hopelessly drunk, is struck and has wine thrown in her face.

Using an act of guile, the scheming dwarf convinces the seven fat, greasy-looking royal advisers that he has prepared for them a masquerade costume par excellence. Describing tediously how he covers them in tar and fur and then chains them together and hoists them roofward in place of a chandelier, he proceeds to set the whole bloody lot of them ablaze. It is then that, with Trippetta as his hostage to fortune, the two escape back to their own country, never to be seen again.

This fantasy of vengeance, of comeuppance on the part of a maligned "outsider" (which, surely, Edgar Poe must have considered himself to be) and the resultant escape to a fabled never-never land "home," must have appealed to the still-beating heart within the breast of its author, who wished to escape from the cold clutches of a death-besotted world wherein he, too, was made drunk on wine at the behest of a man who made him the butt of jokes, who roasted his dignity. That wine became blood, and the king was the subject of a killing in the manner of a pagan sacrificial rite.

The "Seven Advisers," the fat orangutans who blaze like veritable stars for all to wonder at in horror, are, as noted, seven. In that day and age, there were thought to be seven planets. The king—"le Roi Soleil," perhaps—is the symbolic stand-in for the sun. The Sun card in the Tarot denotes new beginnings and a new romance. Was Hop-Frog, with his immolation of the advisers, symbolically setting fire to the universe or to the flames of passionate desire burning in his heart? Poe, perhaps, could not have possibly meant this.

Or could he?

Who but an orangutan would ever know?

Hop Frog I Edgar Allen Poe I Audiobook

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