Post 7: Cabbage and Clocks

The Devil in the Belfry
Vondervotteimittiss is a little town in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Devil in the Belfry.” The sixty houses in the town all face the steeple of the House of the Town Council, which houses an all-important bell, whose ringing dictates what must be done.

Now even though the members that form the Town Council are “little, round, oily, intelligent men, with big saucer eyes and fat double chins, and have their coats much longer and their shoe-buckles much bigger than the ordinary inhabitants of Vondervotteimittiss,” (read: the most respectable citizens of the town), they are really enslaved. The whole borough is enslaved to the demands of the bell in the tower.

Everyone waits for a few minutes before each hour. It’s a New Years’ countdown, but for every hour. When the belfry-man strikes the time, everyone counts the number of strikes and expects to go about their business according to what time of day it is.

This short story actually portrays Dutch burghers quite stereotypically. In addition to the stereotypical physical description of the stocky, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking towners, the short story gives these towners an unnatural obsession with 1) the time and 2) cabbage (for their sauer-kraut, of course).

In fact, the good people’s enslavement to both time and cabbage can be summed up in the Town Council’s three declarations:
"That it is wrong to alter the good old course of things:"
"That there is nothing tolerable out of Vondervotteimittiss:" and-
"That we will stick by our clocks and our cabbages."

The first statement may seem a traditional view, but it applies to nearly all humanity. Humans don’t like change. And picture-perfect Vondervotteimittiss is not unlike the rest of humanity, despite their funny vesture.

Secondly, the inhabitants also believed that the only good already rested in Vondervotteimittiss (things not from Vondervotteimitts cannot be good); and Poe foreshadows the arrival of the devilish stranger.

Thirdly, the burghers were fully satisfied with their lives; they saw no need to change and no need to look beyond the hills of Vondervotteimittiss for further fulfillment.

Do you see the problem with such beliefs?
And so, perfectly content with their cabbages and their clocks, the burghers are astounded when a dark, hook-nosed stranger (whose out-of-time hops betray a disregard for timing) fandangos and pirouettes into town. His haphazard way of walking shows his disdain for keeping the right time, and therefore his contempt for order. This disdain is finally manifested through the stranger’s violent assault of the innocent belfry-man.

No one stopped the stranger from killing the belfry-man because they were too preoccupied with the countdown to twelve o’clock noon. As a result, the stranger seizes control of the bell tower and rings the bell an extra time. The town is thrown into an uproar at the thirteenth ring: the old men complain that their pipes must have been lit for too long if it its thirteen o’clock, little boys complain that they must be hungry since it is thirteen o’clock, and the middle-aged complain that their sauer-kraut must be overcooked because it is thirteen o’clock. No one takes notice that thirteen o’clock doesn’t exist; they are upset because too much time has gone by.

Poe ends with a plea for all good people to expel the stranger who has control of the bell tower, and to return the good order. With an ending like this, there must be some sort of message that Poe wants to get across.

Meaning
On a broad note, this seems to me to be a warning against the obsession with useless things. The cabbage symbolizes our needs and what physically sustains us. So the townsmen like their cabbage—fine. But it is not right to be utterly consumed by what you consume.

The clocks are the indicators of a well-ordered society, structured to the second. But time is a human invention, and all things human are imperfect in some way. Laughably, the townspeople try to put time (and thus their whole lives) into a little controlled box with a pendulum. They pretend that they can control their lives if they can just control time. The townspeople don’t understand that things happen. Time is. We can measure it, but we cannot dictate it. And we must not let it dictate us.