Talk:Never Bet the Devil Your Head

Tomas de las Torres
Can someone tell us who the hell is Thomas o Tomas de las Torres? Thank you very much. --85.53.143.226 (talk) 10:35, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, he's not relevant to the Poe story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" so I'm not sure why you're asking here. --Midnightdreary (talk) 15:23, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I´m asking this precisely because I do not know who is Mr De las Torres, inside the work of Poe, and it would be interesting to know it. Don´t you know nobody knows it? Is posible that a great connaiseur on Poe knows something about it? Anyway, thank you very much. I am an old friend of you, Midnightdreary.--85.53.128.94 (talk) 17:57, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I had to do a lot of work to figure out what you were asking. Without looking into it, I had no idea this de las Torres person was quoted in the opening line of "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" - as far as I could tell, you weren't asking anything relevant to Poe, this article, or Wikipedia. Try to be clearer next time. I looked it up, and it does seem to be a real person, full name is Tomas Hermenegildo de las Torres. It's a quote from an 1828 work called Cuentos en verso castellano. That's all I have. --Midnightdreary (talk) 18:04, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much. That is all I wanted to know. No difficult to understand. It's another information about Poe. I see he was a forbbiden writer, contemporary of Poe, in XIX century in Spain. Poe didn't invented a fictional person in this case. It's the same that we like to know that nemo me impune lacessit (in "The Cask..") is the motto of Scotland. Yes? Thanks.--85.53.135.21 (talk) 11:15, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
 * It was very difficult to understand, trust me. You asked about a person without saying anything about who the person was, where you heard the name, and how it was related to "Never Bet the Devil Your Head". If you had simply said, "Who is Tomas de las Torres, the person Poe mentions at the beginning of this story?" it would have been much easier to understand. --Midnightdreary (talk) 12:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry. Maybe I wasn't enough clear. But now you understand my interest. You know, English is not my mother language. (And now you are too busy in real life due to completing your M.A.) By the way, I think I remember all names in Poe's work (Maybe because I read Poe chiefly in Spanish?) Thank you. Best wishes for your M.A.--85.53.143.71 (talk) 11:16, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Clear attack on transcendentalism? I don't think so
Saying the story is a "clear attack on transcendentalism" is not accurate. The story is a satire, so it isn't terribly clear what the message is. We could say that the story appears to have a clear moral (taken from the title) that no matter how offensive your behavior, you should never "bet the devil your head" since he might take you up on the offer. Of course the premise is absurd: the power of a story with a moral is commensurate with the degree to which the behavior of the characters can be generalized. For instance the "moral" of a story about characters who steal may be intended to generalize to the golden rule: "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Poe goes out of his way to demolish any such generalization for his story: the "moral" of the story is not that you should avoid uttering sentences like "I'll bet you so and so" since these are annoying but not fatal.

A "deconstructed" interpretation of the story would proceed like this:
 * Poe mockingly "admits" that his critics are right: all stories have a moral, even if the moral is unintended.
 * Poe goes out of his way to write a story with an absurd "moral"
 * Therefore he suggests by implication that the notion that all stories have a moral is itself absurd since it applies in a trivial way to the story he just wrote.

To borrow a term from mathematics, Poe's story can be interpreted as a literary analogue of a proof by contradiction.

The alternative to the contention that the story is a clear attack on transcendentalists is the claim that transcendentalists were simply collateral damage in the story, the main target of which was Poe's critics. Poe wanted to illustrate Dammit's annoying behavior, so he took a swipe at the transcendentalists in a nod to the popularity of the movement. If he had wrote this story in the 1960's, he might have substituted "hippies" for "transcendentalists."

128.32.82.78 (talk) 18:25, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * You are offering some interesting information, but it qualifies as original research. The idea that this story is a knock on Transcendentalism is an established understanding in Poe scholarly circles and, as far as I know, has never been contested as anything but face value (Poe saying Transcendentalists aren't even good enough for dog meat seems fairly clear). You'll notice that the analysis in this article is completely sourced and seems to reflect well-established scholarly consensus rather than fringe theories. Thanks for dropping the note though; I'm intrigued by this analysis. --Midnightdreary (talk) 22:49, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Attack on transcendentalism
Someone has added a fact tag to the statement in the article that Poe's story is a clear attack on Transcendentalism. Not sure why this is controversial. Not only do all critical works and analyses of this story focus on it, but the tale itself makes its purpose quite obvious. Could we discuss? --Midnightdreary (talk) 02:31, 26 October 2011 (UTC)