Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

Much of our difficulty with Poe begins with his distasteful life. Never a good judge of character, Poe had the misfortune to choose as his literary executor and first biographer a man who vilified him as a charlatan and profligate. Although no one continues to credit Griswold’s calumnies, biographers must still admit that Poe’s life was something of a mess. Orphaned at three, Poe never subsequently felt at home anywhere, and spent much of his life searching for a kind of parental approval. His futile attempts to impress his remote foster-father John Allan set the pattern for his lifelong wooings and renunciations of powerful men. His hyperbolic attempts to earn Allan’s love—through academic and military achievement—inevitably ended in disaster. Repeatedly Allan’s failure to respond led the disgruntled Poe to disgrace himself more thoroughly than he had initially succeeded. As a result, history remembers his college gambling but not his prizes; his West Point court martial for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders, but not his rapid rise through the military ranks.

Poe’s search in his career for masculine approval was matched in his private life by a yearning after familial affection. Recoiling from the untimely deaths of both his birth mother Eliza Poe and his foster-mother ‘Fanny’ Allan, Poe sought in women less life-partners than surrogate mothers or sisters. The longest of his female relationships—the sixteen-year
ménage
with his aunt Maria Clemm and her pre-pubescent daughter Virginia—epitomized the idiosyncrasies of Poe’s emotional life. It is impossible to agree with those early ill-wishers who read the situation as sexually degenerate. As an economic and living unit, the household was quite successful, and Poe was adored by both his aunt and the cousin he eventually married. Yet the sexual reticence of the arrangement remains disconcerting. Far from degenerate, the relationship was apparently sexless, with the childlike, childless Virginia remaining ill for much of their eleven-year marriage. The emotional aimlessness and the repetitive circularity of his personal relations found a fitting end in Poe’s death while travelling to bring his former mother-in-law to his new marriage with a long-lost love from childhood.

Poe’s professional life was as untidy as his private one. Although not the habitual dissolute that later writers made of him, Poe did
over-indulge occasionally in laudanum and more frequently in alcohol, for which his system had little tolerance. His addictions did not, however, affect his professional accomplishments. He remained a tireless journalist and a canny editor who, in addition to his creative work, produced large quantities of reviews and occasional prose while increasing the circulation of his periodicals as much as fivefold. If anything, his intensity impeded his career more than alcohol did. As exhausting a friend as he was a foe, his enthusiasms for James Russell Lowell and Thomas Chivers were only slightly less discomforting to these patrician poets than was the venom he directed at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Margaret Fuller. However engaging, his energy and optimism were seldom grounded in a mature assessment of the literary market-place. Poe’s repeated failures to find backing for his collection of interconnected stories ‘Tales of the Folio Club’ or his literary journal
The Stylus
may mark merely the short-sightedness of mid-century publishing. Yet one can only stand bemused before his final enthusiasm—the foolish belief that
Eureka
, his dense and obscure lecture on Newtonian physics, would be a crowd-pleaser.

The problem of Poe began with his hapless life. Honest but wholly without luck, Poe was never able completely to master his environment or his emotions. Yet the difficulty did not end with his death. His supporters compounded the error by praising his foibles as virtues. Modern readers continue to resist taking Poe seriously in part because of what ‘taking him seriously’ has meant in the past. Early admirers celebrated the very unsociability that troubled everyone else. To authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Algernon Swinburne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Arlington Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sergei Rachmaninov, Poe’s failed life proved his refined sensibilities. Walt Whitman pictured him as a visionary lost in the stormy chaos of mid-century culture:

On the deck [of a foundering ship] was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.
¹

In the second half of the century, French symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and (later) Paul Valéry expanded Whitman’s image of an American Cassandra to view Poe more globally as the
poete maudit
, the cursed truth-teller unwelcome wherever commercialism and bourgeois morality reigned. Such high aesthetic praise added considerably to Poe’s reputation. Even the sceptical William Butler Yeats could not dismiss a poet admired by Baudelaire. Yet his sponsors may have done Poe a disservice, promising depths and subtleties that his works could not deliver. As is apparent in Whitman’s description, Poe’s advocates praised in him what they most admired in themselves. The result was a mythic figure, created in their own image with little concern for historical accuracy. Poe was not a cosmic outcast. His demons were decidedly commonplace—a lack of drawing-room skills and a tendency to tipple. Had he been truly profligate we might enjoy him more. Nor was he, for all his negativity, really a social reformer. Hardly critical of the bourgeoisie, Poe venerated middle-class values. His odd household was not an act of cultural defiance but a measure of how greatly he longed for domesticity, and how little he knew about achieving it.

Later generations of admirers turned from mythic biography back to the works themselves without entirely resisting the temptation to project themselves onto Poe. In response to his preoccupation with extreme mental states, psychoanalytic readers used him to detail the labyrinthine splendours of the mind. Princess Marie Bonaparte and other students of Freud combed the tales for insights into the unconscious. Though stunning demonstrations of the range of dream symbolism, these readings were hard pressed to discover repression in the confessions of Poe’s all-too-talkative narrators. Seeking out a shadow plot of sexual misdoing hidden beneath the tales’ obvious gothicism, psychoanalytic critics recast the tales as explorations into, virtually creations of, a diseased mind. Even those readings that did not confuse Poe with his unhinged narrators had difficulty explaining why the author was so fixated on a single state of mind. Reducing Poe’s extravagances to by-products of mental illness, these early psychologists made the narratives as predictably middle-class as their author.

The recent reinterpretation of psychoanalysis in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the linguistic structure of the mental has taken Poe’s work as one of its major testing-grounds. In his ‘seminar’ on ‘The Purloined Letter’, maverick psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan used the story’s unread letter as a model for the ways in which meaning circulates in the mind and in society. Subsequently, aestheti-cians such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Cavell explicated semiological implications not only in the deductions of the detective fiction but also in the horror of ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. In their intellectual rigour and respect for Poe’s creations, these theoretical readings made it once again safe for grownups to think about Poe without feeling guilty.

Linguistic theory brought about a rebirth of scholarly interest in Poe. Yet even these post-modern critics explored his fiction to illustrate analytic paradigms derived from elsewhere. In over-praising Poe’s prescience, theorists called attention to how much he left for later generations to articulate. Although anticipating modern trends, Poe is hardly modern. ‘The Bells’ is not ‘Le Bateau ivre’, nor ratiocination, deconstruction; and any reader who goes to him looking for Mallarmé or Derrida is bound to be disappointed. The inability of such dazzling analyses to make Poe respectable suggests that perhaps we are trying to defend him in the wrong way. No author wishes to be a precursor—a literary way station on the road to somewhere else. Each aspires to be the word itself. And until we can respect Poe without regard for what his progeny have made of him, we will not be able to appreciate him at all.

Respect for Poe must begin with his ideas. Although his characters are forever burying themselves in ‘volumes of forgotten lore’, modern readers have trouble imagining Poe himself as an intellectual. Yet in fact Poe’s uniqueness rests more with his thought than with his craft. Despite Baudelaire’s assertion that he was a pure aesthete, an early proponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, Poe’s technical skills were uneven. His language in both the poetry and the prose could be swift and evocative; it could also be ungrammatical, overwrought, relentless. His supposedly innovative use of the
outré
and the perverse was unremarkable, roughly comparable to that in other Gothic fictions of the period. And although we remember the tales as having strong characters and plots, Poe was, as psychoanalytic criticism inadvertently demonstrated, not really very interested in either.

Poe’s characters are largely psychic types. However precisely they represent mental disorientation, the tales do not locate these images of insanity within particularized individuals. All Poe’s narrators speak
roughly the same language. Unconcerned with the ways in which mental states shape personalities or events, Poe treated all disorientation as the same, whether it derived from guilt, anger, fear, or stupidity; and there is little tonal difference between the murderer in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and the innocent prisoner of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The tales show no fascination, as do Freud’s case-studies, for how inner turmoil gets expressed differently by individuals, and, in the absence of such personalizing idiosyncrasies, the Usher twins seem much less fully imagined characters than Wolf-Man or Dora.

Poe was no more concerned with plotting than with characterization. According to his celebrated theory about the ‘unity of effect’, every element of a tale must contribute to the overall purpose. In reviewing Hawthorne’s tales, Poe explained:

in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of great importance…. [The skilful literary artist] has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single
effect
to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.

Attempting to professionalize writing, the theory glorified artistic wholeness or ‘integrity’, by insisting that a work which did not from its very first sentence start doing whatever it intended to do did not deserve the name of ‘art’.

The apparent singularity of these ‘effects’ misled both his readers and occasionally even Poe himself to confuse artistic consistency with narrative surprise. In the very obviousness of their ironic reversals, his endings are often the weakest parts of the tales. His detective stories are compelling in every way
except
as ‘whodunits’, and in horror tales like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ or ‘The Black Cat’, the reader is swept along by the psychological or philosophical intensity and simply ignores the moralizing conclusions. Other tales disguise less well the mechanics of their plotting. In tone-poems like ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, the admirable stylistic unity cannot hide the fact that too
much symbolic machinery is expended on the platitude that one cannot cheat Death. And Poe’s leisurely pacing can make for slow and attenuated tales: some readers find ‘Hop-Frog’ preachy and predictable, and the ironies of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ can seem more arch with each rereading.

Poe’s indifference to character and plot is apparent even in the finest of the moral tales, ‘William Wilson’. An immoral man is haunted by a double who shares his name but not his dishonesty. The profligate’s hostility to this better self leads him to murder what he at last discovers to be his own conscience. While not a bad narrative idea, the purported ‘mystery’ of the second Wilson accounts for none of the tale’s power. There is no real suspense. Readers guess the double’s identity long before its ‘revelation’ in the final sentence. Nor is the moral particularly compelling. By the end of the tale, we find ourselves siding with the wastrel Wilson, and rejecting his
alter ego
as a tiresome nag. More important, it is hard to figure out exactly what that moral is. Although the name ‘Will, son of Will’ accuses the protagonist of wilfulness, the charge seems both trivial and a poor description of someone who wanders aimlessly throughout the story. Nor is it clear how his conscience represents a moral advance. Usually in
doppelgänger
stories, the double shows the central figure a new side to himself. In a highly moralistic version like Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, for example, a picture reveals the corruption that the protagonist attempts to hide. In Poe’s account, however, the twin teaches the narrator nothing about his inner nature, both because Wilson understands his villainy pretty well from the beginning and because he does not have much of an inner nature to understand. If anything, the tale’s allegory discomfortingly suggests that people’s desire to be good causes them to be bad. With nothing to illumine, Wilson’s conscience turns tattle-tale, driving the bad Wilson on to greater sins if only to escape his own inner dullness.

The moral ambiguities of ‘William Wilson’ are illumined by Poe’s more detailed exploration of ‘will’ in ‘Ligeia’. Here too the tale’s triumph lies in neither plot nor character. As Richard Wilbur observed long ago, the story is coherent without making the least bit of sense.
²
A man marries a woman; they study arcane knowledge; she dies. He
marries a second, very different woman; she dies, but arises from her funeral bier in the shape of the first wife. Such a narrative is structurally balanced but devoid of incident or individuals. Rowena has no identity except as second wife, and the narrator lacks even a name. The final character, Ligeia, is explicitly defined in terms of this absence of characteristics—the narrator’s inability to remember anything about her except some vague physical features. The two death scenes and the exposition that separates them flesh out the situation without making it more comprehensible. What, after all, is the point of parallels between the two marriages, and especially of the final resurrection of Rowena as Ligeia? Why does so sketchy a plot waste time on detailed descriptions of background material, like Ligeia’s relation to astronomy, the oriental decor of Rowena’s bridal chamber, and the narrator’s fruitless ministrations to her corpse? Psychoanalytic and symbolic readings only compound the confusion by making the narrative too sensible—a lunatic’s compulsive confession of killing two wives—or senseless in a different way—a Neoplatonic allegory of cosmic reunification into the Primal One. Such readings prove that the plot does not mean what it says and that it does not mean anything else either.