AMERICAN LITERATURE I

THE CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO EDGAR ALLAN POE (excerpts from pages 48-87)The fiction: tales

Poes tales are his chief contribution to the literature of the world.

Poe quickly learned how to write artistic brief tales, eventually turning out almost seventy, of varied characteristics and qualities, a spectrum ranging from ghastly horrors in The Pit and the Pendulum or The Murders in the Rue Morgue to light comedy in Three Sundays in a Week, or from the serious, but not terrifying, landscape visions in The Island of the Fay and The Domain of Arnheim to the extravagantly satiric mode in Loss of Breath. Poe wrote and published fiction in hopes of financial gain, and although he is best remembered as a writer of Gothic horror his stories are actually not of just one type but reveal greater variety, as might be expected from a journalist eager to write what would sell.

The years (183133) when Poe turned to the writing of fiction remain just about the most obscure period in his life, but we may justifiably surmise that he undertook a study of Gothicism that resembles an academic independent study course on todays campuses. Poe studied the nature of and experimented with creating effective short fiction.

Poe had published some of his finest tales, e.g. MS. Found in a Bottle, The Assignation, King Pest, Silence A Fable, Shadow A Parable, Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Masque of the Red Death. He had collected the tales that originally circulated in periodicals into two volumes entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840 [1839]).

Not only did he not invent lurid sensational fiction, but when his tales began to appear during the 1830s many reviewers deplored what they saw as a promising young writers waste of time and talent in publishing German (for which read Gothic) fiction, which, of course, according to certain critical schools of thought, could not be first-rate literature.

Evidence exists to reveal that he planned, and nurtured for several years, a book that, had it seen publication, might testify to his being one of Americas great humorists instead of a purveyor of sensational writings, usually, but not exclusively, with supernatural underpinnings.

Poe must quickly have realized that he must really dispense with the externals of alcohol and any other intoxicant, much less gluttony, in creating characters who speak with the same incoherence and act from a bewilderment similar to what we encounter in the gluttons and alcoholics in the Folio Club or like the drug addicts who often appeared in popular fiction of the day, and from whom Poe may have derived several of his characters, e.g. the narrators in Ligeia (1838) and in the original version of The Oval Portrait (Life in Death [1842]) or those who think about drug addiction, e.g. the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Poe would also continue to employ trappings and themes of antecedent Gothicism decaying architecture or bleak landscapes and the stereotypical plot of vicious pursuit of innocence for purposes of lust, money or power, often related to family identity involving physically or emotionally debilitated characters, gender issues, sexuality, and perhaps, as some recent critics argue, even racial issues.

Sometimes we encounter genuine supernaturalism, for example in Metzengerstein, sometimes what only seems to be supernatural, as in The Premature Burial (1844). Such themes Poe would craft to suit his own intents and techniques in composing what in How To Write a Blackwood Article (1838) are called tales of sensations or, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), mystery [or] romance. Any of these terms, or German, are synonyms for what has long been called Gothic. The shifts away from literary and intoxicant motifs are apparent in many of Poes later tales, and not just those that seem to be perennial favorites among anthologists. Whatever the particular features of Gothicism Poe may have employed in a given work, the development of disorder or the creation of a frisson is not necessarily the actual aim, but is instead a means to demonstrate that terrors originating within an individuals mind, unassisted by supernaturalism and intoxicants, are as frightening, or more, than those circulated by writers of sleazy tales intended merely to stimulate a tightened gut or cold chills in readers. Poe perceived that he had to write for two audiences. The first, larger group would read his works at face value, relishing what they interpreted as unquestionable supernaturalism. A second, far smaller, more discerning readership would realize that Poe had manipulated conventions of supernatural literature to create subtle psychological fiction (and poetry).

Some readers have attempted to distinguish Poes detective or, as he preferred, ratiocinative tales fromhis other fiction, contending that the five, tales of detection, perhaps six if one includes TheMan of the Crowd (1840), show a strong departure in method from the other fiction he published, particularly since the ratiocinative tales offer a realism that is lacking in most of Poes other stories. That is a mistaken idea (and amistaken conception of realism) because the first detective tale, TheMurders in the RueMorgue (1841), demonstrates how Poe transformed the Gothic story, with its hints of supernatural causes for the deaths of the LEspanaye women, into the modern detective story.

The way he takes his less perceptive companion, the unnamed narrator in Murders, through a series of illuminations about the atrocities committed in the LEspanaye house prompts the narrator to conclude that a madman or a supernatural creature is the murderer. Folklore attributes more than ordinary human strength to the insane, and if no human perpetrated these horrifying murders, why, then, a supernatural being must be the culprit. For Dupin, however, a reasonable solution emerges, which he must explain to his companion. Other touches of ironic humor in Murders reinforce the thought that Poe often enjoyed insinuating ironies into his fiction. That the police chiefs major suspect is named Le Bon (The Good) heightens irony in the tale. An even greater irony occurs because, despite all signs to the contrary, Dupin alone realizes that a non-human committed the murders. That the murders occur in the Rue Morgue is another irony: there has never been such a street in Paris, and since Poe changed in manuscript the original Rue Trianon Bas to Rue Morgue, or Street of the Mortuary, he must have been wholly conscious of the irony.An easy transition takes us to a cluster of tales inwhich an onlooker-narrator plays a significant role. These tales begin with an air of scientific accuracy that moves on into an increasingly weird conclusion, which seems to link with supernaturalism.

Mirror images are not exact reproductions of what they reflect, and so the off-center image in the water may terrify him all the more because it reflects/exposes his own chaotic mindset. Like many other Poe narrators, for example those in MS. Found in a Bottle, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat or TheMurders in the RueMorgue, this storyteller tries to convince us of the validity in his narrative, though like others, too, he slips up every now and then, providing a key to his own unreliability. The Usher siblings are by no means the only sick characters in this narrative; the narrator seems similarly debilitated.

Berenice and the narrator, her cousin, are betrothed, but she falls ill from a mysterious disease, presumably dies, and is buried. The narrator is fixated on her teeth, and the more her physical beauty deteriorates, the more prominent they become. He opens her grave, and pulls her teeth only to learn, after succumbing to a trance state, that Berenice was actually alive when he pulled the teeth, but that she died from the trauma of that violence. Not accidentally is this narrator named Egaeus, the same name as Hermias father in Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, a man who does not comprehend the nature of love, and whose spiritual handicap almost causes tragedy. []He rapidly loses his love for Berenice because her physical appearance seems increasingly to repel him. Whether her physical features actually turn repulsive, or whether Egaeus falsifies (to rationalize his avoidance of marrying and, presumably, engaging with what should be the emotional and physical intimacy in marriage) is never made clear.Bereft of Berenice, Egaeus himself deteriorates spiritually, thus prompting his violation of her grave. Unlike several other women in Poes writings who sicken and die, Berenice does not return to persecute this lover, whose own ego had apparently killed any emotional bonding between them, though recollections of her haunt Egaeus, as is evident throughout the tale. Emotionally disoriented, he disjointedly describes the burial of Berenice, which torments him with a memory replete with horror horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections (M 2: 21718). Aware that these hazy memories are connected with a shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice (M 2: 218), Egaeus continues to grope for meaning in what he remembers, until a servant enters to announce that Berenices grave has been desecrated. Egaeus then discovers his own dishevelment, and knocks down a small box he has been regarding uneasily. The suspense, which has been carefully built up, culminates when the box smashes and Berenices teeth scatter over the floor.

The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart also stand as companion pieces in which terrors well up in the mind(s) of the narrator(s). In the former, the narrators insistence that his reactions to pets are implicated in his murder of his wife and walling up her corpse in the cellar is suspect, to say the least. His thoughts and actions have belied this rationalization, and the ultimate revelation of the truth suggests that he himself has not really believed unquestionably in such would-be justifications. Effects of alcohol may contribute no mean share to his murderous impulses, making the tale one in which alcohol has no connection with comedy. Because sharply divided attitudes toward alcohol consumption were timely issues in Poes day, he may in part have calculated on appealing to temperance advocates (i.e. people who were anti-alcohol). The narrators intense relationships with the cats may exemplify a reversal of the usual animal-as-beastly/human-as-rational paradigm. Ironically the cats seem to harbor far more genuine humaneness than their master does, and in the end the narrators brutality and its results seem to prompt him to spontaneous confession. The live burial motif may deepen the narrators repressed emotions, but such repression cannot be long sustained without leading to explosive reactions, precisely the case in The Black Cat. Since in folklore black cats are unpredictable, but usually evil creatures, the discovery of the murder because of the cats cries adds another irony to this tale.

Much more brief, The Tell-Tale Heart repeats the situation of foul murder, though here we confront premeditated murder of an old man by the narrator, who may very likely be his caregiver. As in The Black Cat, the more strenuously the narrator tries to convince us of his sanity, the more he convinces us that he is deranged. Here is another tale of cruelty to the living old man and brutality to his corpse. Foolishly, the murderer buries the body parts under the steps, inviting the police, who arrive at neighbors request, to position themselves near the burial place. All the while the narrators guilty conscience, his heart, has seemed to throb relentlessly to him alone, causing him finally to blurt out that he has murdered the old man. Along with the storyteller in The Black Cat, this narrator is impelled to confession, all previous bragging to the contrary going for naught. The greater brevity in The Tell-Tale Heart is in perfect keeping with the mounting intensity of the narrators emotions, which rapidly increase to the breaking point. In these two tales, as is so typical of Poes characters, the protagonists murders may represent their killing, or attempting to repress, key elements in what should be a balanced self. The imbalancings are eventually self-destructive, and, it should be emphasized, such destruction often requires no great time to take effect.