The Multiform Self of Edgar Allan Poe
Here is my essay about Edgar Allan Poe.
Translation from English by Leni Remedios, with the supervising of Jane Broadhurst.
You may find the original essay, in Italian, in www.criticaimpura.wordpress.com
The Multiform Self of Edgar Allan Poe
“It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic
steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb
little schooner yachts...flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars
through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a
slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the
terror, the murk and the dislocation of which he was the center 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].
It is with the dream of the American Poet Walt Whitman
that I like to open this reflection about one of the most controversial and influential
figures of the literary outline: Edgar Allan Poe.
No other image should be more aesthetically and
psychologically proper than the dream vision of Whitman to immortalise the
writer from Baltimore: a lonely and gaunt profile in the middle of his
favourite element, the sea, not by chance quite often present in his tales and
dominates one of his two novels, The
Narrative of Gordon Pym from Nantucket. A figure that flies above the
darkest waters of the human soul and who not only is not afraid but seems to be
delighted by it.
Before plunging into the dreamy and emotional ocean of
Poe – because that is what I intend to do here – I’d like to spend a few words
about what has been written or said about him, just to provide a brief
synthesis to readers lacking this knowledge.
At the beginning I mentioned Poe as a controversial
and influential figure.
Influential, not just because he arouse as a pivot for
the admirers of supernatural and psychological horror, raising “the bar for all
subsequent work” [2] but also because his versatility deservedly gave him
the paternity of the detective story such as is conceived in modern times (see
the so called tales of the ratiocination, as The Murders of the Rue Morgue or The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt) while it’s common that his influence on the French
poets, thanks to the precious intermediary Charles Baudelaire - his first
translator in France, strongly contributed to new literary movements as the
Symbolism and in general to his positive reception in Europe.
Further, Gordon
Pym will be inspiring not only for other geniuses of supernatural and
fantastic like H.P. Lovecraft, whose At
the Mountain of Madness is a clear reference to the Master work, but also
for Hermann Melville, the author of Moby
Dick, and for a great adventures teller like Jules Verne, who wrote an
ideal continuation of Poe’s novel in The
Sphinx of the Ice Fields.
Yet very harsh criticisms coming from men of letters,
mostly his compatriots, have weighted on him, that’s why Poe is also
controversial: he never reconciled the critics and the other writers, maybe up
to our days. A fact that needs to be contextualized, on one hand, in the
literary circles of the time: due to his corrosive reviews, it was natural Poe
had several enemies.
But on the other hand much weight had (maybe still
have?) the anathema pronounced by Henry James, fellow countryman of Poe, author
of the ghost story The turn of the Screw,
who wasn’t very subtle on it “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly
primitive stage of reflection. It seems to us that to take him with more than a
certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self”[3].
About this
harsh sentence I invite the reader to weigh up with accuracy the word primitive used by James. I will return to
the topic later.
The other heavy anathema comes not surely from a
fanatic alarmed by the horrible truths revealed by Poe, but rather from a pivot
of the counter-culture, Aldous Huxley, who accuses Poe, as poet, of vulgarity: the critic done by the
author of The Doors of Perception is
a worthy critic and, without being misled by the word, it has nothing to do
with morality.
Huxley’s objection is bluntly technical-poetical,
where he charges Poe with the exploiting of a certain easy musicality intrinsic
to words in order to create sensation, in particular making an exasperating use
of the rhyme, sometimes in an inappropriate way[4].
That’s true, but just up to a point. Poe is not
faultless, but Huxley forgets something: devices and tricks that turn
unavoidably trivial in unskilled hands, offer quite the opposite results in the
hands of a genius, exactly as H.P. Lovecraft points out regarding the prose
“These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskilful hands, become under Poe’s
spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights”[5].
It is no accident that the charm and the atmosphere
evoked by The Raven, considered
unanimously by the critics not certainly among his best poems, has become
indeed a cross-generational flag, continually touching thousands of readers.
Finally, we can’t fail to mention another
authoritative judgment, that of T.S. Eliot, who attributes to Poe “the
intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”[6]. In regards to boldness and content it’s not very far
from what expressed by Henry James.
I’d like to end this digression bringing the following
observation, that I offer as a momentary provocation, a cat put among the
pigeons, that I will take back later: we can say that never the morbid attention
of the public towards the private dimension of a writer was so high, as in the
case of Edgar Allan Poe.
Now, I’m inviting you, reader, to get rid of all this
just for one moment, to clean up your mind from all the concepts and the bias,
from all the chatting done on Mr Poe
and on his works. I’m inviting you to begin a journey
underground, in the darkest unconscious depths, without ready-made arguments.
The descent into the abyss.
That’s what really matters to Mr Poe. There’s no more
abyssal depth than the human soul. There’s no other land more extensive and
doomed to remain unavoidably unexplored.
What’s stirring and hiding in ambush in the most
recondite twists and turns of ourselves? Which are the issues that steal in the
inner self and that we can never completely master, like a slimy eel that we
try to grab in vain and is continually slipping out of our hands? There’s a
human condition in particular that can arouse, although just for a moment, the
most hidden contents of our, we can say, psyche: fear.
Poe opens the wound and he doesn’t limit himself on twisting
the knife in it to see what happens: he analyzes accurately, seizes the scalpel
and lances the nervous ganglions one by one.
It’s a so radical vivisection that it obtains a multiplicity
of the individual who is under the knife: who is the narrator of The Black Cat? Is he the young fellow “noted
for the docility and humanity of my disposition (...) especially fond of
animals”[7] as he qualifies himself at the beginning? Or is he
the abominable man that turns out in the end of his days, a murderer with an
atavistic hatred towards the felines? Yet isn’t he the very same person? What
happened in the meantime, what is the mechanism who installed the germ of
perverseness?
Changing is a natural and desirable process in the
development of the individual conscience, in which thoughts and external
experiences bring new insights to individuality.
But what happens in the case of a radical overturning
of the feelings, a total revolution of personality, induced and supported by
extreme external agents, such as a chronic hunger or a helpless addiction to
alcohol, or by more intimate elements, such as a personal hypersensitiveness or
a certain inclination to insanity? Is there any chance to become, Poe seems to
ask, even inhuman?
“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew
myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my
body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre
of my frame” [8].
Here Poe, the surgeon of the soul, draws our attention
to another, ambiguous feeling dawning. The fury found its own expression and
the black cat, victim of his master’s atrocity, is now eyeless. Once the
alcoholic fumes are chilled, the narrator starts to think and something
uncommon emerges “I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse,
for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and
equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched” [9].
Feelings are rarely pure, univocal. The negative ones,
in particular, often contain a component of duplicity.
“(The cat) went about the house as usual, but, as
might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my
old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part
of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to
irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the
spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am
not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart –
one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction
to the character of Man. Who has not, a
hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other
reason than because he knows he should not?” [10].
It’s a question asked also by the narrator of The Imp of Perverse, as we will see
later.
What is inducing Arthur Gordon Pym, after a disastrous
misadventure in the sea in which he put at risk his own life, to embark again
in the most precipitous way and in precarious conditions, when any other
rational individual should be very careful not to go to sea again?
“For the bright side of the painting I had a limited
sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among
barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray
and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or
desires – for they amounted to desires – are common, I have since been assured,
to the whole numerous race of the melancholy among men – at the time of which I
speak I regarded them only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt
myself in a measure bound to fulfil” [11]
Perverseness has got an unequivocal seductive component.
Beyond the disgust and the aversion other silent
presences hide in ambush, presences that the rational and conscious man hardly acknowledges
to himself: an irresistible attraction, curiosity, even pleasure. There’s a
scale of shades regarding the same feeling or sensation: Poe’s narrators live
undoubtedly extreme situations, on the top of the scale, hovering on the last
step leading straightforwardly to madness or already irreparably mad, but they
speak directly to the multiplicity of human beings who stand in the middle of
the scale, who live the very same feelings, just on another level (“Who has
not, a hundred times, found himself etc...?”).
Further, in tales like The Imp of Perverse, The
Black Cat and The tell-tale Heart
the protagonists disclose a further shade about this ambivalence, difficult to
explain in rational terms: the excitement provoked by risk.
The utmost terror for the crime to be discovered goes
hand in hand with a display of arrogance, nearly a will to be discovered,
bringing to surface an ambiguous intention: the boasting in accomplishing a
similar deed before humanity, the fact of telling to the world “Do you see what
I was able to do?”.
Every single trace of repentance or remorse has been erased;
the process of dehumanisation has been brilliantly accomplished.
It’s not by chance that the imp of perverse to which
the tale refers doesn’t regard at all the crime committed, the murder, but the
tendency to confession: that is
regarded unwholesome by the narrator, miserably fallen in the spiral of
madness, the revealing of his misdeeds while he should do the best to hide
them.
Perverseness doesn’t have just a seductive component,
as I said, but also a constitutive component of disobedience, intolerance, opposition,
without which it shouldn’t be what it is: as displayed in The Black Cat, the subject returns back here too “And because our
reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously
approach it” [12].
Here too the narrator is evidently mad, but he speaks
straight to the reader, to the human being who stands in the middle of the scale,
hooking him with harmless examples, in which Poe genially uses the first plural
person:
“We have a task before us which must be speedily
performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important
crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We
glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the
anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it
shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why?” [13].
Any procrastinator of any level should be touched by
these words.
But what is the deepest chasm onto which man faces
himself? Isn’t it death, the most extreme experience by definition? Yet even on
the brink of death it is plausible that a weird, uncommon upheaval happens in
the turns of our soul, a radical and unpredictable overturning.
The narrator of The
Descent in the Maelstrӧm, from my point of view one of Poe’s best tales, during a fatal trip on
the sea with his brothers finds himself in the middle of a gigantic sea
whirlpool, and he reports as honestly as he can what happened in the moment of
looking into the jaws of death. From sheer terror, in which body and soul is shivering
throughout with genuine fear, he suddenly turns to a sort of ecstatic
catalepsy:
“Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of
a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was
despair that strung my nerves.
It may look like boasting – but what I tell you is
truth – I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a
manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as
my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power” [14].
Maybe the theme of internal ambiguity is developed at
its best in William Wilson, unparalleled
masterpiece about the double, the identity crisis and the will (notice the word
pun Will-I-am, Wil-son). Also here a radical transformation of the narrator is
pointed out by the very beginning:
“Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an
instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle” [15].
It’s never clearly aversion what Wilson feels towards
his homonymous, a lad who attends the same school, was born the same day and enjoys
subtly provoking the narrator.
“It may seem strange that in spite of the continual
anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of
contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether” [16].
A feeling that seems to be mutual:
“(...) there were times when I could not help
observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he
mingles with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate
and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness
of manner”[17].
The relationship between good and bad conscience is a
link of love and hate, an interdependence that cannot be renounced, in which
nothing is well defined and shades adumbrate all the interstices.
“It is difficult, indeed, to define, or even to
describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous
admixture; some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more
respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist it will
be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myself were the most
inseparable of companions” [18].
Eventually, Poe isn’t just afraid to sound situations
on the edge, but he also doesn’t refrain himself from going beyond the edge: The Adventures of Gordon Pym, far from being a tale for boys, as it
could be labelled, is a gruesome and macabre descent into the hell of human
cruelties and miseries, a “coming-of-age novel” with a negative mark, in which
what the enigmatic ending gives us is more a suspension, a magical-dreamy
escape than a resolution.
One of the grisliest and most brilliant scenes is when
the four shipwrecked, tormented by an atrocious hunger in the middle of the
ocean, decide to resort to the most extreme and inhuman act for the sake of survival:
cannibalism.
They have recourse to a trick to decide who among them
will be the sacrificed; a sort of Russian roulette in which the one who takes
the shortest splinter of wood will be the intended victim.
Where probably any other writer should have smoothed the
rough edges off with strokes of uplifting morality, Poe doesn’t refrain from
examining the lowest meanness about his narrator, who until the end struggles
to find a way to cheat his companions, so much for any feeling of compassion
and complicity that are supposed to keep bound a group of people involved in
the same tragedy.
Yet “Before any one condemn me for this apparent
heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own” [19].
Left alone with his companion Parker in the delirious
competition, Pym goes through a frightful, horrible feeling towards his friend,
under the pressure of an imminent death: “At this moment all the fierceness of
the tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt toward my poor fellow-creature,
Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred” [20].
Is it the natural selection for the survival sake? Is
it the law of homo homini lupus to
dominate in the situations on the edge and to get rid of any moral
superstructure, of any ethics?
Poe doesn’t seem to offer a definite answer with the
narrative of Pym, but rather invites to take the distance from any sterile
intellectualism, from the convenience of a rational detachment in order to
empathise with the personal experiences.
It’s worthy to notice that Poe overlooks the horrible
ending of this event, halting at a step from the edge, at the death of poor
Parker, without indulging further. Maybe it was too early to pass a so extreme
threshold, by this time a door knocked down by the current literature or
cinematography.
The process of Pym’s coming-of-age doesn’t end here,
but seems rather to indulge on the repetition of continuous comedowns, of
continuous challenges to the eventuality of an accommodating positive ending.
Another brilliant turn of events, preceding shortly
before the cannibalism episode and somehow pre-announcing it, is the
approaching of a vessel that, to the eyes of the desperate shipwrecked, seems
to put an end to long days of starvation, thirst and unease.
But right at the height of the enthusiasm, in the
delirium of happiness, the utmost delusion makes its way, the most deceiving of
the visions: the vessel – a clear reference to Coleridge’s The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner – it’s a load of dead, where the
apparently smiling and gesticulating sailor (another incredibly brilliant idea
of an inspired Poe) is nothing but a corpse bound to the edge of the ship and
devoured by a seagull leant on his back: his quirky smile is due to the lips
eaten up by the bird, his gesticulating provoked by its bites on his torso.
Here, I said, the theme of cannibalism is preannounced,
but still there’s a hint of ethics to refrain the souls, when the seagull, a massive
blood feathered bird, leaves its prey to hover above the shipwrecked and to
drop by their feet a piece of entrails of the poor sailor:
“May God forgive me, but now, for the first time,
there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which I will not mention,
and I felt myself making a step toward the ensanguined spot. I looked upward,
and the eyes of Augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning
which immediately brought me to my senses. I sprang forward quickly, and, with
a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea”[21].
Not to mention the meeting with the natives. The only
two shipwrecked remained, Pym and Peters, are rescued by the ship Jane Guy and together they land at some
inhospitable islands at the limits of Antarctica.
Tsalal inhabitants, primitives in their costumes, yet
prove to be welcoming after a starting distrust. Now the reader is inclined to
think to a positive outcome, to a happy interaction between two different
cultures, where modernity can serenely meet tribal way of living. But it’s not
the case.
After weeks of pacific life in common and interaction,
the real plan of the tribe comes out: they commit a horrible butchery of the
entire foreign crew, out of which just Pym and Peters save themselves thanks to
an extraordinary coincidence.
Nothing else remains that escape, aboard of a canoe
taken away from the savages. In their flight they are helped by an incredible
stream that sucks them and progressively brings them to the edge of the world,
supposed to be, according to some odd theories of the time, one of the accesses
to the centre of the earth.
White and luridly warm waters run through this portion
of planet, enshrouded by a thick mist, in the middle of which a mysterious,
gigantic white figure rises.
I wanted to resume this part because it’s undoubtedly
one of the most enigmatic and less understood pages written by Poe.
From my point of view with this ending Poe didn’t mean
to suggest any definite idea or message. After such a ferociously honest
display of human debaucheries as it’s made all throughout the narrative, he
simply needed a stratagem to put an end to the story in a sort of suspension;
how else could he have concluded it? Any other explicit and rational gloss,
maybe with a hint of morality to keep conscience clean, should have been
superficial or too much emphatic.
Now, after this digression among some of Poe’s pages,
I’m asking you, reader, to re-emerge from the warm white waters of Antarctica
with which I ended this journey and to go back to the beginning of the essay, glancing
to critics and judgments with different eyes.
Henry James’s words come home to roost despite himself: it’s right primitive the most proper term to define the horror analysed by
Poe.
Poe’s horror is primitive and honest.
If you look at where he is set in the context of the
gothic tradition, his tales have nothing of the detachment, of the filters –
intellectual, moral, geographical – of his precursors. Horace Walpole, Ann
Radcliffe, up to the deservedly famous Mary Shelley set their novels in ancient
times and in far places, in exotic Mediterranean countries or at best among the
woods of an ethereal Switzerland where, according to Nature, passions burst out
in distorted way, element from which the Anglo Saxon audience is exonerated and that arouses an unavoidable distance
and sense of superiority.
Poe doesn’t have filters, instead and with the device
of writing in first person perennially used, the effect resounds like a shock
wave to the reader.
It’s perfectly normal that Poe, at least at the
beginning, should be misunderstood, scorned “perhaps the most thoroughly
misunderstood of all American writers”[22].
It’s perfectly normal that the literary establishment
should be upset by the irreverence of the one who seems to be the ‘enfant
terrible’ of literature.
The genius of Poe is a simple and straightforward
genius that tells the truth in no uncertain terms, that’s why he can be
disliked. It’s not always true that geniality resides in complexity, it’s
rather often true the opposite: geniality finds its own way in the ability and
lucidity of catching the core in complexity.
Simple and straightforward, never trivial.
If he had been trivial, the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum, for instance,
should have died in a bloodbath, as is actually displayed in the trivial movie
dedicated to him, The Raven, because
“people want gore”, as said by one of the characters and eventually market is
what really matters; keeping on the digression for a moment, this movie doesn’t
deserve even a review, but just a brief hint: I consider good just the idea at
the basis, I mean the play-acting of the tales following the string of events
of a serial killer, may be the only way to give a consequentiality to the
different narratives, but unfortunately the movie is highlighted for its
mediocrity and its risible epilogue. Surely it won’t make the movie history and
saying that, I think I won’t dishonour Poe as critic who, if alive, should have
harsher words about this film.
Ending the digression, Poe puts in first person the
modern man, dissecting his moods in the heat of the moment, like a surgeon
dissects a wound without any kind of anaesthetic and although he sets his
stories in nearly timeless contexts and in indefinite places – the “never-never
land”[23] as called by S.T. Joshi, the message is glaring, who
is pointed at is the everyday man, all of us.
In this way what we detect in his tales it’s not just
“a subliminal self endlessly repeated” [24], but a never ending, exponential multiplication of
the self, because the duplicities and multiplicities pointed in the characters
mirror the duplicities and the multiplicities of us readers.
Poe anticipates psychoanalysis issues with several
years and we can say that James’s reaction, as well as that of the other
detractors, appears as a mean of defence before the revelation of a disturbing
content: to belittle is the most immediate and effective defence.
Talking about
the artistic process as elaboration of unconscious contents and dynamics: in Marginalia, Poe gives a definition of
Art that, according to Robert Regan, should be Carl Gustav Jung’s: “Were I
called on to define, very briefly, the term ‘Art’ I should call it ‘the
reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the
Soul”[25].
With the time psychoanalysis should consider attentively
Poe’s works, especially in the person of Marie Bonaparte who wrote a very
accurate and diligent critical commentary about his output, using Master
Freud’s categories.
I’m joining the general comments of disappointment
about her commentary, adding that, if Poe undoubtedly opened the way to the
unconscious dynamics that later will be dominion of psychoanalysis – in
particular about the mechanisms of attraction-repulsion and about the levels of
personality – we can’t say, on the other hand, that psychoanalysis has been so
much respectful of his works, projecting indiscriminately its own categories on
them.
It seems to me, for instance, that interpreting
symbolically the Gordon Pym with
categories of infantile masturbation and incestuous desires is at least
limiting[26].
Merits and limits.
I should assert, as said by Edward H. Davidson, that
the strongest point in Poe is also his biggest limit “Poe’s great limitation is
the repeated topic of the self” [27].
But that is what mainly contributed to the greatness
of his genius and made him the pillar of psychological horror, as Richard
Wilbur rightly observes pointing out “the upward and downward spiral motifs
that he (Wilbur) believes are symbolic journeys into depths in the self, and
that thereby enrich symbolic texture in these writings” [28]. S.T. Joshi is much more peremptory “over the next
half-century or more after Poe’s death, we can find no writer who focused
single-mindedly upon either supernatural or psychological horror as Poe has
done” [29].
The other strong point I’d like to underline is merely
stylistic, but it’s also instrumental to the upward and downward psychological
spirals I mentioned before: in Poe’s works it’s not infrequent to realise just
afterwards of a double level of reading, strongly supported by the use of the
first person.
Ligeia is maybe the
perfect example in this sense: a supernatural tale at a first superficial
reading, it actually turns to be another incredible psychological journey into
insanity.
The visions and the bodily transmutation of the dying
Lady Rowena into the features of the dead Lady Ligeia are but the figment of
the narrator’s delirious mind, supported by an exaggerated use of opium, as he
candidly admits, in addition to a sick obsession. To the point we have to reckon
with the fact that in reality Lady Ligeia never existed, as it can be suggested
by an apparently trivial initial statement “And now, while I write, a
recollection flashes upon me that I have never
known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who
became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom” [30].
But it’s the very incipit of the story, although
vague, to show itself to the more attentive readers as a candid confession “I
cannot, for my soul, remember how, when or even precisely where, I first became
acquainted with the lady Ligeia” [31].
The same stratagem is used in William Wilson, where
it’s never totally cleared – it’s evident Poe’s will of maintaining this
ambiguity – if the narrator’s antagonist is really another boy or rather the
figment of his imagination, already twisted at such a young age, so much so the
other school mates seem not to notice the rivalry and the provocations between
them, so evident at the eyes of the protagonist.
Yet in all this, is Poe really keeping a distance from
his characters? I mean, it has been often insinuated that the ravings described
in his tales were his own ravings and this has often aroused the morbidity not
just of the public, but also illustrious critics, especially the American ones,
whose tendency to indulge on Poe’s alcoholic past records and lifestyle has
been for a too long time their favourite hobby, in addition to be the easiest
excuse to confine him on the fringes of the literary world.
We have to wait Baudelaire’s nearly devotional
admiration, abroad, to reconsider the value of Poe’s output and several years
will pass before it should have the proper recognition.
The point is that, as Lovecraft said, fear is “The
oldest and strongest emotion of mankind (...) and the oldest and strongest kind
of fear is fear of the unknown” [32].
Now, Poe often makes his characters evoke the philosophical
reflection and doing that he actually seems to explicate his own thinking, his own
point of view.
If philosophy, according to some contemporary
thinkers, is to be explained, more than as wonder, rather as an answer right to
terror, to fear of mankind towards the unknown, Poe accuses philosophy (and
theology) to have never given proper answers to this question, that is the most
urgent one of mankind, because it has always been too much levelled over a
rationality that wants to schematise man at any rate, without having first studied
materially, honestly, his real dynamics; further, I dare add, leaving all the irrational
issues to the exclusive dominion of other sciences, as though these arguments didn’t
regard philosophy. As though they didn’t regard mankind.
“It would have been wiser, it would have been safer,
to classify (if classify we must) upon
the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally
doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took for granted the Deity
intended him to do” [33].
But obviously philosophy, intended as a rational
instrument that man uses to explain the world, is glad to overlook over a land
that doesn’t cope to explain. It’s much easier to confine the irrational to the
mere field of impulses and in this way considering it not deserving the
attention of its inquiry. But doing this means to consider man amputated,
lacking a considerable part of himself.
Well, from my point of view it’s not just that Poe
anticipated psychoanalytic theories, but also in some subtle way he hinted to
the modern crisis of fragmentation of sciences, from which philosophy is
certainly not immune and that let it lose sight of the complexity of human
being: philosophy can’t be either reason, or irrationality, but rather both the
things together and inseparably.
Finally, getting back to strictly literary arguments,
it makes you wonder whether prejudice towards the man Poe is also, but not
only, a prejudice against the genre: if we think about it attentively, every great
writer’s output in the whole is not exempt from faults or falls off.
Nonetheless he or she remains a great writer.
In the case of supernatural, psychological horror or
fantasy it does exist a sort of double will of finding in it ‘a priori’ a lack
of credibility.
As I said above, Poe had to wait several years before
enjoying certain recognition, after a whole life passed in economical
difficulties. Same destiny was for the great H. P. Lovecraft, dead in poverty
and entered in the American literary canon pretty much late.
The question, for me never really faced deeply and
honestly, remains opened.
I’m ending this essay pointing out that Poe coped in a
big hoax, he, whose irony has been often undervalued: the morbidity with which
the public, scholars or not, has been always tried to penetrate his private
dimension using it as a weapon to denigrate him, is the very same morbidity and
ambiguity that he often laid bare in his tales. Conscious or not, the reader
mirrors himself over Poe’s pages. In a continuous run-up of a multiform Self.
[1] Robert Regan, Poe. A
Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey, 1967, p.147.
[2] S.T. Joshi, Introduction to American Supernatural Tales, Penguin Classics, London, 2007, p.
xiii.
[4] Aldous Huxley, From “Vulgarity in Literature”, in Robert Regan, op. cit. pp.
31-37.
[5] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural
Horror in Literature, in Eldritch
Tales. A miscellaneous of the Macabre, Gollancz, London, 2011, p. 456.
[6] James W. Gargano, The
Question of Poe’s Narrators, in Robert Regan, op. cit., p. 164.
[7] E.A. Poe, The Black Cat,
in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe,
Wordsworth Editions Limited, London, 2009, p. 62.
[8] Ibid. p. 63.
[9] Ibid. p. 63.
[10]Ibid., p. 63.
[11]Ibid., p. 596.
[12] E.A. Poe, op. cit., p. 264.
[13] Ibid. p. 263.
[14] Ibid, p. 113.
[15] E.A. Poe, William
Wilson, in E.A. Poe, op. cit., p. 151.
[16] Ibid., p. 155.
[17] Ibid., p. 154.
[18] Ibid., p. 155.
[19] E.A. Poe, The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
in E.A. Poe, op. cit., p. 652.
[23] S. T. Joshi, op. cit., p. xiv.
[25] Robert Regan, op. cit., pp. 6-7.
[26] See Sidney Kaplan, An
Introduction to Pym, in Robert Regan, op. cit., p. 153.
[27] Benjamin F. Fisher, The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan
Poe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 119.
[28] Ibid., p. 119.
[29] S. T. Joshi, op. cit., p. xiii.
[30] E.A. Poe, Ligeia, in E.A. Poe, op. cit., p. 95. For a complete essay about this subject see Roy
P. Basler, The Interpretation of Ligeia, in Robert Regan, op. cit., pp. 51-63.
[31] Ibid., p. 94.
[32] H.P. Lovecraft, op. cit., p. 423.
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