Short Story Month: 2015--Poe's Theories

Poe's theory of short fiction, derived primarily from A. W. Schlegel's Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, is, as Gerhard Hoffmann has pointed out, based on the concept of unity as the fundamental principle of existence.  As a result, for Poe, the purpose of literature is not to mirror the external world but to create a self-contained realm of reality that corresponds to the basic human desire for total unity.

From his first reference to Schlegel's concept of "totality of interest," in 1836 Poe argued that whereas in long works one may be pleased with particular passages, in short pieces, the pleasure results from the perception of the oneness, the uniqueness, the overall unity of the piece--on the adaptation of all the constituent parts.  For Poe "plot" is not merely a series of sequential events to arouse suspense, but rather overall pattern, design, or unity.  Only pattern, not realistic cause-and-effect, can make the separate elements of the work meaningful.  Moreover, Poe insists that only when the reader has an awareness of the "end" of the work, that is, the overall pattern, will seemingly trivial elements become relevant and therefore meaningful.

There is little doubt that Poe was always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological theme.  Because the meaning of the work for Poe was its technique, he thematizes narrative conventions issues in many of his stories, often making the creation and interpretation of the work's unity its central thematic "truth."  Although Poe's formalism and emphasis on the work's effect on the reader once alienated him from critics, postmodernist interest in form has made his theories more acceptable.  Critics who once complained that "The Philosophy of Composition" coldly manipulated the reader toward a preexistent effect now realize that for Poe the overall design was not a preestablished intention in the mind of the writer before the work's composition, but rather that the pattern of the work was discovered in the working out of tentative intentions.

Poe's theory of the tale derives from a generic mix of such conventions as the ritualized structure of drama, the metaphoric unity of lyric poetry, the verisimilitude of the eighteenth-century novel, the unifying point of view of the eighteenth-century essay, the projective technique of the gothic romance, and the spatial form of painting.  Poe's notion of short fiction as a picture is particularly important, as Robert Jacobs reminds us, for to see narrative as a painting is to see it as a design in space rather than a movement in time with the emphasis on overall pattern equivalent to thematic design.

Poe's argument in the famous 1842 Hawthorne review is straightforward:  Although unity is the most important characteristic of the literary work, unity can only be achieved in a work that the reader can hold in the mind all at once.  After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says, the short tale has the greatest potential for being unified in the way the poem is.  The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea.  Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the themes of the story.

Poe carries his concern with unity of effect even further in "The Philosophy of Composition," asserting the importance of beginning with the end of the work, the possibility of which is what transforms reality into narrative discourse.  A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events which it takes as its subject matter have already occurred.  Therefore the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.  The only narrative the reader gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event, so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in an aesthetic, eventless way, by means of tone, metaphor, and all the other artificial conventions of fictional discourse.  Consequently, it is inevitable that events in narrative will be motivated or determined by demands of the discourse, demands that do not necessarily have anything to do with psychological or phenomenological motivation of the narrated events in the real world.

Poe's Stories of Dream and Reality: "Descent into the Maelstrom" and "Pit and the Pendulum"

Today is Halloween, and I can't resist a post about my favorite writer of "alternate reality" short stories, Edgar Allan Poe, who has not always been taken as seriously as he should be. Sometimes dismissed, at best, as a creator of creepy potboilers, or at worst, as a drunk and a child molester, Poe has been sneered at by many critics, even as he has been hailed as an inspiration by many fiction writers.

Edgar Allan Poe was interested in all human experiences which challenged or undermined the easy assumption that everyday reality was the only reality worth attending to.  Although some readers may think that this preference for alternate realms of experience was part of his psychological makeup, it is much more likely that it grew out of his acceptance of the German romantic tradition of short fiction as a vehicle for presenting experiences that break up the ordinary.

One of the most common such "alternate" experiences, of course, one that is accessible to every human being, is the experience of dream.  However, Poe was not only interested in presenting dreams as if they were reality, he was also interested, as was typical of the Blackwood fiction of the day, in presenting experiences that were so extreme that they seemed to have the nightmarish quality of dream.  To present dream as reality and reality as dream was, for Poe, to blur the lines between the two forms of experience.  It was to give the human construct of a dream the hard feel of the external world and to give the seemingly hard contours of the external world a sense of being a human construct. 

Two of Poe's best-known stories which blur this dream/reality distinction are "Descent into the Maelstrom" (May 1841) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842).  Both present characters placed in an extreme situation; however, the situations differ in a crucial way.  In the first the extreme situation is a natural phenomenon, in spite of the fact that by its extremity it seems unnatural. It is a favorite Poe technique to create the extreme situation by pushing the ordinary situation to extraordinary lengths, to suggest the supernatural by pushing the natural to extremes. 

In the second story, the ontological status of the situation is ambiguous, for although  the character knows physically where he is, he does not know psychically what state he is in.  The stories also differ in terms of what motivates the extreme state.  In "A Descent into the Maelstrom," Poe devotes most of the story to setting up the situation, normalizing it, locating it in space; once the situation is established the story is almost over.  In "The Pit and the Pendulum," how the character got to his present situation is left vague; a great deal of the story is spent considering whether he is in is a dream or a waking state.  However, the means by which the two characters cope with their situations is similar; both make use of careful and lucid observation to try to escape their fate.

"Descent into the Maelstrom" begins in the typical Blackwood magazine manner by presenting a character who has undergone an "event" which has never happened to a human being before and who needs, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to tell about it.  Moreover, Poe follows the device common to romantic dramatic lyric poetry of having the narrator tell the story while located the self at that point where the events of the story took place, informing his wedding-guest-like auditor: "I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned--and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye."  However, the teller also makes use of the eighteenth-century technique of verisimilitude, using a "particularizing manner" to give  precise details of the physical phenomenon he is describing.  The listener adds to this particularizing technique of authenticating the event by quoting from written sources such as Rasmus and the Encyclopedia Britannica, but asserts that no matter how "circumstantial" or detailed the descriptions are, they fall short of conveying the horror, the magnificence, or the "sense of the novel" which the scene of the whirlpool elicits, noting, however, that he is not sure from what "point of view" previous commentators viewed the whirlpool.  It is this notion of point of view that motivates the story, for, as the teller has said at the beginning, no one has had the viewpoint he has had--the typical romantic perspective from within rather than from without.

The storyteller presents himself as an inadequate teller, for he often claims the inability of his words to capture the event; he says it is "folly to attempt describing" the hurricane which hits, and when he knows he is close to the whirlpool, he says, "no one will know what my feelings were at that moment".  However, if his feelings of horror are indescribable, his feelings when he loses his sense of horror are calm and logical.  Indeed, when he makes up his mind to hope no more, he becomes composed and begins to reflect on how magnificent it would be to die in this manifestation of God's power, becoming obsessed with the "keenest curiosity."

It is precisely this obsession to observe which saves the narrator.  The nearer he comes to the bottom of the whirlpool, the keener grows what he calls his "unnatural curiosity."  It is a combination of memory and observation of the geometric shapes which are less apt to be drawn down in the whirlpool that marks the means of his escape.  Lashing himself to a cylinder-shaped barrel, he throws himself off the fishing boat into the whirlpool and hovers half-way between the top and the bottom, between chaos below and salvation above, until the whirlpool--which is, after all, limited in time, subsides.  At this point, the teller ends his tale by  moving from the past to the present-tense, reflecting on the tale itself, becoming transformed by the experience from participant to manipulator of his own discourse, for he says his companions on shore "knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land."

"The Pit and the Pendulum" is much more ambiguous about the epistemological or ontological state of the extreme situation than "A Descent into the Maelstrom."  Although the entire story takes place inside a prison cell into which the narrator of the story, and indeed the story's only visible character, has been thrown, the story does not indicate what the nameless narrator has done to deserve the tortures he endures in the pit, nor does it deal with any of the religious or social implications of the Inquisition responsible for his imprisonment.  It simply recounts, in excruciatingly exact detail, the step-by-step means by which the torturers try to break the protagonist's spirit and his own methodical attempts to escape each new horror that they put in his path.

Although "The Pit and the Pendulum" only focuses on one character, the reader actually discovers very little about him.  We do not know his name, what he has done, whether he is guilty, whether he is a criminal, what he misses about life in the everyday world--in short, we know none of those things about the character that we might expect to learn if this were a novel in which a man spends several years in prison.  Although such a lack of knowledge would make readers quickly lose interest if they were reading a novel, it is indeed all that it is necessary to know to become involved with Poe's short story.  For this is not a realistic story of an individual human character caught in an unjust social system, but rather a nightmarish, symbolic story about every person's worst nightmare and an allegory of the most basic human situation and dilemma.  Harry Levine has described the story as such an allegory, and David Hirsch has further argued that the character's situation embodies the modern existential experience:  "the surface of Poe's world has broken and cracked, and man stands at the edge of the bottomless abyss."

The story is a Poe paradigm.  Focusing on a character under sentence of death and aware of it, it moves the character into a concrete dilemma which seems to "stand for" a metaphysical situation in an ambiguous way that suggests its "dreamy," "indeterminate" nature.  In this story we find the most explicit statement in Poe's fiction of his sense of the blurry line between dream and reality.   The narrator considers that although when we awake even from the soundest sleep, "we break the gossamer web of some dream," the web is so flimsy that a second later we forget we have dreamed at all.  However, sometimes, perhaps much later, memories of the details of the dream come back and we do not know where they have come from.  This sense of having a memory of that which did not in fact occur is central to the story's ambiguity, for as the narrator tries to remember his experience, it is not clear whether the memory is of a real event or a dream event that has been forgotten.

He does not know in what state he is; the only thing he does know is that he is not dead, for he says "Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we read in fiction, is altogether inconsistent with real existence;--but where and in what state was I?"  The narrator's task is simply to save himself, but in order to survive he must know where he is, and the first crucial task he undertakes is to try to orient himself.  However, his efforts are complicated by his moving back and forth between sleep and waking; each time he falls asleep, he must reorient himself all over again.  This explains why even after trying to demarcate his position, he awakes and, instead of going on forward, retraces his steps and thus overestimates the size of his cell.

Like the protagonist in "A Descent into the Maelstrom," he is preoccupied with curiosity about the mere physical nature of his surroundings, taking a "wild interest in trifles."  However, in spite of his deliberative efforts, it is the accident of tripping that saves him from the pit the first time.  Waking from another interlude of sleep, he is bound down, and this time above him is a picture of time, synonymous with death, carrying not the image of a scythe, but rather an actual pendulum which sweeps back and forth.  In this situation, surrounded by the repulsive rats, with the scythe of time and thus death over his head, he again moves back and forth between the states of sensibility and insensibility. 

This pattern of moving in and out of consciousness is typical of Poe, for in such an alternating state, consciousness has some of the characteristics of unconsciousness and vice versa; one state is imbued with the qualities of the other state.  As a result, Poe's stories are neither solely like the consciousness of realism, nor the projective unconsciousness of romance.  As the narrator totters on the brink of the pit, the walls rush back and an outstretched arm catches him as he falls.  The ending is not an ending at all, but rather the beginning of waking life, the movement from the gossamer dream or nightmare which constitutes the story itself.       

Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" and Poe's "Berenice": Two American Fantastic Tales

Each week The Library of America will post to your email account a free “Story of the Week” from a volume in their large catalog.  You can sign up for this at http://www.loa.org

This week, they are featuring “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.  If you like tales that make you think after you shudder, you might find American Fantastic Tales interesting.

I am providing a brief discussion of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as well as a discussion of another story in the book, Poe’s “Berenice,” which is not one of his most popular tales, but certainly one of his most curious.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

            "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a story originally published in the late nineteenth century (1892), but which has only relatively recently been anthologized and widely read because of its thematic relevance to the rise in academic feminism in U.S. universities.  The story can be seen as a criticism of the treatment of women in the nineteenth century, particularly the issue of madness as a way men controlled women or else as a way women escaped from, or rebelled against, men.  However, the story can also be read as an interesting use of the technique of first-person point of view and the relationship between writing and reality--especially the difference between traditional male and female texts. 

            The story makes use of a common convention of what has often been called women's fiction--gothic romance.  It opens with the typical hereditary estate, which the narrator is tempted to call a "haunted house," and then introduces the convention, best known in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre," of the mysterious mad woman in the upstairs room.  However, the primary convention the story uses is the traditional difference between how men and women supposedly approach reality.  The husband, who is a doctor or scientist, has no patience with faith, superstition, or anything that cannot be physically verified and converted to mathematical figures.  This contrasts with the wife's imaginative power and her "habit of story-making." 

            Serving as a background to this tension is the wallpaper itself, which gives the story its title--an image of domestic "woman's things," but which takes on significance because of the nature of the "patterns" that it embodies.  If students isolate all those references to the wallpaper in the story, they will see how the patterns begin to take on an ominous expression of reality.  The nature of the woman's "madness" is projective and thus identified with the nature of writing, for she creates meaningful patterns and then responds to the patterns as if the meaning existed in them instead of being projected on them.  Although this may be at least one definition of madness, it is also a definition of the artist, who creates meaning out of patterns that readers take to be real and significant.  The difference between madness and art, of course, is between allowing the projection to possess one only temporarily or being drawn into it obsessively without the desire or ability to escape. 

            What the narrator does is to transform a "pointless pattern" into a meaningful one by following it to its conclusion or end and thus determining its purpose.  The narrator says she knows little of the principal of design, but that she does know that there is no law or rule that governs the pattern of the wallpaper.  Of course, as the story proceeds and she perceives or projects a woman behind the pattern, the reader knows that inevitability the woman must be herself, for the conventional rule that applies here is that if one projects a pattern, the pattern then indeed reflects the self.  The story thus involves two basic notions of patterns that the reader may need to unravel--patterns created by society itself that entrap a woman and bind her and patterns the mind of the woman herself creates that follow only the law of her own psychic distress. 

            A 1982 film version of this story invents a number of elements to present the story as a male/female conflict in which the male is responsible for the madness of the female.  For example, there is the difference between what the wife writes--her impressions and personal thoughts in a small notebook she keeps hidden in her pocket--and what the husband writes--a schedule that controls her every move and an academic paper.  Thus, the story is about the woman's external life dominated by her husband's schedule and her inner life captured by her own notebook, which her husband wishes to deny her.  In one scene the husband explains that he wants things solid, wants to get at the "reality of things"; he says, for example, that once pollination was explained to him, the mystery of love vanished.         

               A number of other inventions, such as a mysterious young girl who occasionally rides through the landscape outside the house on a bicycle, suggest the possibilities of the wife when she was a young girl herself, possibilities that have been closed off by the patterns that control her.  Throughout the film, the dialogue emphasizes the husband's view that the wife thinks too much, that her imagination is her worst enemy. He argues that to be healthy she must be "calm and pink"; for him the essence of woman is body not mind; as a doctor friend of the husband says to her, "You must put on flesh."

            The woman realizes that she seems to be living in a world of her own, but that the more it becomes her own the less control she has over it.  Indeed, her inner world becomes externalized.  At the end of the film, the conflict between the man and woman is made most explicit by a montage of shots that cut back and forth between the man reading his paper at a professional meeting and the woman tearing off the paper from her walls.  What the woman wishes is to expose what lies behind the patterns, to destroy the patterns themselves, and to free the woman who is entrapped there.  The climactic scene occurs when a hand comes out of the wall and a mysterious woman in a yellow dress kisses her and the two become one. 

Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice”

        What Poe wanted to evoke in the story “Berenice" (March 1835) was some physical manifestation of identity that was both expressive of the self and suggestive of permanence. And the one last remnant of expression that remains after death and decay of the body would be the teeth. Perhaps the strange and seemingly over generalized first paragraph of the story indicates Poe's realization that his metaphor did not work, for it seems a case of special pleading.  He focuses on the manifold misery and wretchedness of the earth that derives from the fact that beauty results from unloveliness, that evil results from good, and that joy is born out of sorrow. The narrator focuses on a chamber filled with books--"a palace of imagination...the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition.”  Spending his childhood with books and in reverie results in what he calls an inversion in his thoughts: 

            The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,--not the material of my everyday existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

This is the most resounding statement in Poe's fiction of the central thrust of his vision, for it reflects the basic romantic mode of presenting the everyday world as strange and unusual and the fantastic world of dream and imagination as the only reality.

            Moreover, this is Poe's most emphatic statement of his idea of the intensity of interest.  Although the disease that falls on Bernice is the disease of epilepsy, which Poe uses as a metaphor for death, the narrator's disease, what he calls a "monomania," consists of a "morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive" (II, 211).  He describes an "intensity of interest" for "even the most ordinary objects of the universe."  However, the objects with which he becomes absorbed are not objects as such, for he singles out such things as a frivolous device in the typography of a book, a shadow falling aslant a tapestry, the steady flame of a lamp, the perfume of a flower, and the monotonous repetition of some common word, "until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind.”

 

            This condition, like the condition of the perverse, defies analysis or explanation.  Furthermore, he insists that his "undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous” is not to be confused with mere rumination.  It is not, he argues, even an exaggeration of such rumination, but something quite different.  Whereas the dreamer gradually loses sight of the object of his attention in deductions and suggestions deriving from it, in his own case, the primary object of his attention assumes an unreal importance and at the termination of the reverie, instead of disappearing, attains that "supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease.  In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.” 

            The narrator is fully aware of his obsession, for he notes that he never loved Berenice as a living and breathing individual, but as the embodiment of a dream:

            not as a being of the earth, earthly, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze--not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.

As Berenice becomes more and more emaciated, that is, as the body wastes away and the face becomes more skull-like, the teeth become more predominant.  Consequently, it is the teeth that become the center of his monomania; "they alone were present to the mental eye," for he transforms them into a metaphoric embodiment of pure "idea" and thus the ultimate metaphor of his desire.  The only twist in the story, a grotesque twist that contributes to its ghastly nature, is the fact that Berenice is not dead but only in an epileptic coma when the narrator pulls out her teeth as she lies in her tomb.

            Poe's obsession with the Ideal and his abhorrence of body is less likely to be a result of his own psychological anxieties and fears, as some readers have assumed, than an inevitable implication of his metaphysical and aesthetic theories that true reality was purely pattern rather than merely physical.

Is the Short Story an Obsessive, Unnatural Form?

The short story's dependence on tightly unified form rather than mimetic methods has been its central aesthetic characteristic since Poe’s assertion: 'In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency . . . is not to the pre-established design.'"  One of the reasons the short story has always been less respected by critics than the novel is the often tacit, sometimes explicit, suspicion that there is something psychologically or aesthetically "unhealthy" about the form, that it is "obsessed" with an abnormally artificial and intense unity that has a tendency to dissolve the referential material of the form.

The short story's dependence on form, however, is not simply a product of Edgar Allan Poe's obsessive imagination; it is a conventional characteristic deriving from the short story's ancestry in myth and folklore.  As Frederic Jameson reminded us in The Prison House of Language, short stories have a kind of "atemporal and object-like unity in the way they convert existence into a sudden coincidence between two systems:  a resolution of multiplicity into unity, or a fulfillment of a single wish."  Jameson says that for Poe the short story was a way of "surmounting time, of translating a formless temporal succession into a simultaneity which we can grasp and possess."

Poe has always been accused of being indifferent to living, flesh and blood subjects.  W. H. Auden has said there is no place in any of his stories for "the human individual as he actually exists in space and time," that is, as a natural creature and an historical person.  Richard Wilbur in his famous Library of Congress Lecture in 1959 concluded that Poe's aesthetic that "art should repudiate everything human and earthly," was insane.  However, the repudiation of "reality" as defined only as everyday human experience is precisely what myth and folklore--the primal forerunners of the short story--are based on. 

As Mircea Eliade has shown, when primitive human beings divided the world into the two realms of the profane (the world of everyday reality) and the sacred (the world of desire for immanent or transcendent meaning), they had no doubt that true reality lay within the realm of the sacred.  Poe's aesthetic, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the short story, has always been based on this same assumption that the artistic objectification of desire, not the stuff of everyday, is true reality.

Although Poe's immediate background for this perspective lay in the gothic romance popular in Germany and England, the late 18th- and early 19th-century romance with which Poe was familiar differed from its medieval prototype by being a hybrid form that combined the symbolic projective characters of the old romance with the increasingly realistic detail and social reality of the novel. 

The ambiguity and complexity of such early prototypes of the short story as "Young Goodman Brown, "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" result from the fact that in these stories allegorical characters in a code-bound plot uneasily interrelate with realistic characters in the verisimilitude of a real world.  The sense we have that something "unnatural" motivates Goodman Brown, Roderick Usher, and Bartleby results from the fact that they are allegorical figures who have stepped into an "as-if-real" world created by the techniques of verisimilitude.

Angus Fletcher provides a suggestion about the effect created by such juxtaposition in his discussion of allegory.  He argues that because the allegorical figure is bound to its single role in the story in which it plays a part, if placed in the real world, the character would act like an obsessed person.  For example, a character named "Faith" in an allegory would act as if she were obsessed with faith, since she would be an embodiment of that characteristic and thus could not "think" of anything else.  And indeed, the characters in short fiction often seem motivated by something that they cannot articulate and that those around them cannot easily understand.

The most obvious early examples are those stories by Poe that focus on "the perverse," that obsessive-like behavior that compels someone to act in a way that may go against reason, common sense, even the best interests of the survival of the physical self.  In many of Poe's most important stories, the obsession is presented as behavior that can only be manifested in elliptical or symbolic ways.

Two of Hawthorne's best-known stories--"Wakefield" and "Young Goodman Brown"--also manifest this same mysterious sense of obsessive acts that have no obvious, commonsense motivation.  Goodman Brown alternately acts as if he were an allegorical figure who must make his journey into the forest as an inevitable working out of the preordained mythic story of which he is a part, and as a psychologically complex, realistic character who, although obsessed with his journey, is able to question its wisdom and morality.  In "Wakefield" Hawthorne is not interested in a man who is realistically motivated to leave his wife because he no longer cares for her, but rather a character who gets so entangled in an obsessive act that he can neither explain it nor escape it.

Melville's Bartleby cannot explain why he is compelled to behave as he does either.  He responds to the wall outside his window as if it were not merely a metaphor for the absurdity that confronts him, but rather the absurdity itself and thus, like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he responds to the map as if it were the territory, kicks himself loose from the earth, and becomes transformed into a character who no longer can be defined within social, historical, or cultural contexts.  As a result, the reader is caught in an ambivalent situation of not knowing whether to respond to Bartleby as if he is a character who is psychologically obsessed or an allegorical emblem of obsession.  It is typical of the short story that when an obsessed character makes the metaphoric mistake of perceiving a metaphor as real, he or she becomes transformed into a parabolic figure in a fable of his own her own creation.

What is it about the short story that demands this focus on unified form, and what does "obsession" have to do with it?  A brief summary of some of the characteristics of psychological obsession may point to some answers.  Freud says, and most analysts confirm, that obsessive acts are usually performed to escape feelings of dread or anxiety--most often defined as a vague fear of loss of identity.  Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety says that Franklin D. Roosevelt's line about "fear of fear itself" is what he means by anxiety, since anxiety results from no discernible cause.  As Roderick Usher says about his struggle with the grim fantasy FEAR, he has no abhorrence of danger, "except in its absolute effect--in terror."  Analysts suggest that since anxiety cannot be dealt with directly because its sources are usually unknown, the individual develops defenses against it, of which the obsessive defense is the most common.

Ritual is one of the most characteristic obsessive means by which one defends against anxiety, for the ritual act is a symbolic enactment to simulate command of that for which the personality feels it has no control.  Freud's famous "fort-da, described" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which a baby repetitively throws a toy out of its crib to simulate its sense of control over the mother's departure is perhaps the most famous example.  If, as Georg Lukács has said, the short story is the most artistic form, it may be because, as Frederic Jameson has suggested, it is the most formal and ritualistic narrative form, for it recapitulates the most basic motivation of the artistic impulse--the "for-da"--the need to create a similitude of control. 

Randal Jarrell describes the same compulsion when he claims that our stories show that we take pleasure in "repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found unbearable:  the child whose mother left her so often that she invented a game of throwing her doll out of her crib, exclaiming as it vanished 'Gone! gone!' was a true poet."  Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that fairy stories, one of the primary progenitors of the short story, are such ritualized defenses or outlets for childhood anxiety.  Bettleheim argues that the child is subject to fears of loneliness, isolation, and mortal anxiety--existential anxieties that fairy tales take seriously and deal with by objectifying in a highly formal structure, much the way that Sufi healing stories do.

As psychologist Leon Salzman reminds us, the obsessive impulse is not a defense against anxiety about everyday problems, but rather anxiety about the most basic problems that arise from our fundamental humanness.  Salzman says that realization of one's "humanness--with its inherent limitations--is often the basis for considerable anxiety and obsessive attempts at great control over one's living."  Freud noted that obsessed neurotics turn their thoughts "to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgments remain open to doubt.  The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory....”

The entire line of development of the short story--from fairy tale to Poe, from Chekhov to Raymond Carver--has focused on such basic human anxieties and has dealt with them by the creation of a highly formalized, unified, and ritualized aesthetic object.  As a result the short story has often been accused of being cut off from everyday social reality and thus somehow unhealthy.

 However, this severance from social reality is simply part of the short story's generic heritage.  In the early 19th century, Friedrich Schlegel argued that the short narrative form is like a story "torn away from any cultural background"--a perception echoed by Frank O'Connor's famous claim that the short story focuses on characters that remain remote from the community--"romantic, individualistic, and intransigent." 

Richard Ford has said that short stories in particular do not have a clear relationship to the national character because they are often about things that are not clear but need clearing up:  "Making short stories into exponents for history certainly isn't the most interesting thing we can do with them....” Interesting or not, when critics are unable to find any semblance of social reality in fiction, they are apt to accuse the form of being "inhuman" and "unnatural."  When they encounter fiction that depends on poetic techniques of compression and highly unified form rather than mimetic techniques of expansion and verisimilitude, they are apt to call it "obsessive" and "mechanical."

Perhaps there is something about the essential nature of storytelling that naturally moves toward compression and form as opposed to expansion and explanation.  Walter Benjamin seems to think so in his well-known discussion of Nikolai Leskov, for he notes that one of the main reasons for the decline in storytelling is the increase in the dissemination of information: "Actually it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it . . ..  The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced upon the reader.  It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." 

If Benjamin is right, then the common critical accusation that the short story is somehow unnatural and obsessed is merely the result of a common bias toward novelistic information and away from the pure storytelling of the short story.

Cusack is Detective Poe in "The Raven": Poe's Ratiocinative Stories

I read a couple of conflicting reviews of the new film "The Raven" this morning in which John Cusack plays Edgar Allen Poe.  The film's excuse to depict gruesome murder and high tension detective suspense is to combine such Poe horror tales as "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Premature Burial," etc. with Poe's detective technique of ratiocination.  According to the reviews and the trailer on YouTube, Poe is asked to help solve crimes (ala his amateur detective Dupin) in which a killer is imitating murders from his own stories.  Not a bad concept, but I will probably wait until it comes out on DVD to watch it.  But always alert for a tie-in to my own modest imaginative/ratiocinative efforts, I thought I would post an entry on Poe's detective stories for your reading pleasure, in hopes that you will return to the source and reread Poe.

Although Edgar Allan Poe's career was relatively short, he was the most important writer in the mid-19th century to transform the legendary tale form into a sophisticated psychological fiction now known as the short story. Experimenting with many different fictional forms such as the gothic tale, science fiction, occult fantasies, and satire, Poe gained great recognition in the early 1840's for his creation of a genre that has grown in popularity ever since--the so-called tale of ratiocination, or detective story, which features an amateur sleuth who by his superior deductive abilities outsmarts criminals and outclasses the police.

Such stories as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" created a small sensation in America when they were first published. Following fast upon these works was the "The Gold-Bug" (1843) which, although it did not feature Dupin, focused on analytical detection and also was so popular that it was immediately reprinted three times. "The Purloined Letter," the third and final story in the Dupin series, has been the subject of a great deal of critical analysis since its publication as a model of ironic and tightly-structured plot. 

Poe is credited as the creator of the detective story and the character type known as the amateur sleuth. However, Auguste Dupin and his ratiocinative ability did not spring from nowhere.  Probably the two most obvious sources are Voltaire's ”Zadig” (1748) and Eugene Francois Vidocq's ”Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police” (1828-29).  Poe mentions Zadig in "Hop-Frog" (1849) and thus probably knew the story of Zadig's being able to deduce the description of the King's horse and the Queen's dog by examining tracks left on the ground and hair left on bushes.  He also mentions Vidocq, the first real-life detective, in "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" as a "good guesser," but one who could not see clearly because he held the object of investigation too close.

     

However, Poe's creation of the ratiocinative story also derives from broader and more basic interests and sources.  First there was his interest in the aesthetic theory of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as derived from 19^th-century German Romanticism. In several of Poe's most famous critical essays, such as his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's ”Twice-Told Tales• and his theoretical articles, "Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and "The Poetic Principle" (1848), Poe develops his own version of the theory of the art work as a form in which every single detail contributes to the overall effect. This organic aesthetic theory obviously contributes much to Poe's creation of the detective genre in which every detail, even the most seemingly minor, may be a clue to the solution of the story's central mystery.

       

Secondly, there was Poe's knowledge of the gothic genre, which, based on the concept of hidden sin and filled with mysterious and unexplained events, had, like the detective story, to move inexorably toward a denouement that would explain or lay bare all the previous puzzles.  The first Gothic story, Horace Walpole's ”The Castle of Otranto” (1764), with its secret guilt and cryptic clues, was thus an early source of the detective story.

           

Thirdly, there was Poe's fascination with cryptograms, riddles, codes, and other conundrums and puzzles. In an article in a weekly magazine in 1839, he offered to solve any and all cryptograms submitted; in a follow-up article in 1841 he said that he had indeed solved most of them.  Although Poe demonstrated his skill as a solver of puzzles in many magazine articles, the most famous fictional depiction of his skill as a cryptographer is his story "The Gold Bug" (1843).
        

William Legrand, the central character in "The Gold Bug," shares some characteristics with Poe's famous amateur sleuth, Auguste Dupin: he is of an illustrious family, but because of financial misfortunes he has been reduced to near poverty; although he is of French ancestry from New Orleans, he lives alone on an island near Charleston, South Carolina; moreover, like Dupin, he alternates between gloomy melancholy and excited enthusiasm, which leads the narrator (also like the narrator in the Dupin stories) to suspect that he is the victim of a species of madness.
      

The basic premise of the story is that Legrand is figuratively bitten by the gold bug after discovering a piece of parchment on which he finds a cryptogram with directions to the buried treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd.  As with the more influential Dupin stories, "The Gold Bug" focuses less on action than on the explanation of the steps toward the solution of its mystery. In order to solve the puzzle of the cryptogram, Legrand demonstrates the essential qualities of the amateur detective:  close attention to minute detail, extensive information about language and mathematics, far©reaching knowledge about his opponent (in this case the pirate Captain Kidd), and most importantly a perceptive intuition as well as a methodical reasoning ability.

However, it is in the Auguste Dupin stories that Poe develops most of the conventions of the detective story which have been used by other writers ever since. The first of the three, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," is the most popular because it combines horrifying inexplicable events with astonishing feats of deductive reasoning.   The narrator, the forerunner of Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories, meets Dupin in this story and very early recognizes that he has a double personality, a Bi-Part Soul, for he is both wildly imaginative and coldly analytical.        

The reader's first encounter with Dupin's deductive ability takes place even before the murders occur when he seems to read his companion's mind by responding to something that the narrator had only been thinking.  When Dupin explains the elaborate method whereby he followed the narrator's thought processes by noticing small details and associating them, we have the  beginning of a long history of fictional detectives taking great pleasure in recounting the means by which they solved a hidden mystery.  

        

 Dupin's knowledge of the brutal murder of a mother and daughter on the Rue Morgue is by the same means that any ordinary citizen might know of a murder--the newspapers. As is to become usual in the amateur sleuth genre, Dupin scorns the methods of the professional investigators as being no method at all. He argues that the police find the mystery insoluble for the very reason that it should be regarded as easy to solve, that is, its bizarre nature; thus the facility with which he solves the case is in direct proportion to its apparent insolubility by the police. 

             

The heart of the story, as it is to become the heart of practically every detective story since, centers not on the action of the crime but rather on Dupin's extended explanation of how he solved it. The points about the murder which stump the police are precisely those which enable Dupin to master the case: the contradiction of several neighbors who describe hearing a voice in several different foreign languages and the fact that there seems no possible means of entering or exiting the room where the murders took place.  The first he accounts for by deducing that the criminal must have been an animal; the second he explains by following a mode of reasoning based on a process of elimination to determine that apparent impossibilities are in reality possible after all. When Dupin reveals that an escaped Ourang-Outang did the killing, the Paris Prefect of Police complains that Dupin should mind his own business.  However, Dupin is content to have beaten the Prefect in his own realm; descendants of Dupin have been beating police inspectors ever since.

"The Mystery of Marie Roget," although it also focuses on Dupin's solving of a crime primarily from newspaper reports, is actually based on the murder of a young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, near New York city.  Because the crime had not been solved when Poe wrote the story, he made use of the actual facts of the case of Mary Rogers to tell a story of the murder of a young Parisian girl, Marie Roget, as a means of demonstrating his superior deductive ability.
          

 The story ostensibly begins two years after the events of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" when the Prefect of Police, having failed to solve the Marie Roget case himself, worries about his reputation and comes to Dupin to ask for his help.  Dupin's method is the classic means of the armchair detective; he gathers all the copies of the newspapers which have accounts of the crime and sets about methodically examining each one.  He declares the case more intricate than that of the Rue Morgue because, ironically, it seems so simple.

        

 One of the characteristics of the story that makes it less popular than the other two Dupin tales is the extensive analysis of the newspaper articles Dupin engages in--an analysis which makes the story read more like an article critical of newspaper techniques than a narrative story.  In fact, that which makes Poe able to propose a solution to the crime is not so much his knowledge of crime as it is his knowledge of the conventions of newspaper writing.  In a similar manner, it was his knowledge of the conventions of novel-writing that made it possible for him to deduce the correct conclusion of Dickens' novel Barnaby Rudge the previous year when he had read only one or two of the first installments.

   

Another aspect of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" which reflects Dupin's deductive genius and which has been used by detective writers since is his conviction that the usual error of the police is to pay so much attention to the immediate events that they ignore the peripheral, that is, the circumstantial, evidence.  Both experience and true philosophy, says Dupin, show that truth arises more often from the seemingly irrelevant than from the so-called strictly relevant.  By this means, Dupin eliminates the various hypotheses for the crime proposed by the newspapers and proposes his own hypothesis which is confirmed by the confession of the murderer.
      

Although "The Mystery of Marie Roget" contains some of the primary conventions that find their way into subsequent detective stories, it is the least popular of the Dupin narratives not only because it contains so much reasoning and exposition that very little narrative emerges, but because it is so long and convoluted that the reader tires of following the many details of  Dupin's analyses of the newspaper articles. Of the many experts of detective fiction who have commented on Poe's contribution to the genre, only Dorothy Sayers has praised the "Marie Roget" work, calling it a story especially for connoisseurs, a serious intellectual exercise rather than a sensational thriller like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

However, professional literary critics, if not professional detective writers, have singled out "The Purloined Letter"—the most ironic, economical, and classically pure of the Dupin stories--as the most brilliant of Poe's ratiocinative works. This time the crime is much more subtle than murder, for it focuses on political intrigue and manipulation.  Although the crime is quite simple--the theft of a letter from an exalted and noble personage--its effects are quite complex.  The story depends on several ironies:  first of all, the identity of the criminal is known, for he stole the letter in plain sight of the noble lady; second, the letter is a threat to the lady from whom he stole it only as long as he does nothing with it; finally, the Paris Police cannot find the letter, even though they use the most sophisticated an exhaustive methods of searching for it, precisely because, as Dupin deduces, it is in plain sight.

Also distinguishing the story from the other two Dupin stories is Dupin's extended discussion of the important relationship between the seemingly disparate talents of the mathematician and the poet.  The Minister who has stolen the letter is successful, says Dupin, because he indeed is both poet and mathematician.  In turn, Dupin's method of discovering the location of the letter, a method which has been used by detectives ever since, is also to be poet and mathematician and thus to identify with the mind of the criminal.  The method follows the same principle as that of a young boy Dupin knows of who is an expert of the game of "even and od,--a variation of the old game of holding something in your hand behind your back and asking someone to guess which hand holds the prize.  The boy always wins, not because he is a good guesser, but because, as he says, he fashions the expression on his face to match the face of the one with his hands behind his back and then tries to see what thoughts come into his mind to correspond with that expression. 
  

The various techniques of deduction developed by Poe in the Dupin stories are so familiar to readers of detective fiction that to read the Poe stories is to be reminded that very few essential conventions of the genre have been invented since Poe. Indeed, with the publication of the Dupin stories, Poe truly can be said to have singlehandedly brought the literary genre of the detective story into being.

Terrence Holt's In The Valley of the Kings and Edgar Allan Poe

I have just finished reading Terrence Holt’s debut collection, In The Valley of the Kings (Norton, 2009). Holt started writing these stories while earning MFA and PhD degrees in English from Cornell. One of them, “Charybdis,” appeared in The Kenyon Review thirty years ago and was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories. He taught creative writing and English lit for ten years before earning an MD degree from the University of North Carolina, where he now teaches and practices medicine.

Holt is a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, telling an interviewer that he has loved Poe’s stories since grade school, adding that he often needs a voice “that can blur the lines between rationality and lunacy,” which he says turns out to sound a lot like Poe. Holt concludes, “I’m happy doing anything that makes people think about Poe.”

Since I am also one of those who started reading Poe in grade school, and who has since taught graduate-level seminars on Poe’s work and written a book about his contribution to the short story, reading Holt’s stories got me to thinking about Poe again. I would be happy if this blog entry makes you think about Poe and sends you to Holt’s stories, which I think get their energy from some of the primary sources of the short story as a form.

Poe was never highly respected among my colleagues in graduate school or at the university where I taught. I remember one professor asking me what in the hell I found to talk about in a semester-long course on Edgar Allan Poe, saying he had a hard time filling up one class meeting in his American Literature class on that adolescent-minded, alcoholic drug addict and child molester.

Because two of Holt’s stories--“Charybdis” and “Aurora”-- involve space travel to Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and two others--“ Ό Λογος" and Apocalypse”—center on a futuristic end of the world, the old genre issue of science fiction rears its Hydra head.
I suspect that Terrence Holt’s stories will raise the same kind of issues that Poe’s stories have always raised. When one writes “genre” fiction such as detective stories and science fiction, one risks being called light weight entertainment, appealing only to a small group of fans, such as Star Trek trekkies, but never having the respectability of serious literary writers.

In a Boston Globe interview last year, Holt said he avoids the science fiction label, noting that for him generic distinctions between what’s real and what’s fantastic doesn’t make much sense, since it’s all fiction. “And as part of a larger tendency to isolate things that make us uncomfortable, I think such distinctions are dangerous.” Holt says that it makes perfect sense we named everything in the cosmos after the gods. “When you set a story there you get a free pass into the realm of myth.”

And it is indeed the world of myth and mystery and magic that interests Holt. He says that he is interested in the limits of our capacity to understand ourselves. “For me, these stories are more than anything else about where stories come from, and where they take us. They’re about the moment-by-moment process by which our brains convince us that the world exists, and the gaps in that process as well. Those flaws in the illusion are what I want to capture. They’re the chinks in the structure where mystery gets in and haunts our lives—and through which one day we slip into eternity.” All this sounds very much like Poe, for whom the function of story is not to mirror external reality but to create a self-contained realm of reality that corresponds only to the basic human desire for total unity.

In a New York Times review last September, William Giraldi suggested that Holt’s people are beyond the help of science, quoting one of his characters who says, “Science is a consolation only to the ignorant.” Giraldi asks, “What do we clutch at in place of science? What sustained and deceived us long before science, and what will we return to once modernity becomes an antiquated future? Mystery, magic, myth; the allegories and fables that crowbarred open our psyche.”

The “Power of Words” (which is the title of one of Poe’s stories) is central to Holt. Central is the opening story in Holt’s collection, entitled Ό Λογος” a Greek word that means “The word,” as in “In the beginning was the word” in John 1.1. The word of the title appears mysteriously on a young girl’s body, creating some sort of infection that kills her. When it is seen by others, they die also, and the disease then spreads to plague proportions that threatens the end of the world. Thus, instead of the beginning, it is “In the end was the word.”

The story also has a Latin head note: Videtur quod Auctor hic obiit. Some medieval manuscripts dealing with the Black Death end with the author's last prayer, "Videtur quod Auctor hic obiit" which means, "It seems the author died here." A similar “final word” motif is suggested by the head note for “Charybdis”: a quotation from Poe’s early prize-wining story that launched him on his career, “MS Found in a Bottle,” in which the narrator says that he will continue to write in his journal until the “last moment” when he will enclose the MS in a bottle and cast it within the sea. The story is not one of Poe’s best-known stories, but it is one of his most self reflexively complex.

Holt makes another reference to “Ms Found in a Bottle” in the story “Eurydike,” a futuristic version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Another isolated space traveler recognizes a word out of endless rows of empty letters on his screen, the word “discovery.”

In “Ms Found in a Bottle,” the narrator says a feeling for which he has no name takes possession of his soul--"a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.” Such feelings are the sense of being "captured by the incredible" which is both the very essence of dreams, as Conrad's Marlowe insists in The Heart of Darkness, as well as the essence of story itself; for no "relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams." This realization is what the narrator refers to when he says a "new sense--a new entity is added to my soul." Moreover, this is what constitutes the unintelligible letters he unwittingly daubs on the sail, which, when the sail is put in use, spell out the word DISCOVERY. For the discovery the narrator makes is the discovery that dominates Poe's art and thought throughout his career; it is the discovery of the power of the imagination and thus the power of story.

Like the narrator, Poe himself felt impelled by a "curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of those awful regions . . .. It is evident that we are hurrying on to some exciting knowledge--some never-to-be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction." As Poe's masterworks "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Eureka make clear, the end of the imaginative journey is both the source and the end of life itself, for it is ultimate non-being. We imagine the narrator of "MS. Found in a Bottle" lost in his fantasy, penning the last words--"going down"--and tossing his letter into the sea, from whence, eternally detached from its author, it is taken up by countless readers as a "dead letter" only to be made to live again continuously.

If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material facts of the external world, the short story attempts to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality. If the novel's quest for extensional reality takes place in the social world and the material of its analyses are manners as the indication of one's soul, as Lionel Trilling says, the field of research for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious, and the material of its analysis are not manners, but dreams. The results of this distinction are that whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual. While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophic framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. The novel exists to reaffirm the world of "everyday" reality; the short story exists to "defamiliarize" the everyday. Storytelling does not spring from one's confrontation with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity).

In the short story we are presented with characters in their essential aloneness, not in their taken-for-granted social world. Such an understanding of the two different realms of the short story and the novel helps to account for one of the best-known discussions of the subject matter of the short story--Frank O'Connor's intuitive analysis in The Lonely Voice. The novel, says O'Connor, can "adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community . . .; but the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community--romantic, individualistic, and intransigent. This is why, O'Connor says, the short story always presents a sense of "outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society. . . . As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness." We must approach the short story, O’Connor says, in the mood of Pascal’s “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

All of Holt’s narrator protagonists face the silence of infinite spaces, the mystery of pushing the consciousness to such extremes that physical reality disappears. To read Holt’s stories is not only to be returned to Poe, it is to return to the primal origins of story itself.

Poe: Baltimore comes to bury him; I come to praise him

Last week, in this bicentennial year of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore staged a second wake and funeral procession for the writer most responsible for recognizing the unique characteristics of the short story as an artistic form. The following is a quote from The Baltimore Sun:

"Edgar Allen Poe is finally getting the send-off he always deserved -- from a city that has spent decades claiming him as one of its own.

True, he's spent more than a century-and-a-half buried in the hallowed grounds surrounding Baltimore's Westminster Hall. It's also true that Baltimore isn't the only city celebrating Poe, in this bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, 1809. At least four other East Coast cities -- Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- have legitimate claims to Poe's legacy. The five cities have been squabbling for years, and have spent the past year exploiting their connections to the pioneering writer and early master of the horror and mystery genres.

But Baltimore has something that none of the rest of them have. And over the coming week, his fans here are going to flaunt it for all it's worth -- in ways the macabre Mr. Poe would doubtless appreciate.

"We have the body!" says Poe fan Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No one else can say that."
Which explains why Baltimore will be holding a second wake, funeral procession and funeral for the long-dead Poe, 160 years after the first.

On an early October day in 1849, Poe was found walking the streets of the city, bedraggled, incoherent, possibly beaten up, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to him. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital (later Church Home & Hospital, closed in 2000) and was buried at Westminster the next day, after a sparsely attended three-minute service. His death warranted a paltry four-sentence obituary in The Sun. "This is Baltimore's chance," says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, where a Wednesday-afternoon-and-evening viewing of the famed poet and author's body will begin a five-day commemoration of both his mysterious death on Oct. 7, 1849, and the quiet, almost secretive funeral services that followed. "This is what I've been working for, to honor Poe and to say, 'Thanks.' It's the least I could do."

I did a book on Poe’s short fiction several years ago. He has always been a favorite of mine, much underestimated by many of my colleagues. I remember once when I was teaching a full semester course on Poe’s work, one of my fellow teachers said to me, “I don’t understand what you can find to say about Poe for a whole semester. I can barely fill up one class meeting on his work.”

In honor of Baltimore’s "reburial" of Poe, I come to praise him, not to bury him, by making a few comments on his contribution to the theory of the short story as a completely different narrative form than the novel.

It can be argued that a literary genre does not really exist as long as it is merely practiced. Because a genre concept is just that--a concept--it only truly comes into being when the rules and conventions which constitute it are articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a whole. Poe's rigor as a literary critic and genre theorist is thus as important for understanding his contribution to the short story form as is his skill as a short-story writer.

There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological theme. The meaning of the work for Poe was its technique, so much so that in many of his stories he thematizes aesthetic and literary theory issues, making the creation and explication of unity the central thematic "truth" of the work.

Since there was no theory of the short prose tale when Poe was writing, he took theoretical ideas from those genres that did posses a critical history, such as drama and poetry, and applied them to the Gothic tale form which was popular during his time. The following generic elements are the most important ones Poe made use of: (1)the conventionalized and ritualized structure of the drama; (2)the metaphoric and self-contained unity of the lyric poem; (3)the technique of verisimilitude of the eighteenth-century novel; (4)the point of view and unifying tone of the eighteenth-century essay; and (5)the spiritual undercurrent and projective technique of the old romance and the Gothic story.

When you add to these the notion of prose assuming the spatial form of painting, which Poe suggested in the 1842 Hawthorne review, you have the basis for a new generic form. Poe's notion of short fiction as a picture is particularly important, for to see narrative as a painting is to see it as a design in space rather than a movement in time. Although the consequent implication of considering characters as static groupings in a composition means a loss of dramatic effect, this is compensated for by a gain in emphasis on overall pattern, which is equivalent to thematic design.

Poe’s 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story, for it derives from his earlier discussions of the relationship between aesthetic unity and the concept of plot and looks forward to the ultimate implications of pattern and design in Eureka. The logic of the argument in the Hawthorne review is quite clear: What is most important in the literary work is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can hold in the mind all at once. After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea. Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.

Poe carries his concern with unity of effect even further in "The Philosophy of Composition," for here he asserts the importance of considering the work backwards, that is, beginning with its end. Obviously, the possibility of beginning with the end is what distinguishes fiction from reality, what transforms reality into narrative discourse. A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events which it takes as its subject matter have already occurred. Therefore the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.

It is hardly necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event, so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in an aesthetic, eventless way, i.e, via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artistic conventions of fictional discourse.