American Romanticism
Prof. Bruce Harvey
The
trick is to see how Poe's aesthetic ideas, metaphysical theory, personal
obsessions, and desire to cater to one very popular literary genre of the era
(gothic sensation fiction, which emphasizes the sensations of a victim in some
harrowing situation) all fold together to create the characteristic Poe tale or
typical features of many of his tales.
1)
The Ideal is desired. Music
(non-representational art) provides the best avenue. Problem: how do you create a narrative that doesn't refer
to/represent something beyond its own confines (and thus bog us down in thoughts
of the mundane world)? How do you
avoid the bad art that Poe speaks of in "The Veil of the Soul":
"The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no
man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' ... We can, at any time, double the true
beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it.
The naked Senses sometimes see too little--but then always they see too
much."
2)
What is not of the Ideal realm (all materiality) imprisons us.
For Poe (unlike Emerson and Thoreau, both Transcendentalists), the Ideal
is not immanent in Nature. Burial/enclosure
imagery often symbolizes the aspiring soul entrapped.
3)
#2 links psychologically, perhaps, to Poe's sense of being suffocated by his
desperate, impoverished lifestyle and, probably, to his mother/cousin-wife
dying. Psychologists who have
studied the mourning process claim that images of engulfment typically represent
a child-mourner's frustrated desire to regain attachment/union with the dead
mother (note how images of engulfment/abyss/eternity, etc., in
"Manuscript" simultaneously strike panic/fear and desire in the
narrator--fear of death but also longing for pre-natal "oneness" with
the maternal, as it were). Those
who provide psychoanalytical interpretations of Poe also claim that images of
decay, inanimate substances that seem to be animate, resurrections from the
grave, etc., symbolize the child's inability to understand rationally that the
dead mother is really gone. The
problem with such interpretive approaches (ditto with interpretations that read
the tales as projections of inward psychological conflict--e.g. Superego
punishing Id in "Cask"/ Id killing Superego in "Tell-Tale")
is that they are difficult to relate to. E.g.,
you can grasp the Superego/Id conflict in "Cask" only intellectually,
whereas you emotionally share/are repulsed by Montresor's sadistic glee;
"Pit" registers fears of entrapment that we can feel as we
read--but can you feel the metaphysical concept of the Soul being trapped within
the body/materiality? We should
also consider the trauma of young Poe seeing his (by all accounts, quite
beautiful) mother die and revive on the stage as she played Shakespearean
heroines.
4)
How do you get to work through the psychological trauma of #3 and express the
metaphysical notion of #2? You come
up with another metaphysical idea, which Poe talks about in his treatise Eureka--the
universe is in the process of de-materializing, dissolving into finer and finer
particles, eventually so fine as to be non-corporeal.
Images of death/decay in Poe simultaneously represent a desired movement
towards the Ideal (dissolution of materiality) and the horror of losing loved
ones/being entrapped. The conflict
between desire/fear leads to the typical hysterical tone of many of his
narrators.
5)
Poe also uses gothic imagery because (as an editor) he was immersed in the
magazine culture of his day, and well-knew how to please popular taste.
6)
You also can approach the Ideal by turning your attention away from the mundane
world, by retreating inward: thus all the hypersensitive, introspective artist
types in Poe's fiction (of course, such may also lead to dementia).
7)
What sort of imagery, etc., will best serve non-didactic (non-
"meaning"), non-representational art (#1), provide the desired
intensity of sensation/consciousness, and serve Poe's psychological and
metaphysical agenda? How keep us
interested or in a heightened state of consciousness/suspense, without producing
meaning (which is not to say that there aren't themes in Poe's stories--I'm
emphasizing an aspect of/one way of interpreting Poe's stories)?
--images
of enclosure or rooms sealed from the wider world
--rather
than relationships between psychologically distinct characters (which would lead
to ethical conflict, etc.), lots of doubles (i.e., aspects of the protagonist)
--narratives
with an enigma/puzzle structure (either we don't get the answer or the interest
is in the act of solving the puzzle, not the solution itself)
--many
puns and cryptograms (both carry "buried" messages, but significance
is in the structure of the pun, not meaning per se)
--self-reflexive
references to the process of reading/writing/art (e.g., "The Oval
Portrait" is a story about a story about an artist whose wife decays/fades
so that his art will partake of the Ideal)
--allusions
to all sorts of esoteric knowledge (so you don't really know what is being
referred to)
--vague,
gloomy atmosphere or hypnotic/narcotic prose (alliteration, musicality)
--contradictory
images
--endings
open-ended, cataclysmic, or exceedingly abrupt (you expect more, but don't get
it)
--general
feeling of paranoia (the fearful anticipation of some overwhelming
horror/revelation is more significant than the actual horror or revelation)
8)
Keep in mind that a character in a Poe story may be a projection of the
narrator's (or Poe's) obsessions/mentality or a projection of another
character's obsessions/mentality (burying his sister = Usher's attempt to
repress his desire for her?)
SOME MUSINGS ON BODIES, TOMBS, AND WRITING IN POE'S STORIES
PURLOINED
LETTER
--hmmm
. . . note structure: narrator--Dupin--Prefect--Queen--secret content of letter
never divulged (yup, another story about representation, this time a letter
instead of a portrait)
--hmmm
. . . what is Dupin's motivation: to protect the honor of the Queen (Beauty
should not be violated? Note that there is something vaguely bodily in the way
Minister D. turns the Queen/her letter inside-out)
MANUSCRIPT
--hmmm
. . . typical aristocratic outcast, disconnected from the social realm, with a
nervous sensibility and the vaguest of motives for journeying
--hmmm . . . away from reality; into supernatural and irrational (ship size; sailors senile but wise at the same time; etc.—all details designed to frustrate your craving for mastery and interpretation
--wait-a-sec.
: there is meaning after all; isn't there some portentous meaning in the
tar-brushed word "DISCOVERY" and aren't "obsolete long-forgotten
charts" containers of meaning as it were?
Ah, but then the word DISCOVERY is an accident; words should have
meaning, but here they don't
--at
this point we should all be thinking of the mysterious hieroglyphs in AGPYM: Poe
makes a fetish of devices of meaning, palpable words/signs, that turn out not to
have meaning.
--hmmm…
women's space/queen's letter; hmmm … inside the hieroglyphic crevices that are
like a tomb that are like a womb that are like a place of unrecoverable
knowledge: I'm not talking about sex, Poe longs for the absence that can never
be filled, his dead mother—we long for what we lack, we long for the
unknowable, we long for death because it is the barrier between what we can know
and can never know.
--see
how metaphysics, gothic mystery, and Freud begin to all fold together in Poe?
Poe is an orphan—from mommy and from metaphysical
illumination—seeking to be reunited with the interior space of the
non-material maternal? In Poe, in
an admittedly rather weird way, the woman's body must decay into nothingness (in
OVAL PORTRAIT the woman dies so her representation in art may live; yes, even
that first story links up)
--of
course you cannot get into that pre-rational/metaphysical space if your ego
remains in control. Could that be
why Poe is so fascinated with intoxication?
Note how in MANUSCRIPT the pace of the journey quickens almost absurdly
frantically; everything becomes more bizarre; the narrator almost seems to be
regressing into memories of some pre-natal state/death state that cannot be
empirically/rationally described. He
is "doomed to hover on the brink of Eternity"
--of
course if bodies must dematerialize the otherwise small detail of the ship being
"porous" starts to make sense (students begin to nod, yes, yes, some
of this makes sense!)
POE
SUMMARY THUS FAR: KEEP IN MIND
--stories
mostly are fun/shocking suspense/macabre stories
--but
stories also dream-like magnification/intensification, with symbolic
characters/objects
--irrational/repeated
obsessions (sadistic violence against orifices: wife/cat and old man’s eye)
requires psychological "decoding"
--"decoding"
valid if makes sense of repeated patterns: takes rereading of many tales
--“decoding”
fun but speculative, and you can’t feel the conflict (self-tormenting theme if
we see Montresor/Fortunato as two sides of Poe)
--Tell-Tale:
orifice=sexual desire (Poe sneaking into Virginia’s room) +
father-figure/surveillance that you want to murder because checks desire
A
QUICK CRUISE THRU "PYM"
--initial
masquerade: violence (unmotivated) against father-figure (Oedipal
violence--where is the woman?) who forbids exploration of the oceanic (the space
in which one loses oneself, according to Dr. Freud)
--Pym
navigates labyrinth in cargo hold--order/disorder split: cargo area as unspoken
maternal body?
--fears
of suffocation/entrapment in hold
--writing
is made palpable/odd in match episode and elsewhere
--mutiny
repeats Pym's mutiny against grandfather: lots of violence against authority
--penknife
ink: merges writing/body
--cargo
hold = lost in body = writing/order gets you out = but writing is materialized =
body used to write = endless circularity (PS: body is natural; writing is
artificial; are crevices or strands of odd water natural or not?)
--Pym
can't tolerate "promiscuous" disorder of ship hold
--Peters,
the hybrid, both intoxicated/ not-intoxicated: masquerades intoxication
--Pym
masquerades as a corpse that looks a lot like a pregnant woman (that particular
idea goes nowhere, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!!!)
--weird:
why must Peters, the hybrid, be nearly cut in two, around his loins (punishment,
apt, for being a hybrid, for not being pure: PS: Poe, a Southerner, worries
about miscegenation and "impurity" of races)
--can
opposites be yoked? can Arthur
become a women (only in
masquerade)?
--refers
to "hermaphrodite" brig (apparently a type of ship, but curious)
--cannibalized
corpse goes in water, with a phosphorous glow: links to early body/script stuff
glowing
--gets
picked up by Jane Guy (yoking of opposite genders)
--last
scenes: does Pym desire to name new land or find unscripted land, land that is
not surveyed/ordered/owned, as it were, by the plodding empirical Father (all
that tedious discovery stuff with all the names of male discoverers?