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POE AS PROBABILIST IN FORGUES' CRITIQUE OF THE TALES
SIDNEY P. MOSS
If an object of this Symposium is to see Poe's fiction in fresh ways, I need not apologize for reintroducing a little-known and seldom-read essay on Poe's Tales. In my judgment it ranks with the best criticism done on Poe, for it provides us with shrewd and surprising analyses of individual stories, some of them badly neglected, at the same time that it fits them without forcing into a theoretical frame. That frame is the French mathematical tradition represented by Blaise Pascal, Pierre Fermat, and the Marquis de Laplace. For what especially intrigued E. D. Forgues, the writer of the essay and the man distinguished for conferring upon Poe his first critical reception in France, was Poe's powers as a probabilist, powers, he felt, Poe was using “to explore the most difficult problems of speculative philosophy.” The play of these faculties and the investigation of these mysteries suggest the quintessential quality of a large class of Poe's tales, despite interpretations that would remake Poe in the image of the critic or, worse, in images that are desperately au courant. This is not to say that Forgues’ frame of reference does not continue to be current, if not among literary critics, at least among scientists, mathematicians, and intellectuals in general.
The theory of probability was first developed by Pascal (1623-1662) and Fermat (1601-1665) to analyze games of chance, and it remained limited to such amusements until Laplace (1749-1827), not to mention Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), discovered that the theory had wider and more interesting applications. These mathematicians saw, for example, no essential difference between calling certain outcomes “heads and tails” and calling them “life and death,” from which observation emerged the science of demography. By like logic a study of the ‘”toss-ups” of genes in garden peas enabled Mendel (1822-1884) to formulate his famous laws concerning hereditary phenomena. Today, apart from being a major field of mathematics, probability is used in such sciences as physics to create probabilistic models as alternatives to deterministic ones. Or, to circle back to Pascal and Fermat with a sophistication they made possible, probability is used to create games of chance, called simulation models, to reflect all possible real conditions that may be encountered in, say, commercial, military, or astronautic ventures to enlarge the element of predictibility [[predictability]].
In discussing this theory, also called in its time analysis of chances or mere ly analysis, as well as the Calculus of Probabilities, Poe insisted that the results of the “analyst” though appearing to have “the whole air of intuition,” are “brought about by the very soul and essence of method.” This statement, which he made in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Poe qualified in “The Purloined Letter’ to include the imaginative powers of the probabilist. A “poet and mathematician’ is bound to reason well, he has Dupin remark; “a mere mathematician’ cannot reason at all. The assertion is too flatly stated, no doubt, but Poe only meant that there is an astronomic order of difference between a Laplace who provided the mathematical foundations of analysis and a mathematician who mechanically uses analysis in routine ways. Poe's own powers of imagination in this respect were not so much demonstrated by his theory that “physics and metaphysics’ appear to be identical in their laws (“The Purloined Letter”), for that theory had been expounded from Plato to Swedenborg and was being widely promulgated by the continental and American Transcendentalists. What demonstrated his imaginative powers was his belief that “the Calculus of Probabilities. . ., the most rigidly exact in science,” can be “applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation” (“The Mystery of Marie Roget”).
Forgues was not a trained probabilist; his first-hand knowledge of Laplace, for ~~ example, seems limited to his Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités, a short popularization of his great Théorie analytique des Probabilités. For this reason, if no “other, he discussed probability in terms available to non-mathematicians. Forgues (1813-1889), whose full given name was Paul Émile Daurant, was in fact trained in ‘law, a profession he abandoned almost at once for belles-lettres. Though he became an author in his own right, his chief talent lay in discovering, translating, and discussing literary works that would interest his French public. He contributed to many French journals, among them the Revue de Paris, Journal de Commerce, Le National Charivari, Revue britannique, L’Illustration, and the Revue des deux Mondes. As a [page 5:] critic he was concerned with contemporary literature and principally with English authors, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot among them, though on occasion he de voted critiques.to American writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and Holmes. Among his translations are Macaulay's essays, Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre and Shirley, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables.
His critique of Poe's Tales was written in unusual circumstances, as a measure of self-vindication, in fact. That story, significant for Poe's French reputation, can be briefly recounted here. An adaptation of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had appeared in La Quotidienne prior to Forgues's own version of the tale published in Le Commerce. La Presse, apprised of the two versions, accused Forgues of plagiarism from La Quotidienne. Forgues wrote an explanation of the coincidence. Both versions, he said, derived from a common source and were done independently. But the editor of La Presse, who had never heard of Poe, refused to publish Forgues's statement because Forgues himself had once charged La Presse with plagiarism. To clear his name, Forgues sued the journal for libel. Although he lost his case, the trial held in December, 1846, became a cause célèbre that brought Poe's name prominently before the French public. Nathaniel Willis printed an amusing report of these events in the Home Journal (30 January 1847) under the title “Edgar A. Poe and the Parisian Feuilletonists:”
“All lovers of fiction have read Mr. Edgar A. Poe's famous story of ‘Valdemar,’ and will remember the excitement which it created mot only in this country but in Europe. We find, by the following, from a Parisian correspondent of Willmer and Smith's European Times, that this excitement has not yet subsided; — ‘The name of Edgar A. Poe, the American novelist, has figured rather prominently of late before the law courts. A newspaper which, for the sake of clearness, I will call No. 1, gave a feuilleton, in which one of Mr. Poe's tales of a horrible murder in the United States was dressed up to suit the French palate; but no acknowledgement was made of the story being taken from Mr. Poe. Another newspaper, No. 2, stated that the said feuilleton was stolen from one previously published in another journal. This led To a squabble between the writer of feuilleton No. 1 and the editor of the newspaper No. 2, that accused him of plagiary from newspaper No. 3. This squabble resulted in a process [of litigation], in the course of which the feuilletoniste No. 1 proved that he had stolen it from Mr. Poe. It was proved, too, that No. 3 was himself an impudent plagiarist, for he had filched Mr. Poe's tale without one word of acknowledgement; whilst, as to No. 2, he was forced to admit that not only had he never read Mr. Poe, but had never heard of him in his life. All this, it will be perceived, is anything but creditable to the three newspapers in question.’”
To vindicate himself while the trial was pending, Forgues, the “No. 1” of Willis's report, published his critique of Poe in the prestigious Revue des deux Mondes (15 October 1846), which turned what would have been only a succédsde circonstance for Poe into a succés d’estime. A twenty-page article, it was the first discussion of Poe to be published in France, and hardly the least of its value was that it brought Poe to the attention of other French critics, translators, and literary figures, the most important of whom was, of course, Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire, for instance, only echoed Forgues when he wrote in the introduction to his first volume of Poe translations (1856) that Poe's “technique! in some of his tales “lies in a well handled analysis,” and that his ‘’genius. . .makes him delight in a difficulty overcome, an enigma explained, a successful tour de force — which leads him to play. . .in a world of probabilities,! though this was not the side of Poe, as he explained, that especially appealed to him.
Unlike Baudelaire, however, Forgues knew Poe only through the Tales; he did not know that Poe was also a poet and, like himself, a journalist and critic. Nevertheless, he rendered him the critical courtesy of treating him as a serious writer and paid him the deserved compliment of placing him in the French mathematical tradition. If Poe could have foreseen his French reception on these grounds, he might not have complained so often that Evert Duyckinck's selection for the volume was too one-sided. “Duyckinck,” he wrote to Philip Cooke on 9 August 1846, “has what he thinks [is] a taste for ratiocination, and has accordingly made up the book mostly of analytic stories,” though he had about seventy to choose from. “But this is not representing my mind in its various phases. . . .” Forgues considered all the stories in the Tales except two. His neglect of ‘”Lionizing” is understandable; his disregard of ‘’The Fall of the House of Usher” is puzzling. His critique, entitled “Studies of English and American Fiction: The [page 6:] Tales of Edgar A. Poe,’ has been condensed to about a third of its original length, and his notes have been dropped as unnecessary. Minor deletions are indicated by ellipsis marks; the nature of large omissions is explained in brackets. Probabilities?
Are you acquainted with the [Marquis de Laplace's] Philosophical Essay on Probabilities? It is one of the books in which the boldness of the human mind is best revealed at its most audacious. Since the venture of Prometheus. . .one has scarcely seen anything so daring as the urge of those men who want to make the mut- able, uncertain, mysterious order of the destinies submit to their calculations, to penetrate the obscure realm of the future, to reduce the fortunes of chance to numbers. . . . For this reason Laplace's book exerts a real fascination on certain minds which the power of reason intoxicates, and on which a new truth acts like an opium pipe. . . . Such minds make probability their gospel; they devote themselves to propagating its theories. . . . The Philosophical Essay is not only an ambitious effort of the intellect. . .to know; the Essay has its moral aspect in that it brings men back to the practice of the good by observation of eternal principles.(1)
Without being of such an exalted order, without leading to such a noble end, without emanating from so vigorous a mind, the tales we are about to discuss have an evident kinship with the serious work of the learned Marquis. If the incoherent fictions of the common narrative have enough to attract and hold your interest, you will find nothing here to intrigue you. Poetry, invention, effects of style, logical dramatic sequence, all are subservient in these tales to a bizarre preoccupation. We might almost call it an obsession of the author, who seems to have only one faculty of inspiration, reason; only one muse, logic; only one effect upon his readers, the creation of doubt. There are as many enigmas as there are tales and all of them take diverse forms and guises. Whether wearing the fantastic livery of Hoffmann or the grave and magisterial costume of Godwin renovated by Washington Irving or Dickens, it is always the same combination which sets Oedipus and the Sphinx by the ears — a protagonist and a puzzle;. . .an apparently impenetrable mystery and an intellect which irritated. . .by the veil stretched before it solves the enigma after incredible operations of the mind rendered in the most minute detail.
. . . . Every narrative. . .implies a plot whose doubtful vicissitudes are. . .linked together by a bond of logic, according to the ability of the writer. The syllogism is at the bottom of the most moving situations, and the climax that arouses the reader's emotions is fundamentally only a development of a dramatically rendered logical sequence. In short, logic is the hidden pivot of the action. It is concealed in an infinite number of details which are designed to dazzle and bewilder our minds; and because the action moves so quickly from its starting point and rushes so headlong to its conclusion, we tend not to be conscious of the logic. To see that the logic is concealed by the fiction, you have merely to separate the logical substratum from its brilliantly colored and ingeniously embellished envelope. You will then notice from what a thin argument, from what a tenuous thread, the magnificent fabric hangs.
In contrast, the unique tales that we wish to make known and that have Just arrived from New York by the last packet boat have a logic that is unconcealed. It dominates everything; it is queen and mistress. Its office is not to hide itself; it is not a monument to exterior riches — it is its own monument; it borrows nothing nearly nothing from the many resources of fiction. It no longer plays the role of with the submissive slave which lends its robust shoulders to its master tottering wine and conducts him, not without difficulty, to a door barely seen. Instead, & walks alone, strong in its own strength; it is the end and the way, the cause mxd the effect. Yesterday, in the hands of a philosopher, logic was used to explore be the most difficult problems of speculative philosophy; today, it lodges itself in a diction so as to put itself within reach of the greatest number, yet for all that departing as little as possible from philosophical dignity.
Exactly what was Laplace looking for in his analysis of chance and Buffon in his political arithmetic? Each of them . . . wanted to subdue an obstinate unknown quantity by the power of induction, to neutralize the resistance it offers to reason, and to gain mathematical certainty in regard to moral problems. For this son Laplace weighs in the same balance the periodical reappearance of a comet, chances of a lottery ticket, and the value of historical testimony. The same er of reasoning serves to assure him that the action of the moon on the ocean more than twice as powerful as that of the sun, and that Pascal's niece, the Perrier, was not cured of her fistula by the direct and miraculous intervention [page 7:] of divine Providence.(2) Thus whether in respect to the past, the present, or the future, he lays down a system of principles and establishes the general laws of probability.
In his own unique way Mr. Poe is also concerned with probabilities, but he “does not weigh them by rules but by intuition. . . . The fundamental idea of his tales seems to be borrowed from the first adventures of Zadig in which the young. . . “ philosopher displays marvelous perspicacity. The eccentric character who is Mr. Poe's favorite protagonist and whose subtle intelligence he puts to such difficult tests would also have inferred by merely inspecting their tracks that the Queen of Babylon's spaniel had just had a litter of puppies and that the King's horse. . .had twenty-three-caret gold bosses on his bit.(3) This protagonist is really Mr. Poe who hardly troubles to conceal himself, and in those tales in which he does not have a surrogate Mr. Poe appears in his own person.
Who other than this searcher after problems to solve would have imposed on himself the task of imagining what the posthumous sensations of a man, or rather of a body, might be, stretched out first on the funeral bed, then in a coffin under the damp earth, listening to himself dissolve and watching himself rot? To whose mind would it have occurred to relate in such a convincing way the final catastrophe which must reduce this terrestrial globe to nothingness? To touch on these great secrets of human and planetary death seems the business of the profoundest thinkers, the longest studies, and the most complete systems. For Mr. Poe it is only a question of assuming an hypothesis, of establishing a starting point, and letting the tale develop in the most plausible way among all its probable and possible consequences.
Monos has died. Una, his adored mistress, has followed him into the somber kingdom of death. They meet. Una wants to know of her beloved what he felt a while ago when, desolate, she contemplated him immobile, cold, disfigured, marked by the supreme wound. Had all thought disappeared with life? Is the divorce of soul and body so abrupt,. . .so complete, that with the last death-rattle the soul escapes entirely, leaving behind it only an inert lump? The common man answers yes. Hardly afraid of shocking everyone's judgment, our author denies the validity of this unprovable assumption and, supporting his denial by logic, he erects his narrative from beyond the grave.
It is not, to tell the truth, the first time that imagination has gone beyond the limits of life, those limits impassable to reason and before which all philosophy lowers its eyes, humbled; but I do not think that anyone has ever before in fiction given to the recollections of a dead person this character of exact definition and reasoned conviction. It is not a question here of fantastic adventures, of arbitrary complications, of dialogues. . .filled with fancy, but rather the matter of a veritable monograph patiently and methodically developed which seems to aspire to take its place among the other documents of humane philosophy. Mr. Poe has deduced from the phenomena of the dream the phenomena of the sensibility of the corpse; he has taken seriously the brotherhood of sleep and death of which so many poets have sung; and from this philosophical doctrine he has applied himself to drawing all the truths he could derive from it. One will agree that such work is not hackneyed. [Here follows a long quotation from The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’ in which Monos describes his port-mortem sensations.]
We shall not prolong this singular quotation which is indispensable for justifying what we said above of the unique character of Mr. Poe's work — in this instance, that of a dead man analyzing his posthumous sensations.
The final ruin of the globe, the destruction of our planet, is as methodically treated in the conversation of Eiros and Charmion as is the decomposition of the human being in that of Monos and Una. The principle is presented in the same way. Given the elementary fact that the breathable air is composed of twenty-one parts oxygen and seventy-nine parts nitrogen,. . .as well as the fact that the earth is surrounded by a thick atmosphere of nearly fifteen leagues, what would happen if the elliptical course around the sun taken by a comet led that comet into contact with the terrestrial globe? This is exactly the supposition Trissotin makes in The Learned Ladies,(4) but Mr. Poe does not adopt his way of viewing the problem. He sees the comet not as a massive and heavy body but as a whirlwind of impalpable material whose nucleus is of a density much less than that of our lightest gases. The imminent meeting does not present the same kind of danger as that of two locomotives [page 8:] rushing toward each other on the same rails; indeed, it even seems prob able that the earth might pass through this enemy comet without difficulty. But what is likely to happen to us while we are in this peculiar situation? Oxygen, the principle of combustion, would become a hostile force, for nitrogen would be completely drawn out of our earthly atmosphere. And what would be the result of this double phenomenon? An irresistible combustion would devour all, would prevail over all. . . . On this fundamental idea, once conceded, the story develops with implacable logic, with inevitable deductions, with pitiless consequences. Challenge if you wish the major and minor premises which are the point of departure; the remainder is strictly unassailable.
[Here follows a detailed retelling of “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.”]
You see, then, that this extraordinary story, this unprecedented freak of an imagination which nothing stops, has all the appearance, if not all the reality, of a severe logic. Few people will deny that a comet and the earth can meet in space. Granting this, one must recognize that the possibility of this conflagration of gas, this combustion of the atmosphere, and this horrible end of the entire human race, all of whom are reduced to breathing only fire, is at least very possible.
Having approached such problems, one takes pleasure in examining all those that philosophy seems eternally condemned to deny us the solution, reserved as they are to God. Mr. Poe is thus led to look for a plausible explanation of the human soul and of divinity. This is the subject of a third story entitled Mesmeric Revelation. The author imagines himself at the bedside of a sceptic who, arrived at the final stage of a fatal illness, has himself treated by mesmerism. Mr. Vankirk has all his life doubted the immortality of the soul. Now, troubled by the vague recollections that mesmeric trances have induced in him, he wonders if in this strange state a series of well-directed questions might not clarify. . . those metaphysical truths which philosophy has guessed but has badly explained because of the inadequacy of our ordinary resources. Indeed, granting that mesmeric action permits man to compensate for the imperfection of his finite organs and enables him while endowed with miraculous clairvoyance to be transported to that domain of creation which is beyond the senses, does it not follow that the mesmerized person is better qualified than others to explain to us the realities of the invisible world? This prime point granted, do you trust the storyteller to give you by questions and answers a very probable theory of all that which is related to the division of soul and body, with the essence that constitutes. . . the superior order known under the name of God. . .? It goes without saying that we do not take it upon ourselves to guarantee. . .the system expounded by the American storyteller. . .[Here is expounded Poe's conception of the unparticled materiality of God, to be found in “Mesmeric Revelation,” and a supporting quotation from that tale. ]
We will not pursue this purely hypothetical revelation that reminds us of the inspirations or aspirations of those fiction writers of fourteen or fifteen years ago who found it fascinating to put into “madrigals” the visions of Jacob f Boehm, of Saint Martin, of Swedenborg, and even of Mme. Guyon. It must be said, however, that Mr. Poe's logic has a much more precise character. It is much more tenacious. . . . ‘ It is not satisfied with vague, grandiloquent words and with im penetrable formulas rendered with feigned rigor. Once the principles are posed, his logic deviates only rarely; it is always clear, always intelligible, and it takes possession of the reader in spite of himself.
It is time to return to earth and. . .follow this inexorable logic. . . . In The Gold-Bug we can see all the ratiocinative faculties of man at grips with an apparently impenetrable cipher, upon the solution of which depends a rich pirate's treasure. . . . Later, in A Descent into the Maelström Mr. Poe will tell us how a sound observation, a well-followed argument, will deliver safe and sound from the bottom of a Norwegian gulf ap unfortunate fisherman carried away by a devouring whirlpool. We do not insist that ordinary verisimilitude be completely respected here — that a theory of gravity could be improvised by an uneducated countryman in a situation that would arrest the mental faculties. . .; but if everything that is rigorously and strictly possible in the situation is conceived by the human mind, one must admit the possibility that extreme peril might induce in a man. . .a peculiar lucidity of intellect, a miraculous power of observation, and that is enough [page 9:] to make this story captivate you, as do the Anacandaia [?] of [“Monk”] Lewis or the novel of Frankenstein, both of which are certainly not very probable.
Here is something easier to believe. [The power of Auguste Dupin is recounted, that of a man who is “first rate in all the games in which success depends on the exact valuation of chances’ and who is able to read his companion's mind from a few clues.]
Apply this astonishing perspicacity, the result of almost superhuman concentration of the mind and of a marvelous intuition, to a police operation and you have. ..an investigator whom nothing escapes. . . . Mr. Poe fastens upon this situation and with completely American tenacity develops the extraordinary events to their extreme limits.
Three of four stories rest on this very simple contrivance with very telling effect. We regret only that the foreign storyteller has thought to enhance the interest of these tales by locating them in Paris, of which he has not the least idea, and in our contemporary society, which is very badly known in the United States. . . . Mr. Poe was. . .not. . .unwise in removing his scenes to a distance in order to conceal the artifices of his painting and lend to it all the semblance of truth; but he should have foreseen that French readers, pausing before these can vases, would be astounded to find the capital of France completely overturned, the main quarters very suddenly dislodged — an Impasse Lamartine in the neighborhood of the Palais-Royal, a Rue Morgue in the Saint-Roch quarter, and the Barridre du Roule at the edge of the Seine ‘on the shore opposite the Rue Pavée-Saint-André.’ Neither should he have applied the ideas of a much more democratic country to our social structure by supposing that the prefect of police, at his wit's end and not knowing which way to turn to recover a mysterious letter. . ., would come one evening to fa- miliarly smoke one or two cigars with the young observer of whom we have spoken, to ask his advice, to express his doubts, and to make a wager on the success of the measures proposed by this obliging counselor. Yet we do not cite all the blunders nor the most egregious ones that our red pencil has noted in the margin of these curious little fictions. These blunders are explained not only by their foreign origin but also by the method that the author adopts of transporting to our country some real chronicles chosen from among the crimes which have occupied the magistrates of New York or Boston. The story of Marie Roget. . .is a famous American case; the names alone have been changed to French ones; the incidents could not be. The Hudson becomes the Seine; Weehawken the Barrière du Roule; Nassau Street, the Rue Pavée-Saint-André, and so forth. Likewise, Marie Roget, the supposed young Parisian grisette, is no other than Mary Cecilia Rogers, the cigar girl whose mysterious murder terrified a few years ago the people of New York. Let us first tell the event as it was related in the New York Mercury or in Brother Jonathan. We will return to the fiction when we have an exact idea of the reality. Here is summarized the actual murder mystery of Mary Rogers as it was reported in the newspapers.]
Mr. Poe seizes upon this story in his turn and sets in the midst of all these conflicting newspaper accounts his unique character, this living syllogism of whom we have spoken. The Chevalier Dupin — such is the name he has fabricated for him, a truly characteristic name that has a very remarkable improbability and strangeness — the Chevalier Dupin, attentive to all the contradictory versions, discusses them rigorously and submits them to mathematical analysis. One sees that he has read in Laplace's Philosophical Essay the chapter devoted to The Probability of the Judgments of Tribunals. . . . His calculations of probability are striking and curious. That is all one must ask of them.
Novalis has this passage in his Moral Ansichten: “There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.’ In choosing this passage as the epigraph of his story, the American author explains to us his metaphysical design. When he exhibits the various hypotheses of the French (which is to say, American) journals on the subject of the murder committed in New York; when he exposes the gross errors of common logic, improvised as fodder for the unintelligent masses; his purpose is to prove that by virtue of certain principles an ideal series — one that is purely logical and consisting of mutually related facts — must lead, by an accumulation of mutually corroborative suppositions, to the nearest point of the real series or the truth. By an inexorable dialetic he thus destroys the false systems and, having [page 10:] thoroughly cleared the terrain, constructs a new edifice with all the pieces in place.
In the eyes of this remarkable thinker, the practice of the courts which restricts the admission of evidence to a few crucial facts is extremely erroneous. Modern science, which very often depends on the unexpected and proves the known by the unknown, understands better than the courts the importance of secondary incidents, of collateral evidence, which, above all, must be taken into consideration. There are seemingly inessential facts, apparent fortuities, which have become the foundation of the most complete and best-established systems. . . .
This principle once granted, the consequences are self-evident. By abandoning the main fact in order to concentrate on the details which seem insignificant, the Chevalier succeeds in establishing a number of circumstances that eventually serve to clarify the mystery. [Here follows a retelling of “The Mystery of Marie Roget” which emphasizes Poe's power of logic. ]
We do not give you — notice this well — a twentieth part of the reasonings which directly or indirectly corroborate this inference. . . .
Now that you have an idea of the American author in his favorite aspect, we should try to see him under another one. We have studied him as a logician, as a pursuer of abstract truths, and as a lover of the most eccentric hypotheses and the most difficult calculations. Now we should see him as a poet, as an inventor of objectless fantasies, of purely literary whims. We will confine ourselves to two tales we have expressly reserved for this purpose, The Black Cat and The Man of the Crowd.
The Black Cat reminds us of the gloomiest inspirations of Theodore Hoffmann. ‘Never did the Sérapion Club listen to anything more fantastic than the story of this man, this unfortunate maniac, who harbors in his liquor-burned brain a monstrous hatred, the hatred of his poor cat. [Here follows a retelling of the story.]
The Man of the Crowd is not a story; it is a study, a simple idea vigorously rendered. [Here the tale is retold.]
We have already compared the talent of Mr. Poe with that of Washington Irving, the latter more cheerful, more varied, less ambitious, as well as with that of Wm. Godwin, whose “sombre and unwholesome popularity” was so severely censured by Hazlitt. One must, however, recognize in the author of St. Leon and Caleb Williams more true philosophy and a tendency less pronounced toward purely literary paradox. If one wanted to show in America itself a predecessor of Mr. Edgar Poe, one could. . . compare him to Charles Brockden Brown who also searched in good faith, even in ‘his most frivolous fictions, for the solution of some intellectual problem, taking Pleasure as Mr. Poe does in describing those interior tortures, those obsessions of the soul, those maladies of the mind which offer so vast a field for observation and so many curious phenomena to the thoughtful makers of metaphysical systems.
Brockden Brown, it is true, wrote novels and we know of Poe only by very brief short stories, some no more than six to ten pages; but it would be unwise, it seems to us, to classify compositions of this genre by length. It is so easy to protract indefinitely a series of facts and so difficult, on the other hand, to condense. . . in the form of a tale a whole abstract theory with all the elements of an original concept. Today when the least scribbler appears with a melodrama in ten or twenty volumes, Richardson himself, if he returned to the world, would be. . .obliged to trim his characterizations, curtail his interminable dialogues, and reduce to finely wrought medallions the numerous figures of his vast canvases. Yesterday the victory was to large battalions; tomorrow it will belong to elite troops. From the great novels. . .one came to the stories of Voltaire and Diderot. . . . Tales like these of Mr. Poe's offer more substance to the mind, open newer horizons to the imagination, than twenty volumes like those of Courtilz de Sandras, de Baculard D’Arnaud, and de Lusssan, precursors and prototypes of many contemporary story writers. . . .(5) Between such writers and the American author we will refrain from making comparisons. It will be opportune and useful to compare them when time has established the nas cent reputation of the foreign storyteller and — who knows? — has shaken a little that of our prolific novelists. [page 11:]
The initial point Forgues makes, once he establishes Poe as a probabilist, is obvious enough — that traditionally authors have concerned themselves with the “common narrative!” (a term by no means pejorative and that, by definition, simply means the dramatizing of characters involved in human problems); and that, though they inevitably draw upon their logical powers to make the characters and situations seem probable, they never make logic the point of their narratives, only the means. The subtler point Forgues makes is that Poe reverses this procedure by dramatizing the methodology of probability rather than merely using it as a device for the plausible presentation of the “common narrative.” In other words, Poe is concerned with gold-bugs and codes, with maelstroms and fishermen, with stolen letters and delinquent ministers of state, with straying comets and posthumous recollections, only to the extent that they offer problems to which he could dramatically apply probability theory. Forgues credits Poe with high purpose in his use of analysis, the purpose of hypothesizing possible solutions to those mysteries of speculative philosophy which by their nature defy definitive solutions. Whatever the legitimacy of this view — for a central problem in Poe scholarship hinges upon the degree of Poe's seriousness — Forgues failed to see that Poe with incorrigible playfulness also wanted to shock his readers by making them doubt their conventional beliefs.
Though Forgues touched upon ‘The Black Cat! and “The Man of the Crowd,’ he was not tempted, as Edward H. Davidson was in his Poe: A Critical Study, to distinguish a counter-tendency in Poe's fiction to the one that preoccupied him in his critique, though he noticed that Poe's characters sometimes suffer “interior tortures,” “obsessions of the soul,’ “maladies of the mind.” If we forget that Dupin is only the instrument of inquiry into metaphysical mysteries, not the object of that inquiry, we may be beguiled into error. For on the face of it, it does appear that there is a contrast between a Dupin whose preterhuman intelligence is unbaffled by, and in that sense is superior to, circumstance, and those characters who, afflicted with self-destructive compulsions, are victimized by circum- stance. For the one has almost total intellectual freedom, while the others, like the protagonists of “The Black Cat” and “The Man of the Crowd,” are entrapped in nearly total psychologic unfreedom, or psychosis. But Forgues, in remarking that “maladies of the mind. . .offer [a] vast field for observation and so many curious phenomena to the thoughtful makers of metaphysical systems,” seemed to be saying that only the direction of Poe's investigations sometimes changed, from the out- ward to the inward world, not the nature of his investigations. What he might have noticed, had he let his critical intelligence play upon “The Fall of the House of Usher,” was that on occasion Poe investigated both these worlds simultaneously. In “Ligeia,’ too, another case in point and ome that also precedes in publication the self-consciously “analytic stories,” Poe dramatized the Kantian principle widely disseminated in Romantic literature, that the way the material world seems to operate depends very much upon the operations of the mind that perceives the world, the so-called indeterminacy principle of modern physics.
We might consider ‘”Ligeia’ in this context, a case all the more interesting for being so controversial. Given the conventional starting point that the body is mortal and the soul immortal, and the less conventional view that “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weak ness of his feeble will” (a statement Poe thrice used in the tale and which he attributed to Joseph Glanvill, a l7th-century authority on witcheraft(6) ), it follows that a soul of “gigantic volition” like that of Ligeia, who has a “wild desire for life — for life — but for life,” need not relinquish her hold upon this world so long as she can possess the body of a weaker-willed woman like that of the Lady Rowena. The suggestion that metempsychosis is a real possibility is unmistakably the matter of half the story. Shall Death the conqueror “be not once conquered?! Ligeia asks on her deathbed; and after her “death’ she becomes some “palpable but invisible object,” an “invisible foe” who triumphantly struggles with Lady Rowena for her body.
The other half of the story concerns the narrator who, for all we know, may have hallucinated the events he recounts. He attests to his “incipient madness, to his “mental alienation,” to his “opium dreams,” to his “consuming ardor’ to restore the “dead” Ligeia “to the pathways she had abandoned — ah, could it be for ever? — upon the earth.”
For critical convenience one may truncate the tale and argue that it is only about metempsychosis. By a similar procedure, one may disregard the theme of metempsychosis and urge that the tale is only about a man who “has murdered Rowena in his maniacal attempt to restore Ligeia to life.”(7) But if one is to see the [page 12:] story as a whole, he will either have to confess that it does not submit to rigorous explication on the grounds that the narrator cannot be trusted, especially as his senses are disturbed and his testimony suspect; or he will have to concede that the narrator may be mad but that the events he reports are not necessarily untrue-that, like the ancient mariner, the narrator's disorientation, which is to say, his new orientation, may derive from the very authenticity of the events he experienced. Such a view seems consonant with the intention of the story, as well as with other stories of this kind such as “The Tell-Tale Heart! and “The Black Cat.” Or doubting that “the ostensible story is the real or only one,” the critic may in his judgment “more fruitfully decide to treat it as a cunning allegory” and come to believe that “Ligeia” “is an allegory of the efforts of the poetic soul, once compromised and disrupted by exposure to the world, to overcome the world and itself, and recover the imaginative absolutism of childhood.(8) At all events, one can see why Poe lavished his fantastic art of diablerie upon the tale and generally preferred it to his other stories, for in it he simultaneously explored the worlds within and without, producing as a final result the effect of indeterminacy. No wonder Baudelaire said that at times Poe was a “prankster,” a ‘’marvelous Jjongleur.”
There are, of course, exceptions in Poe's prose works to these generalizations, the satires on contemporary figures and contemporary writing, as well as the obvious hoaxes such as “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” and to ignore such exceptions is to create Procrustean beds. Eureka is the most interesting exception, for Poe used his “Prose Poem! not merely for exhibiting the virtuosity of his method but for arriving at conviction about the nature and purpose of Creation itself. The intellectual playfulness, which I regard as the hallmark of his fiction, is anomalously absent in this work. By analogy, it is as if Poe in an incredible failure of presence had not only seriously advocated mesmerism as a means of revealing the mysteries of the afterlife; it is also as if he had endorsed as authentic the revelations made by the mesmerized Valdemar. To establish this anomaly and the early “Al Aaraaf” from which he borrowed as the beginning and ending points in Poe; to make one's reading of Poe square with the visions expounded in them; to see Poe's central concerns figured in Al Aaraaf” and affirmed in Eureka, as Richard Wilbur has thrice done,(9) I find unsettling, not because the view is totally unfounded but because it is greatly exaggerated. Elsewhere I have discussed “thematic fallacy” as the trap of reductionist critics and there is little point in restating the arguments here.(10) Yet the treatment of Poe as a metaphysician might have been less unsettling for Forgues, for he too ignored the irrepressible playfulness of Poe that ran the gamut from the put-on of scholarly allusion and esoteric quotation to-the effort to make even the most extravagant ideas seem real possibilities.
The question that remains involves a judgment of Poe's fiction. T. S. Eliot, like Forgues, recognized that Poe “had a powerful intellect;” that the “variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle;’” but he felt that “all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed.” What is lacking, he sensed, is “that maturity of the intellect which comes only with the maturing of the man as a whole. . . . The work of Poe is such as I should expect of a man of very exceptional mind and sensibility, whose emotional development has been in some respect arrested at an early age.”(11) “An observation of this order has, of course, no value for physicists, geneticists, or mathematicians, for no one expects an Einstein, a Mendel, a Wiener, to satisfy our standards of maturity; it is enough that they satisfy our standards of performance. In literature, however, matters are necessarily otherwise than they are in science; performance begins with maturity (for one's vision of the world and of humanity is at stake) and ends with the felt rendering of experience. Were this not so, we might prefer the virtuoso effects of John Updike to the grim austerities of Thomas Hardy. Despite formalist critics who are tempted to put a high premium on technical cleverness, what gives Hardy the edge is his surer, which is to say, his maturer grasp of the realities. Judged by the standards I have suggested, and I know of none more important or more indispensable in literary criticism, Poe, it must be confessed, has much less in common with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton than he has with Lewis Carroll, Ambrose Bierce, and H. G. Wells. What sets him apart from the latter three authors, however, is his power to appeal to the subliminal senses, a power almost Rorschach in character, and to whose effect readers have at tested by the variety and unexpectedness of their responses. The “mystery of how he achieved that effect is explained here and there in his critical writings, but nowhere more notably than in his “probabilistic model,” ‘The Philosophy of Composition,” a work trivially or derisively treated by most critics. Whether we believe Poe when he writes that “no one point! in the composition of “The Raven” is ‘’referable to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its [page 13:] completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” is immaterial. What is material is the insight he afforded us into his means of affecting our subliminal senses.
Southern Illinois University
1 Laplace considered in some detail what he called the “Application of the Calculus of Probabilities to the Moral Sciences.” The last half of the Essay is devoted to such applications. I would like here to thank Mrs. Carol Lawson, a teacher of French, for collaborating with me in translating this article.
2 Mlle. Perrier had suffered for more than three years from a lachrymal fistula. When she touched her afflicted eye with a relic supposed to be one of the thorns on Christ's crown, she recovered instantaneously. Doctors attested to the remarkable cure and declared it was wrought supernaturally. This “miracle” occurred in 1656 and made a great sensation. See Ch. XI of the Essay on Probabilities for Laplace's discussion of this event.
3 Zadig's inferences concerning the queen's spaniel and the king's horse are recounted in Ch. III of Voltaire's Zadig.
4 Trissotin in Moliédre's play, Les Femmes savantes, remarks: ‘Last night we had the narrowest escape! / A world passed just beside us, fell across / our vortex; if in passing it had struck us, / We had been dashed to pieces just like glass.” This allusion to Trissotin is odd, for Trissotin, meaning Triple Fool, is the name under which Moliére satirized the Abbé Charles Cotin. A poet and member of the French Academy, Cotin had published a work entitled Gallant Dissertation upon the Comet Which Appeared in December 1664, and January 1665.
5 Gatien Courtilz de Sandras (16454-1712) spent nine years in the Bastille for writing scandalous novels; Françoise-Thomas de Baculard D’Arnaud (1718-1803) and Marguerite de Lussan (1682-1758) were once popular novelists.
6 His work on the subject is A Philosophical Endeavour towards the Defence of the Being of Witches and Apparitions (1666) better known by the title of the enlarged edition, Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681), which went through five editions by 1726. George Lyman Kittredge im Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York, 1929), p. 335, said of it: “No English work on the subject had a more powerful influence.” For a thorough and learned discussion of Glanvill's book, see Moody E. Prior, “Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft and Seventeenth-Century Science,” Modern Philology, XXX, (Nov., 1932), 167-193.
7 Roy P. Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia’ ” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967) p. 58.
8 Richard Wilbur, “Edgar Allan Poe” in Major Writers of America, I, ed. Perry (New York, 1962), 375, 377. Wilbur's Interpretation has a context I touch upon later in this article.
9 Introduction to Poe in the Laurel Poetry Series, (New York, 1959), 7-19; in the work cited in note 8 above, pp. 373-382; and in “The House of Poe” in the collection cited in note 7 above, pp. 98-120,
10 “Arthur Gordon Pym, or The Fallacy of Thematic Interpretation,” University Review, XXXIII, (June, 1967), 298-306.
11 “From Poe to Valéry,” Hudson Review, II, (Autumn, 1949), 335,
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Notes:
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[S:0 - NAP70, 1970] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - New Approaches on Poe (Poe as Probablist in Forgues' Critique of the Tales)