Text: John P. Hussey, “Narrative Voicde and Classical Rhetoric in Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 37-42 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 37, continued:]

In an essay of the 1940's, Marshall McLuhan asserted that Poe was heir to the tradition of classical rhetoric that has as its goal the “Ciceronian ideal,”(1) the “rational man reaching his noblest attainment in the expression of an eloquent vision” (25). It was still alive, he continues, in Jefferson's and Poe's Virginia — a fact that can be established by a glance at the curricula and textbooks of its schools and universities.(2) This article will explore ramifications of this rhetorical tradition, first in Poe's fiction and then in Eureka.

Although Poe would have been familiar with Cicero and Horace, his working knowledge of the proscriptions and goals of the tradition might have come through Blair's popular Lectures on Rhetoric,(3) just as his conservative aesthetics is derived from Blair's fellow Scotsmen, Kames and Alison,(4) and his conservative psychology from the American textbooks of Thomas Upham.(5) Regardless of his sources, however, Poe's art is grounded not only in the specific injunctions of the handbooks, but in their fundamental conception of the interrelationship between the character of the speaker, the quality of his work, and the well-being of his audience. For the rhetoricians, the audience came first: Its need to be taught, excited, or moved to motion was the primary goal of the orator. To this end, neither Romantic self-expression nor mere technical wizardry could be endured for its own sake. Instead, what the handbooks enjoin is that the speaker, in effect, create a strategy of masks — that he submerge his own personality within a gallery of carefully chosen personae appropriate for the given subject (be it forensic, deliberative, or epideictic) as well as for the various segments within any single address. A eulogy, for instance, required a different method from a call for war; and the speaker must assume a posture in the beginning of a speech (modest, calm, reassuring) different from that in the conclusion (where he must be firm, passionate, and exciting). He must be in total, conscious control of his own impulses, passions, and enthusiasms. Even though he may rage and burn, he must coolly portray himself as reasonable and tolerant — because only in such a role can he achieve acceptance is audience. If he fails to control himself, he cannot effectively shape his own personae, his auditors are not persuaded, his art fails, and ultimately, communal progress and cohesion are lost.

Such a view of art, audience and artist is Poe's as well. As Robert Jacobs has demonstrated,(6) Poe believed in an art which would calm, strengthen, and renew its audience by creating an effect or “undercurrent” of cosmic harmony.(7) What many of his tales (especially Eureka) display is the corollary of this view of art and the artist: only a man who can control his own passions as well as those of his audience will be able to create true art. Poe created a series of rhetoricians, characters who try to persuade and guide their readers to particular ends. Those who failed are portrayed as blind, deluded artist-manqués, unable to control their presentations of themselves and hence heal their audiences. But those who triumph — and there are more of them than is usually acknowledged — are clear-sighted, sternly self-controlled, and capable of creating a [page 38:] Redemptive art. The apotheosis of Poe's victorious heroes is the narrator of Eureka, who utters Poe's version of an epideictic oration on the sublime. To examine some of the triumphant characters in the tales by contrasting them with failed characters is to predict the appearance of Eureka's narrator.

Before Mann and Nabokov, Poe was the subtlest diagnostician of the artist's mind we have had. For him, the most fatal affliction that can beset the artist's nerve-ridden personality is myopia, an inability to see either self or other — too blind to unravel the source of his perplexity or see exactly what is occurring or why he is acting as he is. In the satirical tales, the origins of this blindness (in both artists and non-artists alike) are drink (e.g., “Bon-Bon,” “Angel of the Odd”), vanity (e.g., the narrator of “The Spectacles” who, to his grief, refuses all optometric assistance), a delusory belief in material progress (e.g., “The Man Who Was Used Up”), and sheer stupidity (e.g., “The Oblong Box”). In “The Sphinx,” the silly narrator believes a spider on the window is a huge monster because of his “palsying” fear of cholera and by “a mere misadmeasurement of its propinquity.” The “terror-stricken” London citizenry of “King Pest” are bedeviled as much by a plague as by their own superstitious credulity in a “Demon of Disease” which they believe stalks their streets.

In the tales of madness (e.g., “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Ligeia,” “Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson”), delusions are engendered not only by material causes (cholera, swamp gas, fog, opium or whiskey) but, more importantly, by the protagonists’ own panic and pride — pride which induces a hideous, life-denying solipsism; panic which disrupts their emotional and mental equilibrium. From such minds come the phantoms — Ligeia, Madeline, the corpse with the tom-tom heart.(8) Their art suffers as much as if they fail; its end is forgotten; its techniques are perverted and twisted. Its proper subject, that suggestion of supernal Beauty, is lost; what is revealed is only the unbalanced psyches of the artists themselves, instead of bringing health to the heart-sick, they use their art only as inept attempts at self-exculpation. If they tell their own tales, their language is discordant and their narratives interrupted with defensive pleas of innocence (“Why will you say that I am mad?.. .Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me.”). The madness of Ligeia's lover is revealed by his nervous prose, his turret room's “bedlam of decorative styles” (Jacobs, 211), and his attempted evocation of Ligeia's beauty; this latter goal is undercut because he makes her appear to be no more than a ludicrous collection of spare parts gathered from the junk yards of the world; none of this is reflective of her (whoever she is), but instead only of the disfigured imagination of the narrator.

Although many tales diagnose lost vision, others clarify the means by which true sight can be attained and preserved. This is not the place to detail the complicated, arduous path by which Poe's successful protagonists struggle through to their triumphs. Suffice it to mention here three large sets of tales, one in which the heroes must disentangle the mysteries of earthly flux and mutability (e.g., “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the Dupin tales, and the first twenty chapters of Arthur Gordon Pym); another in which they must envision the supra-sensual realm (e.g., “Ms. Found in a Bottle, “the final chapters of Pym); and the third in which they must search for material analogues for their immaterial visions (e.g., “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” “Island of the Fay,” “The Domain of Arnheim”). The powers of mind necessary for the first are predominantly those of close observation, memory, curiosity, “sympathetic imagination,” all of which are subsumed within Dupin’ s gift of analysis or ratiocination. The second quest calls for a submergence of those rational powers and for the summoning of the intuitive, a-sensual vision, or Taste. For the final task the hero needs to combine both his powers of observation (in order to discover those material elements evocative of spirit) and his taste (lest he forget what his revery had brought him to); simultaneously he must reconcile himself to the inevitable loss of that vision (as the protagonist of “Ligeia” is not) and through his art commit himself to bring to “heart-sick” humanity some approximation of his vision.

However, the acute insight which these heroes have gained does not arise automatically from their strength of character. Whether they are exploring the nature of earthly or unearthly reality, they first need to find the proper middle distance from it: neither too close (as in “The Sphinx”) nor too far away. The narrator of “Island of the Fay” generates his luminous vision from a position close enough to the island to see its features in some detail, yet far enough away to “include in a single view both the eastern and western extremities of the islet.” This matter of physical distance has a corollary in the artist's need to isolate himself, yet not be utterly cut off from human proximity, as witness Dupin's ventures into Paris and, in “The Domain of Arnheim,” Ellison's need to create his kingdom on “a spot not far from a populous city.” The correct light is needed as well: The narrators of “Island of the Fay” and “Morning on the Wissahiccon” explore [page 39:] their realms either in twilight or from within a shadowy grove, as do the visitors to Arnheim and the kingdom of Landor; Dupin also must operate within a dimly lit chamber, and in his semi-isolation and smoky room he is able to “keep sight of the matter as a whole.” Ultimately, the middle-distance, the muted light and the detachment must be understood as analogues for the hypnagogic condition itself, that state of half-wakefulness, “half-slumber,” which best enables the visionary to mediate between time and eternity(9) and fulfill his vocation as bohisattva.(10)

The most triumphant of Poe's heroes is the narrator of Eureka, a character who is at once calm, lucid, humane, and oracular. In most of the earlier tales of triumph, the hero has been approached indirectly via the narrative voice of a companion (Dupin's and Ellison's friends; the frightened youths of “Descent” and “The Sphinx, “and the traveller of “Landor's Cottage’’); here the visionary is allowed to speak directly to us, his strength of eye, mind and spirit displayed by his scrupulous attention to the needs of his audience and the consequent care with which he presents himself and arranges his argument. His sense of other-ness marks the most immediate contrast between the persona of Eureka and the narrators of the “mad” tales. Those in “William Wilson,” “Tell-Tale Heart” and “Ligeia” are concerned only with self-justification, with erecting desperate defenses of their murders and obsessions. Nothing of that is here; Eureka's narrator is not immured within the abyss of ego. Instead, he submerges his personality within his gospel; to describe his character, we need, like Dupin, to unravel the clues buried in the text.

For one thing, he is able to see. Indeed, if his integrity has a single characteristic it is his discovery of a point of view from which he can see the entire continuum of space and time, a perspective from which he speaks and to which he continually beckons his readers. He frequently asserts that his audience, like the narrator of “The Sphinx, “is, in its present situation, too much in the center of the individuated objects of the cosmos to be able to see the design (or “plot”) of which they are only parts. He enjoins his hearers not to err as does the “wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see an object the more distinctly, the more closely he holds it in his eyes.”(11) Given the limitations of human vision and the parochialism of an earthly perspective, mankind is forced into misleading assumptions: the “vast superiority in size” of the Milky Way over other galaxies “is but an apparent superiority arising from our position in regard to it — that is to say, from our position in its midst” (97) ; the “scattered ‘nebulae’ [must] be understood as only perspectively scattered, and as part and parcel of the one supreme and Universal sphere” (100); “the merely sensitive perception of gravity as we experience it on Earth, beguiles Mankind. . .” (41). To achieve a new perspective, the narrator says, we need “something like a mental gyration on the heel, “ so “rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight that, while the minutiae vanish altogether, even the most conspicuous objects become blended into one “In such a mystical, hypnagogic state, the Earth “would be considered in its planetary relations alone. A man, in this view, becomes mankind; mankind a member of the cosmical family of Intelligences” (9-10). This latter sentence relates not alone to the narrator's methodology of vision but to the very structure of the book itself; in the first half of the work, he is strongly present as “I, “as a distinct personality; but in the latter pages, as he describes the future and tries to gather his audience into his vision, the collective “we” begins to appear, and in the final pages, the “we” becomes, in effect, “We” — that is, God — whose being we share.

The narrator asserts that to envision cosmic order and harmony as he has, one must employ both senses and intuition. One obviously begins with intuition, with “guesses, “ reveries, with allowing oneself to “be guided by his poetical, which I have maintained to be his truthful, it being his symmetrical, instinct” (130). As Poe implies in earlier stories, intuition can only operate when it is preceded by strength of character; because what one may see in that state will so dismay ordinary expectations that one can approach it “only from [a] deep tranquility of self-inspection”; only in a state of calm fortitude can one “hope to attain the presence of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face” (140). Guided, thus, by both self-possession and intuitive vision, one can effectively use reason and the senses to corroborate intuition, much as the guesses of Kepler and Newton were finally “proved” scientifically.

Given his own discovery of perspective and his sensitivity to his audience, the narrator is able to provide his vision with a persuasive voice. Although Poe's poems are known for their rigorously formalized patterns of sound, rhyme, and form, in Eureka, he wished to do more than suggest undercurrents of eternity as in his lyrics. Rather, he planned to divulge directly the course of man's memories of, and hopes for, joy. To do so, he needed a pattern or mold which was as rigidly structured as, say, a sonnet, but more expansive. For it he turned to classical address, the rules and organization of which had been handed down for centuries and were found in Poe's day within Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric. [page 40:]

First of all, his narrator possesses the rhetorician's ability to assume a succession of appropriate, related, and coolly considered masks or poses by which, at each stage of the work, he can effectively sway his audience. We ought to remind ourselves that neither the classical rhetoricians nor Poe in Eureka employed these “poses” for deceit but rather as the only effective way to convince others of their genuine convictions. Given the fact that the narrator is about to take on the entire universe as well as the views of “many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men” (7), he must, in the beginning, appear neither overweeningly arrogant nor incompetent. Indeed, as Blair suggests, he must be both modest and calm in order “to render the hearers docile, or open to persuasion” (Blair, II, 158). In his opening page, Eureka's narrator presents himself in just that way: as an earnestly humble seeker of a truth so “solemn” and “sublime” that he feels himself (or avers that he does) to be “rash” even to consider dealing with it (7).

Given this initial posture of humility and awe in the introduction, the narrator can risk his second role, that of a satirist, in the section on methodology wherein he attacks strict reliance on either induction or deduction, on “Aries Tottle” or “Hogg”. Because the narrator is shrewd enough, however, not to let himself lose the good will of his auditors, he engages us in the obvious pretense of having the mockery appear in a sneering letter written in the twenty-ninth century. The transparent device keeps the narrator one remove from this irreverence, enabling him quickly to dispose of an otherwise long and possibly offensive argument.

In the lengthy third section, the narrator appears as a perspicacious scholar — an effaced, lucid, objective encyclopedist — who can comprehend the lore of great scientists and, through his own observations and logic, integrate their learning into his own system. That it is shot through with contradictions, inconsistencies, and misinterpretations of other works has been demonstrated by Frederick Conner.(12) But even he admits that his rigorously analytical examination of Eureka's science, though valuable and interesting, is not addressed to the use which the narrator makes of this aggregation of lore. As the narrator says again and again, he is only interested in the “impression, “the aesthetic rather than the rational effect which he can induce in his audience; it is as Beauty, as an “Art-Product alone, “as a “Romance, “a “Poem” that he has given voice to this work. Its operating principles (universal animism, simplicity, harmony and design) are not those gained through ratiocination but through “intuition.” But he must seem to be a master of logarithmic legerdemain if he is to gain the respect of nineteenth-century pragmatists and positivists. And thus appears this third of his roles, no longer the reverential supplicant he was in the beginning, or the superior and sarcastic visitant who demolished Aristotle and Bacon; but instead the master scholar, dropping such names as Newton, Laplace, Leibnitz, and Herschel with a familiarity which bespeaks his equality with them, wielding their formulae and graphs in a manner just cavalier enough so that his auditor must look the fool if he would question the narrator's self-assured authority.

What is of equal interest in this long “scientific” section is that the narrator is quietly undercutting its purported objectivity by his increasing use of metaphorical language. In particular, here appears a series of recurring images by which the cosmic particles are personalized and given self-animation. At times, their gravitational attraction for each other is described in terms of a family seeking reunion after a diaspora (e.g., original Unity is the “lost parent” of that “brotherhood” of atoms who seek return to their “common paternity”); or, more often, they are described as sexually frenzied beings who desperately seek consummation (e.g., the “appetite” and “desire on the part of Matter.. .to return into the Unity whence it was diffused”; the “spiritual passion of their appetite for oneness.. .[and] a common embrace”). Such images, of course, clarify his thesis, but even more they demonstrate just where the narrator is heading — toward the entirely metaphorical diction and the decidedly un-scientific pantheism of the finale.

In the concluding pages, he follows Blair's “great rule” for rhetoricians, “to place that last on which we choose that the strength of our cause should rest” (Blair, II, 200). Most readers agree with Conner that only at the end do we come to the true center of the work (Conner, 78). And Poe himself concurs: “‘That was the dearest part’ “(quoted in Conner, 85). Earlier in Eureka, the narrator has declared the primacy of intuitive over analytical truths; here he steps forward as entirely the man of transcendent vision who speaks as prophet, healer, lover, and redeemer, announcing the divinity within each person and the joy such awareness must generate. The earlier roles were all preparatory for this final one, the true voice of Eureka, the one waiting, in effect, behind the curtains while the others warmed and primed the audience. Here all pretense at scientific “objectivity” vanishes. The language is both metaphorical and passionate. The speaker, no longer humble, sarcastic, or coldly reasonable, lunges into metaphor (the principle one [page 41:] being that the universe and all its elements constitute the “Heart Divine”). The “I” is here a “We”; he reveals the secrets of the cosmos and the unerring human memories of a joy once possessed, a joy finally to be had again. He is clearly speaking here with the same healing spirit that prompted Ellison of “The Domain of Arnheim” to create his valley garden for all the “heart-sick” of the world and thereby bring them new life. If Eureka has been guided by the classical principle of appropriate personae, of controlled presentation of self, it follows with even greater specificity the basic organization of the classical address, again as Blair describes it, with six major sections: the Introduction (Exordium), Proposition and Division, Narration, Reasoning or Arguments, the Pathetic, and the Conclusion (Peroration).

Blair assigns three purposes to the Introduction: to attract, conciliate, and make persuadable the audience. The calm modesty of the speaker is one of the primary means of securing these goals. We have already observed that in Eureka's first three paragraphs, one finds that tone of ingratiating modesty along with a hushed awe clearly designed to whet the audience's suspense; and when, in the third paragraph, the narrator hints to them of the nature of his subject (the “Material and Spiritual Universe: — of its Essence, its Origins, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny”), the audience is meant, like him, to be awestruck, excited, and readied for his overwhelming revelations.

In the second section, he states with greater clarity than before his “general Proposition” (Unity as the clue to the creation and consummation of the cosmos). In so doing, he follows Blair's dictum that the proposition “be clear and distinct . . . expressed in few and plain words, without the least affectation” (Blair, II, 169). The next twenty pages of this section should be called the Division, “the laying down of the method of the Discourse” (Blair, II, 171). Here the narrator, speaking in his own and in the voice of that letter from the future, describes his intuitive method of attaining Truth, attacking those who give credence solely to either induction or deduction.

Blair states that the third section of the address, Narration (or Explication), must “illustrate the cause, or the subject of which one treats, before proceeding to argue either on one side or the other; or to make any attempt for interesting the passions of the hearers” (II, 174). And for two pages after the letter from the future, Eureka's narrator does just that: he elaborates on the idea he expressed in the introduction, that God could only have created “Matter in its utmost conceivable state of — what? — of Simplicity” (29), and further asserts that this simplicity, or Oneness, can account for the present condition and “the plainly inevitable annihilation of at least the material Universe” (30). What follows for the next one hundred pages is the equivalent of the fourth segment of the classical oration, the Reasoning (Arguments), which are here the attempts at scientific corroboration of his intuitions and assumptions. Throughout this section, the narrator follows Blair's advice not to confuse and run his arguments together, but slowly to build ‘proofs’ one by one.

Of the fifth section, the Pathetic, or appeal to the emotions, Blair asserts that it frequently “comes in most properly at the Peroration” (II, 200). In Eureka's final pages, as we have already seen, both the climactic point (our shared, Divine life) and the narrator's full emotional engagement are finally revealed in ne last attempt to impart the fullness of that “impression” he has tried to engender.

Such an organization as the one just described could be fitted to any of the three major subjects of classical oratory: the forensic (a past event), the deliberative (an event that may occur), or the epideictic. According to John H. Mackin, this last subject concerns “an aspect of things or events that transcends time, ”(13) and, although in the classical period it “was associated with ceremonial praise of those whom the nation wished to honor” (Mackin, 20), the epideictic oration came to be associated with timeless values and virtues. Clearly, Eureka is just such a subject. More particularly, it adheres to the tone, presentation and goals of a work on the Sublime (that perennial subject of all the eighteenth-century aestheticians, most notably, of course, Burke). Blair states that “the pleasure which arises from Sublimity or Grandeur, “the “precise impression which great and sublime objects make upon us.. .consists in a kind of admiration and ‘expansion of the mind much above its ordinary state; and fills it with a degree of wonder and astonishment, which it cannot well express” (I, 45-46). Furthermore, what Blair says is the most effective of the subjects which can induce this exalted, solemn joy is the very subject of Eureka: “the vast and boundless prospects presented to us by nature.. .the firmament of heaven, “and all boundless vistas (I, 47-48). And, he says, no “ideas . . . are so sublime as those taken from the Supreme Being, “whose nature, duration and power, “though they surpass our conceptions, yet exalt them to the highest” (I, 51). Blair concludes that in order to effect the full impression of Sublimity, one must steadily, gradually awaken the imaginations of his auditors and maintain a consistent and simple language; “the main secret of being Sublime, is to say great things in few and plain words. . . . The most Sublime authors are the simplest in their style . . .” (I, 77). [page 42:]

The echo of this call for an awesome subject and a simple style is so plainly heard in Eureka's opening passage — and throughout the entire work — that Poe must have referred to Blair (or some other expositor of the rhetorical tradition) for guidance on how to prepare his essay on the Sublime. Indeed, given his lifelong concern with aesthetic patterns and effects, one is not surprised that he would turn to the classical oration as a guide in organizing Eureka, controlling its tone, and presenting its narrator. He needed all the assistance he could find. For Eureka was to be his ultimate attempt at creating a vision and a voice which would clarify all his earlier work, and force us to acknowledge that he had spent his life endeavoring not to terrify but to heal his audience, and that he was not wallowing in madness and murder but, instead, showing us the way out of it.

Fairmont State College

[[Footnotes]]

1. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, “Edgar Poe's Tradition,” Sewanee Review, 52 (Winter, 1944), 25.

2. Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia 1790-1830 (Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1964), 257.

3. Hugh Blair, D.D., Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), in two volumes. That Poe knew and admired Blair is tested to by Poe's remark in “Exordium” that the works of the German critics “differ from those of Kames, Johnson, and of Blair, in principle not at all, (for the principles of these artists will not fail until Nature herself expires) . . . .”

4. The source of Poe's aesthetic principles in the Scottish school is the subject of Robert D. Jacobs’ Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969).

5. In “The ‘Legitimate Sources’ of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Modern Language Review, XI (Oct., 1966), 589-592, I. M. Walker demonstrates one use which Poe made of Upham's principles. In iy dissertation, Ascent and Return: The Redemptive Voyage of Poe's Hero (Univ, of Florida, 1971), I tried to establish Upham's presence throughout the range of Poe's psychological fiction.

6. Poe: Journalist and Critic, 402-426.

7. In addition to the works to be discussed here, Poe's clearest enunciation of this principle of art is found this famous essays on Longfellow's Ballads and “The Poetic Principle.”

8. Poe always drops enough clues to keep us, if not his heroes, aware of what is “real” and what is hallucinatory; that Madeline, for instance, could not return, dead or alive, is testified to by her burial in an airless, securely locked chamber, behind a “massive iron” door and within a coffin whose top has been tightly crewed into place.

9. Poe's most elaborate statement on the “hypnagogic” state is found in his Marginalia (Harrison edition, VI, 87-89).

10. For a concurring view of Poe's artists, see Alice Chandler's “The Visionary Race: Poe's Attitude Toward Us Dreamers,” ESQ, 60, Supplement I, 73-81.

11. Eureka: A Prose Poem, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1973), 13. All future references are to this text.

12. “Poe's Eureka” in Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (N.Y.: Octagon Books, 1973), 67-91.

13. Classical Rhetoric for Modern Discourse (N. Y.: The Free Press, 1969), 19.