Text: Julia W. Mazow, “The Undivided Consciousness of the Narrator in Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 55-59 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 55, continued:]

Writing of the two-fold rhythm in American art — a “disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness” and the formation of a new one — D. H. Lawrence, recognizing only the first in Poe,(1) distorts his view of man, which, in Eureka, looks beyond annihilation to survival,(2) as demonstrated by the evolving awareness of the narrator. Poe's prose poem focuses upon the cycle of diffusion, fusion, and return to “the original unity of the first thing,”(3) referring to a stage in the development of the human being when conscious and unconscious minds were undivided.(4) A refutation of Lawrence's contention, Eureka is Poe's final attempt (1848-1849) at a presentation of the wholeness to which man has access because of the postulated law of periodicity.

Poe's comments in the Democratic Review, April, 1846, specify the return as a matter of affirmation and necessity for individual man and mankind, providing also a standard of assessment: “as individuals, we think in cycles, and may, from the frequency or infrequency of our revolutions about the various thought-centres, form an accurate estimate of the advance of our thought toward maturity. And as with individuals so, perhaps, with mankind. When the world begins to return, frequently, to its first impressions, we shall then be warranted in looking for the millennium — or what ever it is: — we may safely take it for granted that we are attaining our maximum of wit, and of the happiness which is thence to ensue.” However, Poe continues “The indications of such a return are, at present, like the visits of angels — but we have them now and then . . .” (H, XVI, 92). [page 56:]

In Eureka the periodic return to an undivided consciousness makes it possible for man to deal with despair and meaninglessness. Exemplifying the ability to perceive and to understand truth without any external aids, the narrator contains within himself the guidance necessary for survival. If man can confront the void at one end of the cycle of diffusion, fusion, and annihilation, the law of periodicity ensures that he will become part of the process once again. Among recent writers on Eureka(5) only David Halliburton understands the importance of man in the work: “despite the cool abstractness of much of the theorizing.. .the physics of the universe leads to God, who leads in turn to man in whom God is immanent.”(6) Regarding the conclusion, Halliburton writes: “Man is no longer.. .a being of disproportion, caught between the deux infinis. If the infinite exists, says Poe, it exists humanly, in man-who-is-God. Through the power of words the interpreter [i.e., narrator] thus anticipates the state he will experience once he has finished his passage through the gulf beyond.”(7)

Because the narrator of Eureka has internalized the concept of guidance, he can show and tell simultaneously and successfully(8) through an examination of three items: the letter found in a bottle, anticipatory questions, and summary statements. Before introducing the letter he states his subject, which is “the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical.. .the Material and Spiritual Universe.. .its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny,” and the general proposition: “In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (H, XVI, 186).(9) He proposes “to take such a survey of the Universe that the mind may be able really to receive and to perceive an individual impression” — as, for example, of the “Original Unity” or oneness of the universe-by “a rapid whirling” on one's heel. Since no one has ever imagined such an act, “no man has ever taken into his brain the full uniqueness of the prospect; and so, again, whatever considerations lie involved in this uniqueness, have as yet no practical consequences for mankind” (H, XVI, 186). Through a “mental gyration on the heel,” the narrator will demonstrate the “individuality” which has “hitherto lain hidden behind” the appearance of universality.

First he discusses “an extract or two from a somewhat remarkable letter, which appears to have been found corked in a bottle and floating on the Mare Tenebrarum.” The future date (2848) and the narrator's reference to the “Transcendentalists and. . .other divers for crotchets” (H, XVI, 188) suggest a satirical purpose. Poe's known antipathy for thinkers of his time, such as Emerson and Margaret Fuller, however, seems to have been a matter of literary politics rather than lack of sympathy for their ideas.

Translated variously as Sea of Darkness, Night, Blindness, or Unconsciousness — a mental construction representing a state of psychological wholeness(10) — the Mare Tenebrarum becomes the “original unity” of the work's basic proposition; it refers to the level of mind where splits and fragmentation do not exist. The letter then is all that man in his present state of division may hope to know. Guiding both reader and narrator through a consideration of inductive and deductive reasoning(11) (H, XVI, 189), it shows that both methods stand for adherence to single ideas which exclude other possibilities; they restrict seekers after truth and suppress the imagination: “The error of our progenitors was quite analogous with that of the wiseacre who fancies he must necessarily see an object the more distinctly, the more closely he holds it to his eyes” (H, XVI, 190). Poe makes the same point comically and satirically in “The Devil in the Belfry” and “The Spectacles.” In case the reader has misunderstood, the writer gladly reiterates: he quarrels with the followers of both Bacon and Aristotle “on account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths. . .” (H, XVI, 195).

Because Kepler proceeded by the intuitive leaps appropriate to “true Science” (H, XVI, 189), he should be admired more than Newton. However, no metaphysician told Kepler “that what he called ‘intuition’ was but the conviction resulting from deductions or inductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity of expression” (H, XVI, 197) Praising Kepler, the author of the letter suggests a stance for the narrator, whom he guides by telling the importance of proceeding by intuition. The narrator, however, shows and tells: he includes the letter as part of the introduction to Eureka, because it demonstrates to him further evidence of the validity of his own thinking processes, which will be illustrated in the course of the text. Coming from the Mare Tenebrarum, or Sea of Unconsciousness, the letter in the bottle guides the narrator, who internalizes the special kind of direction provided by the author of the manuscript.

The use of anticipatory questions and statements — particularly in the examination of gravitation-shows how the narrator has assimilated the method of the letter. He begins with a paraphrase of the Newtonian proposition: “Every atom, of every body, attracts every other atom, both of its own and of [page 57:] very other body, with a force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances between he attracting and attracted atom.” Immediately, he anticipates and simultaneously guides the reader's thoughts: “Here, indeed, a flood of suggestion bursts upon the mind” (H, XVI, 214). Agreeing with the metaphysicians” who rejected the “ocular, physical” proofs of Newton, the narrator directs through the anticipatory question: “Now, to what does so partial a consideration tend — to what species of error does it give rise? On the Earth we see and feel, only that gravity impels all bodies toward the centre “However, “no man in the common walks of life could be made to see or feel anything else — could be made to perceive that anything, anywhere, has a perpetual, gravitating tendency in any other direction than to the centre of the Earth.”(H, XVI, 216-217). The earth-centered assumption misleads “mankind into the fancy of concentralization or especiality respecting it — has been continually biasing towards this fancy even the might est intellects — perpetually, although imperceptibly, leading them away from the real characteristics of the principle. “People thus are blind to “that vital truth which lies in a diametrically opposite direction. . . . This ‘vital truth’ is Unity as the source of the Phaenomenon” (H, XVI, 217). Thus the narrator-interpreter has aided the reader through his anticipatory questions and statements to that which supersedes and includes he multiplicity underlying the idea of diffusion.

Proceeding to a discussion of Attraction and the next set of anticipatory questions, the narrator demonstrates further the way in which he has internalized the concept of guidance: “with such a vision of the marvellous complexity of Attraction fairly in his mind — let any person competent of thought set himself to the task of imagining a principle for the phaenomena observed — a condition from which they sprang. “Leading towards the idea that the atoms originate in a context of Unity, he asks: “Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms [that they each tend to the other] point to a common parentage?” And he answers: “It is not that the atoms, as we see them, are divided or that they are complex in their relations — but that they are inconceivably divided and unutterably complex. In a word, not because the atoms were, at some remote epoch of time, even more than together — is it not because originally, and therefore normally, they were One — that now, in all circumstances — at all points they struggle back to this absolutely, this irrelatively, this unconditionally one?” (H, XVI, 219).

Again the narrator-guide anticipates: “Some person may here demand” why investigators do not “find ind define Attraction ‘a merely general tendency to a centre?’ — why, in especial, do not the atoms which you describe as having been irradiated from a centre — proceed at once back to the central point of their origin?” (H, XVI, 219-220). The question leads to the answer: “Nothing like location was conceived as their [the atoms’] origin. Their source lies in . . . Unity. This is their lost parent” (H, XVI, 220). From this general center, which is a principle of the universe, the atoms are irradiated at the source. The narrator realizes that, according to the logic of “the schools, “he may have proved nothing. But to all intellects, including his own, “there is no mathematical demonstration which could bring the least additional true proof of the great Truth. . .of Original Unity as the source — as the principle of the Universal Phaenomena” (H, XVI, 221). Thus the narrator assumes the function of guidance through the anticipatory statement and question, which he proceeds to answer, all the while countering objections which may arise.

Because Eureka is such a miscellany of information, summaries are crucial and occur most often as definitions repeated after explanations. For example, following the discussion of Unity as the “lost parent” of the atoms, the narrator states: “Let me now repeat the definition of gravity: — Every atom, of every body, attracts every other atom, both of its own and of every other body, with a force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances of the attracting and attracted atom” (H, XVI, 217). He is now free to delineate the significance of the point: “Here let the reader pause with me, for a moment, in contemplation of the miraculous — of the ineffable — of the altogether unimaginable complexity of relation involved merely in the fact that each atom attracts every other atom at all, in a wilderness of atoms so numerous that those which go to the composition of a cannon-ball, exceed, probably, in mere point of number, all the stars which go t:o the constitution of the Universe” (H, XVI, 217-218). Such interrelation inspires “unthought-like thoughts — soul reveries rather than conclusions or even considerations of the intellect” which one must entertain in order to grasp “the great principle, Attraction” (H, XVI, 219). A variant of the summary statement, the repeated definition provides a transition to the next idea to which he will guide his reader.

The narrator's repetition of purpose and method might have aided those attempting to read Eureka as a scientific treatise only. For instance, he feels “impelled to fancy — without daring to call it more — that here does exist a limitless succession of Universes, “each of which “exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God” (H, XVI, 276). Lest such speculations seem pointless, he reminds his readers that he aims “less at physical than at metaphysical order,”(12) echoing the thought of the [page 58:]

Preface and providing a link to the language of the conclusion: “If then I seem to step somewhat too discursively from point to point of my topic, let me suggest that I do so in the hope of thus the better keeping unbroken that chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them” (H, XVI, 276-277).

Concerned with individual as well as with cosmic survival, the narrator-interpreter guides to understanding through his discussion of adaptation: “There is that about it which stamps it as divine, in distinction from that which is merely the work of human constructiveness, “alluding “to the complete mutuality of adaptation” (H, XVI, 291), which man could not have devised. Furthermore, “The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity.” “Perfection of plot is really, or practically, unattainable” in imaginative works, “but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs, “while “the plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God” (H, XVI, 292). Man sometimes errs, because of the longing for symmetry, “the poetical essence of the Universe Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms: — thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the ratio of its truth — true in the ratio of its consistency. A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth.” If man wishes to perceive it, he must ‘be guided by his poetical, which I have maintained to be his truthful instinct” (H, XVI, 302). Through contemplation of the Universe or the general proposition of Eureka itself the individual may satisfy his need for unity, and truth, as well as symmetry and consistency.

This, however, is not all. Though all created matter will sink “into Unity,” the narrator still can answer man's needs: “Are we here to pause? Not so. we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue — another creation and irradiation, returning into itself-another action and reaction of the Divine Will.” Here he provides an important clue: “Guiding our imaginations by the omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief — let us say, rather, in indulging a hope — that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?” (H, XVI, 311). Satisfying man's need for symmetry in both the plots of fiction and the plots of God, the cycle ensures a return to the Original Unity, to which the basic proposition refers. Humankind will survive in some form, if the individual imagination allows itself to be guided by it. As this truth becomes evident, people will become more aware of previously “faint, indeterminate glimpses of an identity with God” (H, XVI, 314).

One still might ask if, in the world of Eureka, individual identity is to be annihilated totally. The answer seems to be “no, “ for “the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah” (H, XVI, 314). The “general consciousness” then is identified with the undivided consciousness from which man was separated originally. His sense of symmetry must lead him back to this unified state to which the reader has been guided by the narrator in his presentation of cosmic and individual human survival. Just as all things are affected by the law of periodicity and, therefore, cannot die, “if by any means” the truth of Eureka should “be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting’” (H, XVI, 183).

First, however, man must return to the level of being at which conscious and unconscious segments of the mind are still whole — to the Original Unity of the basic proposition, to which the narrator has guided us through the letter found in a bottle, the anticipatory question and statement, and the summaries found throughout the work. The key to reading the meaning of Eureka, the law of periodicity accounts fully for the possibility of the return. The narrator both shows and tells how it may be accomplished. Since the diffusion-fusion process, begun by an act of divine volition, created the universe and is ongoing, survival is cyclical and contains within itself the idea of permanence.

University of Houston

[[Footnotes]]

1. Studies in Classic American Literature (2nd ed., 1923; rpt. N.Y.: Viking Press, 1964), p. 65.

2. In Poe's work survival occurs on the physical, psychological, and psychic levels. When survival is chiefly physical, as in “Some Words with a Mummy, “ the intent is usually satiric. More often it is both psychological and physical; Hop-Frog's ability to survive psychologically insures his physical survival; similar situations are found in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” The other-worldly dialogues depict psychic survival, in which the soul lives beyond, or outlasts, the state of physical death. [page 59:]

3. All quotations are from The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (N. Y., Crowell, 1902), XVI. They are cited parenthetically as H, followed by volume and page numbers in the text of this paper.

4. Edward Engelberg speaks of a similar notion and notes that what once was consciousness has split slowly into two words and concepts: consciousness and conscience. He uses consciousness as I have: to signify a “full awareness.” See Engelberg's The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience: Goethe to Camus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 2. Similarly, Victor J. Vitanza concludes that “for Poe, the individual selves or consciousnesses of all men.. .are in an abnormal state.. .the principle of Perverseness compels all. ..to return to the One, the normal state of being.” See “Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: An Anatomy of Perverseness,” Etudes Anglaises, XXVII (1974), no. 1, 37?

5. Because Poe stated in his Preface that he wished Eureka read as a “poem, “commentators, such as Floyd Stovall, have discussed it as poetry. See Edgar Poe the Poet (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 237. On the other hand, Patrick F. Quinn maintains that Eureka is Poe's Nature, just as Nature is Emerson's Eureka; both works are concerned with man and his relation to the universe (“Poe's Eureka and Emerson's Nature,” ESQ, 31 [2nd quarter, 1963], 4). Writing more recently in Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: The Univ, of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 188, 189, G. R. Thompson explains, “the tension between the sense of the creative and the sense of the destructive in Eureka. . . . results in what. . . cannot be called other than skepticism, “which “results from the appalling possibility that the essence of the universe is . . . nothingness.”

6. David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 408. See also Patrick F. Quinn's review article, the title of which reflects the polarities which he believes Thompson's and Halliburton's works represent: “Poe: Between Being and Nothingness,” Southern Literary Journal, 2 (1973), 81-100.

7. Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 411-412.

8. One survives by following the lead of various characters or concepts representing guidance, which derives from the morality play personifications. However, the narrator or protagonist in the Poe tale must avoid ideas or figures of false guidance, the equivalent of any notion or method leading to the exclusion of alternative possibilities. False guidance is treated seriously in works such as “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Oval Portrait,” in which the false guides are perverseness, revenge, and art, respectively. It is treated comically in “The Devil in the Belfry,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” and “The Angel of the Odd.” One best succeeds in the quest for survival by internalizing the appropriate type of guidance, as the narrative consciousness has done in Eureka. There the narrator guides the reader through the showing and telling discussed by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The Univ, of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 155, 211, 212. Poe's narrator seems to be the author's second self, or the implied author, engaged in the business of guiding the reader. He is “reliable” and a dramatized spokesman for the implied author, i.e., guidance personified. In the works cited earlier in this note the concept of guidance resides usually outside or external to the narrative consciousness. By the time Poe wrote Eureka he had learned to internalize the concept of guidance.

9. For Poe's summary of the premises of Eureka, see his letter to George W. Eveleth, February 29, 1848, in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom, II (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), 361-362.

10. Edward Edinger writes: “The day is the time of light, consciousness. The night is darkness, unconsciousness. Each one of us at night returns to that original wholeness out of which we were born.” Before consciousness separates from the undivided state which we term unconsciousness, “Pain and suffering and death” do not exist. See Edinger's Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1973), p. 25.

11. Poe's narrator criticizes both methods in “Mellonta Tauta” also. However, there can be no doubt that the criticism is part of a larger satiric purpose: the letter found in a bottle, written by Pundita, is presented as part of an article translated by “Martin Van Buren Mavis (sometimes called the ‘Toughkeepsie Seer’).”

12. This statement corrects what some critics, such as Harriet Holman, consider Poe's earlier carping at the inhabitants of the “Cloud-Land of Metaphysics” (H, XVI, 261). See “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and other ‘Savans ‘ in Eureka: Notes Toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter, 2 (1969), 49-55.