Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Poe's Apocalyptic Vision,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 42-53

[page 42, unnumbered:]

Sidney P. Moss

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

 

Poe's Apocalyptic Vision

 

TO GET any notion of Poe's apocalyptic vision, we must see Poe's major fiction,(1) not in Gothic terms, nor as an event in American literary history, and certainly not as an outcropping of some psychic disturbance in the man, but as a phenomenon in world literature. In attempting this, I shall be making certain assumptions of a quite speculative and questionable nature that perhaps had better be exposed at once: That alienation is the condition to which man is most prone, the condition which constitutes the continual crisis of his life. That the theme of alienation has been the constant preoccupation of man, sounding down the ages from Genesis to Waiting for Godot, and that the amelioration of its effects, if not an eradication of the condition itself, has been the dream of philosophers like Plato and Buber; of psychologists like Freud and Reik; of economists like Marx and C. Wright Mills. That, historically, man feels progressively more alienated as he feels more powerless, and that negative culture myths,(2) originated or given viability by artists and thinkers, contribute to man's sense of powerlessness, not to mention the irrationalities of a progressively deteriorating society. And lastly, that despite many anticipations, for genius does not necessarily follow nice historical patterns, we have a declension such that contemporary man feels generally more alienated than his predecessors.(3) [page 43:]

For the sake of gaining perspective on Poe, let me now speak in the briefest way possible (though I know full well the vulnerability of unqualified generalization) about three “touchstones” in literature — Greek tragic drama, The Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare's plays. Classical Greek drama, whatever else it does, preserves as in amber the traditional humanistic values of Western civilization and presents at once a most hopeful image of man with a genius and artistry that themselves give credence to that image. These plays are distinguished, in my judgment, by the positive culture-myth that “Freedom and self-fulfillment arise, in Samuel Johnson's noble phrase, only as the mind can ‘repose on the stability of truth.’”(4) The truth, as the Greeks saw it, is that Nature (of which art is an imitation) is rationally ordered and harmonious, and that man's task in this life, difficult as it is, is to live in harmonious relations with the Order of Things. For tragedy, as Aristotle saw it in the Poetics, “is the result ... of some great error or frailty” in man, not in the universe, a result that unmistakably manifests itself in the phenomenon of alienation.

The Divine Comedy, insofar as it adumbrates an image of man and his universe, is not so much different from Greek tragic drama, despite its Christian fable and concerns. In his “Letter to Can Grande,” Dante wrote, “The subject of the whole work from the allegorical point of view is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice.” The work, he added, belongs to “morals or ethics” and has a “practical object”: “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness,” a condition achieved by establishing harmonious relations with the Divine Will, the correlative to the Greek conception of Nature as Rational Order. Clearly, Dante conceived of his Comedy as the Greeks conceived of their drama, as having didactic purpose — that literary art, in other words, plays and ought to play a powerful role in psychagogia (the persuading of the soul) or, in modern parlance, as a moral educator. For the art of literature lies ultimately in its power to convert moral knowledge into emotional terms that penetrate and abide with the psyche and that guide the “spontaneous” behavior of men.

Of Shakespeare's plays I shall only observe that if the Bard acted upon a single principle, it was the systematic refusal to reduce character, situation, or idea to simplicity. His whole tendency instead was to complicate his dramas so as to catch the essence and fullness of [page 44:] life, and to see character, situation, and idea as organic wholes, as they are in life. His heroes for this reason seem to me the most fully round ed, the most fully human, in all literature (with such possible exceptions as Joyce's Bloom); their predicaments the most weighted with possibilities and consequences, enough to make them hesitate to de fine themselves by the acts of their consciousness, as Existentialists would have us do. And Shakespeare rejected no vision of life to which the unfolding of the work impelled him, whether it was that life sig nifies nothing or that man is like the angels. Finally, however destructive the forces released and however anguished the characters involved, whether in Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear, the world at the end rolls back into Harmony.

 

The Newtonian Revolution, as we now know, had an effect far beyond its time and far beyond its scope of physics. For Newton's world-model, at once mechanistic and deterministic, was adopted programmatically over the years by the social sciences, including psy chology, not to speak of its influence upon such literary figures as Zola, Hardy, and Dreiser. It was as if Newton's “wish,” expressed in his Mathematical Principles, became answered; namely, the wish that “we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles.” These sciences became in time not so much man-centered as object-centered. Man in the pro cess was reduced to object, too, and, worse still, if possible, fractionated so as to be susceptible of “scientific” study in given contexts. Thus we have biological man, economic man, social man, psychological man. These tendencies, inevitably dehumanizing, culminated as we know in the fatalistic sciences of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, which make men appear on the whole hopelessly determined, the products of a dialectic that obviates free will and makes human intervention in human affairs seem impossible.(5) Furthermore, where the Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance images of man found considerable social and institutional support, the accelerating breakdown in modern times of rational society — e.g., a society designed for the fulfillment of hu man beings, not for the mere making of profits — reinforced and made plausible the Newtonian model, that of man as a product of implacably operating laws. Such became the new culture-myths that had their impact, consciously or subliminally, upon modern man; and though, to be sure, we can find expressions of helplessness and visions [page 45:] of despair in Ecclesiastes, in Epictetus, and elsewhere, one feels that those views, unsynthesized and without authority, were not nearly so widely accepted, did not penetrate so deeply into the collective psyche as these modern culture-myths have.

None of this is to say that the Greek tradition has passed away even now, however attenuated it has become. Wherever we turn we find men, far more than one might imagine, in continual struggle against the mechanistic image of man and his universe, however Parthian that struggle seems at times — among them, the Romantics, the Existentialists, and even the Absurdists, who reject reason as a mode of knowing and causality as an explanation of life. For whatever else man is, he is the meaning-creating animal; and whether the meanings he creates are only constructs, as he is sometimes aware, the fact re mains that he needs meaning desperately, perhaps most of all the idea that to some degree or another he is free. For unlike other ani mals, man does not live in mere presentness nor in a world where in stinct suffices for apprehension. His search is for his true being, his personal authenticity, even if the cost must be at times an anguished consciousness. Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh says that life may indeed be “compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.” And having a vision of man's diminishment and hearing the Devil declare: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine,” Teufelsdrockh an swers with his whole being: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” And he tells us the value of his Epiphany: “It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-Birth ...; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”

Whitman, too, celebrated himself in his “Song of Myself,” proclaim ing to the mechanists, “Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,” and declaring of the universe and man's role in it: “Do you see O my brothers and sisters? / It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan.” Emerson in his “Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing” insisted:

Doestoevsky's Underground Man kept asking vexatious questions of the gentlemen reformers to whom he had been listening for forty years “through a crack under the floor”:

In his essay on Benjamin Franklin, D. H. Lawrence likewise asserted, “I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards,” for he contended that he had no ideal self but many selves, including a wolf or coyote self; that he was no “mechanical contrivance,” no “virtuous little automaton.” And Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life observed that “living is one thing and knowing is another; and ... perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti vital.” Carlyle summarized all this in “The Everlasting No” by saying, “Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic Mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself ... — I tell thee, Nay!”

Hawthorne, too, though profoundly disturbed by the scientist manipulators whom he literally vilifies in his work, was still able to write fiction from the beliefs that people err out of frailty of character; that adjustment to the inherent evil in the world, not the mere recognition of it, constitutes the fundamental human problem; and that, to cope with the human situation, we must rely upon some “mystique,” whether love, or trust in the intuitions of our psychic being, or faith in some unexplained and no doubt inexplicable Providence (“Man's accidents,” he once wrote, “are God's purposes”). For completeness, we might add that Hawthorne, like men at all times, yearned for a community of shared values to overcome man's [page 47:] alienation, a community he could not find at Brook Farm or in his own society.

We can close this portion of the discussion by saying that the literature of affirmation, the literature that affirms man's worth and mystery, while it persists at all times, characteristically becomes, as we approach modern times, the literature of resistance, when it does not veer off into despair. For if, in Henry Adams’ words, “chaos is the law of nature, order the dream of man,” the dream seems steadily to lose credibility. Blaming the “new philosophy [that] calls all in doubt,” Donne declared, “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone. ...” Swift in Gulliver's Travels, to borrow Bonamy Dobree's phrase, found “the irrational, not only in the hearts of men, but at the heart of things.” Goethe's Faust doubts man's capacity to perceive “that which holds the world together in its very core.” Matthew Arnold, casting his eye backward to the literature of the Greeks, observed, “the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared.” And speaking of the new literature, he added, ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced”; “there is everything to be endured; nothing to be done.” Yeats felt that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” And he wondered apocalyptically “what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

In contrast to Hawthorne's, Poe's universe is so irrational and his characters so disturbed that his major tales seem apocalyptic, too, prefiguring conditions and a fiction beyond the twentieth century. Historically, his narratives should have appeared after Zola and the naturalists, after Doestoevsky, after the proletarian novelists, after Kafka, and even after Beckett. For Poe carried the theme of alienation and victimization to its ultimate conclusion — that man is totally helpless in a universe he has abandoned all hope of understanding. All that man really knows, all he can experience, is terrible torment. “The Pit and the Pendulum” can, in fact, be read as a fable of man's condition, as Poe at times saw that condition. The nameless narrator is the victim of the Inquisition, which represents for him the “King of Terrors” whose “decrees” are as “Fate.” Cast in this void of a world to die after successive ordeals, each more terrifying than the other, he suffers in solitude the “most hideous moral horrors’ and [page 48:] seems headed for “the pit, typical of hell,” that waits for him at the end. Freeing himself from the terror of the down-swinging pendulum only to face, as yet unbeknown to him, the more appalling ordeal of the pit, he comments upon the human paradox: “I was free ... . and in the grasp of the Inquisition.” Nothing he can do can avert his “mad rushing descent ... into Hades”; only a force outside himself can prevail, as it does in the deus ex machina of General Lasalle.

Beckett's world is also no longer capable of supplying a raison d’etre for human beings; yet his characters, however blighted by this fact, continue to require meaning to make their existence sufferable and continue to seek meaning, however querulously, powerlessly, and futilely. But Poe begins even beyond this point, perhaps the fu thest reach of the twentieth century. As if all the proofs were in and all the proofs were indisputable, he assumes as his starting-point that life is devoid of meaning; that there is no point in seeking meaning; that man is the helpless victim of irrational forces; and that man, in being thrown back upon himself, discovers only a self tormented by delusion and compulsion (as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”), or a self plagued with the “spirit of Perverseness,” the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself” (as in “The Black Cat”), or an alienated, even a schizophrenic self that finally leads him to destruction (as in “William Wilson”).

At times some of Poe's characters seem morally free agents, like Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado,” but this illusion occurs only because they are victimizers rather than victims. The sign of Montresor's freedom is that he carries out a plan to bury Fortunato alive. Yet it is plainly evident that Montresor is a madman, under compulsion to destroy a man merely because “he ventured upon in sult,” if, in fact, Fortunato has. Dissociated from anything we call objective reality, Montresor is a slave of his own compulsions and delusions. We are hardly more certain at the end that he perpetrated his crime than we are that the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” committed his. Certain wretched people, including some of Poe's own characters, confess to imaginary crimes, so convinced are they that their delusions are realities. But whether the crimes have been com mitted or not matters little for our purpose. Like the protagonists of “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Black Cat,” Montresor is entrapped in nearly total psychologic unfreedom, or psychosis.

“Ligeia,” like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” represents a post-Beckett world to the degree that we can say hardly anything a [page 49:] bout what is really happening in the story, and nothing at all about its meaning, except that if there is meaning, it is inexplicable. In this tale we are 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 ... unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” It follows, then, that a soul of “gigantic volition,” like that of Ligeia, who has a “wild desire 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 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 “death” she becomes some “palpable but invisible object,” an “invisible foe,” who triumphantly struggles with Rowena for her body.

But the other half of the story throws this half in doubt, for this portion concerns the nameless 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 life. For the sake of reading meaning into the tale, one may truncate the story and argue that it is only about metempsychosis. Or, by a similar procedure for a similar purpose, one may disregard the theme of metempsychosis and urge that the tale is only about a man who has murdered Rowena in a maniacal attempt to bring Ligeia back to life. But if we are to see the story as a whole (and what other way is there?), we shall have to confess that the “meaning” of the tale escapes us. On the one hand, the narrator cannot be trusted, as his senses are disturbed and his testimony suspect. On the other hand, the events the narrator reports may be true: his madness may derive from the very authenticity of the events he experienced. In any case, taking “Ligeia” both as story and paradigm of man's relation to the universe, we must conclude that its meaning is not only indeterminate but indeterminable. As Poe says of the Man in “The Man of the Crowd,” “er lässt sich nicht lesen.”(6)

It can be said, of course, that Gothic fables like those of Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are inappropriate for Poe's vision, and I would agree, though as Allen Tate reminds us in “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” this “particular vision ... is perhaps not capable of anything better than Mr. Poe's ludicrous decor.” And if it is of any consequence, we might remember that the brilliant fables that characterize Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape are being [page 50:] dropped by Beckett in favor of more claustrophobic fables like Poe's (Breath is a case in point), as if those other fables suggested too much hopefulness in the human condition. It might be pointed out, too, that D. H. Lawrence (in “Edgar Allan Poe”) noticed that Poe's fictional style sounds metallic, clanking, mechanical. Apparently unaware that Poe commanded a critical style that for lucidity, vigor, and self-possession was inferior only to Thoreau's in the period, Lawrence derided that style. Yet he glimpsed the explanation and even the justification for it in saying that Poe “never sees anything in terms of life, but almost always in terms of matter ... or in terms of force, scientific.”

It is time to conclude. In Poe's major fiction we see man in a condition of total alienation, without the power to alter or ameliorate his condition, without the wisdom to comprehend his condition, without the courage or grace to submit to his condition. In adop ing the mechanistic model of man, Poe denied his characters dignity, joy, humor, creative force, fortitude, often even names; indeed, he denied them all the humanizing features and reduced them all to psychological objects. In his characteristic first-person narratives, we have very much of the data of tormented self-consciousness, very little pertaining to the world “out there”; and even these data are ex tensions of the mind, the weird landscapes and fantastic interiors of the projective psyche. Far from “I-Thou” and “I-Other” relation ships, to play with Martin Buber's terms, we have “It-It” relations — when, that is, Poe's characters relate to anyone or anything. When human connections are made, they produce only violence, violation, terror, and finally murder. One remembers The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with its slaughter and cannibalism. Yet this story, being one of adventure, may perhaps be discounted. But what does one do with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell Tale Heart,” “Hop-Frog,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and all the other stories that involve murders of one sort or another?

We have come a long way from Greek tragedy with its hopeful image of man, or from Dante with his overpowering vision of coherence in the universe, or from Shakespeare with his fully humanized characters in fully drawn situations. We have come to Poe, whose characters, all of them more or less interchangeable like mechanical parts, seem the most diminished in all literature, driven atoms in a [page 51:] universe void of hope, meaning, and volition. It is as if Poe consciously dramatized Teufelsdrdckh's confession:

Poe's narratives, as prefigurative fables of man's total debasement, are perhaps too unrelieved, too appalling, to be taken as culture myths, as we have taken Katka's, Faulkner's, Flannery O'Connor's, and Beckett's. In fact, we have sought in every way to rid ourselves of his apocalyptic vision by labeling his fiction mere Gothicisms, or wretched art, or the suppurations of a profoundly wounded psyche (did not Poe protest in story after story, “Why will you say that I am mad?”). Yet, however marginally, that vision continues to haunt the international imagination, like Hiroshima, the Nazi death-camps, and Vietnam. And perhaps it is time to listen to the noises issuing from Poe's dungeons and tombs, from behind his walls and underhis floorboards. For Poe, in Lawrence's judgment, “performed some of the bitterest tasks ... that can be asked of a man. Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive.” I take Lawrence's statement to mean that, to save ourselves, we must look into the Abyss, into whose depths we are heading; that we must recognize the mindless mechanical forces that, like the heated telescoping walls of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” are nudging us into the Abyss; that the Abyss represents dehumani zation and disintegration of the personality, the condition of Hell. Only then may the human soul begin to resist and struggle to survive.

The theme of a recent book by Richard Poirier, as Denis Donoghue nicely summarizes it, is that

Donoghue comments, “The imagination can go no further in critique than by finding the given world incorrigible in principle, impenetrable in practice.”(7) But Donoghue, in making this statement, has for gotten Poe, who even in his fiction found no home fit for his beleaguered consciousness to live in. The fictional world he created is more incorrigible in principle, more impenetrable in practice, than the world out there. We can only hope this remains so.

[page 52, continued:]

NOTES

1 Allen Tate has remarked that Poe “discovered our great subject” in modern literature, “the disintegration of the personality” (“The Angelic Imagination,” The Man of Letters in the Modern World [New York, 1964], p. 118). The tales that bear on this subject I refer to as his major fiction.

2 All societies have culture-myths of one kind or another that have no necessary relation to whatever we call objective reality. Some obvious culture-myths are our recent beliefs in romantic love, in universal education, in progress. To trace the variations of a single culture myth, in the 17th century we have John Cotton's statement: “[ Democracy] is the meanest and worst form of all forms of government.” In the 18th century we have Jefferson's affirmations of democracy in the Declaration of Independence, even to the adoption of the social contract and tabula rasa myths. In the 19th century we have Thoreau's statement: “That government is best which governs least.” And in Marx's vision, we have the state withering away altogether. Some culture-myths we may judge to be negative or positive as they aggravate or ameliorate man's sense of alienation, and as they provide quasi-authority for activities and arrangements of a social, political, or economic nature that tend to debase or enhance man. Carlyle, for instance, felt that Utilitarianism was a negative culture-myth, one that was “more beggarly” of “man and man's life ... than Mahomet's” (“The Hero as Man of Letters,” On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History).

3 Some critics for the sake of analysis regard literature as a combination of make-believe and word-game existing more or less independently of life “out there.” Such a view has obvious value in that it constrains us to examine the work of art as art. But literature, in addition to being an organic system of interrelationships, is, in Aristotle's phrase, “an imitation ... of life” (Poetics) or, in Henry James's phrase, a “direct impression of life” (“The Art of Fiction”). If literature reflects life, life also reflects literature. Mackenzie's Man of Feeling and Hemingway's code-heroes, if they did not create images of man out of whole cloth, at least reinforced and popularized those images. George Orwell, for instance, said about H. G. Wells: “Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. ... The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly [page 53:] different if Wells had never existed” (“Wells, Hitler, World State,” Dickens, Dali & Others [New York, 1946], p. 121).

4 Walter Jackson Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts (New York, 1952), p. 6. In “Fate” Emerson said of Greek tragedy: “Whatever is fated that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.” He added, however: “Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.” Spinoza devoted his entire Ethic [[Ethics]] to this idea: “The man who has properly understood that everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature, and comes to pass according to the eternal laws and rules of nature, will in truth discover nothing which is worthy of hatred, laughter, or contempt” (Scholium to Proposition L). Spinoza, no doubt like Sophocles in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, recognized the nearly impossible difficulties in achieving “peace of soul” through Reason, though he also recognized that “‘it can be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered. ... But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare” (Scholium to Proposition LXII).

5 Samuel Butler argued that Darwin had mistakenly “banished mind from the universe,” for he maintained that a true origin of species would involve “sense of need, intelligent contrivance, endeavor, perseverance, faith, and memory” (see Royal A. Gettmann's Introduction to The Way of All Flesh [New York, 1956], p. viii). Sartre regarded Marxism as self-contradictory in that, though it claimed to be a materialist philosophy, it emphasized the active role of consciousness “in anticipating, planning and determining events” (see Bernard Frechtman's Introduction to Sartre's What is Literature? [Northampton, England, 1967], p. xiii). And Abraham Kaplan tells us that Freud “as a scientist ... adheres unswervingly to a deterministic viewpoint” (“Freud and Modern Philosophy,” Freud and the 20th Century, ed. Benjamin Nelson [New York, 1957], p. 218). I cannot resist mentioning Freud's humble object in the psychoanalytic process: “to transform neurotic despair into the general unhappiness which is the usual lot of mankind.” Kaplan comments acutely on Freud's view “of the usual lot of man kind” as follows: “Whether such an appraisal is true of the human condition or only of the life of man in the century since Freud's birth, it is surely impossible to say now” (ibid., p. 229).

6 In discussing “Ligeia” I have drawn upon my article, “Poe as Probabilist in Forgues’ Critique of the Tales,” Supplement to Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 60 (Fall 1970).

7 Poirier's book is A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York, 1966). Donoghue's remarks appear in “When in Rome, Do as the Greeks,” Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924-1966, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis, 1969), p. 487.