Text: William Goldhurst, “Poe-esque Themes,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 126-139

[page 126:]

William Goldhurst

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

 

Poe-esque Themes

 

RELATED GENERALLY to the universal theme of The Faustian Experience and more specifically to the image of the Bargain with the Devil is Poe's own theme of the Devil on the Loose, which is occasionally used for horrific effect, but more often serves as the vehicle for something droll and fanciful. In “The Devil in the Belfry,” his infernal Majesty is given a comic grotesque appearance, and his mission is to throw panic and confusion into the complacent small-towners who live absurdly regulated lives in the village of Vondervotteimittiss. “The Angel of the Odd” and “Loss of Breath” both concern the passive, luckless individual who seems fated for misfortune. It is Poe's whimsical suggestion that this tendency in human affairs is the work of the Devil and that the Devil is everywhere (both non-heroes in these stories read a book entitled The Omnipresence of the Deity). The Devil in “King Pest” is presented in the form of six grotesque wine-drinkers, who when fused in the reader's imagination take on the qualities of a horrifying nightmare; but in Poe's disintegrated portrait they are nothing more than a group of harmless and easily subdued pretenders. This is a case where the horror in a Poe story is disarmed and rendered latent. In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” a foolish gambler named Toby Dammit invokes the Evil One once too often — to his regret; but Poe's real interest is revealed in the constant, satirical barrage of pepper-shot directed at editors and fashionable [page 127:] philosophers of the period. Finally we have “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” wherein the ferocious violence of the unrestrained orang-utang suggests the destructive power of the Devil on the Loose, attacking man in a state of radical unpreparedness. The subtle identification of the beast with the Devil occurs in the passage when ear-witnesses to the crime (the only eye-witness is the sailor-owner) hear the words “‘sacré,” “diable,” and “mon Dieu” coming from inside the room where the butchery is in progress. “Sacré diable mon Dieu” is reminiscent of the aforementioned Ommnipresence of the Deity — both of which tell us something about Poe's attitude towards the diabolical aspects of life, at those times when the infernal threatens to dominate the blessed (which is the ambiguity contained in the word “sacré”). In connection with this point we might remember the closing paragraph of “The Premature Burial,” which says, “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell-[.]”“ And this tells us not that life is given over to the Devil-God, but that there are moments in the lives of all of us when it seems so.

At the same time Poe's use of the Devil on the Loose theme may be metaphorical, an image he employs to dramatize the idea that whatever devils are on the loose in this world are really inside us. This is another occasion when Poe speaks to the modern reader by way of a modulation from the supernatural to the psychological, another way in which Poe's fiction can accommodate itself to the perspective of a later era. And this notion brings us to another Poe-esque theme, Compulsive Self-Betrayal. Here several stories from the last category, Devil on the Loose, have a definite affinity with Poe's emphasis under the present heading and particularly with its lead story, “The Imp of the Perverse.” This tale explores the universal human tendency towards the unproductive, the unnecessary, and self-defeating acts of everyday life, which in neurotic individuals becomes an overpowering or even an exclusive principle of operation. The “imp” is the inexplicable impulse which prompts us to use circumlocution when we know that such a practice is bound to irritate our listener, to delay when immediate action is obviously called for, and to contemplate throwing ourselves off a precipice when we know that that is the one fate we fear most. We cannot help ourselves in these situations, says Poe; we feel compelled to do that which we know will undo us. Or perhaps, he adds as he proceeds once more to explain the inexplicable, we do it because we know we shouldn't. [page 128:]

The leading examples of the Compulsive Self-Betrayal theme are “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” — all three of which are based on the situation of a murderer revealing information that will condemn him; “The Angel of the Odd,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (from the previous category) — which are stories of hard-luck types who may be seen as perverse individuals who bring about their own misfortunes; and finally we have the brilliant scene of Compulsive Self-Betrayal when Pym contemplates falling off the face of the cliff in Chapter XXIV of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Directly related to this theme, as well as to Poe's more general interest in varieties of mental aberration, is the Poe-esque theme of Appearance and Reality. For in “The Gold Bug” the appearance is that the hero is mad; but the reality is that he is full of divinest sense. And in “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” the persons we take to be the custodians of the asylum are in fact the inmates; and the custodians, who later make their entrance acting like mad animals, are in fact the only sane people in the institution. Surely Poe is trying to tell us in these stories that our preconceived notions of sanity and madness can drastically mislead us. For a brief explicit treatment of this theme see the opening paragraph of “Eleanora.”

But Appearance and Reality in Poe applies to other situations as well. In “The Sphinx” an ugly insect crawling down a thread along a window-sash appears to the high-strung narrator to be a monstrous animal scurrying down the side of a distant hill; and this error in perspective affords Poe an opportunity to insinuate a lesson in political complacency. In “The Oblong Box” Poe points up the smugness of the narrator by having him judge the contents of his friend Wyatt's peculiarly shaped wooden crate on its appearances. With grotesque irony Poe has him assume that the box contains a copy of the painting The Last Supper, when in fact it holds the corpse of Wyatt's deceased wife. “The Man That Was Used Up” is a satire upon many things; but it is built upon the situation of a great national hero who appears to be a splendid physical specimen, but who in reality is a composite of false teeth, glass eyes, and prosthetic limbs. The same sort of grotesquely exaggerated difference between the appearance and the reality is found in Poe's delightful comic story “The Spectacles,” in which the vain and amorous hero falls madly in love with a lady whom he believes to be young and beautiful. Actually, since he suffers from a case of extreme near-sightedness, he is unaware until the conclusion [page 129:] that the object of his passions is his own great, great grandmother. The most complex and mature use of the theme of Appearance and Reality occurs in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” when the narrator struggles to make some sense of the strange behavior of Roderick Usher. In effect he is trying to read the reality behind the appearances; but he succeeds only in working himself up into a condition of acute anxiety — before he discovers the secrets of the “house” at the climax of the story.

Particular forms or manifestations of Appearance and Reality are the themes of Masquerade and Deception and Confused Identity. Again here we have some overlapping, for “The Spectacles” from the previous category may obviously qualify for inclusion under the heading Confused Identity, while “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” may be classified as a story of Masquerade and Deception. The latter category will also serve very well, on one level at least, to identify the previously mentioned “King Pest,” for it turns out at the conclusion that the “King” is none other than Tim Hurlygurly, the stage-actor masquerading as a plague-demon. Episodes involving the theme of Confused Identity occur in “Loss of Breath,” when the narrator is taken for the robber who is on his way to execution in the hangman's cart; and also in “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling,” wherein two rivals for the affections of the attractive Mistress Tracle discover that they have been flirtatiously squeezing each others’ hands, rather than the hand of the pretty lady.

Two of the most fascinating uses of the theme Masquerade and Deception are found in “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” where Poe catalogues a number of disguises adopted by the confidence-man to fleece his unsuspecting victims; and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which in fact is largely based on this theme.(1) In Chapter II especially we see Masquerade and Deception at work when Pym disguises himself and denies his identity as Pym; and in VII and VIII when Pym makes up to resemble the corpse of the dead seaman Rogers; then again in XX and XXI when the natives of Tsalal feign friendship to conceal their savage intention to massacre the crew of the Jane Guy. It is interesting to note the burlesque inversion of the disguise episode in Pym, Chapters VII and VIII, when Poe has a corpse masquerade as a living person in the story “Thou Art the Man.”(2) We shall of course include this semi-comic detective tale in the present category, and along with it the masterpiece of sinister tone, “The Cask of Amontillado,” wherein the cunning Montresor conceals his [page 130:] venomous hatred of Fortunato behind the facade of an innocent smile. A variation on the Masquerade and Deception theme occurs in Poe stories such as “Hop Frog” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” where a masquerade ball serves as the setting for the main action of the drama.

Included in the same general category as Confused Identity and Masquerade and Deception is the very closely related theme of Transference of Identity, which to complicate matters further Poe frequently uses in association with the Death of the Loved One. In “Berenice” the narrator notices that the physical appearance, as well as the personal identity of the heroine, undergoes a drastic transformation as the lady's fatal illness approaches its last stages; her decline is brought about by his abstract and uncaring contemplation of her person; in effect he is robbing her day by day of her sense of self. In “Morella” the narrator says that the notion of ‘that identity which at death is or is not lost forever was to me at all times a consideration of intense interest.” This theme is dramatized in the transference of Morella's identity into the person of her young daughter, who dies at the moment she receives her mother's name. In an early version of “Eleanora” Poe suggested that Eleanora and the hero's new love, Ermengarde, share the same identity. In “Ligeia” the beloved first wife of the narrator takes over the identity of the dying Rowena, while the bride in the poem ‘Bridal Ballad” believes that the voice she hears on her wedding day is not her husband's, but her dead lover's. Let us note that Poe uses the general notion of identity, as we shall see by and by when we consider the theme of Supernal Oneness as an integral part of his theories about the origin and composition of the universe. Thus Masquerade and Deception, Confused Identity, Transference of Identity — as well as all variations upon the general notion of identity — must be counted among the most pervasive and fundamental Poe-esque themes.

The same significance should be accorded our next consideration, that is, Poe's use of an intriguing concept which for the sake of clarity and convenience I have divided into two themes designated The Double and Yin and Yang. Concerning these, a few words of explanation are in order. Poe often thinks in terms of the reflected or duplicate image, the double quantity or quality, the pair of persons, events, and things. This is no mere trivial or incidental aspect of Poe's perception, but is basic to his religious, artistic, and philosophical outlook. In Eureka we find numerous examples of the dichotomy or the apparent [page 131:] polarity used to define Poe's ideas, by way of such terms as attraction and repulsion, matter and spirit, centrifugal and centripetal, etc. In the poems we find an example of this sort of binary vision in the beautiful first quatrain of “Sonnet — Silence”: “There are some qualities — some incorporate things, / That have a double life, which thus is made / A type of that twin entity which springs / From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.” The theme of The Double forms a sort of fascinating underlining for “The Mystery of Marie Rogét,” in which the Mary Rogers case in New York is the vehicle for the Marie Rogét case in Paris; lest we miss this point Poe provides footnotes to emphasize the parallels and a headnote from Novalis that renders the theme explicitly: “There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones,” etc.

Furthermore we can not help noticing that Poe's heroes, many of them, have a habit of taking two wives in succession; the narrator of “The Black Cat” has two cats; William Wilson is split into two persons; “Landor's Cottage” contains the image of a double canoe — one floating on the lake and the other reflected in its surface; and the invalid Bedloe in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” has a counterpart, a double, in the deceased Oldeb, whose name in fact is a duplication of Bedloe's, only in reverse. “The Fall of the House of Usher” abounds in examples of the duplicate or double image: Roderick and Madeline are identical twins and soul-mates, the house is mirrored perfectly in the lake, the mansion and the mind of Roderick are equated, the picture on the wall is a duplicate of Madeline's vault, the sounds described in the book read by the narrator are echoed below, as Madeline struggles to escape, etc. Finally, rounding off our catalogue of instances, we remember that there are two Dupins, the creative and the resolvent (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”).

Now we must add two essential points to our discussion of The Double to gain a full appreciation and understanding of what this theme means and how it operates in Poe's works. First, let us take into account the contrastive or opposite quality inherent in all the pairs presented in the poems and tales: Ligeia is dark-haired and beloved, Rowena is blond and despised; Wilson's double is his good self, while he is his bad; Roderick is male, Madeline is female; Oldeb is killed in a native uprising, Bedloe is done in by a poisonous worm accidentally administered as a cure for chills and fever; “Sonnet — Silence” describes two sorts of silence, one of which is melancholy but terrorless, the other being dreadful in the extreme; the paired [page 132:] concepts in Eureka refer to different forces or substances; the two Dupins perform different functions. And so on. Along this line of thought, to reinforce our point we might add some examples of contrasting pairs that appear elsewhere in Poe — as for instance the short, fat man and the tall, lean man in “King Pest” and “Loss of Breath,” the gross creature (Hop-Frog) and the fine (Trippetta) in “Hop-Frog,” the cycle of light and shadow in “The Island of the Fay,” the contrast of present with past in “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” and Poe's habit of writing a comic and a Gothic version of the same image in different stories, or his imaginative inversion of images, as we have seen in the case of the living-man-made-up-as-a-corpse (Pym) and the corpse made-up-as-a-living-man (“Thou Art the Man”). To summarize, on virtually every occasion when Poe uses the theme of The Double he conveys a sense of similarity-in-difference and difference-in-similarity.

This is the second essential point, that the theme of The Double almost always fuses into or merges with the theme of Yin and Yang. In Chinese philosophy Yin and Yang are the fundamental opposing forces or elements that comprise all life — the male principle and the female, the passions and the actions, matter and spirit, fire and water. But in Chinese philosophy, as in Poe, Yin and Yang are not only contrastive and opposite but also complementary and mutually supportive. There is nothing exclusively one thing or another; man and nature are not separate and independent; the flight of the butterfly, man's thoughts, the blazing trail of a falling star — these are part of the same unitary process that makes up the world as we know it.(3) Neither in Poe nor in Yin and Yang do opposite forces stand apart on different sides of an abyss; they are one, unified phenomenon and each makes the other real and valid — as we might say there is no sense of warmth without previous knowledge of what it is to be cold. Poe says the same thing more generally in ‘”Marginalia”: “There can be no counterfeit where there is no genuine — just as there can be no badness where there is no goodness — the terms being purely relative.”(4) Again, in “Mesmeric Revelation” we find Mr. Vankirk advising his questioner that “to be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. ... Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. ... The pain of the primitive life on Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.” In Eureka Poe makes it a special point to tell us that opposite forces are united: “Thus the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion, the Material and the Spiritual — accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever. Thus the Body and the Soul [page 133:] walk hand in hand.” Students of Poe will immediately recognize the correlative passage from “Ulalume,” when the narrator and Psyche, his Soul, roam together through the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

More practically speaking, in certain tales Poe suggests the effect of Yin and Yang on the emotions, as in the opening paragraph of “Berenice”; or on the seasons, when we can experience summer warmth in the midst of winter, as in “Hans Phaall”’; or on our sense of time, in the way day exists in the midst of night (“The Assignation”) or night in the midst of day (the Dupin stories); or on life itself, for although Roderick Usher and Madeline are separate individuals, Roderick cannot survive without his sister, for they are also the same person.

Yin and Yang — and variations on the theme — are really basic to Poe. We find this orientation in the animal-in-man and the man-in-animal images that abound in his fiction: it provides a framework for the idea of death-in-life and life-in-death which appears in so many of the tales and poems. It is represented in a hundred places in Poe's works — in the merge of feelings, identities, and the forces that operate the universe. It also helps us to understand Poe's concept of time and space, for the Yin and Yang principle applied in this area makes us conscious of apparent paradoxes which after some reflection we, with Poe, may accept: the past exists in the present and the present in the past; the circle exists in the square; the flat plane contains an enormous hole.

For Poe time and space are not fixed and absolute, but fluid and plastic. Not only can day become night and night become day, but in Poe's use of the theme of Plastic Space and Time the square can suddenly change its form — as occurs in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” And the flat plane of ocean can suddenly assume the ragged shape of mountainous crests and seemingly bottomless abysses, as happens in “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Or it can change from smooth to choppy and then all at once dip into the form of an immense vortex, which after a while subsides and leaves the surface flat once more, as, in fact, takes place in “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” Or the wide world of space can overnight contract into the narrowest imaginable confines, just large enough to surround and compress the rigid human form — which is the narrator's actual experience in “The Premature Burial.”

In Poe's use of the theme of Plastic Space and Time, time is even more malleable and active than space; it springs into life at Poe's touch and becomes a living organism. Let us set up sub-headings which will help us explore this extraordinary territory. The unwary individual [page 134:] can be Betrayed by Time, as happens in “The Angel of the Odd,” when the non-hero sleeps through his appointment with the insurance agent; or in “A Descent into the Maelström,” when the fisherman faces the terrible realization that his watch has stopped at seven, the slack period is past and they are headed for the full fury of the monstrous whirl-pool. An entire village can be Arrested by Time, which is what happens to the citizens of Vondervotteimittiss in “The Devil in the Belfry” — where the shape of the community is made to resemble the face of a gigantic clock, with the homes of the residents standing for the minute-markings on the dial. A more gruesome fate awaits certain Poe characters who are Assaulted by Time, either in a comic context (“A Predicament”) or a deadly serious one (“The Pit and the Pendulum”). Several Poe stories are based on a theme we might call the Disordered Sequence of Time. Here a Poe character turns a corner and finds himself in the past, which happens to the protagonist of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” Or he encounters a great disappointment or frustration which renders him unable to leave a fixed moment in the past, as occurs to the love-lorn speaker in “To One in Paradise.” (5) Or he is lulled by the situation into a temporary sense of living in the past, which takes place in “Morning on the Wissahiccon.” Or Poe projects his character far into the future, as in “Mellonta Tauta”; or arranges for a voyage from the past into the present, as in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”; or puts his character to sleep in the past and has him wake in the present, which is what happens to the mummy in “Some Words with a Mummy.” Then there is the curious situation in which the past and the future both double back into the present, which is whimsically suggested in the climax to “Three Sundays in 2 Week.” Occasionally Poe's characters encounter Time's End, when the clock stops, the light fades, all motion ceases, and the world returns to its original condition of total nothingness. This is the fate that descends upon the Prince in “The Masque of the Red Death”; it appears to overtake the hero, early in the story, of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It is the impression forced upon the narrator of “The Premature Burial” during his attacks of catalepsy. It is the fearful silence described in “Sonnet — Silence.” It is the great nothingness towards which the universe advances in Eureka.

But of all the themes associated with Plastic Space and Time, perhaps the most fascinating is the one that presents the Poe character Out of Space, Out of Time. This sudden entrance into a dimension unfamiliar to most men occurs when the mind lays itself open to the [page 135:] images of a dream, as is the case with the speaker in “Dream Land.” Sometimes the hero must be willing to embark on voyages into strange seas and feel the extraordinary violence of nature, as happens in “MS. Found in a Bottle” — a story which clearly dramatizes the “fallen from time” theme of “Rip Van Winkle.”(6) The same affinities with Irving's story apply in the case of “Landor's Cottage,” which includes the images of Rip's walking-tour, his hound, and his rifle. Here the hero drops Out of Space, Out of Time into the world of Heart's Desire, a movement which is preceded by love and intense longing.(7) Poe has a comic treatment (as we might have expected) of this same theme in “Some Words with a Mummy,” wherein the narrator, blessed like Rip with a shrewish wife, decides to “drop out” of the nineteenth century and sleep for two hundred years. Finally, Poe provides a very interesting, ironic reversal of the pattern in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Here the body dies, while the sense of time and space becomes more acute. The dying Monos can even distinguish the irregularities in the clock and watch-tickings around him, as if he had entered into an area where he can perceive Absolute Time. Even after the corporal remains crumble into dust, the heightened sense of space and time continues. In this one example Poe suggests that to die is to fall into Space and Time; but other stories suggest that dreams and the intense experience of danger or longing can lead the hero into an area out of space, out of time.

At this point we must backtrack for a moment and pick up a thread which we had to leave off when we were compiling our examples of the theme Plastic Space and Time. This was our passing reference to “The Premature Burial,” a story which we shall now assign to a new and separate category with the heading Buried Alive. There is no doubt that the prospect of such a fate was one of Poe's preoccupations — for artistic purposes if for nothing else; so that he could say with the narrator of “The Premature Burial” that the idea of being buried alive “held continual possession of my brain.” Poe used the theme for its primary potential as a Gothic horror image, and thus it functions very effectively in “The Premature Burial,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” and perhaps more for its sense of adventure than horror, in Chapter XXI of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. There is also a somewhat grotesque, latent humor in the theme, which Poe exploited in “Some Words with a Mummy” and portions of “Loss of Breath.” In addition there are thought-provoking, metaphorical uses of the Buried Alive theme in stories such as [page 136:] “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the hero's descent into the Inquisitorial dungeon suggests a courageous journey of exploration into the human unconscious, where unsuspected dangers, impulses, and resources languish half-hidden in obscurity. Or “The Gold Bug,” in which the condition of the penniless and withdrawn hero suggests that in America there is more than one form of premature interment.(8) In Poe's hands, the theme of Buried Alive is a relatively rich instrument; and though not extensive or profound in the total scheme of his works, it affords him an opportunity to display a fairly wide range and variety of effects.

Our next theme, which Poe himself called Supernal Oneness, involves some of the complicated theories expressed in Eureka, some of the basic tenets of Poe's aesthetics, and an interpenetration with several themes already considered. Basically the idea behind Supernal Oneness is nothing less than the dynamic operating principle of God in the universe. This principle, as outlined in Eureka, may be defined as a movement from a state of perfect unity (Oneness) to a dispersion of particles into a condition of differentiated matter (life as we know it) and then a return to the original unity and Oneness. I should add that the state of unity or Oneness implies an annihilation of differentiated things and a cessation of motion — thus a sort of absolute death or nothingness. Further, Poe implies that at the conclusion of the process the cycle begins again and continues endlessly, expanding and contracting in a pattern which Poe likens to the Divine Heart-beat of God.

As Maurice Beebe points out in his excellent article on “The Fall of the House of Usher,” this theory of the universe is a very close parallel to Poe's theory of the short story, in which the concept of unity is paramount and in which all the various details (differentiated matter) must relate specifically to the pre-established design (unity or Oneness). Beebe also points out that the characters and events in “The Fall of the House of Usher” represent a symbolic dramatization of Poe's universal schema in Eureka.(9) Let me add that the stories already mentioned in connection with the Time's End theme may be included in the Supernal Oneness category, as illustrating the terminal phase of the Eureka cycle. In addition the story elements which I have listed under the heading of The Double are part and parcel of the Supernal Oneness theme, in the sense that all things — though in a state of differentiation at present — retain a reflection of all other things, harking [page 137:] back to the period of absolute unity or Oneness. The same is true of the stories and poems in the identity-related categories, for in his presentation of Transference, Confusion, etc., Poe seems to be dramatizing the theme of Supernal Oneness. Ligeia and Rowena are two persons, then one; Morella and her daughter have separate identities, then the same; Roderick and Madeline seem independent entities, yet one cannot survive without the other, etc.

Explicit treatments of Supernal Oneness are found in Vankirk's insights into the hereafter in ‘”Mesmeric Revelation,” in sections of Eureka, in the headnote to “Morella,” in the names of the speakers in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” and possibly in the name of the narrator in ‘”Shadow — a Parable.” Poe gives a capsule version of his Eureka theories in a letter to James Russell Lowell dated 2 July 1844. And in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” he followed his practice of self-satire by dropping a sarcastic reference to the Poe-esque theme of Supernal Oneness.

Our last theme for discussion is The Novel Experience, which is related specifically to Supernal Oneness and generally to many of the other themes already mentioned. Since at the beginning of each cycle the universe must be created anew, and since Poe considers the role of the artist something of a parallel to that of the God who wills the dispersion of the fresh particles of matter, so therefore the artist is he who provides The Novel Experience for his generation; God-like, he creates a new universe in his fiction and poetry (“The Universe is a plot of God,” says Poe in Eureka). In his review of Longfellow's works Poe echoes this idea when he says that the poet plays the part of Divine Creator by the novel combination of things and thoughts in this life; by such combinations the poet achieves some of the Beauty that exists in Eternity. In “Anastatic Printing” Poe goes a bit further: “Nothing, unless it be novel-not even novelty itself — will be the source of very intense excitement among men.” In “Marginalia” Poe speaks of a class of intuitive vision accompanied by an ecstasy that is supernatural — his conviction about the latter point resting upon the “absoluteness of novelty” which distinguishes the experience. Poe also quotes Bacon on more than one occasion about there being no exquisite beauty “without some strangeness in the proportion.”(10) Obviously we need not multiply instances to make the point that Poe thought often and deeply about The Novel Experience.(11)

But the significance of the concept is in its use in Poe's works, and [page 138:] it will be of interest to note examples of this theme, both explicit and implicit, in various of the tales. Explicit references are found in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” particularly when Eiros says “my senses are bewildered with the keenness of their perception of the new”; several times in “The Domain of Arnheim,” when Poe is describing the emotions and sensations of the visitor to Arnheim; in “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” when the narrator is describing the effect of the vortex on the observer; in the expression on the face of “The Man of the Crowd’; in the extraordinary features of the crime in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

More important and more pervasive is the influence which the concept of The Novel Experience exerted on Poe's fictional and poetic practice in general. In most of the stories and poems he is deliberately cultivating the new and different effect, the strange and original character, plot, or incident. He is, in other words, at all times conscious of his function as artist-creator and the parallel of that function to the role of God in each new cycle of existence.

[page 138, continued:]

NOTES

“Poe-esque Themes” comprises one section of a larger projected work now in progress which will be entitled “Poe's Themes.” When completed, the full study will consist of three parts representing a fairly comprehensive view of this area of Poe's fiction and poetry. The first two sections will be sub-titled “Contemporary Themes and Interests” and “Universal Themes.” In the first I intend to treat Poe's use of themes drawn from the then-current American scene, as well as his borrowings from European Romanticism. In the second I shall deal in some detail with such prevalent and basic patterns in Poe's works as The Faustian Experience and The Dantean Experience. I have used the term “Poe-esque Themes” to designate particular ideas or treatments of ideas which seem to me to be either invented by Poe or presented by him in such a manner as to be associated forever with his name. [page 139:]

1 The idea that Pym is based largely on the theme of masquerade and deception is the opinion of Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, Ill., 1957).

2 Edward H. Davidson, in Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 144, touches upon the idea of Poe's habit of lampooning himself or inverting some of his serious ideas and images for comic effect.

3 For his very brief and lucid exposition of Yin and Yang I am indebted to Abraham Kaplan, The New World of Philosophy (New York, 1961), pp. 271-272. I do not mean to imply in my discussion that Poe was familiar with Chinese philosophy; I use the terms merely for the purpose of clarification and because they seem apt.

4 This is excerpted in Eric W. Carlson's Introduction to Poe: A Thematic Reader (Glenview, Ill., 1967), p. 542.

5 One is reminded of the use of this Poe-esque theme in a relatively recent American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here the hero wants to turn back the time to a period when he had an ecstatic, youthful love-experience. For an excellent discussion see Robert W. Stallman, “Gatsby and the Hole in Time,” Modern Fiction Studies, I (Nov. 1955), 2-16.

6 This theme is discussed at some length by Philip Young in “Fallen From Time: the Mythic Rip Van Winkle,” Kenyon Review, (Autumn 1960), 437-573. Young describes the sources available to Irving (and for that matter, to Poe) which treated the theme of the man who “drops out” of time to witness rites and meet characters who are unknown to ordinary men except in legends. This is obviously the pattern of the hero in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” who finds himself on board the Flying Dutchman with an ageless crew long since dead for company.

7 One is reminded again of a relatively recent work, this time the rather sentimental novel by James Hilton, Lost Horizon — the movie version of which produced sighs and tears in the theater-audiences of the 1930's. Hilton's hero “drops out” into the hidden paradise of Shangrila, whose inhabitants remain forever young and free from such human burdens as conflict and hardship. Poe's romanticism, of course, is never this mawkish.

8 See my article, “Edgar Allan Poe and the Conquest of Death,” New Orleans Review (Summer 1969), 316-319.

9 Beebe's article is conveniently reprinted as “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), pp. 121-133.

10 The Longfellow review of 1842, the excerpt from “Anastatic Printing,” the segment of “Marginalia,” and the citations from Bacon are all in Carlson, Introduction to Poe, pp. 430-441, 475, 536-537, 211, and 474.

11 For other quotations pertaining to the same theme, as well as an informed and enlightening discussion of Poe's use of novelty, see Richard Wilbur's essay which forms the “Introduction” to the Laurel Poetry Series volume on Poe (New York, 1968), especially pp. 18, 21, and 35. My text for Poe stories and poems throughout this study has been The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O'Neill, 2 volumes (New York, 1970).