Text: G. R. Thompson, “Preface,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. xi-xv (This material is protected by copyright)

[page xi:]

Preface

ALTHOUGH IN THIS STUDY I am concerned principally with Poe's Gothic tales, what I have to say about these tales has important implications for his other works. A major point of emphasis is the continuum between the Gothic-occult works and the comic-satiric works. I argue that critics have underestimated his complexity and subtlety in the short story, misconstrued ironic techniques as flaws, and ignored an important aspect of Romanticism that provides a historical context for reading Poe as an ironist instead of a completely serious Gothicist. I attempt to resolve the aesthetic problems of Poe's “flawed” style and to correct the mistaken view that the nearly equal division between the number of his comic and serious tales reflects a “schizophrenic” schism in his world view. At once a Romantic idealist devoted to “transcendental” vision and yet also a satirist, Poe is the preeminent American follower of the European “Romantic Ironists” whose influence was once felt around the world in the larger Romantic movement emanating from Germany.

Although Poe's affinities with the school of Romantic Irony have not been studied before, the possibility that Poe is basically an ironist is not a totally radical suggestion. Indeed, it requires but a few examples to show that in his Gothic tales Poe indulges in ambivalent mockery of man's ability to perceive the world, mockery especially of the rational powers, mockery that includes the ironically and even satirically manipulated responses of the reader.

In placing Poe in a Romantic context, I survey German theories of “transcendental irony,” which emphasized the dark possibilities of Kantian idealism. I focus on the Schlegels and Tieck, whom Poe read with care, and on their relationship to “nightside” psychology and philosophy, which Poe used ambiguously in his tales of metempsychosis and mesmerism. After an initial survey of the theories of irony, my basic strategy is to take up in turn the questions of Poe's serious use of the Gothic, of the grotesque and arabesque, and of the occult as the principal problems in the ironic reading of his fiction. In each case, I try to suggest the close link between the Gothic works and the comic [page xii:] works. Regarding Poe's technique, I cite evidence that his Gothic mode was not supernaturalistic but the psychologically realistic, into which he insinuated an element of burlesque. In exploring the meanings of the terms grotesque and arabesque, which Poe himself applied to his tales, I argue that Poe's Gothic tale developed from a satiric mode into an ironic philosophical concern with the “perverse” as both the structure of man's mind and the structure of the universe. In Poe's universe of misperception and illusion, the fictional hero undergoes extended ironic reverses in fictional structures so ironically twisted and laced with satiric innuendo that the form itself, even the plot, approaches an absurd hoax on the character — just as existence may be God's hoax on man, the ultimate grotesquerie. Thematically, Poe's Gothic works suggest that the deceptive perversity of the universe and of the mind can be transcended only by the Godlike imagination of the ironic artist.

In arguing this, it is not my intention to discredit all those readers who have responded seriously to the sinister, occult element in Poe. Rather, I seek to show other levels of meaning in addition to a surface level of the occult, arguing that a superficially literalist approach to Poe's dark tales in terms of the occult obscures the true complexity of his achievement. It is not so much that previous critics have been wrong, as it is that their readings of Poe's tales have been limited.

Despite occasional appearances to the contrary, I have tried throughout to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. The basic sourcebook for nineteenth-century American “Germanism” is Henry A. Pochmann's massive German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), wherein is to be found the most inclusive and detailed discussion of Poe's knowledge of the German language and his acquaintance with and use of German literature, along with a general discussion of the influence of German literature in America, especially as known in translation. Specific reference to this work is somewhat sparing, however, for Pochmann has little to say about the German theories of irony, which, in fact, seem to have been largely forgotten in our day.

I certainly make no claim to be expert in German literature of the nineteenth century, or even in German literature as known in nineteenth-century America; and much of my presentation derives from previous scholarship rather than from intimate acquaintance with German writers of the period. Moreover, what first-hand knowledge I do have of German literature is principally through translation — which brings me to two important points. First, the evidence presented by Pochmann and others strongly suggests that Poe (who excelled in Greek, Latin, French, and other languages as a schoolboy) could read [page xiii:] German with some facility. Nevertheless, while Poe's ability to read German cannot be proved, the case for German literary influence on Poe does not require reading knowledge of the language on his part. The number of translations, reviews, essays, biographies, and histories of German literature available in English during Poe's lifetime was extraordinary; and I try wherever possible to cite pertinent translations and articles.

Second, I wish to emphasize that the present study is not intended so much as a study of the precise influence of any particular German writer on Poe as it is an attempt to outline what kinds of influential literary and philosophical ideas were “in the air” and thereby provide a plausible historical context for the major subject of the book: a revaluation of Poe's fiction in terms of irony. That is, Poe's irony (this way of reading Poe) is the primary subject, his indebtedness to German writers, a secondary subject.

Since my interest is in Poe as a Romanticist rather than in exact influences and parallels from another literature, much more important than Pochmann's study (or Palmer Cobb's, or any other such study of Poe's knowledge of the German language and indebtedness to German literature) are two other works on which I have relied heavily for the theoretical background of literary criticism. My general debt to René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, 4 vols. to date (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956-) is so pervasive that without that study I should simply have never seen the connection between Poe's ironic modes and European theories of irony. I also stand in debt to Wellek's Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations Between Germany, England, and the United States During the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). But the other seminal work for me was Wolfgang Kayser's Das Groteske: seine Gestaltung in Malerei and Dichtung (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1957), translated by Ulrich Weisstein as The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana [[Indiana University]] Press, 1965), a book that, whatever its shortcomings, seems to me the most insightful and lucid treatment of the grotesque extant, and which confirmed my sense of the close link between the grotesque and Romantic Irony. To these works I should also add Edward H. Davidson's Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), a work in the tradition of the history of ideas that attempts to see Poe in the aesthetic-philosophical context of Romanticism; and Patrick F. Quinn's The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), which contains what is probably the best general, extended criticism of Poe's works heretofore available. [page xiv:]

From this general theoretical background, then, comes what I claim as original here: the basic critical-historical insight into Poe as a man possessed of the temperament of the European Romantic Ironists. The primary impulse for this study came from my initial puzzlement over Poe's entire canon of work and my discovery of a handful of critics who had discussed possible ironic stances in Poe's fiction, notably Darrel Abel and Richard P. Benton, but also Roy P. Basler, Kenneth L. Daughrity, James W. Gargano, Clark Griffith, Terence Martin, Stephen Mooney, William Whipple, and James Southall Wilson. Since then, others have begun to see the compelling logic of ironic masks and modes in Poe. More research into Poe's affinities with and debts to the German Romanticists remains for others better qualified than I to do. But I hope (as my friend and former colleague Davis Dunbar McElroy remarked similarly of his own work on eighteenth-century Scottish clubs) that I have seriously interfered with anyone else hoping to write on the subject.

Regarding critical essays on particular tales, I have made no effort to cite every article. The critical essays on “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” alone run to over a hundred items, many of them highly repetitive of one another. I cite, in the main, what is directly relevant to my argument. Readers seeking a guide to published criticism on a particular tale should consult the annual Poe bibliographies by Richard P. Benton in the Emerson Society Quarterly to 1967, and in Poe Studies thereafter; the Checklist of Edgar Allan Poe compiled by J. Albert Robbins (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Co., 1969); Jay B. Hubbell's chapter on Poe and J. Chesley Matthews's supplementary list of Poe studies, 1955-1962, in Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963; revised, 1971; the revised edition [1971] does not contain the checklist, and the Poe chapter has been rewritten); the first installment of a Complete Bibliography of Poe Criticism 1827-1967, J. Lasley Dameron's Edgar Allan Poe: A Checklist of Criticism 1942-1960 (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1966); and an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Esther F. Hyneman, “The Contemporaneous Reputation of Edgar Allan Poe with Annotated Bibliography of Poe Criticism: 1827-1967” (Columbia University, 1968), which catalogs all citations by subject and work. More generally, the annual PMLA bibliography and the two volumes by Lewis Leary, Articles on American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954, 1970) are useful and dependable. And yet, at the same time, I have tried in the reference matter not only to document my argument thoroughly, but also to provide for those who wish [page xv:] to pursue certain aspects of the subjects of this study a thematic guide through the massive scholarship available.

I have a number of special debts I wish to acknowledge. Edward Avak and Russell Haney gave encouragement at a crucial time. Charles R. Metzger, Eleazer Lecky, and Joseph Boskin, all of the University of Southern California, read the first, more laborious, version of the manuscript as a thesis in 1965-66. Patrick F. Quinn, of Wellesley College, read the same version somewhat later in conjunction with my introduction to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and made so many valuable suggestions that I cannot properly acknowledge all of them. Richard P. Benton of Trinity College read and edited parts of Chapters 3 and 4. The Research Committee of Washington State University awarded me a grant which helped greatly in rewriting and which aided in other related projects. Graduate students here and elsewhere encouraged me to finish the revision sooner than I had intended — to them many thanks. My colleagues in the Department of English at Washington State University, Robert C. McLean, Kathleen McLean, Milton C. Petersen, and especially Conny E. Nelson whose encouragement and good advice kept me at the work, read parts of the later versions of the manuscript and helped me firm it up and trim it down. My colleague in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, David P. Benseler, helped me with some of the difficult German texts.

I wish to thank the following for permission to use portions of my work on Poe that first appeared elsewhere, and in a slightly different form: Harper & Row for the introduction noted above which now forms parts of Chapters 1 and 7; Richard P. Veler and the Chantry Music Press at Wittenberg University for permitting an adaptation of my essay “Poe and ‘Romantic Irony,”’ which appeared in Papers on Poe, a Festschrift in honor of John Ward Ostrom, and which is now a long section in Chapter 2; American Literature for what is now a part of Chapter 2; Kenneth W. Cameron and Richard P. Benton for material now comprising most of Chapter 3, which originally appeared in the Emerson Society Quarterly and was subsequently reprinted in Benton's New Approaches to Poe by Transcendental Books; Poe Studies and the Emerson Society Quarterly for material now a large part of Chapter 4; English Language Notes for material now a part of Chapter 5; Studies in Short Fiction for material now a part of Chapter 6; and PMLA for material now a part of Chapter 7.

G. R. T.

Pullman, Washington

October 1971