Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 01,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 3-18 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 3:]

1

Perspectives

 

ALTHOUGH FEW WOULD DISPUTE the claim that Moby-Dick (1851) is the masterwork of the Gothic tradition in America, it is clearly Edgar Allan Poe, rather than Melville or Hawthorne, who is the acknowledged master of American Gothic fiction. But whereas Moby-Dick has won its place in the canon of the classic American works supposedly by transcending its surface genre of the Gothic, no work of Poe has fully won a place in the lists of classic American writers supposedly because Poe was unable to transcend the Gothic. Thus it is by a curious irony of literary history that Poe's intricate manipulation of the genre has resulted in the critical judgment that his was “merely” a Gothic art: the art of the carney fun house: cheap, obvious, tawdry. And thus Poe's highly complex use of a Romantic genre has become simplified by reductive critics unable to transcend their own preconceptions of genre.

Nevertheless, those of us who read Poe past adolescence find ourselves in a curious position. If we are capable of feeling Poe's massive impact, we are also likely to feel a little guilty about our response, or at the very least feel an odd disappointment with Poe's strangely flawed tales, with their apparently overdone rhetoric, melodramatic situations, sudden shifts in tone, and seemingly inappropriate intrusions of the comic and absurd. Moreover, the strictures of such critics as Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Yvor Winters, and [page 4:] T. S. Eliot are too well known for any student of Poe to feel entirely comfortable about admitting that he does indeed “take Poe seriously.”(1)

Even Allen Tate, one of Poe's most able defenders, admits to a persistent ambivalence of response: an attraction and fascination that is somehow constantly undercut.(2) The enigma of Poe's impact, Tate suggests, is his ability to move us on a deep and primitive level despite (sometimes even through) clumsiness. Moreover, because of his view of the Forlorn Demon of the Self, Poe is impressive in the whole corpus of his work, for no other writer in nineteenth-century England, America, or France “went so far [[as Poe]] in his vision of dehumanized man.” This thematic coherence, Tate maintains, is clearer in Baudelaire's translations of Poe into French since the characteristic blemishes of Poe's style do not show so clearly. But when the native English-speaking critic reads Poe, he finds that not one of Poe's works is unblemished, that the “decor” of Poe's Gothic world is often “ludicrous,” that the “trappings” of his nightmare world are “tawdry.” Tate writes: “I confess that Poe's serious style at its typical worst makes the reading of more than one tale [[story]] at a sitting an almost insuperable task. The Gothic glooms, the Venetian interiors, the ancient wine-cellars (from which nobody ever enjoys a vintage but always drinks ‘deep’) — all this, done up in a glutinous prose, so fatigues one's attention that [[with]] the best will in the world here [[one]] gives up, unless one gets a clue to the power underlying the flummery” (pp. 467-68). Tate also confesses that he is puzzled by this bad writing because Poe is often capable of direct, simple, unpretentious prose, as in his criticism and in a few of his tales. Tate thus delineates the opposition between Poe's important but narrow themes and horrible but affecting style. The primal fact of death, the perverse fascination of death, the horror of the inhuman and of the dehumanized, and the dramatization and symbolization of subconscious feelings are all done up in glutinous prose and with ludicrous stage-Gothic decor. Thus one of the major problems with Poe's Gothic tales is that, as Gothic tales, they never seem quite wholly to work. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Tate writes, “was a little spoiled for me even at fourteen by the interjection of the ‘Mad Tryst of Sir Launcelot Canning — (p. 455).

A second major problem with Poe's tales (actually another aspect of the first) is that as a single group they seem to lack consistency and wholeness; the body of his fiction splits disturbingly into two large, seemingly inconsistent, groups: flawed Gothic tales on the one hand and flawed comic and satiric tales on the other. Poe's critics have found this duality disturbing not only because the humor of his comic stories seems unpleasantly morbid, really humorless, or finally pointless, but also because Poe has always seemed to them to be, first and last, a [page 5:] Gothic-Romantic writer. His many attempts at humor and satire, according to the Gothicist view of Poe, show not that he was a humorist, but only that humor was actually “alien” to his personality; when he tried to write humor, he was attempting to put on an incongruous mask, out of keeping with his real self.(3)

Indeed, it has come to be conventional to explain the curious incongruities in Poe's works by means of a pseudo-Freudian biographical approach, as proceeding from his lack of self-identity (Poe as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving foster father). This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks or guises and to spend his life in “role-playing.”(4) In this mode, one of the most coherent views of the diversity of Poe's career is the suggestion that Poe in his writings borrowed not only the literary symbols of English Romanticism, but also the very personalities of the English Romantic poets. Poe is supposed to have played Byron in his earliest poems, then Shelley, then Coleridge in his later poems. His “unattractive” satire and parody, according to this view, shows, in another dimension, how much he depended on imitation for literary inspiration. This imitative habit of mind is supposed also to be part of Poe's American quality, derived from the empirical habit of mind in the American culture at large. The empirical strain in Poe is supposed to have completely taken over from the Romantic in the early 1840s, when he wrote his first purely “ratiocinative” detective stories. His 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, in which he discussed the principle of complete unity and totality of effect, thus shows Poe systematizing a formula for the short story; and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in which Poe explained in almost mechanical terms how he came to write “The Raven,” step by rational step, shows Poe claiming as his own the analytic mind of M. Dupin, the rational French detective-hero of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844).

The scheme falters a little at this point, however, for at the same time that Poe was playing, in the words of Leon Howard, the “coldly calculating emotional engineer” of “The Philosophy of Composition,” he was also playing the bereaved Romantic hero of “The Raven” (1845), a Romantic role picked up shortly again in “Ulalume” (1847). And so we return to the easy Freudian view of Poe's inconsistencies: the “personal implications” of “The Raven” as a poem along with the prose account of its composition, according to Howard, are “almost” schizophrenic. Howard does go on to say, however, that Poe's was not truly a “psychological” case, since even before 1846, in the Dupin [page 6:] stories, he was seeking a middle ground of intellectuality that is seen most clearly in the long philosophical essay Eureka (1848). Dupin is the man of reason and intuition, poet and mathematician, whose imagination provides a hypothesis, whose reason controls its application, and whose observation verifies it. This, Poe proposes in Eureka, is the true way to knowledge: instead of the creeping and crawling methods of induction and deduction, we must have leaps of intuition “corrected” by reason.(5)

But this view of Poe's imaginative life, attractive and coherent though it may be in general, does not adequately account for the analytic criticism he practiced from the beginning, or for the number of satiric and comic works that appeared throughout his twenty-year career in a pattern of loose alternation with the Gothic works. Poe's first published story, “Metzengerstein,” is ostensibly a Gothic tale; but it was one of five that Poe sent to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1831, four of which (“The Duc de L’Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon”) are comic and satiric. These comic tales, published after “Metzengerstein” early in 1832, were followed in the next three years by four ostensibly Gothic stories (“MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” and “Morella”). Then came three comic and satiric tales (“Lionizing,” “Hans Phaal,” and “King Pest”) in the middle of 1835, followed by the ostensibly

Gothic tale “Shadow.” Then two more comic and satiric tales (“Four Beasts in One” in 1836 and “Mystification” in 1837) were followed by two more Gothic tales (“Silence” in 1837 and “Ligeia” in 1838). From the winter of 1838-39 to the winter of 1839-40, we find four satiric tales (“How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “A Predicament,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” and “The Man That Was Used Up”) followed by three Gothic tales (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), followed in turn by the comic “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling.” This loose pattern of alternation continues to the end of Poe's career, even suggesting conscious self-parody; the Dupin stories (1841 to 1845) are burlesqued in the comic detective story “ ‘Thou Art the Man — (1844); the suspended animation of “M. Valdemar” (1845) is made comic in Count Allamistakeo's resurrection in “Some Words with a Mummy” in the same year; the living burials of Madeline Usher and of Berenice are travestied in “The Premature Burial” (1844); the Gothic decor of “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) and the revenge theme in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) became part of an absurd, though savage, fairy tale in “Hop-Frog” (1849).

When, at almost exactly and midpoint of his career, Poe first collected [page 7:] his stories as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the comic and satiric works outnumbered the “serious” works by fourteen to eleven. Of the tales written after 1840, the serious outnumbered the comic and satiric by twenty-four to nineteen (though what is serious and what is comic in about a half-dozen of these later tales may, initially, seem arguable). Thus, of the total of Poe's sixty-eight short tales, thirty-five are ostensibly serious and thirty-three are comic and satiric — a balancing off of the serious and the comic that can hardly be mere accident.

Another, more comprehensive, kind of explanation of these matters and other seeming “inconsistencies” in Poe's work focuses on the basic thesis of Eureka (1848), Poe's essay on the origin, meaning, and destiny of the universe. In this book-length work, Poe begins with the proposition that existence implies ultimate annihilation — not only of the individual, but of all things, in a pointlessly pulsating cosmos which endlessly creates and destroys itself. Often self-consciously facing extinction, the forlorn Poe hero gives way to “hysterical” laughter or “draws back,” symbolically, toward self-annihilation in a manner paralleling the basic destructive design of the universe as Poe saw it. In Poe, writes Harry Levin, “the premise of knowledge” is that “all men are mortal, and the insights of tragedy culminate in the posture of dying. More than once ... [Poe] reminds us that Tertullian's credo, ‘I believe because it is absurd,’ was inspired by the doctrine of resurrection. And though Poe's resurrections prove ineffectual or woefully incomplete, we are reminded by the Existentialists that the basis of man's plight is absurdity.”(6) Given Levin's “existentialist” context, Poe's Gothic works, implicitly based on a vision of absurdity, and the mad and half-mad Gothic figures which inhabit these works, seem clearly related to the fierce absurdity of his comic and satiric works.

Although this is a progressive explanation (except for the element of “hysteria”) of the whole body of Poe's work and of its fascination for the modern reader, and while it points the way to a more just assessment of Poe, critics have been slow to reexamine thoroughly the corpus of Poe's work. The result has been an incomplete revaluation which has passively reinforced the older, now traditional, view of Poe as merely the schizophrenic genius of the demoniac imagination. The apparent discrepancy between Poe's “unnatural” comic face and his “true” serious face remains a nagging problem for the modern reader. Moreover, even the reader who would allow a simple, natural diversity of interest to Poe finds himself faced with the critical question of just how to read the works of a Gothic humorist — or the works, for that matter, of a humorous Gothicist. [page 8:]

What we need is a new way of reading Poe — a way just as informed as the new readings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville which have in the last few decades saved their works from consignment to the adolescent's bookshelf. We must divorce ourselves from the traditional Gothicist view of Poe, a view which includes not only the image of Poe as the mad genius of the macabre tale but also the contrary image of Poe as the dreamy poet of the “ideal” world of supernal Beauty. The ideal and the demonic are, of course, major elements in Poe's consciously developed image — but so too are the comic and satiric. The real questions are: how to develop a reading inclusive of these divergent tendencies, and how truly divergent are they at last?

In this study, I am concerned primarily with Poe's Gothic fiction. But I attempt to see it within a coherent system provided by the structures of the individual tales, by the entire canon of his work, and by the pattern of his career, as well as in a literary and philosophical context it has not been seen in before. We will take as a given the traditional view of Poe as a man obsessed with the “nightside” of the soul. The depth and insight that characterize this obsession are what make for Poe's power. But an obsession is also a structure of consciousness, however directed by subconscious impulses. A structure of consciousness must find a language, a set of forms to express itself, and if this brings us to another given of Poe, his acceptance of the Gothic tradition as the language of forms by means of which his obsession could be articulated. It is at this point that the traditional criticism of Poe stops, with the recognition of the powerful obsession and the less powerful language and form. How many critics have in effect wished that Poe, like Kafka, had found a language adequate to his obsession? We will go on from this point. We will develop another dimension: the dimension that explains how Poe was able to protect himself from j the despair to which such immersion as his in the nightside vision must normally lead, and that also explains the paradoxical intertwining of the comic and the serious in his tales, and indeed in the pattern of his career. The key to this new style of reading Poe is to be found in the twentieth-century emphasis on the concepts of tension and irony. (American “New Criticism,” in fact, is the culmination of one line of Romantic literary theory.) The contrast between the ideal and the demonic in Poe's works, between the serious and the comic, the Gothic and the satiric, and, thematically, between hope and despair, is a matter of the balance achieved by the dynamic tension of opposite forces. The view of art and life informing both the tales and the poems, and to an extent the criticism, is that of skeptical dissembler and hoaxer who complexly, ambivalently, and ironically explored the fads [page 9:] of the Romantic Age. Flat statements or commitments in Poe are only seeming. Almost everything that Poe wrote is qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing duplicity or irony in which the artist presents us with slyly insinuated mockery of both ourselves as readers and himself as writer. Irony was the device that allowed him both to contemplate his obsession with death, murder, torture, insanity, guilt, loss, and fear of total annihilation in a meaningless universe, and also to detach and protect himself from the obsession.

In general, the word irony, historically and at present, points to some basic discrepancy between what is expected or apparent and what is actually the case.(7) As a literary term, irony implies some deception, which becomes clear with the perception of discrepancy between the immediately apparent intention, or meaning, or circumstance, or stated belief, and a half-hidden meaning or reality. Literary irony is seen in a writer's verbal and structural mode of purporting to take seriously what he does not take seriously, or at least does not take with complete seriousness. In the implied contrasts the ironist sets up, there is often a sense of one term in some way mocking the other. Irony may also be a serious, noncomic, nonsatiric attitude; in such a case irony may mean simply that an expressed attitude is somehow qualified, usually by its opposite possibility. In any event, although there are different ironic tones, irony is more often than not philosophically characterized by a skepticism engendered by seeing opposite possibilities in a situation, as is especially evident in the particularly complex and paradoxical skepticism of the strongly ironic poetry of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. This style of irony is highly praised in modern literary criticism; and it is in this sense that the term irony describes Poe's characteristic mode of writing, his habit of mind, and even his style of Romantic idealism.

But Poe is not only an ironist, he is a satiric ironist. Satire, in general, makes fuller use of comic distortion than irony and is always immediately clearer, since the incongruities show more plainly. Satire distorts the characteristic features of an individual or of a society or of an artistic work in order to ridicule that which the satirist dislikes — usually (or avowedly) the vices and follies of mankind, the lamentable falling away from traditional ideals. When the satirist makes use of irony, he pretends to take his opponents seriously, accepting their premises and values and methods of reasoning in order eventually to expose their absurdity. The relationship of irony to satire, however, is complicated by the problem of emphasis, since either can be the weapon of the other, since either can provide the basic thrust of a work, and since both make use of distortion. But in addition to Poe's [page 10:] ironic and satiric styles, we must consider his closely related style as a hoaxer. Whereas satire makes use of comic surprises and contrasts, irony is usually subtler, and the essential deception involved in literary irony may be so subtle that the work becomes a hoax, and this is often the case in Poe. A hoax is usually thought of as an attempt to deceive others about the truth or reality of an event. But a literary hoax attempts to persuade the reader not merely of the reality of false events but of the reality of false literary intentions or circumstances — that a work is by a certain writer or of a certain age when it is not, or that one is writing a serious Gothic story when one is not. The laugh of the hoaxer is rather private, intended at best for a limited coterie of followers. Just as the satirist limits his circle of understanding readers to those who can perceive the flaws of society, so the ironist limits his circle of understanding readers to those who can discriminate with more subtlety the complexities of art and life.

At the extreme, the hoax can limit the circle of understanding readers to an audience of one. The hoax can in such a case be seen as a kind of supreme irony in which the writer mocks perceptive “eirons” like himself, and even, therefore, himself. Indeed, the German Romantic Ironists of the early nineteenth century, who had great influence on Poe, constructed theories of transcendence of one's mere selfness through almost this very means — what Friedrich Schlegel called “self-parody” and “transcendental buffoonery,” which involves achieving a mystical sense of an “ideal” state beyond our limited earthly one by playing, as it were, a cosmic hoax on both the world and oneself.(8) Critical, skeptical detachment was the basis of these formal theories of Romantic Irony which flourished in the late eighteenth and early li nineteenth centuries, especially in Germany, and which constitute a major and heretofore unexplored part of the historical context of Poe's literary and philosophical vision. These formal theories of irony will be a major touchstone of this study.

In English, the first instances of the word irony reflected its earliest classical meaning. Irony conveyed only a sense of a criticism that blamed through apparent praise, a technique that requires of the writer little more than a sense of the incongruous and an ability to exaggerate or understate. Poe, it is worth mentioning here, in No. 30 of “Fifty Suggestions” shows an interesting awareness of this early meaning. He writes: “A common trick is that of decrying, impliedly, the higher, by insisting on the lower, merits of an author.” That is, a reviewer may praise “the acumen of Carlyle, the analysis of Schlegel, and the style of Macaulay,” thereby implying, by praising Macaulay's “style,” that he does not have the “acumen” and “analysis” of the [page 11:] others (H 14:180-81) [[(P 2:498)]]. Gradually, the term was applied to more diverse effects involving some kind of discrepancy and came to be associated with reverses of circumstance and with certain characters and attitudes in tragedy, but especially with the personality of Socrates — with a habit of mind skeptical, dissimulating, and more than a little amused. Eironeia and eiron were initially terms of abuse for the Greeks, eiron suggesting something like deceiver, or sly fox. But Aristotle, and subsequently Cicero and Quintilian, expanded the meanings of irony so that it came to mean a mode of behavior that makes use of pretended modesty or ignorance in order to expose falsehood or to get at some truth possibly concealed under the surface of a situation or statement. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle used the term eiron to mean one who understates, as opposed to alazon, a pretender who exaggerates, with the ideal lying between the two. J. A. K. Thomson points out, however, that Aristotle, with characteristic Greek hatred of excess, guardedly praised the “eirons.” But Cicero conceived of irony, especially “Socratic” irony, as urbane pretense and humane grace; and since then, Socratic irony has meant detached dissimulation in order to get at truth. In the context of Romantic Hellenism, it is easy to see from this background the logic of the impulse toward a “transcendental” irony.

In this connection, it is pertinent to note the meaning of another word. The term mystic in the sense of an idealist, of a striver after higher truth (even though through deceptive means), was associated with Socrates’ name during his lifetime; and the conjoining of deceptive sly-foxery with idealism, as in Socratic irony, was clearly associated with English and German uses of the word mystic up to Poe's time.(9) Poe, in fact, comments on the German literary usage of mystic in a review of Thomas Moore's Alciphron in 1840. “Mystical” is employed, Poe says, by A. W. Schlegel and “most other German critics” to mean the kind of writing “in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one” (H 10:65). Poe goes on to discuss the “soul-exalting echo” in some writings of a “more ethereal beauty beyond”; but the important point for us in our search for a better understanding of Poe's accomplishment is that Poe links Romantic “ideality” with a suggestive doubleness of meaning and cites Schlegel, a popularizer of the German school of Romantic Irony, as his authority for the concept and the term. By itself, Poe's discussion of mystical” is not particularly conclusive regarding his familiarity with the theories of Romantic Irony; but such fragments scattered throughout his critical reviews, Marginalia notes, essays, and letters, when seen in the literary context of the time, will provide insights that explain [page 12:] how Poe was a skeptical ironist at the same time that he was a Romantic, an idealist, and even a mystic.

It has been insufficiently recognized that it is the Continental movement or school of irony that comprised Poe's basic intellectual, philosophical, and artistic milieu. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth, writers like Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, and others had preceded Poe in the exploration of what they called the “nightside” of the mind and nature. Romanticists generally had come by Poe's time to feel that the secrets of Nature lay deep within the human mind itself. But in their philosophical struggles with objectivity and subjectivity, and in their exploration of mental aberrations, many, especially the “gloomy Germans,” became increasingly pessimistic about man's ability to free himself from the web of illusion that existence seemed to present. But the small group of writers and thinkers with which we are here concerned developed a liberating, if still rather gloomy, theory of the darkly comic along with a philosophy of “Transcendental Irony,” which could, they felt, free the deep-thinking man from his agonies (at least temporarily).

Romantic Irony has come to mean in our time an awkward and seemingly pointless breaking of dramatic illusion, such as having a stage “audience” interrupt a play with criticisms and even usurp the roles of the “actors,” or having a character in a novel observe in Volume 3 that the lake he is now passing by is the very one he had fallen into in Volume 1, page such and such. These techniques, of course, have been used frequently by twentieth-century expressionist playwrights — indeed seem to have been in some sense rediscovered by the practitioners of Theater of the Absurd in their attempt to present an empty, absurd, illusory world. In Poe's time, this kind of irony became (for Poe and the coterie of writers we are talking about) the highest creative, poetic, and philosophical activity, having as its aim the “annihilation” of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations through a liberating perception of the element of absurdity in the mysterious contrarieties of the universe. The Romantic Ironist strove, in his contrariness, deceptiveness, satire, and even self-mockery, to I attain a penetrating view of existence from a subliminally idealistic height of aesthetic perception — but always with an eye on the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, or at best probably decaying and possibly malevolent universe. The more usual Romanticist wished to penetrate beyond the sensory to the ultimate secrets that lay behind appearance, secrets that, as mentioned, Romantic [page 13:] writers increasingly felt lay within the mind itself. But for the “Dark Romanticist,” especially for the Romantic Ironist, the only attainable harmony in all the deceptiveness and chaos which the world presented was a double vision, a double awareness, a double emotion, culminating in an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession and intellectual control. This kind of Romantic artist-hero held the world together by the force of his own mind — or he watched the world and his own mind crumble under the stress of dark contrary forces. The result, in the works of these writers, is an ambivalent pessimism: a kind of black humor, or black irony, and as well a skepticism engendered by the self-awareness of the subjective human mind insistently reaching out toward an illusive certainty.

The fictional and poetic creations resulting from such philosophical and artistic attitudes were sometimes called “grotesques,” sometimes “arabesques,” by the German (and French) writers of the day. These two words have complicated and intertwining histories; but clearly Poe was pointing out his philosophical and literary affinities with these writers when he remarked, albeit negatively, on the apparent “Germanism” of his tales in the preface to his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). This distinctively German genre of Romantic fiction (and poetry) is characterized by multiplicity of points of view and yet also by complete dramatization of the imagined world from the viewpoint of a single mind. Thus, in Poe's works, the limited perspective of the ever-present “I” in the tales has, carefully worked up around it, an intricate “arabesque” structure of illusion, misperception, perversity, and grotesque self-torment. Yet, in the complex structure and tone of the tales and poems, all is treated with a seldom recognized half-humorous ironic detachment from the plight of the “I” protagonist.

In Poe's characteristically intricate, even involuted, patterns of dramatic irony, the apparent narrative voice which pervades the surface atmosphere of the work is also seen within a qualifying frame. Several of the tales (for example, “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Ligeia,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”) involve a confessional element, wherein the first-person narrator, like Montresor, seems calmly or gleefully to recount horrible deeds, but which generally implies a listener to whom the agonized soul is revealing his torment. Especially revealing of the ironic structure thus achieved is Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado.” In the surface story, Montresor seems to be chuckling over his flawlessly executed revenge upon unfortunate Fortunato fifty years before. But a moment's reflection suggests that the indistinct “you” whom Montresor [page 14:] addresses in the first paragraph is probably his death-bed confessor — for if Montresor has murdered Fortunato fifty years before, he must now be some seventy to eighty years of age. None of this is explicitly stated; it is presented dramatically; and we get the double effect of feeling the coldly calculated murder at the same time that we see the larger point that Montresor, rather than having successfully taken his revenge “with impunity,” as he says (H 6:167) [[(M 3:1256)]], has instead suffered a fifty-years’ ravage of conscience.(10) Likewise, many of Poe's Gothic tales seem to involve supernatural happenings; but they too have their dramatic frames carefully worked up around them. Insinuated into them, like clues in a detective story, are details which begin to construct frames around the narrative voice of the work. These dramatic frames suggest the delusiveness of the experience as the first-person narrator renders it. As in the works of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, there is often in a Poe tale a tale within a tale within a tale; and the meaning of the whole lies in the relationship of the various implied stories and their frames rather than in the explicit meaning given to the surface story by the dramatically involved narrator.

It has only been within the last ten to fifteen years that critics have begun to look carefully at Poe's narrators as characters in the total design of his tales and poems, and to suspect that even his most famous Gothic works — like “Usher” and “Ligeia” — have ironic double and triple perspectives playing upon them: supernatural from one point of view, psychological from another point of view, and often burlesque from yet a third.(11) But not only is nearly half of Poe's fiction satiric and comic in an obvious way, also the Gothic tales contain within them satiric and comic elements thematically related to the macabre elements.(12) Poe seems very carefully to have aimed at the ironic effect of touching his readers simultaneously on an archetypal irrational level of fear and on an almost subliminal level of intellectual and philosophical perception of the absurd. The result in the Gothic tales, as in many of the poems, is a kind of ambivalent mockery. We can respond to Poe's scenes of horror or despair at the same time that we are aware of their caricatural quality.

Although not really one of Poe's complex tales, and although at the end ostensibly comic, “The Premature Burial” (l844) is one of the clearest examples of Poe's double effect, of his Gothic irony. The hero is an avid reader of Gothic books on burial alive, and he gives us for three-quarters of the tale horrifying “factual” histories. Terrified of being buried alive himself, especially since he is subject to cataleptic fits, the protagonist arranges for a special sepulcher, easily opened from within, and a special coffin, with a spring-lid and a hole through which [page 15:] a bell-pull is to be tied to the hand of his “corpse.” When he awakes in a cramped, dark, earthy-smelling place, he is convinced that he has fallen into a trance while among strangers and that he has been

The Gothic terror is comically undercut by the reply, and it turns out that the hero has fallen asleep in the narrow berth of a ship, where he has sought refuge for the night, and he is rousted out of his bunk by the sailors he has awakened with his horrible cry. Once we see that this is by no means a straightforward Gothic tale, we can see also the comic exaggeration of the overwrought Gothic style, that is, of what conventionally are “flaws” for twentieth-century readers. The emphasized “deep, deep, and forever,” the italicized “grave,” the punning meaning of “innermost chambers of my soul,” the redundancy of “shriek, or yell,” and the capitalized letter of “subterrene Night” are typical of the exaggerations elsewhere in the tale. There can be no doubt that these stylistic exaggerations are part of Poe's burlesque technique once we read the conclusion, for the incident just described strikes the narrator as so ludicrous that he is shocked into sanity: “My soul acquired tone — acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. ... I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. ‘Buchan’ I burned, I read no ‘Night Thoughts’ — no fustian about church-yards — no bugaboo tales — such as this” (H 5:273) [[(M 3:969)]]. After this jarring, comic, illusion-breaking reference to his own narrative, the hero then tells us that “from that memorable night” his “charnel apprehensions” were “dismissed forever”; and with them “vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.”

The satiric irony of the tale is multiple. The narrator almost terrifies us with his chilling “factual” cases in the first three-quarters of the tale; and then he loses his charnel apprehensions quite suddenly, whereas we are still left entertaining the ghastly possibilities he has suggested. Moreover, the earnestness of his conversion suggests parody of didactic magazine fiction (“out of Evil proceeded Good ... very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion”), especially when we remember Poe's formulation of “the heresy of the Didactic” in “The [page 16:] Poetic Principle” and elsewhere. Finally, in the last paragraph, just as we are perhaps adjusting to the comic conclusion, the narrator reaffirms (“Alas!”) that “sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful.” The “imagination of man” cannot “explore with impunity its every cavern”; our “Demons” must be allowed to “sleep, or they will devour us” (H 5:273) [[(M 3:969)]]. Thus, the final lines suggest with nice ambiguity both the psychological and the supernatural, and leave us entertaining the serious possibilities of the absurd situation.

Many critics, however, will grant Poe a unified complexity of symbolism supporting the madness of an obviously mad character, like Roderick Usher, but balk at seeing an ironic complexity governing the whole tale in the suggested madness of the narrators of spooky stories like “Usher” and “Ligeia.” Edward Wagenknecht, for example, has written that the “absurd notion” that “Ligeia” is “not a story of the supernatural but a study in morbid psychology” requires that we “ignore the text except where it can be perverted” and that we substitute the “fashionable notions of a later period” for those of Poe's own time.(13) “Neither aesthetically nor psychologically,” Wagenknecht writes, does this twentieth-century Freudian reading allow us to read the tale “as a nineteenth-century story”:

Wagenknecht's theoretical point is well taken, but his conclusion about Poe is in error, for given the psychological theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the techniques of nineteenth-century Romantic fiction, especially in Germany and America, one is forced to conclude that the psychological reading of “Ligeia” is, for the proper audience, indeed a nineteenth-century reading. As Michael Allen has shown in his Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, the conception of a coterie audience was an important element in the attitude of the writers of fiction for the influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, whose lead Poe seems to have followed, even though he also subjected the journal to satiric burlesque. There was, in the minds of these writers, on the one hand a large mass audience addicted to the somewhat tawdry melodrama of people caught in impossible predicaments, [page 17:] such as being accidentally baked in an oven (or buried alive), and a smaller coterie of more perceptive readers who could enjoy the sly satire insinuated into such tales.(14) The effect of “Ligeia” is double — for the coterie of the perceptive. The rationale of the tale is psychological. (And who would deny that Poe was interested in abnormal psychology?) But its primary impact is spooky and weird. Yet this double impact is but one part of Poe's irony; “Ligeia” also contains his characteristic satiric innuendo, his ambivalent mockery, for the tale also contains satiric thrusts at transcendentalism and the two kinds of horror materials to be found in the German and English brands of Gothicism.(15)

An obsession and its expressive forms are contingent though different things, just as “code” and “message” are contingent yet different. The device of irony, this way of saying, was itself an obsession; and it could exist in Poe's works separate from the nightside obsession. When it did, it took the form of hoax, parody, satire, and the comic. In attempting to show Poe's constant struggle with his obsessions, I try to delineate his philosophical and literary consciousness in such a way as to show that the element of the horrific was modified by an ability to mock both the vision of the horror that obsessed him and the very forms expressive of it, that Poe's comic face and his Gothic face merged into one ironic face. What was otherwise an inadequate Gothicism became for Poe, in the manner of certain Continental writers, the literary vehicle for his own double and triple vision. With such multiple vision, and with such strategies of duplicity, he could satisfy his public audience, deal with his obsession, and control in intricate structures of opposed forces his simultaneous involvement in, and mocking detachment from, the double horror of the external world and the internal mind. Thus irony, as a device of saying and structuring, became a way of seeing.

The image that opens Poe's difficult poem “Ulalume” catches neatly this tension of involvement and detachment. The self-tortured, bereaved lover, wandering in a “misty mid-region” of numbed forgetfulness, finds that, under the compulsive urgings of his subconscious mind, he has arrived at the tomb of his lost love, whereupon the smoldering agonies of loss burst forth again. Before this, however, he describes the state of his heart as like that of a polar volcano. Although seething with fire within, it was yet encased in ice. This image, I believe, can be seen not only as the objective correlative of the psychological state of the persona of the poem, but also as the emblem of the artistic and philosophical consciousness of Poe himself. Tormenting [page 18:] fire, as well as polar ice, are recurrent images in Poe's works. If the sulphurous currents of fire in “Ulalume” can be taken as suggestive of an inferno of tormented obsessions, the ice which for a time binds them is then equally suggestive of the aesthetic and philosophical control we find forcibly exerted over these obsessive materials which yet continually threatened to break through the cool detachment of his artistry.

Although the ironic vision was natural to Poe, he was by no means alone among Romantic writers in his exploration of irony as a literary device and as a means of ordering the world. Indeed, the artistic consciousness of a writer may be described as the resultant tension between the individual personality and the external givens of the culture. Thus this study is ultimately in the tradition of the history of ideas, and I take up in turn the history and theory of irony, the Gothic, the grotesque and arabesque, and the nightside, in an effort to delineate the intellectual and artistic milieu with which Poe had to deal. And thus ultimately I end where I begin, showing in Poe the pervasiveness and depth of that peculiarly neglected Romantic conception of irony that the early nineteenth-century German aesthetician K. W. F. Solger, for one, called the “consummate fruit” of the Romantic Mind.(16)