Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 03,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 39-67 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 39:]

3

Flawed Gothic

 

HOW DEEP-SEATED and all pervasive the comic, satiric, and absurdist elements are in Poe's Gothic tales is the general question to be explored here, with special reference to Poe's earliest stories. First, we shall note Poe's early plans for a sequential series of burlesque stories, the “Tales of the Arabesque” and the Folio Club tales; then, we shall take a look at the comic technique and satiric thrusts of Poe's first group of comic tales, dating from 1831, in which the hoaxical and comically esoteric are significant factors; and finally, we shall examine the same (but more deceptive) parody and irony in his first Gothic tale “Metzengerstein” (1831-32). Poe's first Gothic tale illustrates in both its exaggerated first version and in its more subtle revised version Poe's development of the burlesque tale into the ironic hoax. Moreover, “Metzengerstein” exhibits in embryonic form Poe's characteristic themes of ultimate annihilation, of hostile and deceptive fortune, of human fear and perversity, and of the absurdity of human existence — but all in burlesque form similar to that of his obvious satires. Poe's themes and techniques in “Metzengerstein” and in the four more clearly comic tales are, I submit, the touchstone for all his subsequent fiction and are exemplary of his style of Romantic Irony.

 

I

In May 1833, Poe wrote to Joseph and Edwin Buckingham, the publishers of the New England Magazine, and offered them a collection [page 40:] of sequential stories called “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque.” Critics have generally assumed that when Poe, seven years later, titled his 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he meant to separate the comic and satiric stories (grotesques) from the serious Gothic stories (arabesques). The never published collection “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque,” however, Poe intended as a burlesque collection. He included with his letter to the Buckinghams, as a representative of the collection, his tale “Epimanes” (later called “Four Beasts in One — The Homocameleopard”), the story of a Syrian tyrant who runs wildly through the streets of Antioch disguised as an animal until the beasts become indignant at the imposture and break out of their cages and lead a protest march through the city — a comic work with many satiric thrusts at American democracy and nineteenth-century concepts of progress. Moreover, the whole series of tales, Poe explained, was a burlesque not only of contemporary styles of tale-writing, but also of current modes of criticism:

The eleven “Tales of the Arabesque” were probably the five tales published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1832, to which Poe added the six tales submitted to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter sometime before October 1833, as the “Tales of the Folio Club.” These eleven stories included the ostensibly serious Gothic works “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Silence,” and possibly “A Descent into the Maelström.”(2) The comic tales, besides “Epimanes,” would have been “The Due de L'Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon” from the Courier, and “Lionizing,” unpublished. The “Folio Club” scheme thus was clearly in Poe's mind sometime prior to the spring of 1833 and may have been worked out even as early as 1831. Between 1831 and 1835, at any rate, Poe wrote a preface for the Folio Club tales, the manuscript of which survives on two leaves, written on both sides in Poe's small hand. The first two pages give the preface essentially complete, though the style of the document, T. O. Mabbott feels, suggests notes to be more fully developed later.(3) The other two pages contain part of what has often [page 41:] been called a beautiful Gothic tone poem, the tale “Siope” (later titled “Silence”). The latter two pages are numbered 61 and 62; thus, as Mabbott, Harrison, and others have observed, a good deal of material must have lain between the preface and the story, and the surviving fragment may be part of a manuscript that Poe unsuccessfully sent around to various publishers in 1835 and 1836.

The Folio Club is a “Junto of Dunderheadism,” which meets once a month at dinner for a reading by each member of “a short tale of his own composition.” The author of the best tale becomes president for the month; the author of the worst tale provides dinner and wine for the next meeting. The writer of the preface represents himself as making an expose of the Club after attending his first meeting. Under the title “The Folio Club” appears a motto from Samuel Butler: “There is a Machiavelian plot/ Though every [n]are olfact it not” (H 2:xxxvi). The implication seems clear: although some of the members’ tales may at first seem no more ridiculous than the Gothic and sensational fiction popular at the time, the stories are actually parodies and satires. In fact, the intention of the Club, the narrator says, is “to abolish Literature, subvert the Press, and overturn the Government of Nouns and Pronouns.” The membership of the Club is limited to eleven (because on April first, in the year three hundred and fifty before the Deluge, there were eleven spots on the sun). The membership includes, besides the newly elected author of the preface, ten “most remarkable men”:

Poe expanded the number of tales and members to seventeen in a [page 42:] letter to the Philadelphia publisher, Harrison Hall, on September 2, 1836, stating that all the tales recently printed in the Southern Literary Messenger were part of the Folio Club series.

At this time, Poe had actually published only fourteen tales in the Southern Literary Messenger: the five Courier stories of 1832, “MS. Found in a Bottle” from the 1833 Visiter, “The Visionary” (later “The Assignation”) from the 1834 Godey's Lady's Book, and seven previously unpublished tales, “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Lionizing,” “Hans Phaal,” “King Pest,” “Shadow,” and “Epimanes.” In order of publication, the tales immediately following the fourteen in the Messenger were the comic “Mystification,” the seemingly serious “Silence” (which was part of the original Folio Club manuscript), the Gothic “Ligeia,” the four comic and satric stories “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “A Predicament,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” ‘The Man That Was Used Up,” and the Gothic “Fall of the House of Usher.” Thus, of Poe's first twenty-two tales, from 1832 to 1839, only two (“Ligeia” and “Usher”) are not either clearly comic and satiric or deceptively ironic burlesques for the Folio Club — a remarkable corroboration of Poe's ironic intent in even the most Gothic of his tales. The next year, having added to the series two “serious” tales (“William Wilson” and “Eiros and Charmion”) and one comic tale (“Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling”) to make a total of twenty-five, Poe finally was able to get a book-length collection of his stories published as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

Poe's overall ironic and satiric intent was only vaguely understood by his contemporaries, however, as is clear from several letters from 1835 and 1836, regarding the “Tales of the Folio Club.” Poe began the Messenger series of tales with “Berenice” in March 1835, and the editor, as we have seen, added by way of introduction the complaint [page 43:] that the story had too much “German” horror. The next month (April 30, 1835), Poe explained to White his ironic attitude toward German horror, though without reference to the Folio Club. He defends “Berenice” on the grounds that it is typical of the kind of absurd Gothic tale that sells magazines, and he remarks that “Berenice” had “originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular,” provided it was treated with an ostensible seriousness.

This statement is often taken by critics to indicate a series of different effects, but Poe's order and especially his punctuation suggest a continuum; the terms of the last sentence quoted here are linked by colons, not by semicolons, nor by the commas that many critics have carelessly interpolated into the letter. The colon signifies a further development, a second thought, a subsidiary class: and the alternations of “fearful,” “witty,” and “singular,” of “horrible,” “burlesque,” and “strange” and “mystical” all derive from the larger category of the “grotesque,” a genre allied primarily with the ludicrous and the ironic, but curiously fusing these comic qualities with the sinister.

The problem of context and therefore of intent is unquestionably the major difficulty in reading Poe's earliest fiction. This is largely the result of Poe's sometimes esoteric interests and his penchant for transmuting satire proper into hoax. The New York novelist James K. Paulding was one of the first to recognize the satiric point of Poe's earliest tales. In 1836 Paulding wrote to Poe and White about the manuscript (presumably the “Tales of the Folio Club”) that had been sent to Harper Bros. for possible publication. Paulding said that the “quiz on Willis” (“The Duke [or Due] de L'Omelette” or “Lionizing”) and the “Burlesque of ‘Blackwood — were “capital” and “understood by all,” but that Poe ought to apply his “fine humor” to “more familiar subjects of satire; to the faults and foibles of our own people ... and above all to the ridiculous affectations and extravagancies of the fashionable English Literature of the day which we copy with such admirable success and servility” (H 17:378). Paulding felt that there was a “degree of obscurity” in the tales that would “prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift, and consequently from enjoying the [page 44:] fine satire they convey” (H 17:377). Emphasizing this point, Paulding added, “For Satire to be relished, it is necessary that it should be leveled at something with which readers are familiar” (H 17:378).(4)

Even Poe's good friend John P. Kennedy, the Baltimore novelist, did not fully comprehend the drift of Poe's first tales. In February of the same year that Paulding criticized Poe's “obscurity,” Kennedy had written that he doubted Poe really “intended” the satiric thrusts one could find in reading his stories; but Poe replied that Kennedy was “not altogether right” since his tales had indeed been “intended for half banter, half satire” — though Poe politely added that perhaps he would not have “acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself” in those tales not “satires properly speaking.”(5) But the mixed intention of satire, banter, and seriousness also seemed obscure to Harpers, for they returned Poe's manuscript with the comment that one of the reasons they had decided not to publish the tales was that they “would be understood and relished only by a very few,” and that the “numbers of readers in this country capable of appreciating and enjoying such writings ... is very small indeed.”(6)

The five Courier tales of 1831-32, then, prove to be especially significant in this regard, for the continuum of the comic, the satiric, the Gothic burlesque, and the Gothic hoax that these tales demonstrate has great importance for the interpretation of Poe's later fiction. In both theme and technique, we find a clear consistency between the light-hearted satiric spoofs “The Duke de L'Omelette,” “The Bargain Lost” (later called “Bon-Bon”), and “A Tale of Jerusalem” on the one hand, and on the other hand the Gothic parody “A Decided Loss” (later called “Loss of Breath”) and the seemingly serious Gothic tale “Metzengerstein.”

 

II

“The Duke de L'Omelette” must have puzzled most of the Courier readers as much as it has the general twentieth-century reader, for the tale appears to be merely a comic exercise, and none too comic at that. A sensitive French nobleman dies in a paroxysm of disgust when served an ortolan without paper ruffles; finding himself in Hell, he plays cards with the Devil to win back his soul, succeeds by cheating, and takes his leave with the remark, in French, that if he were not the Duke de L'Omelette he would have no objection to being the Devil. Reconstruction of the context of the tale reveals the story to be a satiric parody of the literary style and of the elegant manners and [page 45:] cultural pretensions of a contemporary editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. Poe exaggerates Willis's imitation of the “silver-fork” style of Benjamin Disraeli (thus hitting at Disraeli as well) in Willis's preciously written column, “The Editor's Table,” in the American Monthly Magazine. In this column, Willis represented himself as a man of culture, fashion, delicate thought, and exquisitely refined taste. He would invite his readers into his editorial apartments where he wrote at a “rosewood” desk, on which were Chinese cupid inkholders, velvet butterfly pen wipers, and a bottle of Hungary water to perfume his quill; when he was not working, he could be found reclining upon one of his treasured ottomans, reflectively eating an olive, while his pet South American bird flew freely about the apartment. The first paragraphs of Poe's story are, as Kenneth L. Daughrity says, “replete with peppery hits”(7) at Willis: “Keats fell by a criticism. Who was it died of ‘The Andromache’? ... Ignoble souls! — De L'Omelette perished of an ortolan. L’histoire en est breve. ... the Due was to sup alone ... he reclined languidly on that ottoman for which he sacrificed his loyalty in outbidding his king. ... The clock strikes! Unable to restrain his feelings, his Grace swallows an olive” (B 1:100-101) [[(M 1:33)]].(8) Poe's reference to Keats reflects the criticism by other editors that Willis's career would be killed by his affectations; the Peruvian ortolan served naked (and roasted) to the Duke suggests, of course, Willis's pet bird; olives and ottomans were to Willis symbols of refinement; and little French phrases and literary allusions were trademarks of his style.(9) In a moment, Poe has the Devil take the Duke, curiously scented, from a “rosewood” coffin. Ordered to strip, the Duke displays a dainty fastidiousness, mentions the fashionable tailors who have designed his lovely clothes, and objects that it is too much trouble to draw off his gloves. He then gives scrutiny to the bizarre arrangement of the Devil's apartment,” lighted by a ruby hung from a blood-red chain whose upper end is lost (like, variously, Coleridge, Carlyle, or the City of Boston, depending on the version of the tale) in the clouds. Pushed eventually beyond what a gentleman can properly endure, the Duke invites His Majesty to fence — but must settle for cards. Poe's satire seems to be a criticism, like that of the editors suggested in his first sentence.(10) But the events of the tale intimate that such criticism will not even touch Willis, just as the Duke is above ignoble souls like Keats and is able to outwit, politely, even the Devil. But without this context, the tale seems simply pointless.

Certainly, to the general reader of the time, the humor of the other three comic tales in the Courier could have seemed only a trifle clearer than that of “The Duke de L'Omelette.” The surface story of “A Tale [page 46:] of Jerusalem,” for example, in which the Jews (besieged in the Holy City by Pompey's legions) bargain for a sacrificial lamb but are given a hog instead, seems also rather pointless, not especially amusing, and even unpleasantly anti-Semitic. The tale, however, is a satire on the rage for didactic historical novels set in the Holy Land, parodying in particular Horace Smith's Zillah, A Tale of the Holy City, a three-decker published five years before in 1828. Poe lifts phrases and whole lines from the novel and fills his story with mock erudition on Hebrew customs, as well as with burlesque names like Abel Shittim, though the later versions of the story are cleaned up somewhat. Like the opening paragraphs of “The Duke de L'Omelette,” the first paragraph of “A Tale of Jerusalem” gives the situation entire and immediately achieves a remarkable phony style.

The rest of the tale continues in this manner with, as J. S. Wilson notes, an increasing number of lines from Smith. But although the style is obviously exaggerated, the story line is plausible enough, up to the end, so that one could read the tale as a serious piece of biblical fiction — if he were a bit obtuse to the nuances of English prose style. The conclusion, however, makes clear even to the most unread that Poe is satirizing something, even if only the Jews themselves. The three Sub-Collectors of Offerings draw up a long rope hung over the city wall, expecting the Romans below to have placed a lamb in a basket. After an hour's tugging, Buzi-Ben-Levi exclaims “Booshoh he! ... Booshoh he! ... Booshoh he! — for shame! — it is a ram from the thickets of Engedi, and as rugged as the valley of Jehosaphat!”

The last line is directly from Smith's Zillah, and those readers up on current “indigestible” fiction would have seen much more clearly than [page 47:] the reader a hundred years later, or even the casual reader of Poe's time, that Poe here is satirizing the currently popular brand of the historical novel.(12)

“The Bargain Lost” (later called “Bon-Bon”) tells the story of a philosopher chef, who, while completing an absurd metaphysical treatise, gets into a drunken conversation with the Devil (a kind of gourmet of philosophers’ souls) and offers his own soul for his Satanic Majesty's delectation only to be turned down. The satiric point of the tale, with its metaphysical conversation, plentiful references to classical authors, and other recondite allusions, seems to be mockery of, on the one hand, German metaphysics, and, on the other hand, of pretended scholarship in contemporary fiction — a topic Poe takes up more directly six years later in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” in which, as we have seen, Blackwood advises Signora Psyche Zenobia to sprinkle her tales with learned quotations in various languages, to quote obscure titles in German, and to get herself into an impossible predicament.(13)

Similar pretense as well as the whole genre of “sensation” tales, or “intensities,” featured in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine are the major satiric targets, along with transcendentalism, of “Loss of Breath” (called “A Decided Loss” in the Courier). Despite vividly morbid passages, the absurdities of the tale are quite obvious; and the story in its several versions is worth recounting at some length, since it contains in burlesque form many of Poe's favorite themes, including alienation and the crowd, perversity, the Doppelgänger, burial alive, death-in-life, the absurd universe. Moreover, its style at times approaches effective horror at the same time that it employs in exaggerated comic form the supposed flaws of Poe's serious writing. Part of the technique of the sensation tale is the affectation of literary and philosophical learning, most especially of the currently popular German metaphysical speculation. “Loss of Breath” has both a suitable “philosophical” theme and “learned” style. The opening gambit of the tale is similar to that of the other Courier stories; the first sentences not only announce the ostensible theme of bearing ill fortune philosophically, but also suggest an overriding satiric theme through stylistic parody, here involving strained mock-erudite analogies that interrupt the narrative progression.

That the absurd exaggerations of incident and predicament which follow, along with the digressive and inappropriately calm and reflective style, are intended to burlesque the sensation fiction of Blackwood's is made perfectly clear in the republication of the tale three years later in the Southern Literary Messenger by the addition of the subtitle “A Tale a la Blackwood.”(15) Moreover, the character of Win-denough, the inverse double of the hero of the tale, Mr. Lackobreath, seems to fit Poe's impression of John Wilson (“Christopher North”), an editor of Blackwood's. Wilson had published a sentimental poem called “The Convict” in 1816, detailing the predicament of a man wrongly convicted of robbery and murder but rescued at the last moment by the discovery of the real criminal.(16) Poe extends the similar situation of “Loss of Breath,” in order to burlesque much more than the predilection of Blackwood's and Wilson for predicament tales; Poe makes specific thrusts at the American theater, at contemporary philosophical and literary figures (including Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Godwin, St. Pierre, Crabbe, Coleridge, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and possibly by implication Wordsworth); but most especially, Poe hits at the transcendentalists.

The thrusts at the sensationists and the transcendentalists begin soon after the opening incident, in which Mr. Lackobreath literally loses his breath in cursing his wife. Finding himself speechless, he retreats to his room and meditates on his misfortune, discovering himself to be “alive, with the qualifications of the dead — dead, with the propensities of the living — an anomaly on the face of the earth — being very calm, yet breathless.” He considers at once the idea of suicide, but “it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal” (B 1:107-8; my italics).(17) He then searches for his breath, like Adelbert Chamisso's “Peter Schlemiel” for his shadow, in the corners of his room, in his closet, in his drawers — for it might have a vapory or a tangible form, as “authorities” will confirm.

Hiding his calamity from the sure indignation of his wife, the “multitude,” and the “virtuous,” Lackobreath regains some of his speech by practicing Indian tragedies in “frog-like and sepulchral tones,” giving out that he is interested in the theater and observing to himself that any part of the play Metamora applies “equally well to any particular subject.” Nor is he in his practice “ ... deficient in the looking asquint — the showing my teeth — the working my knees — the shuffling my feet — or in any of those unmentionable graces which are now justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer. To be sure they spoke of confining me in a straightjacket — but, good God! they never suspected me of having lost my breath” (B 1:109). Setting out for another city by mail stage, Lackobreath is crushed between “two gentlemen of colossal dimensions” and sat upon by a third “of a size larger,” which dislocates all his limbs. In a scene reminiscent of Fielding's Joseph Andrews, the passengers object to riding with a corpse and throw Lackobreath out of the stage at the Crow tavern, with no further injury to him than the breaking of his arms and the fracturing of his skull. The tavern keeper sells the “corpse” to a surgeon, who, like the surgeons in Candide, proceeds to dissect the still-living body.(18) Lackobreath kicks and plunges, but the surgeon attributes this to the effects of a galvanic battery. Lackobreath then becomes interested in the experiments of the surgeon, though he cannot gather enough wind to “make reply to some ingenious but fanciful theories of which, under other circumstances, my minute acquaintance with the Hippocratian pathology would have afforded me a ready confutation” (B 1:110). Then, tied up corpse-fashion and left alone in a garret “to silence and to meditation,” he repeats “some passages of the ‘Omnipresence of the Deity,’ as is my custom before resigning myself to sleep ...” (B 1:111). Two cats contend for his nose, however, and he leaps out the window into a prison cart containing the mail-robber W—, to whom he bears a singular resemblance, though W— is gaunt and he corpulent. Then W— escapes and Lackobreath is hanged in his place.

In the latest version of the tale (Broadway Journal, 1846), Lackobreath forbears to depict his “sensations upon the gallows,” merely mentioning that the jerk of the rope gave a “corrective twist” to his dislocated neck and that he did his best to please the crowd: “My convulsions were said to be extraordinary. My spasms it would have been difficult to beat. The populace encored. Several gentlemen swooned.” He adds, however, that after the performance, “it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows; — this the more especially as the real culprit had in the meantime been retaken and recognized ...” (B 1:112). But in the earlier versions, not only his [page 50:] “sensations” while standing on the gallows but also the philosophical speculation to which they give rise is detailed. The deleted passage contains a good deal of Poe's specific satire, unfortunately reduced only to implication in the 1846 version of the tale.(19) As Lackobreath waits reflectively for the trap to be pulled, profound Godwin-like thoughts flood his mind: “I now reasoned, rapidly I believe — profoundly I am sure — upon principles of common law — propriety of that law especially, for which I hung — absurdities in political economy which till then I had never been able to acknowledge. ...” Then come ideas from Crabbe, St. Pierre, Bulwer-Lytton and, especially, Disraeli:

When the rope twists his neck, he has the sensation that the event has occurred in another realm of existence, “some other Ens.” He is then taken down and “laid out” in a small chamber, which yet

As night comes, Lackobreath has the horrible sensation that perhaps his state of limbo is actual death:

By itself, this last passage, as with others in the tale, could be considered fairly effective horror even though overdone — if, that is, the repetitions and the comic lines “no one will know my sensations” and “what, O Baalzebub! — what an Eternity!” were removed. It should not be very difficult to see that the style of many of Poe's more famous Gothic tales derives from this kind of burlesque horror in “Loss of Breath” and that in those tales there may be at least two opposing possibilities for interpretation. In “Loss of Breath,” however, there is no ambiguity. Immediately after the terrors of philosophical speculation during the night, for example, the hero sees the light of dawn and realizes that he is not dead (but instead merely in danger of being buried alive): “Then — and not till then — was I fully sensible of the fearful fate hanging over me. The phantasms of the night had faded with its shadows, and the actual terrors of the yawning tomb left me no heart for the bugbear speculations of Transcendentalism” (H 2:362). In both the early and the 1846 versions, Lackobreath is next placed in a tomb where he falls into a deep sleep. He awakes and searches about the sepulchre, complaining eventually of boredom. Finally, he feels his way among the numerous coffins, lifts them down “one by one, and breaking open their lids,” busies himself “in speculations about the mortality within” (B 1:112). [[(M 2:70)]]

Soon Lackobreath discovers two particularly interesting corpses to which he addresses soliloquies, holding one up by the nose. The bodies perhaps bear a vague resemblance to Coleridge and Wordsworth.(20) The familiar-looking, tall, gaunt “corpse,” however, turns out not only to be the criminal W— but also to be Windenough, Lackobreath's wife's “friend.”(21) Lackobreath receives a “respiration” from him and together they shout until rescued by Scissors, the Whig editor, who, hearing them, has in the meanwhile published a treatise on “the nature and origin of subterranean noises” (followed by a vigorous “rejoinder” from the Democratic Gazette). The tale ends with fine symmetry by means of a paragraph on the merits of a proper philosophy to serve as a “sure and ready shield against those shafts of calamity which can neither be seen, felt, nor fully understood” (B 1:115), spun out windily with plentiful learned allusions to Hebrew wisdom, to a plaque at Athens, to Epimenides, and to Laertius. Such is Poe's blatantly comic treatment of the Gothic and the transcendental. [page 52:]

 

III

The last story of the Courier group to be considered is “Metzengerstein,” ostensibly a tale of horror and the supernatural, in which two hereditary family enemies are wedded in mutual destruction. Arthur Hobson Quinn remarks of the tale that it stands out in contrast to the other Courier stories, “not only in its excellence but also in its general tone”; unlike the other four tales, it is “no mere burlesque” but instead a “powerful story of evil passions in a young man's soul,” the allegorical “lesson” of which may be a warning that evil may become so powerful that one may lose the power to resist.(22) But it is hard to read “Metzengerstein” with such seriousness. It has too many absurd exaggerations of both content and style, exaggerations too clearly patterned, too symmetrically developed, for the tale to be a serious work of Gothic terror.

Poe scholars have occasionally suggested that “Metzengerstein” may contain elements of burlesque, but little analysis of such elements has been undertaken. Interest in “Metzengerstein” has centered on noting “serious” art in Poe's early works, such as the creation of vivid scenes of terror and the adumbration of themes and techniques characteristic of his later work. So too the other Courier stories, especially the extravagancies of “A Decided Loss,” have been of interest primarily for their macabre elements. Edward H. Davidson mentions “Metzengerstein” only in connection with Poe's development from “fooling” to “masterly inquiry into the diseased and sin-ridden soul of man,” with the further comment that “only a slight shift of emphasis” would remold “Metzengerstein” into “The Fall of the House of Usher.”(23) But this comment, suggestive though it is, seems to be based on a general similarity of theme and atmosphere rather than on a detailed consideration of technique; and Davidson does not, in this instance, note the presence of like elements of “fooling” in “Usher” and other of Poe's “serious” works. William Bittner suggests the burlesque possibility of “Metzengerstein” but then, in effect, dismisses the idea. He writes that “the narrative is ridiculous enough” — a horse in a tapestry becomes real when possessed by the spirit of Metzengerstein's enemy, Berlifitzing, and during a violent storm carries the fascinated Metzengerstein to his death in his own burning castle, the smoke from which takes the shape of a gigantic horse. But the story, he concludes, following the lead of Marie Bonaparte's psychoanalytic study, changed as Poe wrote; “Metzengerstein” became a working out of Poe's feelings about John Allan, and the resulting “sincerity” makes the tale an effective study in horror.(24) [page 53:]

Indeed, the quality of near seriousness is the principal problem in reading “Metzengerstein” as a satire like the other four Courier stories, which are quite obvious in their comic touches even if the satiric point needs footnoting. A degree of seriousness, however, is essential for hoaxical parody, the ultimate put on, since the original must be recognized for parody to have any point. If, on a casual reading, the serious elements overshadow the clues to parody by reducing the blatancy of comic touches, of exaggerations, and of verbal and structural ironies, the work either may have failed in its ironic purpose or may have achieved a subtler irony. If the work fails as parody, then both the casual and the perceptive reader can take the work as a serious, though “flawed,” effort. If, however, the clues are merely subtle, the work becomes a hoax; the circle of understanding readers is consciously limited, and the casual reader becomes part of the butt of the satire. It is this kind of satire that “Metzengerstein” presents.

When the tale is read carefully, the many seeming lapses in taste and precise control of point of view and style can in fact be seen to form a unified pattern of satiric irony. We discover that the apparent intent of writing a serious Gothic tale is cumulatively undercut by a ridiculous plot, exaggerated stereotypes of melodramatic Gothic scenes and characters, awkward and confused dialog, and a turgid and sometimes shockingly inappropriate manner of narration. Moreover, the literary satire suggested by these flaws is given reinforcement by an exaggerated series of ironies, by multiple innuendoes from the sounds and connotations of words, and by the motifs of meaningless utterance and perverse human behavior. The obvious “lapses” in style, the true subtleties of style, and the semicomic motifs of meaninglessness and perversity interweave with the quality of near seriousness to present a parody a little better in some ways than its original, a burlesque of the Gothic tale that dupes the enthusiastic but unwary devotee of the genre. Or, as Schlegel puts it, the ironist forms a “secret understanding with the select circle of the more intelligent of his readers.”(25)

This then widespread enthusiasm for the Gothic tale is the historical literary context that gives the undersurface of “Metzengerstein” its point, especially the enthusiasm in Poe's day for the kind of “German” horror tale imitated abundantly and badly in English and American periodicals.(26) Poe tried to make his attitude to this (the literary context), and thus the satiric point, clearer by affixing to the 1836 republication of “Metzengerstein” in the Southern Literary Messenger the subtitle “A Tale in Imitation of the German.”(27) It is quite doubtful, however, that “Metzengerstein” reflects any particular German source, [page 54:] as is often claimed; nor is the tale, so far as is known, a parody of any specific non-German work. Rather, the tale burlesques the genre as a whole.(28) German Gothic is reflected primarily in the setting, the atmosphere of which immediately prepares the reader for a tale of the kind in which one accepts — and expects — the conventions of the medieval castle, the aristocratic hero, and a vague, generalized quality of the supernatural and the horrible, as well as such attendant motifs as prophecy, revenge, and dark fatality; but though the German names of the major characters are important for atmosphere, they are comically tongue twisting; Baron Frederick von Metzengerstein and Count Wilhelm von Berlifitzing are hardly the most euphonious and convincing Poe might have chosen had he been serious.

Instead, it is the half-century of English and American Gothic romance that is the target of most of the satiric innuendo. There are in “Metzengerstein” echoes of the Gothic trappings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1796), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816) and The Betrothed (1825), and the elder Richard Henry Dana's once popular poem “The Buccaneer” (1827). T. O. Mabbott has written that Dana's poem, in which the ghost of a slaughtered horse carries a pirate to a burning ship and back twice and finally destroys him, is obviously Poe's source.(29) Mabbott takes the tale seriously, but his view of its source is supported by the fact that Dana was an editor of the North American Review, a periodical Poe later attacked vigorously in both his criticism and in his satiric fiction as part of a corrupt literary clique that puffed its own and tomahawked all other writers; thus, a popular poem by one of its editors is an obvious candidate for one of the satiric butts of the tale.(30) In any case, yet another echo indicates that the suggestions of well-known Gothic works in the tale do not merely reveal the “sources” of a budding Gothicist. There is a parallel in “Metzengerstein” of both the horse in the tapestry and the horse in the storm from Benjamin Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826-27). This novel Poe burlesques in more than one tale, including, as we have seen, versions of two of the other Courier satires, “A Bargain Lost” and “A Decided Loss.”(31) Any such “sources,” then, are more probably the satiric butts of an accomplished satirist. “Metzengerstein,” though for good reasons differing from the others in its near serious tone and in its dark German atmosphere, is of one piece with the other four Courier tales. The other Courier stories are caricatures (not hoaxes) of specific, visible objects of ridicule. “Metzengerstein” is a parody of a genre in general and a hoax on those pleased by the genre. Displaying similar qualities of technique and the same burlesque intent, it is merely subtler — on a casual reading. [page 55:]

 

IV

Like the openings of the other Courier satires, the first paragraphs of “Metzengerstein” announce the ostensible situation and at the same time suggest a satiric point. The connotations of the opening are quite clear once satiric possibility suggests itself. “Metzengerstein” is prefaced with two paragraphs on “horror,” superstition, and the probabilities of metempsychosis, and even the first two sentences immediately suggest satiric overtones: “Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to the story I have to tell?” (B 1:93).(32) The abstractions horror and fatality, whether taken to mean certain kinds of human experience or cosmological forces, are twisted slightly from these frames of reference and given a quiet comic touch by the use of “stalking,” a word through which Poe personifies Horror and Fatality as a couple of demons ranging far and wide in search of prey. What is implied, especially when one is alerted by the later subtitle, is the currently popular German horror tale; the obvious victim implied in the stalking of Horror and Fatality is the reader of such tales. The idea of reader as victim is not a point that Poe makes merely once, nor even a point that he makes indirectly. As we have seen before, one of his clearest statements on his contemporaries’ passion for the Gothic tale appears twelve years later at the conclusion of his semi-comic hoax “The Premature Burial.” In this tale, Poe hoaxes his credulous readers for several pages before ending his tale with a ludicrous event and a comically blunt explanation: the hero finally loses his fears of being buried alive after the very absurdity of the final incident restores his sense of proportion, which he lost originally through reading Gothic “bugaboo tales — such as this” (H 5:273).

The function of the second sentence of “Metzengerstein” (“Why then give a date to the story I have to tell?”) is double. It not only emphasizes in an awkward way the artificial “literary” quality of the undated story to follow, it also interposes a narrator between the reader and the story. Since the story is essentially narrated from the third-person after the opening paragraphs, it may seem somewhat out of place to emphasize the common device of a first-person narrator who never figures in the story himself and is perhaps holding forth before the fireplace in the manner of many tellers of supernatural tales. But the dual purpose of announcing the ostensible theme and at the same time suggesting an overriding irony with a satiric theme is focused in the unwitting persona of this narrator. The first paragraphs, as well as later ones, have their satiric point to make about the narrator — and he is, after all, not sitting by the fireside but at the Folio Club table reading his manuscript to a group of “dunderheads.” [page 56:]

As the story develops, the announced themes of horror and fatality given in the first sentence are carried out through the agencies of a blood feud and metempsychosis, both rooted in an ancient prophecy. The remarks of the narrator about metempsychosis are of special importance; they foreshadow what apparently takes place in the story (even to mentioning in French the shape of a horse as one of several common reincarnations); and these remarks suggest what the qualities of the narrator are. Our “erudite” author, though he says that “some points in the Hungarian superstition ... were fast verging to absurdity” (my italics), claims not to judge “of their falsity, or of their probability.” He immediately proceeds, however, to mention, primarily in a “learned” footnote (in the 1840 edition), some eminent authorities to support the “doctrines of the Metempsychosis.” Among these, the reference to Ethan Allen, the “Green Mountain Boy,” as a “serious metempsychosist” (H 2:185) is not the most appropriate allusion the narrator could have made, since Allen's reputation as a belligerent Deist was still firmly planted in the minds of his countrymen. Indeed, the mere title of Allen's most famous work, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1789), militates against the supernaturalistic atmosphere the narrator is apparently trying to suggest. Moreover, the very sound of the phrase “serious Metempsychosist,” with its abundance of s's, is mildly comic and foreshadows the similarly sibilant names of von Berlifitzing and von Metzengerstein. Thus, the “erudition” of the narrator not only mocks such pretense in the tale of horror, it also underscores the obtuse character of the narrator — and by pointing to a thoroughgoing rationalist in Allen, tips Poe's satiric hand.

Who of the Folio Club members is most likely to be the obtuse teller of a German tale of horror? The obvious candidate is Mr. Horribile Dictu, “with white eyelashes, who had graduated at Göttingen.” Dictu is a particularly suitable narrator for several reasons. The citing of Allen along with the European “authorities” is an appropriate gesture, and blunder, from a foreign narrator and thus further underscores the genre of the foreign horror tale. Satiric intent is implied not only by the surface humor of Horribile Dictu's name but also by its Latin denotation; it makes a double-edged comment on both the matter and the manner of the story — horrible to tell and horribly told. Thus, with its innuendoes about genre and about the narrator, the opening suggests an overriding irony, the satiric thesis of which is that the Gothic tale is in both concept and style inherently absurd. But though the tale is sly in its opening, and though there is to follow an effective scene of terror, the absurdities and ironies of the story become increasingly obvious. [page 57:]

Beginning with plot, we may note, first, that the sequence of events has the kind of careful design associated with Poe's best works, here, as in many of Poe's tales, rigorously symmetrical and unified by the constant image, stated and implied, of a horse. The story begins with 1) the narrator's suggesting possible forms of metempsychosis, including the form of a horse. Then the story turns to 2) a history of the enmity (originating in a vague prophecy) between old Berlifitzing and young Metzengerstein, wherein we learn that the old Count is obsessed with horses and that the young Baron is a typical Gothic villain, described with ludicrous-grotesque appropriateness as a “petty Caligula” (for, as Mabbott notes, the bloody Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul). Next the story shifts to 3) a closeup scene of the Baron staring at a horse in a tapestry during a fire at the Count's stables, followed by an extended closeup scene focused on the appearance of a gigantic flame-colored horse. The pattern is repeated in the second part of the tale. There follows 1) some dark and equivocal speculation on metempsychosis; then the narrative again shifts to 2) a “history,” wherein we learn not only of Metzengerstein's becoming obsessed with the horse (paralleling Berlifitzing's obsession in the first part) and of the vague enmity between horse and man, but also of an absurd curse by the Count's widow (which, like the prophecy earlier, strangely works out). This history is followed by 3) another closeup scene that brings the plot full circle to another fire as the horse carries the Baron to his death.

We may note, second, that the plot involves the careful working out of various ironies. Within the larger hoaxing irony is an irony shaping the plot in terms of the ostensible themes of horrible and fated enmity and revenge; and within this is a series of minor ironic twists that from their sheer number so exaggerate the symmetrical structure of the plot that it becomes comic beyond the absurdity of the bare events. The house of Metzengerstein, for example, is older than the house of Berlifitzing, but in the persons of the two protagonists the reverse is true; Metzengerstein is young and Berlifitzing is nearly senile. This situation is further twisted so that the feeble old Count becomes prodigiously powerful in his horse form while the young Baron weakens, with the added irony that though Berlifitzing is supposedly captive to Metzengerstein, it is actually Metzengerstein who is captive by his “perverse” obsession with Berlifitzing. The comic is added to the ironic in the absurdity of Berlifitzing's metamorphosis, for, as mentioned, in life he is an ardent lover of horses so that he naturally is reincarnated, in young Metzengerstein's view, as a horse — with the letters W. V. B. [page 58:] branded on his forehead to ensure recognition. And in his immortal horse form he becomes the sole companion and friend of his “mortal” enemy Metzengerstein. Moreover, though we are told at the beginning of the story that it is Berlifitzing who has the “more bitter animosity,” what is developed in the tale is the even more bitter enmity of Metzengerstein.

But what gives real unity to the plot — in terms of the apparent themes of fated enmity and supernatural revenge — is the irony involved in the working out of an “ancient prophecy” so ambiguously phrased that it seems merely “silly” to our narrator. And with this judgment, the narrator introduces, though unwittingly, the motif of meaninglessness, expressed throughout the tale, first in the form of vague and confused utterances (the paradoxical prophecy, impotent ranting, bemused exclamations) and second in the intrusions of the narrator himself. The irony of the narrator's repeated interjections is multiple, for his occasional opinion as to the silliness of what the characters say does not merely comment on the absurdity of the characters in the story; the narrator's commentary suggests in a direct way the absurdity of the conventions and style of the German horror tale and in an indirect way the faulty control of Gothic writers, for, since the silly utterances turn out to be not so silly on a plot level, our narrator seems not to understand his own tale very well. In addition, the motif of meaningless words (especially in connection with the plot-structuring prophecy) implies a comment on human behavior beyond what the dull-witted narrator sees, prefiguring Poe's concern in his later tales with order and disintegration and with the rational and the irrational. The ironic implication of the prophecy has to do with the consequences of absurdity and perversity, since the prophecy itself, because of what it merely seems to say, is the primary cause of its own fulfillment. The prophecy reads: “A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing” (B 1:94). To the house of Berlifitzing, the ominous utterance seems to imply, “if it implied anything,” the eventual triumph of the already more powerful Metzengerstein and thus engenders a “more bitter animosity” in Berlifitzing. The paradox involved in mortality triumphing over immortality is similar to that in the emblem of the Montresors in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), in which it is not clear who is the crushing heel and who the fanged serpent, a synecdoche of the story itself, in which it is not absolutely clear who is avenged and who is not. And, of course, the ambiguity of the prophecy adds to the ominous quality of its Gothic vagueness. A further twist is provided by the fact that the tale can be seen as the [page 59:] working out of two paradoxes. The first is the prophecy just quoted. The other is the Latin motto to the story, which can be translated as “Living, I was your plague — dying, I shall be your death.”(33)

The prediction, of course, works out literally and ironically in every detail. The lofty name fated to have a fearful fall is not Berlifitzing but Metzengerstein. The mere mortal Metzengerstein does triumph for a limited time over the immortal Berlifitzing when he rides the Count in his horse form, an ironic literal occurrence of what in the prophecy is apparently only a figure of speech: “as the rider over his horse.” But this triumph soon proves illusory, for the palace cracks and burns and the Count carries the last of the line of Metzengerstein into the flames, presumably to final death, whereas Berlifitzing is metamorphosed once more, this time into a kind of vapor horse rising triumphant above the ruins of the castle.

The reason the prophecy works, however, lies in the perverse and irrational human reaction to its vagueness. The meaninglessness of the prophecy and the absurdity of the enmity between the two families is emphasized quite pointedly at the beginning of the story.

We learn next that what gives the prophecy its peculiar power to set the two houses at odds is the result of the two estates being “contiguous.” The two houses are thus “predisposed” to quarrel, not so much because of political and economic rivalry, but because “near neighbors are seldom friends.” This wry axiom, given as a primary cause of the “enmity” between Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein, underscores early in the story the basic absurdity of the events to follow.

But the manner in which this blunt axiom concerning human relationships is presented epitomizes Poe's technique of maintaining an apparent seriousness; the bluntness, and the absurdity, of the comment is modified through paragraph organization, sentence rhythm, and diction so as to present a surface reasonableness that will keep up the hoax. The paragraph begins with the meaninglessness of the prophecy; next gives the fact of contiguity; then introduces the more reasonable ideas of rival political influence and Berlifitzing envy of Metzengerstein wealth, but phrased in lengthy clauses and sentences that tend to bury the twice emphasized axiom that enmity springs from contiguity. The [page 60:] tendency of the paragraph as a whole is to allay the absurdity of this analysis of the origins of human enmity and bring us, with bland surface coherence, aided by diction abstract enough to suggest a little erudition, to the logical conclusion: “What wonder, then, that the words, however silly, of that prediction should succeed in setting and keeping at variance two families already predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy?” (B 1:94). It is easy, if reading casually, to fail to note that what “every instigation” consists of is merely this: that near neighbors are seldom friends — a melancholy-comic view of perversity as well as of the absurd.

Such explanation for the feud fits well the personality of the narrator, hinted at by the first two paragraphs. Although he recognizes the absurdity inherent in the vagueness of the prophecy, and although he has an inkling of the absurd element in human behavior, he is, under his surface reasonableness, also rather absurd. This is the first of his obvious intrusions on the story proper, but his personality as a typical teller of terrible tales is stamped on all the scenes and is implicit in the style of the whole.

The account of the plot-shaping prophecy provides one kind of exaggeration; absurd exaggeration of scene, character, and style soon follow. The section of the story concluding the history of Metzengerstein's feud with Berlifitzing maintains the motif of Gothic vagueness and meaninglessness in its characterization of the young Baron as a typical Gothic tyrant. His mother, the Lady Mary, died young, leaving him sole heir to the Metzengerstein estates.

The exaggerations of this picture of “flinty” Metzengerstein are concentrated in the image of his hand placed on his dead mother's forehead. But the passage might be taken seriously, despite the grotesque image, because of its impressive-sounding diction and sentence patterns, except that we learn next that the Baron's “career” of “dissipation” since “childhood” has not been that of young manhood nor even of a predatory adolescence. “Heartless” and “flinty” Metzengerstein still has most of his adolescence before him, being just “in his fifteenth year.” Aware, apparently, that fifteen years may be a rather young age [page 61:] for such flintiness, our narrator adds: “In a city, fifteen years are no long period ... but in a wilderness — in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, fifteen years have a far deeper meaning” (B 1:94). Not only is this comment vague, it is an inversion of conventional ideas regarding the corrupting influence of city life and the virtues of country life. Immediately after the horrendous suggestiveness of this passage, we discover that the fifteen-year-old Baron indulges in “shameful debaucheries — flagrant treacheries — unheard-of atrocities” (B 1:95). The generality of these crimes is underscored by the abstract diction, the triptych order, and the dashes, producing not emphasis and climax but repeated vagueness. Moreover, the narrator chooses to intrude a “comment” at this point, suggesting that Metzengerstein “out-heroded Herod” and adding wryly that he “fairly surpassed the expectations of his most enthusiastic admirers.”

Despite the Gothic vagueness of his history of Baron Metzenger-stein's hideous career, at least one concrete crime is attached to his name, though there is no certainty that he committed the act; presumably, he is responsible for the fire in Berlifitzing's stables. But, again, the style points up the melodrama of the entire situation; the diction is overly general, inflated, illogically ordered, and redundant. “The incendiary” is added to the “already hideous list” of Metzengerstein's “misdemeanors” and “enoimities.” But during the “tumult” which is (of all things) “occasioned by this occurrence,” the Baron sits in a “vast and desolate” apartment, buried in meditation, or at least “apparently” so, or maybe he wasn’t. At any rate, as he sits amid this Gothic splendor, his attention is engaged on a horse in a tapestry, and there suddenly arises on his “lip” a “fiendish expression” (B 1:96). Despite these remarkable powers of “lip,” the Baron seems to have been struck with a perverse idea (self-engendered by a guilty conscience?), for the tapestry horse seems to him, possibly, to have changed its position, a phenomenon which strikes “terror” into the heart of the “fiendish,” “reckless,” “dissipated,” “hideous,” “heartless,” “impetuous,” and “flinty” fifteen-year-old. He shudders to perceive that his shadow, thrown by a “flash of red light,” fills up the contour of the “relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.” Such a flinty villain, we might suppose, would rejoice in this omen of the fulfillment of the prophecy; instead, he rushes out “to lighten the depression of his spirits.” The characterization of the child Baron as a Gothic tyrant is, then, done with absurd exaggeration, jarring contrasts, comic twists.

But in the latter middle part of the tale — the scene in which the fiery horse appears, and the following history of Metzengerstein's obsession and ensuing solitude — exaggerations of manner are more important [page 62:] than those of incident and characterization. Poe exaggerates his narrator's use of four devices in this section. First, the narrator continues the Gothic mode of vagueness; while the young Baron is “apparently” thinking this or doing that, both the aristocrats and the “multitude” are “attributing” and “suggesting” and “hinting” darkly of things of an “equivocal” nature (B 1:97-98). Second, the narrator writes stilted dialog marked by repetitions of exclamations like “Indeed!” and “Shocking!” Third, the narrator makes several interpretive intrusions into the story to underscore the motif of meaningless words, though he has only limited awareness of the larger implications of his judgments on the “silliness” of our utterances. Fourth, the style is exaggerated through plays on the sounds of words, reinforced through implied puns on the word horse.

The latter of these, the wordplay, is probably the most revealing. The horse in this section of the tale is repeatedly described as “unnatural,” “untractable,” “intractable,” “intelligent,” “impressive,” and “impetuous.” Other words are used in connection with the horse, but these half dozen are especially noticeable since they are similar in the approximate alliteration and assonance of the first syllables and in being polysyllables of nearly the same length and accent. Among the most emphasized sounds in the middle section of the tale are variants of un-, in-, and im-, repeated enough to keep the figure of the horse constantly in mind as a submerged image. Moreover, the most frequently repeated sounds, not only in the middle of the tale but also in the beginning section, are long and short e sounds, at the beginnings of words. Since the e recurs frequently as equ- in the repetitions of equerry, equerries, equals, equally, equivocal, an implied pun on equus suggests itself, which along with the other sounds associated with the horse keeps the image literally echoing throughout the passage. I have earlier pointed out symmetrical repetitions of the horse image in the beginning, middle, and end of the tale, as well as in the jesting reference to Caligula; the counterpoint of sound is further evidence of the care with which Poe wrote his tale. But let us note in passing that the single most obvious characteristic of Poe's style in both his prose and his poetry is his manipulation of sound and rhythm.

We next learn that Metzengerstein becomes companionless “utterly ... unless, indeed, that unnatural, impetuous” horse may be called his friend; he refuses “invitations” of the Count's “imperious” friends, actions they consider “insults not to be endured.” “Equivocal” hints become current, as the Baron disappoints “every expectation” of (our narrator inserts) “many a manoeuvering mamma” (B 1:98). The widow is “even heard to express” the hope that the Baron “might be at home [page 63:] when he did not wish to be at home, since he disdained the company of his equals; and ride when he did not wish to ride, since he preferred the society of a horse” (B 1:98). The irony of this passage is multiple. The widow of the unfortunate Count wishes to be emphatic, but her speech is so vague that it sounds anticlimactic and her desires for Metzengerstein's discomfort so unhurtful that she sounds (as our narrator points out) merely “silly.” Thus, the perversity of things operates on the widow — at least, according to our narrator. But perversity as a kind of cosmic irony also operates for her and beyond her since her curse, so absurd on the surface, like the prophecy, comes true with absurd precision. Metzengerstein “realizes” that the horse must be Berlifitzing and forms what the narrator calls a “perverse attachment” to the animal — perverse to the narrator because unnatural and malicious, but also perverse for Metzengerstein because the attachment is ultimately against his own best interests. That is, he rides “when he does not wish to ride” into the flames of his castle and thus is “at home” when he assuredly does not wish to be. Despite the prophetic quality of the widow's curse, however, she remains a comic caricature; the widow's curse is a parody, symmetrically placed, of the first prophecy. Moreover, the narrator shows no awareness of the ironic working out of her curse; he notes only the surface bathos of her words and thus reveals himself further as a dunderhead who does not even understand the plot of his story very well.

The rest of the tale details Metzengerstein's perverse obsession, speculates ambiguously on the supernatural character of the horse (at least in Metzengerstein's mind), and concludes with a description of the climactic plunge into the flames. The manner of narration in one sense becomes more subtle and in another sense more obvious. The obvious intrusions of the narrator are reduced; instead, his style intrudes. Rather than commentary on the silliness of what is happening, an enthusiastic recounting of horrible events takes place — rather too enthusiastic, for in his enthusiasm the narrator from time to time loses control of his words, sacrificing meaning and connotation to stereotyped phrases. In attempting to describe the intensity of the perverse attachment between Metzengerstein and the horse, for example, the narrator writes: “In the glare of noon — at the dead hour of night — in sickness or in health — in calm or in tempest — the young Metzengerstein seemed rivetted to the saddle of that colossal horse ...” (B 1:98-99). The use of the phrase “in sickness or in health,” suggestive of the prayer book marriage service (though it connotes the wedding together of the fates of the two enemies), is obviously incongruous; but again the incongruous is buried in a triptych, punctuated melodramatically, so that [page 64:] although the passage is overwrought it also reduces somewhat the blatancy of the contrast between the several frames of reference. When noticed, however, the contrast calls further attention to the cliche-ridden style of the narrator, who here sacrifices meaning and tone to melodrama and trite rhythmic phrases — faults too often attributed to Poe himself rather than to his implied narrators. This kind of incongruity of tone, as well as the different kind involved in inserting such judgments as “many a manoeuvering mamma,” turns the narrator's comments against himself. Not only because he does not see the implications of events and utterances in his own tale, but also because his manner is awkward and obtuse to connotation, his intrusion into the tale is a major satiric pattern.

When the reader recognizes this pattern, the egregious violation of tone and of taste at the beginning of the story — the notorious passage in praise of consumption, sometimes used by hostile critics to prove how obtuse Poe himself is as a narrator or to prove how nearly psychotic he was as a man — is critically appropriate, for it roundly burlesques Gothic melodrama. Writing of the circumstances of young Metzengerstein's inheritance, the narrator tells us that both parents have died, and then introduces a paragraph of elegiac lament that ends with an affirmation.

Illogical, florid, melodramatically punctuated, subtly unparallel, this parody of Romantic sentimentalism has for a true subject obtuseness itself. It is an example of what, as we have seen, Poe called six years later in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” the “tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional”: the “words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning. This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think” (H 2:275). The grotesquerie of the consumptive passage is heightened by its surface associative progression. Blood, passion, fire, and autumnal leaves are easily associated with the implied imagery of heat and color, whereas consumption denotes dampness, delirium from fever, and the coughing up of bloody sputum, each horribly implied by the obtuse “affirmations” [page 65:] of the narrator. And it is immediately after this incredible passage that young Metzengerstein stands beside the corpse with his delicate hand placed delicately upon his dead mother's forehead.

Thus, the “flaws” of “Metzengerstein” interweave to form a unified pattern of satire. The narrator of the Gothic tale is not quite successful in his pretensions to erudition, not quite aware of the ironies of his own plot, not quite in control of his own style. The atmosphere and general technique of the Gothic tale are satirized by Poe's display of the obtuseness of his narrator (regarding tone, connotation, the incongruities of event and character), by the Gothic convention of the vague, by the counterpoint of the doubly ironic motif of meaningless words, and by subtler exaggerations of style through rhythm, puns, and repeated sounds. Gothic figures are satirized through the comic exaggerations of the character of Metzengerstein and through the “perversity” of subjective and superstitious human reactions to vague events and utterances. The plot of the Gothic tale is burlesqued through the exaggeration of events, through the very number and symmetry of ironic and mildly comic twists, and again through the faulty understanding of the narrator. In view of these exaggerations of content, structure, and style, it requires an effort to understand the views of careful readers who yet see “Metzengerstein” as radically different in tone and effect from the other Courier satires, or of readers who claim that “Metzengerstein” presents a powerful allegorical lesson, or a serious working out of Poe's inner conflicts.

 

V

Poe's ironic technique is close to the hoax, even in the more obviously satiric first version of the tale. This burlesque imitation of the German horror story is so close that it can, on a casual reading, be mistaken for its original. It seems clear that the circumstances of the reception of “Metzengerstein” caused Poe eventually, in his revision of this tale and in writing subsequent tales, to narrow the circle of the perceptive audience. The devoted readers of Gothic tales are here hoaxed into believing a carefully flawed tale to be a genuine Gothic performance.

The real flaws of the tale are different. The story seems merely clever rather than intrinsically interesting, despite its intricate ironies and sometimes subtle parody; and the satiric usage of the narrator is mildly inconsistent since he is allowed to make wry comic observations on the characters and on human nature while he is yet part of the butt of the satire. The inconsistency here is not merely a matter of casual [page 66:] verbal irony becoming straightforward from time to time; it is a matter of unclearly defined point of view. We do not have Poe imitating the Gothic tale; the character of the narrator is too strongly implied, and his intrusions form a pattern integral to the ironic structure. And because the narrator has two faces, so to speak, even in his role as narrator, several implications are left unclear.

Horribile Dictu (if I may be allowed this assumption) says that the prophecy and the widow's curse are both silly, but they both work out literally and ironically in every detail, including, ludicrously the metaphors (a technique we shall see to be operative in such works as “Ligeia” and “Usher”). Dictu then may be duped in some way, in which case the implication would seem to be the serious one that mysterious and supernaturally charged events should not be judged too hastily. Or Dictu may be employing foreshadowing dramatic irony to set his audience up for the twists to follow (including the supernatural occurrences); but he shows no other awareness of the ironies of his plot (indeed, seems obtuse about the matter), and his style and taste prevent one from responding with any serious delight to such “ominous” foreshadowing. On the other hand, one wonders if Dictu may himself be satiric; and yet he seems only to be faintly aware of the operation of perversity in his tale, and the range of his satire is limited on the surface to mild, “witty” sarcasm regarding the behavior of his characters. To expand the ironic framework so that he is satiric beyond the wryness of incidental comment tends to merge him with Poe the ironist too much — especially since in the overall Folio Club scheme the holder of the seventeen manuscripts plans to “expose” the dunderheads and their writings. It is only by noting that Dictu does not seem to understand his tale very well that his comments have real consistency with the overall parody, for then his self-assumed superiority (as announced by the opening paragraphs) is ridiculed in the working of his plot. But even granting this, the problem of finding a consistent point of view in “Metzengerstein” is likely to prove annoying. The Folio Club scheme was left incomplete, and perhaps Poe had not clearly thought out the personalities of his narrators by the time “Metzengerstein” was published.

In any event, the inconsistency is fairly minor; and Poe, as he increasingly used participating rather than merely peripheral first-person narrators, did not have the same kind of problem later. That is, the problem of the separation and the intrusion of the narrator is not an operative matter, for Poe makes fuller and clearer use of even the observing “I” in his subsequent tales. The first-person narrators of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the [page 67:] House of Usher,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and “The Oval Portrait,” for example, are involved participants in the action; and their bizarre mental states are integral to the deceptively ironic, seriocomic, and satiric perspectives of the tales.

“Metzengerstein” has sometimes been called a false start by critics who wish to consider only half of Poe's fiction and who insist that Poe is solely a Gothicist. But the tale is a false start only in the sense that its ironic point of view is somewhat blurred. In all other respects, this carefully flawed tale is a paradigm for Poe's subsequent Gothic hoaxes. Poe almost uniquely in American literature possessed the power to touch the unseen, unconscious life, to render forcefully certain dark psychological states, to suggest the demoniac in mankind and in nature — and yet at the same time to bring a cool rationality, an ironic skepticism, and even mockery to bear on all that he examines. He both explores the serious possibilities of the Gothic mania of his times and attacks the society that believes in such things. Poe began his career as a satirist, and he remained a satirist to the end of his career. The only real shift was his increased philosophical and artistic irony, which not only informs all his satire but also came to overshadow the satiric impulse. The ironic mode and the ironic vision of the later tales, however, are implicit in the early satires. The history of Poe's career is the history of his simultaneous exploration of the fearful and the ridiculous. Poe exploited the terrors of the absurd as an ironically detached artist, exploring perverse human psychology in a perverse, absurd universe. And though he may not at first have been in complete control, he knew consciously from the first what he was about.