Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 05,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 105-138 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 105:]

5

Grotesque and Arabesque

 

IN 1853 John Ruskin defined the grotesque as the art of a disturbed imagination and declared it to be an essential part of the Gothic.(1) The meaning of the word grotesque in the twentieth century is likely to be, loosely, something ugly, distorted, unnatural, with the connotations, in some contexts, of both the ludicrous and the sinister. Since this very ambivalence of connotation was in Poe's time the literary denotation of the term, there should be little difficulty in understanding Poe's meaning in labeling his tales in 1840 “Grotesque and Arabesque.” Yet it is characteristic of Poe studies that Poe's terms should have been greatly misinterpreted, grotesque, as we have seen, being defined as merely satiric and comic, arabesque as emotive and imaginative, and Gothic.

Such definitions, of course, assert a bifurcation to corroborate the apparent split between the comic and the Gothic in Poe's whole body of work. But I remain convinced that Poe did not mean to split apart the comic and the tragic, or the comic and the serious. Instead, I submit, he conceived of “effect” as a continuum of emotional involvement with the grotesque and the arabesque as terms indicating closely proximate areas of feeling or impact, as that point between laughter and tears, calmness and frenzy, seriousness and mockery. Arabesque in fact seems often to be an alternative term for grotesque. If arabesque has any clear-cut distinction from grotesque in normal Romantic usage, it is only in its stronger suggestion of a deceptive overall pattern, [page 106:] which is yet intricate and symmetrical, as in an arabesque screen. Arabesque often implies a formal intricacy in the handling of narrative frames; but its psychological meaning is nearly the same as for grotesque. Both terms have as a constant element a tension between opposites that somehow gives one insight, a transcendental vision resulting from the paradoxical fusion of opposing forces.(2)

 

I

Grotesque as both noun and adjective derives from the Italian words grottesca and grottesco, which were coined in the latter fifteenth century to designate an ancient Roman ornamental style of sculpture and painting which was discovered through excavations in Rome and other parts of Italy. It was almost immediately realized by Renaissance art critics that this lost style of “grotto-paintings” had been described by Vitruvius, a contemporary of Augustus, who had complained that contemporary Roman artists had rejected “reality” and “verisimilitude” in favor of “bastard forms” wherein human and animal heads and bodies were merged with plants, roots, and tendrils, and in which clear design gives way to a “turbulent entanglement of tools, tendrils, and bastard creatures” to form a sinister background of disorganization to a rationally organized foreground. The Renaissance used the term grotesque first to designate the specific scroll type and gradually came to associate the word with both the “carelessly fantastic” and the ominous, with a world almost totally different from the familiar one of reality, “a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separate from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statistics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid” (K 21). Wolfgang Kayser speculates that the sinister meaning in part ensued from a phrase so often associated with grotesque in the sixteenth century that it became almost a synonym, as in the phrase “sogni dei pittori,” or “dreams of the painters,” suggesting a fantastic realm of imagination and fancy welling up from the subconscious (K 21-22). This we shall see to be of major importance in Poe.

Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, according to Kayser, the terms grotesque, arabesque and Gothic were “perennially confused” (K 23). Sixteenth-century German usage of the term grotesque referred to the monstrous fusion of human and nonhuman elements as the most typical feature of the style and connected this with the “infernal,” with devils, tortures, and monstrosities from Ovid, Dante, Giotto, and others. Seventeenth-century French usage, however, [page 107:] emphasized the “pleasantly ridiculous,” equally applicable to a person, a manner, a face, or an action; and at the beginning of the eighteenth century (and lingering into the twentieth) the French dictionaries defined grotesque as “silly,” “bizarre,” “fantastic,” “capricious,” “ridiculous,” “comic,” and “burlesque” — usages which are in accord with the usual, reductive, interpretation of Poe's meaning.(3)

But in the eighteenth century, the two usages, the weirdly monstrous and the weirdly comic, developed side by side so that by the last quarter of the century the term grotesque was used to mean both simultaneously, and eventually it became a supportive element of the theories of irony developed by the Germans. Wieland, for example, writing on “grotesque caricature” in his Conversations with the Parson of * * *” (1775), seemed to be disturbed by the possibility that the “grotesque” had a hidden meaning of some kind, and frequently returned to the strange impact of the works of the elder Brueghel. The two Brueghels (1520?-1569; 1564?-?1638) and Bosch (c. 1450-1516) painted weird, infernal, flying and creeping creatures, abstracted animate objects, and monsters with both human and animal parts, who seem, as Kayser observes (K 30-32, 38), indifferently to inflict torments on their victims. The elder Brueghel, especially, made the sinister invade an otherwise normal world.

With the German “Storm and Stress” movement and the beginnings of a clear Romantic movement, the concept of the grotesque as a literary form became quite important. Of his play Confusion, or Storm and Stress (1776), F. M. von Klinger (1752-1831) wrote, “I have assembled the craziest characters, and the most profoundly tragic feelings frequently alternate with laughing and roaring.” Of the reaction of the first audience, he wrote, “There they sat and did not comprehend” (K 44). What they did not comprehend, according to Kayser, was that Klinger's play was neither comedy nor tragedy but a third genre — not a “confusion,” as they thought, but a “fusion” — the grotesque, which went beyond mere literary satire and caricature. Another German writer, J. M. R. Lenz (1751-1792), reviewing his own play The New Menoza (1775), wrote that German writers of comedy needed to realize that since comedy dealt with serious problems they ought to aim at writing comically and tragically at the same time, as he had (K 44).

The principal literary philosopher of ironic mysticism, Friedrich Schlegel, between 1798 and 1800, linked the terms comedy, tragedy, irony, and grotesque and arabesque together under the banner of irony. We have already seen that in his Lectures on Poetry (1800) Schlegel praised the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes for their [page 108:] “artfully regulated confusion, that charming symmetry of contradictions, that strange and constant alternation between irony and enthusiasm present even in the smallest parts of the whole,” a structure he called “arabesque.” In Fragment 418 of the first Athenäum volume (1798) Schlegel characterized Tieck's works as “poetic arabesques,” composed with a sense of irony and endowed with fantasy and gaiety. In Fragments 75, 305, and 389 Schlegel associated the “grotesque” with a contrast between form and content, with the explosiveness of the paradoxical antithesis and fusion of the ridiculous and the terrifying, and with sophisticated caricature (K 50-53). Thus, although both terms are associated with irony (contrasts, discrepancies, mockery) in Schlegel's view, again there is a curious inversion of the meanings of grotesque and arabesque as they are usually interpreted with reference to Poe: the arabesque suggesting deceptive point of view and general duplicity; the grotesque suggesting a powerfully emotive fusion of the ridiculous and the terrifying. Yet Friedrich's brother, August Wilhelm, had at the same time associated the grotesque with charm, humor, tenderness, wantonness, and sublimity, a connection apparently derived from Goethe's essay On Arabesques (1789) in which Goethe defended the grotesque-arabesque style (making no distinction) from the strictures of the classicists.

As Raymond Immerwahr points out, in Friedrich Schlegel's thought the term grotesque is “frequently synonymous” with arabesque, just as Schlegel's concept of the arabesque tends to merge with his concept of irony. Immerwahr makes several important historical distinctions among the three terms grotesque, arabesque, and irony which yet underscore their similarity. He suggests that the origin of the Romantic concept of arabesque is to be found in the “romances” of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which the author has, with full awareness, carefully insinuated into his narrative incongruity in detail and antithesis in character and structure. He cites the works of Wolfram, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Berni as prime examples of this “playful” tradition and traces it through Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, to the German writers Wieland, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and Klinger (see pp. 673-82). Schlegel's concept of the arabesque, Immerwahr claims, is “centered in the generally playful treatment of artistic form,” especially as manifested in two closely related ways.

The first is “discussion within the work of the form or medium along with the actual object of portrayal,” or the “portraying of this form or medium instead of the object” (p. 673). (We have looked at this effect earlier as characteristic of Tieck's Romantic Irony and have observed it in such Poe tales as “The Premature Burial.”) The second, and more [page 109:] important here, is the writer's development of “incongruities in the relationship between a framing narrative and one or more inner strands which break or severely strain the narrative illusion” (p. 678). Immer-wahr, from a wide historical perspective, thus defines arabesque, as the Romanticists came to know it, as a technique of “deliberate intricacies and inconsistencies in the handling of narrative frames and direct treatment within the narrative of the conditions of the narrative ...” (p. 683). The close similarity of this concept of arabesque to Romantic Irony in general is most important, for it corroborates Poe's ironic intent in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Indeed, it is precisely this latter arabesque technique that I have been arguing is the operative strategy, though with very subtle frames, in “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and other of Poe's Gothic tales from “Metzengerstein” to “The Cask of Amontillado.” As Immerwahr observes, arabesque is a term applicable to the “form of a narrative” which is an “outward manifestation of irony” (p. 683), or a term signifying the “ironic potentialities inherent in the use of a narrative frame” (p. 681).

Thus, the constant element in the Romanticists’ usage of grotesque and arabesque, I suggest, is a carefully patterned union of ironic opposites giving rise to a transcendent vision of the true state of things. The grotesque suggests more strongly a yoking of the chaotic, the fearful, and the comic; the arabesque suggests more strongly a sense of ironic perspectives in the midst of confusion and ominousness. Both suggest the struggle to understand the incomprehensible, neither term meaning anything absolutely exclusive of the other, both focused on the tension between conscious control and subconscious fear and delusion. Friedrich Schlegel called Jean Paul's “grotesques” the “only romantic products of our unromantic age”; and Jean Paul in his Introduction to Aesthetics (1804) characterized the genre of the terrifying and the ridiculous, of the tragic and the comic, of the serious and the satiric as true “humor.” Humor, Jean Paul wrote, is that “skepticism” which is “born when the mind's eye surveys the terrible mass of martial opinions which surround it,” and which leads downward to “the abyss” [[the abyss [not a quotation]]] and upward toward the “idea of infinity” (K 55). This formulation of Romantic “skepticism” we shall later see to be most useful in describing Poe's stance toward art and the world.

Only four years before Poe sent his first tales to a publisher, Victor Hugo, a writer to whom Poe has frequent reference, in the preface to Cromwell (1827) used the word grotesque to indicate an ambiguous comic genre, creating what is on the one hand “deformed and horrible,” and on the other what is “comic and farcical” (K 57). Moreover, [page 110:] , Hugo's grotesque exhibits precisely that concern for a union of opposites, a harmony of contrarieties, and a resultant transcendental vision that is characteristic of philosophical Romantic Irony. In art, said Hugo, “an ugly, horrible, hideous thing,” transformed by “truth and poetry,” becomes “beautiful, admirable, sublime, without losing anything of its monstrosity.” For Hugo, the grotesque involved a structural principle of ironic contrasts leading to “a vision of the great infernal laughter.” Burton R. Pollin has pointed out that not only was Hugo's preface to Cromwell a “widely discussed and extensively publicized document” but also that the June 1828 number of the Foreign Quarterly Review, a journal that Poe read regularly, carried a review of Cromwell with a summary of Hugo's conception of the historical development of literature (from the ode, to the epos, to the drama and the modern sensibility). The reviewer characterized this modern sensibility with the assertion, derived from Hugo, that “the burlesque is the just and distinguishing feature of the ... present age” and is born of “the jumbling of tragedy and comedy, terror and buffoonery” as human society progresses toward its present state of clearer vision.(4) The parallels with, and perhaps indebtedness to, the German critics are obvious. There seems little doubt that in calling his tales “Grotesque and Arabesque,” Poe did not mean to split them into the comic and the serious but instead to indicate the fusion of the comic and serious into that vision the German Romanticists were calling irony. This conviction is deepened by yet another article in the Foreign Quarterly Review the year preceding (July 1827), an essay-review of the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann by Sir Walter Scott.

 

II

Scott's review, titled “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition: and Particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann,”(5) has long been associated with Poe's conception of the Gothic and the grotesque and arabesque. But little detailed analysis of what Scott actually said has been offered. Pollin, naturally enough, given his subject of the pervasive influence of Hugo on Poe, seeks to minimize the importance of the discussion of the grotesque that Scott gives. While I do not deny the importance of Hugo's discussion of the grotesque — indeed, I am convinced that Poe must have been aware of it — the Scott article is undoubtedly the more significant.(6) Whereas the influence of Hugo's preface must have been general, the influence of Scott's review was specific: it is clear that Poe not only read Scott's [page 111:] article with care but also that he appropriated Gothic materials from it in a manner similar to the way he appropriated critical materials from A. W. Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures.

As with Schlegel's Lectures, the evidence that Poe read Scott on Hoffmann is conclusive. The summary of Hoffmann's story “The Entail” that Scott gives in this essay is clearly the source for some of the Gothic elements of Poe's “Metzengerstein” and “Usher,” and the parallels provide some striking evidence for Poe's careful perusal of Scott's article. The background of the “Entail” involves an eccentric prince named Roderick, who had in the past (as in “Metzengerstein”) given wild parties in a frenzied attempt to achieve good spirits, but who remained essentially alone in a castle surrounded by ghastly vegetation growing blackly up to the very walls. At the time of the story, part of the castle is in ruins, split by a deep fissure “which extended from the highest turret to the dungeon of the castle,” rather obviously the source for Roderick Usher's house and its zigzag fissure extending from the roof down into the tarn. A magistrate visits the castle with his nephew (the narrator), who, Scott said, is a vain, “romantic,” “enthusiastic” “coxcomb,” “trained ... in the school of Werther” (p. 85), a suggestive judgment if applied to the “nervous” narrator of “Usher.” This young man spends the night in a lonely hall of the castle, and at one point (as in “Usher”) the storm outside suddenly stops, and the moonlight streams through the windows to illuminate strangely lifelike portraits of ancestral knights and fantastic carvings upon the walls and the ceiling, which project weirdly and in the “uncertain light of the moon and the fire, gave a grisly degree of reality” (p. 87). The narrator (as in “Usher”) comments on the influence of environment over the human imagination, and reveals that he has drunk too much. He then decides to indulge his half-pleasant apprehensiveness (like the lover in “The Raven”) with a ghost story, the “Ghost-Seer” of Schiller. (Schiller's “Ghost-Seer,” we may note in passing, is a rationally explained tale.) He reads Schiller's tale up to the wedding feast of Count von B—— (“Count von Berlifitzing,” of course, figures in “Metzengerstein”), that is, to that point where the ghost appears. At this moment, the door to the hall bursts open, and the narrator drops his book; but he explains to himself that it is the wind or something else equally natural, and continues reading, only to be interrupted by the sound of footsteps outside the door. This timing of incidents in the tale to events in the book is like the episode of the “Mad Trist” in “Usher,” though Poe makes it more extended, dreamlike, and psychologically delusive.

Other evidence of Poe's reading of Scott's review (though Hoffmann [page 112:] was available in translation) is primarily additive after these parallels. In Pinakidia, writing on the derivation of the term assassin, Poe mentions Von Hammer (H 14:45), whose work the History of the Assassins (1818) is extensively reviewed in the same volume of the Foreign Quarterly Review (1:449-72). There is also in this volume a review of Manzoni's Betrothed (498-515) from which an extract, concerning death carts used in the plague in Milan in the seventeenth century, may have been used by Poe (there is some doubt about his authorship) in his 1835 review of Featherstonhaugh's translation of the Betrothed (H 8:12-19). Scott also makes particular reference in his essay to the burlesque tales of County Anthony Hamilton and to Puler s comi-heroic poetry (pp. 65-66), both of whom Poe mentions briefly (H 10:189; 14:185; 16:123; 14:43), referring to Pulci as “the sire of the half-serious rhyme.” Scott also refers to the horror tales of the “secondary names” of German literature, the very phrase that Poe uses in the preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

More important, Scott in this essay extensively discussed Hoffmann's techniques and compared them to the normal use of the supernatural in Gothic tales, concluding by commenting on Hoffmann's propensity to indulge in the sickly fantasies of the grotesque or arabesque. This Scott disapproved of, preferring the more regular Gothic. According to Scott, Hoffmann's “Entail” has a legitimate human interest, whereas his “The Sandman” belongs to that unsatisfactory genre of “half horror and half whim,” and is merely “ingenuity thrown away” (pp. 93-94).

Wolfgang Kayser has observed that the development of Hoffmann's career involved a shift from a kind of allegorical explanation of odd happenings in which inexplicable and vaguely demonic figures turn out to be the traditional devil (which thus tends to undercut the sinister impact of the true grotesque) to an art that permits doubt about unnatural and improbable behavior, encouraging the reader to seek an explanation, within the limits of verisimilitude, but which normally will not be forthcoming. The result of this double effect is the “estranged” world of the true grotesque. Although a little different, this parallels the supernaturalist, explained, and ambiguous modes of the Gothic we examined in the last chapter. Kayser offers a clear example of what he means by ineffective allegorized fairy tale in the figure of the polite stranger in Hoffmann's “Life of a Well-Known Man.” The Stranger, when offered help in crossing a street, jumps six feet high and twelve feet across it. At night, dressed in white, he knocks at various doors, his purpose never quite clear, his explanations never quite satisfactory. The weird, estranged world conjured up by these bizarre incidents tends to evaporate, however, when we learn that the stranger is simply the devil (K 75-76, 69-70). Grotesque effect, on [page 113:] the other hand, resists a tendency toward a firm frame of reference, and we are left with a sense of the mysterious.(7)

A major part of this effect lies with the narrative point of view, and it is here that the arabesque merges into the grotesque. Thus a narrator begins with some rationality and separation from the events and characters and gradually moves closer to the events, adopting the perspective of other characters or becoming a deeply affected eyewitness. As we have seen, this technique is typical of many of Poe's stories, especially “Usher” and “Ligeia.” Kayser uses as his principal example of this kind of weird psychological verisimilitude Hoffmann's “Sandman” which so puzzled Scott. Kayser characterizes Hoffmann's “Sandman” as a tale with the double effect of the weird and the real — weird when seen from the point of view of the protagonist, but realistically understandable as a psychological study of trauma and obsession. The shifting and contrasting points of view, of terror, apprehension, commonsense, clear perception, willful delusion, and madness, produce in their total ambiguous interaction a large arabesque pattern of irony. Indeed, in the preface to his Phantasy-Pieces (1814-15), Hoffmann praised Jacques Callas etchings of the commedia dell’arte, the quality of which he proposed to imitate in his writings, not only for their dreamlike vision but also for their “irony.”

Scott also in this essay tries to account for the psychology of the supernatural in literature in terms of effect. In the process he comments on the grotesque and arabesque styles and effects with reference to the comic possibilities of the Gothic, thus further linking Poe's “Gothicism” with the German concepts of ironic horror and whimsy. After some initial remarks on the propensity of even the most incredulous and rational of men to be affected by suggestions of the supernatural, Scott proceeded to this “comic side of the supernatural,” which, he said, may either entirely travesty and hold up to laughter the Gothic or generate a sort of “imperfect excitement” (p. 66). This latter species of the supernatural romance, he says, is well executed by French and German writers, like the German Wieland; and there is also a large area of “comi-heroic” poetry that belongs to this class, Scott noted, including the works of Luigi Pulci, Francesco Berni, and Ariosto. Scott found Ariosto only occasionally humorous; but “in some passages at least,” said Scott, Ariosto “lifts his knightly vizor so far as to give a momentary glimpse of the smile which mantles upon his countenance” (p. 66). These remarks, I submit, were seminal for the young Poe, interested in the Gothic and yet possessed of a sardonic turn of mind.

When Scott considered the collections of fairy tales, like those of the brothers Grimm, he found them to glut the appetite with too much [page 114:] of the supernatural, remarking, in addition, that there is yet another species of supernatural romance, allied to the satiric, to the comic, to the comi-heroic, to the eccentric, and to the fairy tale, but specifically resulting from the “attachment of the Germans to the mysterious” (p. 72). “This,” writes Scott, “may be called the FANTASTIC mode of writing, — in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy, and all species of combination, however ludicrous, or however shocking, are attempted and executed without scruple” (p. 72). Commenting on recent translations of Chamisso and Hoffmann, Scott described Hoffmann's works in general as “grotesque” pieces of “diablerie” (p. 77), which do not have quite the quality of the true supernatural, and linked the terms grotesque and arabesque tightly together:

Scott's notion of grotesque, then, is much like the eighteenth-century usage of “arabesque Gothic,” as he himself suggested; and, applying rather classicistic standards, Scott found Hoffmann's grotesquerie unsatisfactory. Scott especially found Hoffmann's admission of a sense of kinship with Callot puzzling, and contrasted the engravings of Hogarth with Canoes etchings; in examining the “diablerie” of Callot, he suggests, we find instances of “ingenuity thrown away,” whereas Hogarth has a sense of the human and of the social world in which human beings move (pp. 93-94). This comment rather strikingly bears out what Kayser feels is the essential characteristic of the grotesque, an “estranged” world. Scott's attempt to define grotesque writing by reference to arabesque painting again tends to confirm the probability that Poe, too, conceived of the two terms as near synonyms.

In part, Scott's disapproval of the grotesque was the result of his having misconstrued the aims of the genre; especially did he fail to see its concern for ambivalent irony, an effect Hoffmann tried to make clear in the preface to his Phantasy-Pieces. And in part he was the victim of a prejudgment which associated such works with a “sick mind.” The parallel with the critical reception of Poe is striking. Yet [page 115:] Scott admitted that it could sometimes be “pleasing to look at the wildness of an Arabesque painting executed by a man of rich fancy” (p. 93). But he complained that the grotesque writers ask us not only to be tolerant of “startling and extravagant caprice,” but also of the “horrible” and even the “disgusting.” The underlying element of this mixture of whimsy and horror, according to Scott, is “overstrained feelings,” which always tend ultimately toward pain and even madness. We, “possess in a much greater degree [he writes] the power of exciting in our minds what is fearful, melancholy, or horrible, than of commanding thoughts of a lively and pleasing character. The grotesque ... has a natural alliance with the horrible; for that which is out of nature can be with difficulty reconciled to the beautiful” (p. 93). In Scott's essay, then, Poe found not only useful Gothic decor for “Metzengerstein” and “Usher,” but also discussion of the insinuated supernatural, of the psychology of the supernatural, of eccentric and nervous (and drunken) Gothic heroes and narrators, of satiric and sportive Gothic, and, most importantly, of a special Gothic blend of the serious and the comic, based on overstrained emotions, that Scott called alternatively the “fantastic,” the “grotesque,” and the “arabesque.”

Scott tended to dislike grotesque fantasy because he thought it was depressing and had little affinity with beauty. On this latter point at least, Poe thought otherwise. In an essay on N. P. Willis in the Broadway Journal (January 18, 1845), Poe defined “imagination,” “fancy,” “fantasy,” and “humor” in a way that confirms his commitment to that Germanic fantasy which Scott identified with the grotesque. All four faculties have in common “the elements Combination and Novelty.” The “Imagination,” Poe says, is “the artist of the four”: “From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects only such as are harmonious; — the result, of course, is beauty itself — using the term in its most extended sense, and as inclusive of the sublime” (H 12:38).

Poe, we have seen before, considered the imagination as almost a divine power of man, a lesser power of God. The most perfect work of imagination would be God's universe (which just may be imperfect), a perfection the human artist obviously cannot hope to approach. Insofar as the imagination combines items in a truly novel form, it can be “said” to create, which the other faculties may do too, though not so well. True creation, however, is not within man's province (H 12:37-38). But the ultimate artistic beauty of “harmony,” Poe says (like a Romantic Ironist), can be the result of the imagination transmuting the elements of “either beauty or deformity” (H 12:38): “The range [page 116:] of the Imagination [[of Imagination]] is ... unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the Universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that Beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test” (H 12:39). The thoroughly or most purely imaginative work, argued Poe, has such a “thorough harmony” that it is often “under valued [[under-valued]] by the undiscriminating,” since its combinations have a quality of the expected, the smooth, the obviously appropriate. But when in a work “there is introduced the sub-element of unexpectedness” (matters never before combined “brought into [a] combination” that “strikes us as a difficulty happily overcome”), the result is a work of “fancy.” A work of “fantasy” carries these “enticing” imperfections of “difficulty overcome” to excess and may result in painful incoherence instead of pleasurable harmony if the writer, delighting in “novelty and unexpectedness of combination,” avoids “proportion” (H 12:39-40). But there is, added Poe, another, more harmonious, beautiful, and ultimately more truthful kind of fantasy: “When, proceeding a step farther ... Fantasy seeks not merely disproportionate but incongruous or antagonistical elements, the effect is rendered more pleasurable from its greater positiveness ...” (H 12:40). Into this kind of fantasy, which seeks the incongruous and the antagonistical, “truth” makes a “merry effort” to enter, and we recognize true “humor” (H 12:40).

Poe's identification of fantasy with, on the one hand, unexpectedness and avoidance of proportion, and, on the other hand, with a work of imagination that combines the beautiful and the deformed, the an-tagonistical and the incongruous, into a harmonious, truthful, beautiful work of “humor,” is most important. For it not only links Poe with Scott's dubious review of Hoffmann's grotesques, but it also places him deep within what he called the “vortex” of German theory from Tieck and the Schlegels to Jean Paul.(8) And thus Poe's genre in his fiction is just what he said it was in his first collection of tales: “grotesque and arabesque.” That by these terms Poe did not mean to split his work in two but instead to emphasize its unity is further underscored by his proposed title for an expanded collection two years later — the Germanic sounding “Phantasy-Pieces,” tales of fearful humor, and of ultimately harmonious irony.

 

III

The terms grotesque and arabesque frequently occur together in Poe's writings in such a way as to suggest, predominantly, that they refer to a single psychological effect or response having to do with ambivalence, [page 117:] tension between opposites, and a sense of the transcendent ironic vision.(9) One senses the smile behind the phrasing of the statement in the preface to the 1840 collection of tales that the “epithets ‘Grotesque’ and ‘Arabesque’ will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published” (H 1:150). While Poe does hint at the association of arabesque with Germanism and gloom, phantasy and horror, he refuses to be pinned down and in the next breath paradoxically denies Germanic horror in what he has just admited are indeed Germanic horror tales. He writes in a subtle contradiction that “Germanism is ‘the vein for the time being. Tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else” (H 1:150).

Certainly, Poe's actual usage of grotesque does not have a simple comic or satiric quality. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” for example, Poe suggests in connection with the term grotesque a psychological sense of the weird. The unnamed narrator of the tale says that the common temper of Dupin and himself partakes of a “fantastic gloom,” which is reflected in their inversion of night and day and in their choice of a “time-eaten and grotesque mansion” which had been “long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire ...” (H 4:151). When the term grotesque comes up again toward the conclusion of the tale, Poe again links it with superstitious fear, but indirectly and with a number of ironic perspectives working on it. When the analytical Dupin reviews the circumstances of the murders (one woman's head is almost completely severed from her body, the other woman's corpse is “thrust up a chimney [[,]] head downward,” the locked chamber is in an “odd disorder”), he remarks almost comically that the extremity of the horror seems “excessively outré” (H 4:178). The whole situation seems, Dupin says, like a “grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity” (H 4:180). Moreover, the alien quality of the murders is intensified by the reports of the murderer's voice, which was “devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification.” “What impression,” Dupin asks the narrator, does the total pattern of these strange details make “upon your fancy?” The narrator, with “a creeping of the flesh,” replies that some “madman ... some raving maniac” must have committed the murders. But Dupin points out that madmen, “even in their wildest paroxysms” and “however incoherent” in their words, speak a human language; thus, their ravings have the “coherence of syllabification,” which the overheard voice of the murderer did not. Dupin then shows the narrator a bit of hair “disentangled” from the “rigidly clutched fingers” of one of the murdered women. The narrator, “completely unnerved,” remarks that “this is [page 118:] no human hair” (H 4:181). His horrified statement is the high point, emotively, of the tale, for the nonhuman quality of the hair suddenly, if briefly, brings the odd circumstances of the murders to a point of mystery and supernaturalism beyond the conventionally Gothic and into the realm of the inexplicably eerie and alien. Poe has here brought his tale to the point of the “estranged” world of the true grotesque, as Kayser defines it.(10)

That such estrangement is Poe's intention in this passage is confirmed by the emphasis on reactions of the narrator, which constitutes a pattern of dramatic irony in the tale. Significantly, however, there are two reactions to the strange circumstances of the murder, for Poe contrasts the “creeping flesh” of the narrator with the cold rationality of Dupin. Some critics have thought that Dupin is a symbolic projection of Poe's sell-assumed superiority to the rest of mankind. Dupin's “superiority,” however, contains at least two major ironies. First, regarding the relationship of the reader to the writer, we have seen that Poe commented in a letter to P. P. Cooke in 1846 that part of the “effect” of ratiocinative tales like “The Rue Morgue” consists in a hoax, in making the reader “confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” Poe's mocking and self-deprecating irony regarding the relation of reader and writer is further revealed by his question, “where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the purpose of unravelling?” (O 2:328). Second, Dupin functions in the tale almost like the controlling ironic artist himself. After having “unnerved” the narrator by pointing out the grotesque details of the murders, Dupin calmly provides a realistic explanation which he has deduced from a number of small clues intricately related to the overall “outré” pattern of the situation. Through “deduction” and a leap of imagination, he sees through a chaos of bizarre appearances to the more pedestrian reality behind the deceptive “facts.” The narrator's comment that “this is no human hair” epitomizes in its way Poe's ironic technique, since at the very instant that the narrator is duped into fancying some unnameable horror, the rational explanation begins. A nonhuman but humanlike animal, an escaped orangutan, has killed the two women, a rather disappointingly commonplace (certainly not grotesque) fusing of two different realms of existence, though doubtless satisfying on a detective-story level.

Dupin's phrase, “a grotesquerie in horror,” suggests that the very extremity of the violence and of the unusual circumstances impresses him as some sort of “mocking” caricature of “ordinary” (Dupin uses the word) horror. Yet the sense of grotesque horror is momentarily [page 119:] increased by Dupin's matter-of-fact tone and then dissolved abruptly by the rational explanation. Moreover, the eerie in-between emotional state of the grotesque “ratiocination,” in which the clues to the “solution” of a weird tale are ingeniously combined with Romantic-Ironic destruction of illusion, can be seen as the basic ironic technique of Poe's fiction. In the ratiocinative story proper, the reader is encouraged to try his wits against those of the writer in a search for clues within a rational pattern; the reader is encouraged to look for a realistic explanation from the very beginning. In the “Rue Morgue,” however, when Poe's Dupin for all his rationality finally brings the reader to a flesh-creeping sense of the uncanny, then brings him up short again with the rational, the overall technique is much like the Romantic Irony at the conclusion of “The Premature Burial.” Similarly, we have seen that in Gothic tales like “Ligeia” and “Usher,” Poe constantly suggests the supernatural while carefully insinuating ratiocinative clues. He brings the reader to the edge of the supernatural, as it were, then leaves him confronting, through an “unnerved” narrator, the luminous eyes of Ligeia, or the pale figure of Madeline Usher returned from the grave. From the beginning, the reader is encouraged to doubt, although ambivalently, any rational explanation and instead to enjoy the luxury of a supernatural thrill, despite the psychological clues. But Poe also insinuates into his Gothic tales an absurd and mocking destruction of the spooky effect — such as the narrator's elaborate preparation in “Ligeia” of the bridal-funeral chamber, with its wind machine to animate the draperies, or the Gothic tale of the “Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning” that the narrator of “Usher” finds in the library along with works not only by mystics but also by Ludwig Tieck.

Another example of the way he turns even the grotesque back on itself and its practitioners is found in the comic tale “Mystification,” where Poe remarks of the hero that he was a “habitual mystific” who was “ever upon the look-out for the grotesque” (H 4:105, 106). Poe's narrator observes that the Baron Ritzner von Jung was one of those “anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives” (H 4:104). As Harry Levin has suggested, the tale seems almost an analysis of Poe's own psychology. The narrator observes, “I truly think that no person at the university, with the exception of myself, ever suspected him to be capable of a joke, verbal or practical.” For despite all the grotesque “drolleries” that he generated, Baron von Jung had the “consummate ability” to give the impression that everything happened in spite of his efforts to prevent them. He had, moreover, the “adroitness” to “shift the sense of the grotesque from the creator to the created.” That is, [page 120:] he never came to be associated with the “absurdities” he produced but remained, incognito, detached from them. As the narrator says, “in no instance before that of which I speak [the ensuing tale], have I known the habitual mystific escape the natural consequences of his manoeuvers — an attachment of the ludicrous to his own character and person” (H 4:104-5).

Such multiple mocking irony, I suggest, is the basis of the “rare” and “glowing” humor that Poe saw in the grotesquerie of some of the writings of Tieck and Thomas Hood. Yet, though Poe uses the word grotesquerie in his Marginalia comment on Hood to indicate an area of extreme imaginativeness and wit, involving puns and an “ideal” but wild comic sense, the association of the grotesque with the uncanny psychological effect of superstition and terror on the fancy hovers over the surface. Of Hood, Poe writes:

Again, the “rushing abandon” suggests the overstrained emotions of a madman, forcibly recalling Poe's comment on the “wit and humor” of The Doctor, that seeming madman's “rhapsody” which yet did not have “the proper evidences of madness.” The statement also is consistent with Walter Scott's association of the grotesque and arabesque with “overstrained” feelings tending toward pain and madness, which, to his disfavor, certain German writers favored. The psychological import of the term grotesque, then, should be clear; moreover, Poe uses the term in just that ambivalent way that the Romantic Ironists in Germany did to fuse ironically the sinister and the comic, the weird and the absurd.

The association of the grotesque with the odd, bizarre, eerie, and disturbing impression of things on the overstrained human mind Poe links with the term arabesque in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). The two terms are used together in such a way as to suggest a fusion of psychological meaning clearly connected with both sheer irony of events and with insinuated, mocking irony of tone and point of view. In an effort to escape the plague, Prince Prospero takes refuge with his guests in his country castle. He orders seven halls to be built [page 121:] according to a design which reflects his “love of the bizarre” (H 4:251). The apartments are irregularly laid out with sharp turns so that one's vision is focused and limited. Each room is decorated with different colors and lighted naturally from Gothic windows of the same color as the room. Otherwise, there are no lights, except from the flickering braziers in the connecting passageways that project glaring light through the windows, and produce a “multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances.” In the black chamber, “the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all” (H 4:252). The prince orders a ball to lighten the pervasive sense of death that oppressively hangs over everything. But a gigantic ebony clock, with its pendulum swinging monotonously, upon each hour utters from its “brazen lungs” a clear, loud, deep musical sound so peculiar that the musicians and dancers suddenly pause in their motions (like the performers of the commedia dell’arte) and listen: “the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hand over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation” (H 4:253). When the echoes of the chiming clock die away, a light laughter follows and the musicians look at each other and smile as if at “their own nervousness and folly.” Although this scene is repeated with each hour, the ball is “gay and magnificent.” The guests are all masked in accordance with the instructions of their host. Poe writes that the guests’ masks were “grotesque” and immediately proceeds to the “arabesque” decor:

This simultaneously grotesque and arabesque scene is strikingly akin to the grotesquerie of Hoffmann and Callot. But the important [page 122:] point here is that Poe uses grotesque and arabesque together. Separately, he associates grotesque explicitly with glare and glitter, piquancy and phantasm, and adds a half-satiric reference to Hugo's play, all in all a kind of confusion of surface gaiety interrupted by a weird sense of the ominous. The arabesque Poe associates more directly with Gothic figures, either disproportionate or disarrayed. Both terms together, however, he connects with the delirious dreams of madmen, in which are mixed the terrible, the disgusting, the beautiful, the wanton, and the bizarre.

Moreover, in the midst of the revelry, a strange figure, dressed as Death, appears, and the insulting “mockery” (H 4:256) of his costume further defines the sinister “humor” of the true grotesque in its generic sense: “Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed” (H 4:255-56). That is, the costume seems now no joke, but the further point is that the joke has become sinister, the humor ominous, the mockery horrible. The stranger comes to seem like Death himself. Yet, while the tale seems to tell of this supernatural visitation of Death, it can also be read as an ironic tone poem about hysteria, engendered by mood and setting, with a sarcastic concluding echo (as Levin seems to have been the first to notice) from Pope's Dunciad:

Such mocking irony reflects the larger jest of death and life basic to the dramatic irony of the tale. Prince Prospero's sinister stronghold, of course, contrasts directly with the enchanted island of his namesake, Prospero, the magician in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The ironic theme of Poe's tale focuses on the grimly perverse joke of Prospero's having walled in death in a frenetic attempt to wall it out. While the mocking undertone to all this may be described as that of the grotesque, the narrative point of view is that of the arabesque — of the sardonically superior Romantic Ironist, who, after having evoked the sinister scene from the well of subconscious (and metaphysical) fears, at the end soars freely above it all. [page 123:]

 

IV

A striking feature of the grotesque and arabesque elements in both “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and in “The Masque of the Red Death” is that of the delusive or dreamlike effect of interior design.(11) And the close similarity of meaning of the two terms grotesque and arabesque as Poe uses them is further revealed in the wordplay of his satiric essay on interior design, “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), in which he ironically recommends an arabesque modification of the rather grotesque tastes of American “decorists.” He ostensibly advises “median laws” in the patterns of carpeting, upholstery, curtains, and wallpaper. A carpet must have “distinct grounds”; the figures should be “vivid circular or cycloid” and “of no meaning”: “The abomination of flowers, or representations of well-known objects of any kind, should not be endured within the limits of Christendom. Indeed, whether on carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman covering, all upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque” (H 14:103-4). This usage of the term arabesque would seem to be a kind of Kantian conception, suggesting beauty of pure design, involving perspective against a distinct background, recalling the seventeenth-century distinction of perspective in scrollwork — except that Poe has here insinuated a punning contradiction that produces, at the least, a trace of doubt about the complete sincerity of his advice in the rest of the essay. Although the passage seems reasonable enough on the surface, Poe has turned the prejudices of two cultures topsy-turvy: Americans of taste will prefer Arabesque patterns, reproducing no natural forms, and will not endure natural forms within the limits of “Christendom,” especially on such items as “ottomans.” Poe then goes on to describe perversions of taste that emphasize mere glare and glitter, glass and gaslight,”sprawling and radiating devises,” “stripe interspersed and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible” (H 14:104). This perversion of quiet order into sprawling lines, glitter, and confusion is obviously like that grotesque confusion of Prince Prospero's halls in “The Masque of the Red Death” and gives another twist to the element of sardonic mockery we have just examined in that tale. Even the very title of the essay is a mock-serious device, the pretentiousness of which is undercut by the subject, and underscored by alliteration. The essay is always taken seriously, but its satiric level can be easily demonstrated. Published the same year as the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the essay is contemporaneous with Poe's clearest formulation of his genre; and his satiric presentation of “decorist” [page 124:] theory makes for an illuminating comparison with the mocking decorist theory of the early tale “The Assignation.”

A look at the opening of “The Philosophy of Furniture” clarifies the satiric irony of Poe's arabesque recommendations. Poe begins with vituperative comments on Romantic taste, accusing Americans of mere display. Since the well-furnished apartment in America is distinguished by lack of restraint and by general “want of keeping,” he will recommend his own conception of the “ideal” room (H 14:101-3). But he gradually adds more and more “glitter” and “glare” and “picture” until he ironically produces his own perversion of quiet tastefulness. He suggests as “ideal” an oblong room, with crimson-paned windows (as in “The Masque of the Red Death”), curtained with airy silver curtains within the recess and with crimson silk curtains without. The curtains are drawn with ropes of thick gold; a rich giltwork ornaments the juncture of ceiling and walls; the walls themselves are “prepared with a glossy paper of silver gray tint, spotted with small Arabesque devices of a fainter hue of the prevalent crimson.” Relieving the expanse of the paper are imaginative landscape paintings — such as Chapman's “Lake of the Dismal Swamp.” The furniture is of crimson and rosewood; central in the room is an octagonal table formed of rich “gold-threaded marble” and a few “appurtenances” such as a candelabrum and a lamp with perfumed oil. The general similarity to the bridal chamber in “Ligeia” is easily seen, especially when Poe adds the final touch: all this quiet tastefulness surrounds a “sleeping” body (H 14:106-8).

In the context of Poe's career, suspicion of burlesque intent in this essay is confirmed by comparison of its “ideal” room with the room in the idyllic “Landor's Cottage” (1849), with the chamber of Prince Prospero, with the ghastly bridal chamber of Lady Rowena Trevanion (of Tremaine), and with the apartment of his Satanic Majesty the Devil in Poe's early satire, “The Due de L’Omelette” (1832). Landor's room, set in a house itself set in a valley that is a kind of natural outdoor room or “amphitheatre,” is similar in some respects to the ideal room of “The Philosophy of Furniture,” but simpler, more realistic, less lurid in color; the design of the carpet, for example, consists merely of small circular green figures against a simple white background (H 6:270). In the “Due de L’Omelette” the lighting arrangement of the Devil's apartment is almost precisely that recommended as ideal in “The Philosophy of Furniture.” The last detail of the ideal room is “an Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground-glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold chain ...” (H 14:109). In the earlier satiric tale, as we have seen, the [page 125:] Devil's ruby lamp is suspended by a slender red-gold chain, the end of which is lost in the clouds like Coleridge, Carlyle, or the City of Boston. Similar “censers” in other tales are called “Saracenic” and “arabesque.”

Thus Poe's earliest use of this setting and its fiery lamplight is blatantly comic and satiric, and it is such a setting in “The Philosophy of Furniture” that he associates with the ideal of the arabesque. But we have seen that the term is double-edged, employed as both design of no apparent natural meaning against the perspective of clear background and also as an ironic pun carrying one of the first clues to the hoaxing satire of the essay. The “pure beauty” of the arabesque pattern ostensibly connotes the opposite of the chaotic designs popular in America, but Poe's arabesque room reads like a grotesquerie of the ideal. We have seen also that in “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe associates arabesque clearly with gloomy Gothic figures in chaotic disarray and disproportion, suggesting the early eighteenth-century conception of the “Saracen” style of the Gothic. The word arabesque in “Red Death” suggests, in addition, an extreme psychological state as well as the merely weird, for the term is juxtaposed to the “delirious” “fancies” of a “madman.” Moreover, there is in this tale an insinuated current of mockery at least as closely associated with arabesque as with grotesque.

Thus Poe uses what is basically a satiric decor, and a satiric lighting arrangement, ironically in Gothic tales like “The Assignation,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Ligeia,” and “Usher.” And he does so in connection with the word arabesque in such a way as to confirm absolutely the deceptive ambivalence of both his term and his “flawed” Gothic technique. The usual view of Poe's Gothic lighting and interior decor, when they are not considered merely melodramatic and tawdry, is that they are Gothic stage properties which suggest rather well the demonic and supernatural. Oliver Evans, for example, writes that Poe often carefully arranges his lighting so that it seems to well up from below, frequently connecting such light with the word sulphurous,(12) and thereby suggesting an “infernal illumination.”

But on a level beyond the merely weird, though simultaneously with the weird, Poe's infernal lighting suggests, or is the objective correlative of, a tormented mind. The light it sees by wells up from the subconscious. Poe's characters often take a fiery “arabesque censer” as a symbol of their own state, as does the stranger in “The Assignation,” an early tale as significant as “Metzengerstein” for seeing Poe's multiple levels of irony. The stranger characterizes his spirit as writhing, as though damned, in the fire of his lamp. As put bluntly here, the metaphor [page 126:] is a bit comic, rather like some imp in a bottle. The metaphor is comic in a less obvious way in Poe's tale itself, for Poe in “The Assignation” gives the surface story a surface reasonableness and effectiveness. But the tale is actually a satiric hoax, a pretended Romantic tale of passion which actually lampoons the type as well as the prototypes of its unnamed hero and unnamed narrator. The story is worth looking at in detail, for not only have its satiric butts been clearly identified, but Poe's technique of giving deceptive clues to the true insinuated meaning of the tale can also be clearly exemplified in connection with grotesque and arabesque decor.

The dramatic action of the tale is ostensibly serious and Gothic. An unnamed narrator, returning home at sunset in a gondola by way of the Grand Canal in Venice, hears a “wild, hysterical, and long continued shriek” (H 2:110), another of many such in Poe. Looking up, he sees a beautiful woman standing statuelike at an upper-story window, but in frozen horror, for her child has fallen into the black water of the canal. “Stupified and aghast,” the narrator sees also the “Satyr-like figure” of old Mentoni, “thrumming a guitar” while desultorily giving “directions for the recovery of his child” (H 2:112). Suddenly a muffled figure steps out of a dark niche in the architecture of the building opposite and plunges into the water after the child. This strange figure “in an instant afterward [[afterwards]]” is standing “upon the marble flagstones” by the side of the Marchesa di Mentoni with “the still living and breathing child within his grasp.” His cloak, drenched with water, falls about his feet and discovers “to the wonder-stricken spectators the graceful person of a very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing” (H 2:113). (The narrator does not give the stranger's name, but later reveals that he is an English poet.) The beautiful Marchesa Aphrodite, like a “statue that has [[statue has]] started into life,” then gratefully whispers to the handsome stranger that he has “conquered” and that “one hour after sun-rise — we shall meet — so let it be!” (H 2:113-14). The narrator offers to take the dripping stranger home in his gondola, and the stranger (who has the mouth and chin of a deity, wild and full dark eyes, and a profusion of curling black hair over a broad ivory forehead) invites the narrator to come to his palace at sunrise. Early the next morning, the narrator is overwhelmed by the rich decor, especially the statuary, of the stranger's apartment, as well as by the stranger's somewhat mad behavior. About an hour after sunrise, the stranger shows the narrator a portrait of the Marchesa Aphrodite and calls the narrator to join him in drink. He then makes some remarks about life, death, and art, recites the lines “Stay for me there! I will not fail / To meet thee in [page 127:] that hollow vale,” and seems to fall asleep. At this moment, a messenger brings news that the Marchesa has taken poison. The narrator tries to “arouse the sleeper,” but the stranger's limbs are rigid and his eyes are riveted in death. As the narrator staggers back, he finds a “cracked and blackened goblet,” and then “a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth” flashes over his “soul” (H 2:124).

The melodramatic quality of the action and the language is given a quality of satiric exaggeration by the semicomic motif of statuary in the tale, including a reference to the survival of an altar to laughter, some banter about the Apollo Belvedere, as well as the statuelike appearances of the two major characters. The Marchesa is first seen in the niche of her window (looking like a statue of either Aphrodite or a Madonna) and the stranger seems to step from a dark architectural niche in the next building; in a moment they pose marblelike on the marble steps. The stranger's features are like those of the Apollo; his bearing recalls to the narrator's mind some words of Bussy D'Ambois: “... like a Roman statue! He will stand / Till Death hath made him marble!” (H 2:123). And when he dies his limbs become immediately rigid. It is as if Poe is suggesting, under the surface seriousness, that the characters of such tales are rigid and artificial, a satiric possibility that becomes more likely when the statue motif is seen in the context of Poe's use of Childe Harold and Thomas Moore's edition of the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830).

Writing of his visit to the principal art galleries of Florence, Byron had mentioned, among other items, the Venus de Medici, Canova's Venus, the Antinous, and a work of Michael Angelo. Poe's unnamed stranger also alludes to these four figures. Further parallels in Poe's tale with Byron's affair with the Countess Guiccioli lie not only in the general setting, but also in specific details associated with Byron, the most obvious of which is perhaps the reference to the Bridge of Sighs, near a “palace and a prison.” Richard P. Benton, in an article as significant for a just reassessment of Poe as Darrel Abel's on “Usher,” has shown that while Byron's Childe Harold may have been the general or initial inspiration for Poe's story, two other references in “The Assignation” show not only that Thomas Moore's edition of Byron's letters was the immediate inspiration but also that Poe's narrator represents Moore himself. The tale is a kind of allegorical parody, Benton writes, in which Poe

Moore's description of his 1819 visit to Byron's “palazzo on the Grand Canal,” near the Rialto Bridge, is similar to the visit of Poe's narrator to the stranger's apai lucent. Moore was met by Byron who took him, in his gondola, to the palazzo. Then Byron led Moore “up the staircase” to his “spacious and elegant” rooms, where he expressed his unorthodox opinions on sculpture and painting. Poe's narrator says: “I found myself ... at his Palazzo ... [on] the Grand Canal in the vicinity of the Rialto,” and was “shown up a broad winding staircase” into an apartment of “unparalleled splendor.” Inside, the narrator is subjected to the stranger's unorthodox opinions on painting and sculpture. But the conclusive proof of the satiric “identity” of the narrator, is a pun. Benton explains:

Thomas O. Mabbott notes, however, that More's last words are supposed to have been a mild jest.(14) The reference then is doubly appropriate, and the real clue to the satiric suggestion of Tom Moore lies in the repetition. Benton, however, suggests that Poe is doing some decapitating of his own. Benton's concluding remarks regarding Poe's hoaxing irony are pertinent:

More important here, perhaps, as far as clarifying Poe's conception of the ambivalent mockery of the grotesque and arabesque is what immediately precedes this passage. The narrator is overwhelmed by the dazzling decor of the stranger's apartment, which is distinguished by its want of “keeping” equally as much as by the magnificence of its [page 129:] treasures. “The eye wandered,” the narrator says, “from object to object, and rested upon none — neither the grotesques of the Greek painters, nor the sculptures of the best Italian days, nor the huge carvings of untutored Egypt” (H 2:116). Somewhat as in “Ligeia,” rich draperies tremble to a “low, melancholy music” and the “senses” are “oppressed by mingled and conflicting” perfumes from “strange convolute censers” which burn with “multitudinous flaring and flickering tongues of emerald and violet fire” — censers that are also called arabesque. The rays from the newly risen sun pour in through “windows formed each of a single pane of crimson-tinted glass,” and the natural and artificial lights mingle and glance “to and fro, in a thousand reflections” (H 2:116), much as in the grotesque velvet chamber of “The Masque of the Red Death” and the “ideal” arabesque room of “The Philosophy of Furniture” (where such glitter and want of keeping are faults).

Laughing at the narrator's astonishment at the apartment and its art objects, the Byronic stranger comments that “some things are so completely ludicrous that a man must laugh or die” (H 2:117). He then makes the remark about Sir Thomas More and follows it with the intriguing comment that at Sparta there survives “among a chaos of scarcely visible ruins” an altar to laughter: “Now at Sparta were a thousand different temples [[thousand temples]] and shrines to a thousand different divinities. How exceedingly strange that the altar of Laughter should have survived all the others!” (H 2:117). That this passage is an emblematic clue to the comic undertone and satiric point of the tale is corroborated by the stranger's exhibition of his art treasures. The stranger shows the narrator the Madonna della Pieta of Guido Reni, of which Mabbott observes (p. 416) “its presence even in a palace” is “amusing” for it is “over ten by twenty feet.” Then the stranger expresses his preference for the Antinous over the Apollo; this, Benton suggests, is a comic rejection of the stranger's own image, for Moore had remarked on Byron's resemblance to the Apollo.

During and following this exhibition, the narrator observes that the Byronic stranger somehow seems “essentially apart from all other human beings.” The narrator attributes the stranger's abstraction to a kind of “habit of intense and continual thought, pervading even his most trivial actions ... and interweaving itself with his very flashes of merriment — like adders which writhe from out the eyes of the grinning masks in the cornices around the temples of Persepolis” (H 2:119; my italics). This striking fusion of the sinister and the comic announces an important psychological motif. The stranger's “mingled tone of levity and solemnity,” his “nervous unction,” his “excitability,” [page 130:] and his frequent pauses in the middle of a sentence to listen to “sounds which must have had existence in his imagination alone” suggest madness. But this mingled tone of levity and solemnity, along with the excess of exclamation points, ineffables, tear-stained pages, huge art works, and submerged satiric puns, also becomes emblematic of the grotesquerie of the tale itself, culminating in a doctrine of incongruity associated with bizarre dreams, with death, and with arabesque censers. At the conclusion of the tale, the now drunken Byronic stranger says, “... to dream has been the business of my life. I have therefore framed for myself, as you see, a bower of dreams” (H 2:123). Commenting on the disorder, the want of keeping, in the decor of his “bower of dreams,” he says: “Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Properties [[Proprieties]] of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent” (H 2:123). Once, he continues, he had been a “decorist,” but now the incongruous mixture of his rooms is “the fitter” for him. “Like these arabesque censers,” he adds, “my spirit is writhing in fire ...” (H 2:124). Moreover, he suggests that the “delirium” produced by the decor of his apartment is the more valuable since it provides him with “wilder visions” of that “land of real dreams,” death (H 2:124). The ostensible seriousness, the hoaxing satire, the altar to laughter, the doctrine of incongruity, the melodramatic death, the death jest and pun, the mingled tone of levity and seriousness which is like adders writhing from out the eyes of grinning masks, and the delirious dream of a spirit writhing in fire make “The Assignation” a synecdoche of the seriocomic, ironic ambivalence of Poe's arabesque tale.

 

V

The dreamlike delirium connected directly with the “writhing” light of the arabesque censer in “The Assignation” is consistent with Poe's association of the word with the dreams of the guilty and the insane in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Grotesque and arabesque, then, seem, in addition to their other qualities, to be firmly connected in Poe's writings with the confusing and delirious influence of setting, of environment upon the overstrained human mind. As we have seen, Poe frequently links the terms with irregular, niched, multiform architecture, Gothic armorial trophies, flickering fiery light, the weird transformation of natural light through Gothic windows, and the like. But Poe also applies the word arabesque to a predominantly pleasant dreamlike vision of a natural paradise beyond or out of nature in “The Domain [page 131:] of Arnheim” (1847), but it too, like the other “landscape” tales Poe wrote in the 1840s, eventually comes to suggest something less “perfect” and more sinister than the surface ‘beauty” at first promised.

These landscape tales form a complement to the interiors we have just examined, though we should note again that each landscape, no matter how lush and expansive, also has an “architectural” feel, a sense of interior design. Moreover, each has a structure of dramatic irony that insinuates that man's feeble efforts to see harmonious permanence or to produce Godlike beauty in “natural” art are doomed to failure. In “The Island of the Fay” (1841), for example, which is a prose companion piece to an engraved plate in Graham's Magazine, the drowsy narrator comes upon a romanticized lake scene of a tiny fairy in a boat. But as her cyclical journey describes a series of concentric circles around an island in the lake, the little fay comes to seem to the narrator the last of her race, and she eventually draws nearer and nearer the shadows of the island and fades away into nothingness. This kind of dream vision, and arabesque pattern, we shall later see to be a major structural component of Eureka, in which the concentric circles of the pulsating cycles of creation and destruction that constitute the design of the entire universe also end in nothingness.

In “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe's use of the word arabesque in connection with a transcendent vision of ultimate beauty has also an “oppressive” and overly “dazzling” quality that “bewilders.” In this tale, or essay, Poe indirectly connects the “arabesque devices in vivid scarlet” inscribed on an ivory canoe with the general form of an “irregular crescent,” which is also the shape of the high-pointed canoe itself as it floats in a crystal river. Paradoxically, the river has etched a channel through hard granite so clearly that the “sharpness of outline ... delighted while it bewildered the eye” (H 6:192). The devices on the canoe, the shape of the canoe itself, the winding cycles of the river, and the concentric circles of the great outdoor amphitheater that is Arnheim are all, clearly, conceived as an arabesque design governing the whole of the tale.

As the canoe approaches the paradise of Arnheim, the “visitor” is almost overwhelmed with a “gush” of “entrancing melody” and with a “strange sweet odor” that is yet “oppressive,” as though of drugs. The vision of the visitor is then further bewildered by a

Again, overstrained feelings, confusion, and delirium are the constant qualities even in this basically pleasant description of an arabesque paradise, and in the tale as a whole death ironically makes a sinister intrusion. “Arnheim” is an extension of “The Landscape Garden” (1842), in which, as noted before, Poe uses rocky outcroppings and geological upheavals as symbolic, melancholy intimations of death amidst the ideal beauties of the natural world. “Arnheim” deals with the attempts of the wealthy Ellison to “improve” the landscaping concepts of the “grovelling herd” of men by constructing a fantastic, irregular, and unnatural paradise in the midst of a natural paradise, and, in so paralleling God's creation, to become Godlike himself. But he dies. The mockery of such simple dramatic irony is obvious once one steps back from the details of Ellison's “art work”; and in fact, similar dramatic irony informs each of the landscape tales Poe did in the 1840s, just as their physical settings tend to describe arabesque patterns of concentric circles and twistings and writhings, from which, implicitly, there is no exit. They are all deceptive, arabesque dreams.

But let us turn to another “interior” tale for one final example of the conjoining of semi-Saracenic Gothic beauty and delirium. For the arabesque dream also provides a major clue to the irony of “The Oval Portrait” (1842, 1845), a tale that is most significant for a clearer understanding of Poe's arabesque and his technique of hoaxlike dramatic irony. “The Oval Portrait” is ostensibly an occult tale of the metempsychosis of a young woman's soul into a painting, and the usual reading given it by critics focuses on its quality as a serious parable of the mysteriously ambivalent “moral” relationship of life and art.(15) The curious thing about such interpretations, however, is that they deal only with the last third of Poe's tale and virtually ignore the first two-thirds in which Poe focuses the reader's attention on the first-person narrator of the strange story. Even Poe's revisions, which are especially relevant to the character of this narrator, have been brought forward as evidence that Poe shifted his original intention. In his first version, titled “Life in Death” (1842), Poe seems to have intended a psychological study of the hypersensitive Romantic imagination. But in the second version, Seymour L. Gross suggests, Poe seems to have dispensed with “those macabre elements” which “threatened the thematic coherence and totality of impression in the story.”(16) In the first version, [page 133:] Gross writes, we find a passage that, “as do the opening paragraphs of several other of Poe's stories, sets out to delineate the neurotic imbalance of the narrator's mind”; but in the revised version the “narrator's mind is irrelevant, for once the story of the painter and his wife begins to emerge, the narrator is forgotten.” Gross then considers the conclusion. In the second version, when the painter finishes the portrait, he exclaims: “This is indeed Life itself!” only to turn to a dead wife (114:249). “The tale ends, therefore,” Gross remarks (with a pun I think would have amused Poe), “on thematic dead center.” This thematic center is the moral blindness of the painter. In the original version of the tale, however, Poe had the painter add: “But is this indeed Death?” (H 4:318). This queer remark vitiates the proper effect of the story, Gross says, “for it takes it out of the realm of the moral and puts it into the realm of the psychological.”

The fact that Poe's first intention clearly was to paint a portrait of a disturbed imagination does not, however, necessarily lead to the view that because Poe reduced the obviousness of his narrator's imbalance of mind he had shifted his intent from the psychological to the occult. “The Oval Portrait” may be read, just as it stands, as an ironic, fully dramatized, psychological portrait. What Poe did in revising “Life in Death” is what he consistently did in the revisions of all his Gothic works. In “The Oval Portrait” Poe's reduction of the obviousness of the narrator's imbalance of mind produces an ironic double effect. Simultaneously, while achieving a more authentic, realistic dramatization of a crazed mind from a first-person point of view, Poe also produces a spooky “Gothic” story that the majority of his nineteenth-century readers thrilled to. The revisions make the tale into another trap for “the unwary.” “The Oval Portrait” remains what “Life in Death” was — a psychological study of the Romantic imagination — but with an added level of dramatic irony, and even, from the viewpoint of the hoaxer, a level of mockery aimed at the unwary reader who sees merely a story of the supernatural.

If the thematic center of the tale is the blindness of the painter, who, engrossed in his work, fails to see life fading from his model as it begins to glow in his painting, and if as the story develops the narrator of the tale is indeed forgotten in the latter part of the tale, then the “moral” reading naturally follows. But because the narrator is the focus of over half of “The Oval Portrait,” his presence is still felt behind the concluding supernaturalism of the story. (Indeed, fewer than five hundred words are devoted to the painter and his wife.) If, then, we interpret the thematic center of the tale as a moral allegory, the work is incredibly flawed. Not only does the story, by this interpretation, [page 134:] lack the careful symmetry of most of Poe's other tales, but also the long first section of the tale (devoted entirely to introducing the narrator, setting the scene, and “finding” the “real” story in a mysterious book) has almost no relevance to the thematic center of the moral blindness of the painter. The coherence and totality of impression of the tale would be so badly flawed that we should hardly recognize the tale as Poe's were not his name appended to it.

Although Poe excised from “The Oval Portrait” many of the references to narcotics that are found in the earlier “Life in Death,” he did not completely excise what he calls the “delirium” of the narrator. The narrator specifically mentions in the opening paragraph of “The Oval Portrait” that his immediate fascination with the richly framed paintings, which are hung in an eccentric manner in the niches of the weirdly constructed castle walls, is likely due to his “incipient delirium” (H 4:245). Moreover, the deceptive and confusing architecture of this Gothic chateau in the Apennines (one such as found in the “fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe”) provides one of the major clues to the dramatic irony of the tale, for Poe associates a dreamlike atmosphere with the environment, and uses the word arabesque in connection with a setting full of odd twistings and turnings, with “manifold” and “multiform” armorial trophies, with sleep and dreams, and with the play of flickering light over the filigreed picture frames. By means of the eccentric setting and by carefully structured emphasis on the arabesque frames, Poe provides symbolic “clues” to the deceptive quality of the narrator's experience.

It is significant that Poe refers to the arabesque frames at two symmetrical points in the revised story: at the beginning of the narrator's “introduction” and at the end, just before he reads of the painter and his wife. Each time, the frames are mentioned in conjunction with the confusing architecture of the castle and with what the narrator is able to see from any one point of view. In the first paragraph, the narrator remarks on the “rich golden arabesque” frames of the many paintings which are hung not only from the “main surfaces” of the walls but also in the “very many nooks” of the “bizarre architecture” (H 4:245). Finding a small volume which describes the paintings, the narrator has his servant close the shutters and light the “tongues of a tall candelabrum” so that he may study the pictures more closely. After reading about the paintings for some time, he moves the candelabrum, carefully, so as not to wake his slumbering servant, in order to throw more light on the book. But “the rays of the numerous candles ... now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed posts” to reveal a startlingly lifelike [page 135:] portrait of a “young girl just ripening into womanhood” (H 4:246). The narrator then shuts his eyes, for he fears that his vision has “deceived” him and that his “fancy” has run away with “sober” reason (H 4:246). Again looking at the portrait, however, he remarks that he could not and would not “doubt” that he “now saw aright” because the filigreed “Moresque” frame around the picture seems to provide conclusive evidence, to him, that he is not dreaming, for he sees that the picture is a picture. Moreover, the “first flashing of the candles upon that canvas” causes him now to become aware of a “dreamy stupor” that has been “stealing over” his “senses” (H 4:246). So much emphasis on shadow, drowsiness, and dreaming, however, produces not merely Romantic intensification of the strangeness of the experience but also an ambiguity, a suspicion, about the actuality of the events. And given Poe's normal use of the term arabesque, his pointed use of arabesque frames as evidence of the “reality” of what the narrator perceives is an ironic confirmation that the narrator is indeed dreaming the rest of the tale, including the story in the small volume which details the metempsychosis of the woman's soul into the lifelike painting.

Further supporting this reading of “The Oval Portrait” as a deceptive dream-experience, the reader will find that dream-imagery dominates the first two-thirds of the tale: the narrator is delirious and drowsy and his servant is slumbering; when the narrator shifts the candelabrum, the shadow of one of the bed posts shifts to reveal the recessed portrait which had been deeply submerged in the darkness; the small volume explaining the pictures is discovered mysteriously on the narrator's pillow. Moreover, Poe emphasizes the dreamy deceptive quality of the lighting through the eerie play of light and shadow from the numerous flickering candles over the multiform surfaces of the Gothic armor, the irregularities of the walls, and the filigree of the portrait frames, as well as through the reflected flashings of the oiled canvasses. Finally, we are given throughout the “introduction” a picture of the narrator falling asleep.

Thus, the discovery that the original version, “Life in Death,” contained unequivocal evidence that Poe had first conceived of the work as a psychological portrait of a character in the throes of an opium dream tends to confirm the psychological interpretation of “The Oval Portrait” rather than to suggest Poe's complete shifting of his single preconceived effect.

Probably it is the length and the emphasis of the long passage in “Life in Death” which Poe omitted as a block from “The Oval Portrait,” along with the omission of the clearly insane final remark of the [page 136:] painter, that deceives critics into thinking of Poe's second version of the tale as “moral.” The emphasis on the delusiveness of the narrator's experience is so pronounced in the first version that it is quite natural (initially) to conclude that its relative de-emphasise in the second version indicates a shift of intent. The omitted portion, therefore, is worth a brief look. In the opening paragraphs of “Life in Death,” Poe has his narrator explain his intrusion into the deserted chateau, commenting that he has lost so much blood in “an affray with the banditti” that he is delirious from pain and from lack of sleep. The narrator explains that in his weakened condition, rather than take a chance with being bled, he will rely on opium for relief from his pain. Poe then emphasizes the deceptive quality of things as the narrator sees them by devoting the bulk of the omitted passage to the narrator's hazy deliberations in judging the amount of opium he will swallow. In the “dull delirium” of his sleepless state, the narrator tries to judge the smallness of the dose of opium in terms of the whole piece which he holds in his hand. His “reeling senses” prevent him from “perceiving the incoherence of [his] reason” and he remarks that since he has always smoked opium before, never swallowed it, he has “no preconceived standard of comparison,” nor the “faintest idea [then] that what I conceived to be an exceedingly small dose of solid opium might, in fact, be an excessively large one” (H 4:317). Next, as he gazes at the paintings in the bedroom, he remarks: “— I felt meantime, the voluptuous narcotic stealing its way to my brain, I felt that in its magical influence lay much of the gorgeous richness and variety of the frames — much of the etherial hue that gleamed from the canvas — and much of the wild interest of the book which I perused” (H 4:318; my italics). After this confession, the narrator shifts the candelabrum, sees the hidden painting, and reads the incredible story of the painter and his wife.

Thus, in the first version of the tale, Poe clearly set up the delusiveness of the experience as the narrator renders it. In the second version, three years later, Poe characteristically reduced the clear touches of psychological realism (“Romantic” on the surface as an opium-dream might seem) but without removing them altogether. In “The Oval Portrait” Poe makes the narrator less aware of his hallucinatory state. But by this maneuver Poe makes the general reader, too, less clearly aware of the narrator's state — thereby producing for the unwary a Gothic tale of the occult with a clear didactic point, but producing for the wary a multiform ironic tale, with no obtrusive didacticism, and with rather satisfying ratiocinative clues to a typical Poe hoax. Most telling of these clues is the subtly ironic paralleling of the narrative structure [page 137:] of the tale to its visual focal point: just as the strange portrait has an arabesque frame, so too does the painter's story have its arabesque frame. Here, then, the techniques of ambiguously explained psychological Gothic and of the grotesque and arabesque coalesce in a pattern emblematic of Poe's ironic consciousness.

Such arabesque construction reminds one strongly of A. W. Schlegel's remarks that the Romantic Ironist tacitly makes “a sort of secret understanding with the select circle of the more intelligent of his readers,” that is, those who are able to see the “secret irony of characterization” in the arabesque design.(17) We have seen that such clues to the “secret irony”are carefully insinuated into the deceptively psychological Gothicism of “Usher” and “Ligeia” and, as well, carefully identified by Poe as arabesque. Poe's Gothic hoaxes probably reach a high point in the deceptive grotesquerie of “Ligeia” and “Usher,” and we may recall here Poe's attitude in his letter to P. P. Cooke in 1838 regarding the technique and the reception of “Ligeia.” “As for the mob,” Poe writes, “let them talk on. I should be grieved if I thought they comprehended me here” (O 1:118). We should recall also the detailed description of the arabesque design of the tapestries in “Ligeia,” wherein deceptiveness, confusion, point of view, and the subconscious are all associated with the arabesque pattern and effect.

The proposed Folio Club tales, and the publisher's rejection of them, have seemed to most critics important only for establishing some “point” to Poe's early satiric tales. But the burlesque, or ambivalently burlesque, intent is constant in Poe's fiction, and we may well note again Poe's early identification of the term arabesque with satire in his letter to Joseph and Edwin Buckingham, the editors of the New England Magazine, wherein he offered them a series of sequential satiric and burlesque stories as “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque (O 1:53). Poe's usage of arabesque here to mean burlesque not only strikingly confirms his conscious ambiguity in his use of the two terms, but also suggests that grotesque and arabesque together are meant to communicate a sense of overall irony.

The terms grotesque and arabesque recur again and again in his tales, and the basis of the later stories, equally as much as in the earlier stories, is some kind of ironic twist. Moreover, Poe's defense of the “Germanism” of his stories in the preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) emphasizes the unity of the burlesque and the grotesque-arabesque point of view. He writes that he has written with “an eye to republication in volume form” and therefore desired “to preserve ... a certain unity of design. ... These many pieces are yet one book” (H 1:150). As late as 1846, three years before [page 138:] the end of his career, after writing about two dozen more “Gothic” tales and fourteen more comic tales, Poe notes: “In writing these Tales one by one, at long intervals, I have kept the book-unity always in mind — that is, each has been composed with reference to its effect as part of a whole” (O 2:328-29). It is true that Poe goes on to say that one of his chief aims “has been the widest diversity.” But this diversity is within the limits of his chosen genre as he explained it in 1835: the ludicrous, grotesque, fearful, horrible, witty, burlesque, singular, and strange. “No two of these Tales,” he claimed, “have the slightest resemblance one to the other either in matter or manner — still however preserving the character which I speak of” (O 1:57-58). This character, I submit, is that of Romantic Irony, as exemplified in Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.