Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 06,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 139-164 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 139:]

6

The Nightside

 

AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY wore on, Romantic writers tended to grow increasingly dark in their vision. Romantic Irony involved a recognition of the contrast between the inexplicable flux of life and vain efforts to impose pattern. It became therefore, Alan Reynolds Thompson suggests, a psychological way of avoiding spiritual self-destruction by laughing at the sources of one's own despair. (This is what I have suggested in Poe's structure of consciousness.) In Tieck's works, for example, experience constantly defeats romantic dreams, disillusion follows illusion, with sudden transitions from sentiment to self-mockery. All this was necessary if he was to maintain his mental balance, for as Tieck commented regarding his fiction, he was strangely frightened by the weird, subconscious “nightside” region he found he could tap.(1)

The compulsive literary explorations of Tieck and others, like Novalis, into the “nightside” of nature, along with Schelling's theories of the step-by-step development of inanimate nature toward animateness and conscious intelligence (compare “Usher” and Eureka), led to a fascination with the then apparently valid, mystical pseudosciences that arose around the end of the eighteenth century. Around 1790, for example, there loomed large in the field of natural sciences the concurrent and seemingly related investigations of gravitational attraction, [page 140:] acoustical vibrations, galvanic and voltaic electricity, and hypnotism. Oskar Walzel describes this activity as a

Such fascination with pseudoscience was common among the German Romantics. Fichte (and Goethe) sought prototypes of life in scientific discoveries, as well as evidence in support of the psychological evolution of spiritual processes. Schelling applied scientific discoveries to show the gradual assumption of consciousness in the universe, and wove a human element into nature. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel transferred spiritual qualities to nature and tried to explain spiritual processes in terms of chemical reactions and electrical affinity. Johann Wilhelm Ritter sought the mystical bonds between nature and the human soul which were thought to exist in hypnotic sleep. Ritter and Novalis thought they had discovered a state of “involuntariness” (a “sleep-waking” state) in which the soul beholds the absolute; the consciousness of a human being in this state of involuntariness became a key to knowledge. Again Walzers remarks are pertinent:

From 1806 to 1830, G. H. Schubert undertook to investigate the subconscious seat of psychic disturbances and the mysterious phenomena of somnambulism as defining the place of man (with his “curious concatenation of conscious and subconscious activity”) on the “unstable fringe of the world of nature and reason” (Walzel, p. 245). In his Views on the Nightside of Natural Science (1808) and The Symbolism of Dreams (1814), Schubert attempted to show that phenomena inaccessible to the waking consciousness are revealed in sleep, in dreams, [page 141:] in dreamlike states — an idea taken even further by Justinus Kerner (whom Poe seems to have read), in an effort to find new sources of knowledge in epilepsy, insanity, and catalepsy.

Poe, of course, reflects this interest in the subconscious and other nightside ideas extensively in his tales. As we approach this aspect of his work, however, we must put it in the context suggested by the preceding chapters and the first paragraph of this chapter. That is, these nightside materials are not only ideas — they imply a way of looking at ideas. They represent both a matter and a manner. Poe, with Tieck and the other Romantic Ironists, could work with these materials and see only in a doubling ironic mode. Thus Poe dealt with them more complexly than is usually assumed. He treated these “night-side” matters of the unconscious visionary, the sleep-waker, mesmerism, and other occult and pseudoscientific matters not just at face value, but ambiguously and ironically in his tales.

With reference to human magnetism, mesmerism, phrenology, sleep-waking, and the like, the real quality of Poe's seemingly serious advo-cation of the nightside may be seen as a touchstone symmetrically opposite the early tale “Metzengerstein” and the Courier satires with which this study began. For critics who advocate seeing Poe as a serious occultist, the most important stories besides “Usher” and “Ligeia” (and perhaps “Metzengerstein” and “The Oval Portrait”) are likely to be “Eleonora,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and “Mesmeric Revelation” — all of which deal with suspended animation or metempsychosis from one state of being to another.(3) It is principally these tales, and a few of Poe's critical comments in his letters and reviews, that we shall have reference to in this chapter in an attempt to answer the question of whether or not the same elements of mockery we have seen elsewhere manifest themselves in these nightside works. If the ironic vision is indeed integral to and coextensive with Poe's structure of consciousness, we should expect to find that ironic sensibility in these tales as well.

 

I

We may note, first of all, that Poe treated the occult sciences in a blatantly comic fashion too, as in “Some Words with a Mummy,” in which the Egyptian nobleman, Count Allamistakeo, is resurrected (by means of the voltaic pile) in nineteenth-century America and confronted with modern invention, science, government, and culture. As the nineteenth-century gentlemen who have brought him to consciousness question [page 142:] him about Egyptian life, they find themselves rather hard put to find matters in which their own culture is superior; increasingly they ignore the implications of Allamistakeo's words, preferring to think him a bit addled. Finding him not quite well informed, after his long sleep, on modern advances, Mr. Silk Buckingham applies the “science” of phrenology, by “glancing slightly at the occiput and then at the sinciput of Allamistakeo.” He then remarks:

Similarly the Americans fail to triumph with questions of astronomy, optics, architecture, transportation, mechanics, steam power, metaphysics, or democracy. Regarding democracy, Count Allamistakeo observes that thirteen Egyptian provinces had tried it once but had consolidated into “the most odious and insupportable despotism that ever was heard of upon the face of the Earth,” a state called “Mob” (H 6:136). Regarding metaphysics, the Americans present the Count with a selection from the Dial, the Concord transcendentalist journal. This turns out to be a “chapter or two about something which is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the Great Movement or Progress.” Of this the Count merely observes that “Great Movements were awfully common things in his day,” and that the trouble with “Progress” is that it “never progressed” (H 6:136).

Finally, having failed on every count to demonstrate the superiority of nineteenth-century life, even in dress, the Americans confront Allamistakeo with “Ponnonner's lozenges” and “Brandreth's pills.” At this:

Surely the ironic satire of this tale should lead us to see that the “sincerity” of Poe's use of the occult sciences in his “serious” tales is questionable. That Poe did entertain the general Romantic yearnings of his times is obvious; but his attitudes are always presented as ambivalent, skeptical, detached; he uses the nightside as a maker of illusions, as a writer of fiction, as a “literary histrio,” as he more than once characterized his kind (H 11:2).

One of Poe's most beautiful and poetic tales, according to Gothicist critics, is “Eleonora” (1841). It is also a remarkable example of Poe's purposely ambiguous treatment of Romantic interest in pseudoscience, the psychology of madness, the occult, and the sinister underside to things, and well illustrates Poe's simultaneous involvement in and detachment from the nightside. The tale seems quite serious in its opening gambit, which introduces the sleep-waking visionary who is the narrator of the tale.

To be sure, this passage has an occult, seemingly profound, and even a poetic surface; but it also is a passage likely to be quoted as an example of Poe's overdone Romanticism, with its dashes, its “ineffable,” its climactic repetition, its piquant Latin phrase (which may be translated “penetrated into the Dark Sea, in which they were merely [page 144:] explorers”). The tale even has a Latin motto preceding this paragraph: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima: “Only in the preservation of the specific form is the soul saved.” We are set, then, for a profound occult revelation.

In the first two-thirds of the tale, the narrator recalls the idyllic days with his beloved Eleonora in the fantastically strange yet beautiful “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.” Yet the beauty of the valley is suspiciously flawed, though the narrator seems not to notice. The lovers’ paradise is surrounded by precipitous mountains that shut out the sunlight, while the winding river that circumscribes the valley in an intricate twisting maze disappears into a shadowy gorge. To walk anywhere requires “crushing to death ... millions of fragrant flowers” (H 4:237). The valley is eerily still, its river named “Silence,” and its tremulous rows of trees, reminiscent of “giant serpents of Syria,” bow undulantly in the barely perceptible wind (H 4:238). Even when a cloud “all gorgeous in crimson and gold” (H 4:239) appears in the sky, it gradually sinks lower and lower until it seems to imprison the lovers (though in “grandeur,” the narrator says) within the valley. It is a setting much like that of the landscape tales we have looked at earlier, where the overstrained mind refuses at first to see, amidst the apparent beauty, the insinuated signs that are “prognostic of death.” Eleonora sickens, however, and the narrator rashly binds himself to a promise not to remarry. The second part of his life he remembers as a period of mourning, until beguiled by a second woman, the beautiful Ermengarde; he abruptly forgets Eleonora, remembering her only when whispers out of the night tell him, as he sleeps (or sleep-wakes), that for “reasons which shall be made known” to him “in Heaven” he is absolved of his “vows unto Eleonora” (H 4:244).

The usual view of the tale (when it is not read as a dramatization of Poe's love for Virginia, grief for her imminent death, and decision to live on) is that Eleonora, with a dual personality, one melancholy, one cheerful, returns as Ermengarde; and the husband, sensing her return, has a dream-vision of his release from his former melancholy vows.(6) And thus “Eleonora” is sometimes pointed to as the only tale Poe wrote with a “happy” ending. The tale is rather more chilling and double than this, however.

In the opening paragraph, Poe is careful to suggest the duality of the sublime and the terrible that is possible for the sleep-explorer lucky enough to achieve the thrilling glimpse of the great secret of eternity. Poe then applies this double possibility, with some emphasis on the sinister, to the veracity of the story, and begins to develop an [page 145:] increasing ironic distance between the narrator and the reader. After all, the narrator in the first paragraph does tell us that he has a tendency to vigorous fancy and that he has even been regarded as mad. Indeed the rhythms and the subject matter of the paragraph are likely to suggest the rhapsody of a madman, and we have seen before, in “Ligeia” for example, with what subtle care Poe has his narrator reveal his madness in the opening paragraphs of a tale. The narrator of “Eleonora” says that (whether he is mad or not) there are “at least ... two distinct conditions of my mental existence — the condition of a lucid reason, not to be disputed,” which belongs to the first epoch of his life, and “a condition of shadow and doubt, appertaining to the present, and to the recollection of what constitutes the second great era of my being” (H 4:236-37). Obviously, a condition of shadow and doubt appertaining to his present state casts some doubt on his present memory of that past “not to be disputed” and the lucidity of his mind at that time — not to mention the efficacy of the forgiveness out of the night.

Moreover, the narrator is suspiciously emphatic as to the actuality of the earlier events. He says: “... what I shall tell of the earlier period, believe; and to what I may relate of the later time, give only such credit as may seem due; or doubt it altogether; or, if doubt it ye cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus” (H 4:237). Poe thus sets up doubt and evokes some mystery about what has actually happened, recommending romantically and mysteriously that the reader doubt, ambivalently, the end of the tale. In a conventionally Romantic tale, this caution would serve to intensify the general indefiniteness and the actual (Romantic, transcendental, occult) truth of the metempsychosis of Eleonora into Ermengarde. But since it is put so oddly, with such emphasis on believing one part of the tale rather than the other, and with such emphasis on the uncertainty of good and evil, truth and actuality, the tale takes on an ambiguity that works against what is the final ostensibly “happy” resolution. If we believe one part of the tale, then we cannot believe the other; and if one part of what the narrator tells us is false, then how do we know how to take the other part? We are forced to consider the possibility that the narrator, half-mad, may have invented the first fantastic part about the Valley of Many-Colored Grass, with its absurdist landscape in which great Syrian serpent-plants do homage to a sun that never appears. He may have come up with the fantasy as a romantic escape from some dull reality; or he may have invented the absolving voice out of the night in order to forgive himself his lack of fidelity, or even to rationalize [page 146:] perhaps some deeper guilt regarding the dead Eleonora. (This is the only one of Poe's “marriage tales” in which the husband does not, apparently, somehow cause the death of the wife.)

Poe's revisions tend to support an ambiguously ironic reading of the tale. In the earlier version, the narrator says of Eleonora, “I could not but dream as I gazed, enrapt, upon her alternate moods of melancholy and mirth, that two separate souls were enshrined within her.” Looking at Ermengarde, who has the same “auburn tresses” and “fantastic step” as Eleonora, the narrator says, “... there was a wild delirium in the love I bore her when I started to see upon her countenance the identical transition from tears to smiles that I had wondered at in the long-lost Eleonora” (H 4:314-15). Hardin Craig speculates that Poe took out both these passages in order to reduce obviousness and to experiment with “the indefinite,” which Poe considered a major quality of Romantic poetry. But by reducing the narrator's identification of Ermengarde with Eleonora, Poe makes more reasonable the separate identities of the two women and strengthens his presentation of the real point of the tale: the narrator, fanciful and half-mad, has imposed his vigorous fancy on the flux of his idiosyncratic “reality.” The clinching point is Poe's Latin motto to the story: “The safety of the soul lies in the preservation of the specific form.” If Eleonora is now Ermen-garde, the specific form has been violated. The sense of the motto, along with the narrator's remarks on his madness, confirms the delusiveness of the entire experience as he renders it.

Moreover, Poe twice remarks with approval, in a review and in a Marginalia note, upon De La Motte Fouqué's conviction in Undine that “the mere death of a beloved wife does not imply a final separation so complete as to justify an union with another!” (H 10:36; 16:49). “Eleonora” is ostensibly in the Gothic, sentimental Romantic mode and seems to suggest a weird, supernatural, but ideal love that endures beyond apparent earthly death. But the story may also be read as a dramatic presentation, within the context of Romantic materials, of the human mind refusing to see the sinister implication within the illusory, idyllic world of its own imagining, and then shifting the object of its passion and rationalizing its guilt — unless we are prepared to claim that Poe was a sincere believer in metempsychosis and sleep-waking revelations, and that the ambiguities of the tale are merely Poe's characteristic “flaws.”

Contemporaneous proof of Poe's ambivalent skepticism concerning such occult matters is to be found in his Marginalia comment on a book on human magnetism by William Newnham. As remarked earlier, Poe here objects to Newnham's circular logic and points out the subjectivity [page 147:] of human belief: “That the belief in ghosts, or in a Deity, or in a future state, or in anything else credible or incredible — that any such belief is universal, demonstrates nothing more than ... the identity of construction in the human brain ...” (H 16:115; cf. 12:121-23). Further, Poe's final attitude toward mesmerism, magnetism, and the like is, like his initial one, sarcastically skeptical. In Eureka he wrote that although men have felt that there is some principle ordering the universe, something beyond the law of gravity, no one has really pointed out the particulars of such a principle, “if we except, perhaps, occasional fantastic efforts at referring it to Magnetism, or Mesmerism, or Swedenborgianism, or Transcendentalism, or some other equally delicious ism of the same species, and invariably patronized by one and the same species of people” (H 16:223).

 

II

Further use of occult dream-states, and of other occult materials, is found in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) which, significantly, makes specific reference to the German Romanticist Novalis, who not only entertained occult speculation of dream states but who also incorporated the theories of the Schlegels on irony into his aesthetics.(7) To a large extent, “Ragged Mountains” epitomizes Poe's fascination with but detached attitudes toward the pseudoscientific occultism of his age. The story ostensibly involves metempsychosis and supernatural revelation in a half-conscious sleep-state, though (as we should expect) Poe climaxed the tale with a disturbingly unsatisfactory gimmick. Indeed, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) is without doubt one of the least satisfying and most gimmicky of Poe's Gothic works if one takes it as straightforward, for Poe climaxes the story with the jarringly absurd device of having his narrator convinced by the accidental misspelling of a name that he has been a witness to metempsychosis, to sleep-waking revelation, to weird time displacement, and to the supernatural workings of a malignant fate. But Poe makes his narrator an unwitting dupe who misperceives the entire situation he has observed and who leads the unwitting reader to believe that his surface recounting of the circumstances of the death-dream of Mr. Augustus Bedloe comprises the whole of the story. “Ragged Mountains” is another of those tales in which, as Poe himself said, he wove a web for the purpose of unravelling (O 2:283 [[2:328]]). Poe carefully planted a number of clues to the real action of the story — only there is no Dupin to point them out. If, however, the reader will take the trouble to look for these ironic clues, he will find that under [page 148:] the supernatural tale lies, first, a “scientific” explanation of the apparently supernatural events, which leads, second, to a very different “psychological” explanation of the events, and, third, to an insinuated burlesque (under the whole structure of explanations) of a Gothic novel by Charles Brockden Brown.

There are only three main characters in Poe's tale: Bedloe, who suffers from a general degenerative neuralgic condition and is seeking help through mesmerism; Dr. Templeton, a practicing hypnotist; and an observing narrator. Bedloe one day goes out for a long walk; returning late, he tells Templeton and the narrator of having fallen into a realistic dreamlike state in which he felt himself transported to a distant place where he was surrounded by enemies. Bedloe pauses in his story to assure the narrator and Templeton that his experience had “nothing of the unmistakeable idiosyncrasy of the dream” but was “rigorously self-consistent” (H 5:170). Moreover, Bedloe says that “Novalis errs not in saying that ‘we are near waking when we dream that we dream’ Had the vision occurred to me as I describe it, without my suspecting it as a dream, then a dream it might absolutely have been, but, occurring as it did, and suspected and tested as it was, I am forced to class it among other phenomena” (H 5:171). Bedloe's next sentence is then anticipated by Templeton. Although Bedloe is astonished, he continues telling the tale up to the point where he is killed by a poisoned arrow that strikes him in the right temple. The narrator suggests then that the “death” proves the experience to have been a dream, for here Bedloe is, alive. Templeton, however, is horrified and insists on hearing more. Bedloe tells him how he viewed his own corpse and then with unearthly lightness had “flitted” back to the Virginia mountains where he had been walking. Templeton then produces a miniature of his friend “Oldeb,” points out the resemblance to Bedloe, and tells the tale of Oldeb's death nearly fifty years before. Oldeb had been killed in India by a poisoned arrow under the circumstances experienced by Bedloe; moreover, Templeton had been writing of these events this very afternoon. A week later, at the height of a fever brought on by his walk in the Ragged Mountains, Bedloe dies from the doctor's accidental application of a poisonous leech to his temple. At the end of the story, when the narrator complains that an e has been dropped from Bedloe's name in an obituary notice, it strikes him that this spelling is Oldeb reversed!

The tale on the surface seems to involve a combination of hypnosis, sleep-waking, and metempsychosis. But by placing the tale in its nineteenth-century context and reading it carefully, Sidney E. Lind in an article on “Poe and Mesmerism” has shown that “Ragged Mountains” [page 149:] (along with other Poe tales) is not a realistically handled tale of the supernatural, but is instead a psychological tale based on the possibilities of occult science — “a ease study in mesmerism,” as he says.(8) Poe actually uses only the “science” of mesmerism while, deceptively, suggesting supernatural events so forcibly that we tend at first to accept them and to mistake the real nature of the story. But Poe clearly emphasizes mesmerism in the opening portion of the tale; Templeton can put Bedloe into a hypnotic trance quite easily, “by mere volition” and over a distance, standard mesmeric procedure, according to Lind. Then Poe carefully makes clear that Templeton first became interested in Bedloe when he noticed a “miraculous similarity” to his friend Oldeb; subsequently, Templeton developed an “uneasy, and not altogether horrorless curiosity” about Bedloe (H 5:174). When Bedloe expresses his doubt that his experience in the mountains has been only a dream, Templeton agrees, “with an air of deep solemnity,” and hints mysteriously that “the soul of the man of to-day is upon the verge of some stupendous psychal discoveries.”

Templeton, therefore, is a believer in ghostly experiences, specifically in metempsychosis, and he has been preoccupied during his relationship with Bedloe with the idea that behind the likenesses of Bedloe and Oldeb there lurks, as Lind says, some deep and perhaps terrible significance; and as he listens to Bedloe's story he sits “erect and rigid in his chair,” his teeth chattering and his eyes “starting from their sockets” (H 5:173). But although Bedloe often walked in the mountains, his experience occurred only on the day that Templeton was writing his recollections of Oldeb; this coincidence and Poe's early emphasizing of mesmerism clearly imply that the sympathetic and subdued will of Bedloe received the strongly emotional thoughts of Templeton through involuntary mesmeric transference and that he experienced them as a dreamlike actuality. But to Templeton, as Lind says, the experience is “a sudden and shocking revelation and confirmation of that in which he has hitherto half-believed — the actuality of metempsychosis.” For Templeton, Oldeb's soul lives in Bedloe.

Lind leaves the matter here, essentially, reading the tale as an ambiguous but simple hoax, in which all the characters are duped, first Templeton, then Bedloe, and then the narrator, into believing the apparent metempsychosis. The reader, too, is duped or hoaxed if he misses the clues and takes the “psychological” tale as a supernatural one. There is, however, along with the absurd shattering of effect when the narrator is convinced by the typographical error, another major insinuated irony of plot. Lind argues that the tale would have been better constructed if Poe had made the credulous Templeton [page 150:] rather than the narrator mutter to himself at the end that Oldeb is the converse of Bedloe; but I think Poe had a slightly different point in mind. Templeton's “not altogether horrorless” fascination with Bedloe's resemblance to Oldeb, his uneasy “sentiment of horror” that causes him to keep it a secret, his teeth-chattering horror as he listens to Bedloe's tale, and his claim that he had tried to prevent the death of Oldeb are all ambiguous enough to provide one more psychological turn of the screw: horrified by Oldeb's “return,” Templeton may have psychotically rekilled him in the person of Bedloe. (There is also an ambiguous financial arrangement between Bedloe and Templeton, enabling Templeton to give up his practice, thus providing an additional psychological twist to the real action of the tale.) An absurd corroboration, though less absurd than the typographical error and the backward spelling of Bedloe's name, is to be found in Templeton's name, for Oldeb is struck in the temple by a poison arrow, and Bedloe is poisoned by a leech attached to his temple by Templeton. The submerged pun (which Lind notes also) I take to be a mocking challenge to the reader to see the further intricacies of the story: it links both the supernatural dream and Bedloe's death to the hypnotist. However, the pun suggests another, absurd but corroborating, pun: Templeton is like a leech on the wealthy Bedloe.

Further support for the “murder” of Bedloe is provided by the newspaper account:

In the ostensibly Romantic and supernatural atmosphere of the tale, the serpentlike motions and blackness of the poison leech mysteriously correspond with the “writhing” Indian arrow, made in imitation of a creeping serpent, long and black and tipped with a poison barb, that struck Oldeb in the temple. But the account also contains a sign in capital letters asking the reader to mark well the fact that the poisonous leech may always be distinguished from the medicinal, a distinction we might well expect the physician to have been aware of.

Thus, Poe carefully planned the conclusion for ironic double effect: [page 151:] for absurd Romantic corroboration of the supernatural and for absurd ironic corroboration of murder. If Templeton has murdered Bedloe, it is a far more effective gambit for Poe to have the narrator, rather than Templeton, conclude the tale as he does. The narrator, at first the only skeptic, is duped horribly and absurdly — as we are if we have not perceived the ironic distance Poe has interposed between his observing narrator and us.

Finally, there is one additional twisting that supports the hoaxing, half-bantering, half-satiric mood of the tale. Boyd Carter has pointed out that Poe seems to have borrowed a number of details in “Ragged Mountains” from Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799).(9) Carter takes these “borrowings” seriously, even trying to exonerate Poe from the charge of plagiarism, but there is just enough distortion in Poe's twisting of Edgar Huntly to suggest a burlesque similar to his burlesque of Byron and Moore in “The Assignation.”

The parallels between the two works do not form an allegorical pattern; but the general similarity is obvious, and two direct, though slightly askew, echoes in Poe's tale confirm, I think, a general burlesque intent. Of general similarities, Carter notes that: 1) Poe's Bedloe and Brown's Huntly and Clithero walk (or sleep-walk) in a mountain wilderness; 2) Poe's Templeton and Brown's Huntly are both preoccupied with the same problem, a friend murdered by Indians; 3) Poe's Templeton of Saratoga and Brown's Sarsefield are both physicians, have both been in Benares, where both had narrow escapes, and both have a soldier friend killed in India; 4) Poe's Bedloe, in his dream-experience, arms himself with the weapons of a fallen officer and engages in unequal combat, just as Brown's Huntly does; 5) Brown's Clithero speculates on the possibility of metempsychosis and thought transference, the apparent subjects of Poe's tale; 6) the real subject of Edgar Huntly is not the occult but murder, and Clithero, who has murdered a man in England, is attracted to the scene of Waldgrave's murder in America because of a “distant resemblance which the death of this man bore to that of which I was the perpetrator” — a parallel to Templeton's fascination with Bedloe's resemblance to the murdered Oldeb.(10)

In addition to these parallels, Carter notes that the descriptions of the setting and the incidents involve many similarities: the walks, the steep passes, the winding trails, the desolate solitude into which both Huntly and Bedloe penetrate with the feeling that each is the first civilized adventurer to do so, the majestic river, the fog, and the great precipice. Regarding the aborigines in both stories, Carter writes that “Poe's fierce inhabitants of the groves and caves of the Ragged Mountains [page 152:] all stem conceivably from Edgar Huntly's experiences with Clithero, panthers, and Indians in the Norwalk region.” But Carter then makes this significant observation: the parallel characterization, description, and incidents in Poe's “Ragged Mountains”

Carter's answer is that “the explanation probably lies in the fascination Brown's Edgar Huntly had for Poe.” But the more satisfactory answer is that Poe was burlesquing, even parodying, Edgar Huntly.

As I have said, two rather direct echoes support such a reading. First, the solution to Waldgrave's murder in Brown's novel has a comic parallel in Poe's story. In Edgar Huntly an Indian woman named Old Deb provides the solution to Waldgrave's murder, and of course the name Oldeb provides the “solution” for the narrator in Poe's tale.(11) Second, one of the paralleled passages from Edgar Huntly involves Indians and Huntly's encounter with a panther. Poe emphasizes Bedloe's surprise at hearing a drum, in his “Indian” dream-experience, for “a drum in these hills was a thing unknown”; the sound of the drum is followed by “a rattling or jingling sound” as a half-naked man runs by him with a stick of steel rings (H 5:168). This scene, Carter points out, is “a corollary” to American Indians going to war in Edgar Huntly. Then Poe closes the passage with Bedloe's confrontation with a fierce beast — an indirect parallel with the famous panther scenes in Edgar Huntly — only Poe neatly, subtly, twists the point: “... panting after him, with open mouth and glaring eyes, there darted a huge beast. I could not be mistaken in its character. It was a hyena” (H 5:168). The hyena, of course, as an eater of dead flesh, is an appropriate dream-symbol for Bedloe to see since he is a fated man. But the carrion-eater would seem appropriate also as a symbol of Poe's grotesquerie of a dead novel. Moreover, Poe's substitution of hyena for panther (actually an appropriation of a scene from Macaulay's 1841 review of G. R. Gleig's Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings) has yet another relevancy in the punning, hoaxing, burlesque atmosphere of the tale, for the voice of the hyena is well known for its resemblance to hysterical laughter. [page 153:]

 

III

The occult metaphysics of “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844) seems to be Poe's first formal presentation of the philosophy of Eureka, while at the same time the stylized rhapsody and logical gaps of the tale clearly show why serious critics like Woodberry call the philosophic Poe “his own dupe,” and why modern critics so dislike Poe's “Romantic” style. But Poe here as everywhere else is not quite completely serious.(12)

The fictional frame for the philosophical dialog that forms the main part of the tale involves two characters, a hypnotist (P.) who puts Mr. Vankirk, a dying man in the last stages of consumption, into a mesmeric sleep in order to discuss the immortality of the soul. The rationale for this experiment is that deep mesmeric sleep closely resembles the “phenomena” of death, and the sleep-waker “perceives, with keenly refined perception ... matters beyond the scope of the physical organs ... moreover, his intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated ...” (H 5:241). In this deep sleep Vankirk tells P. about the real nature of the universe until “with a bright smile irradiating all his features” he falls back upon his pillow and expires. His corpse then “had all the stern rigidity of stone” and “his brow was of the coldness of ice,” suggesting phenomena of death that appear only after one has been dead for some time. The tale ends with the ostensibly unambiguous question (which if answered positively, from internal evidence, would “prove” the supernatural metaphysics of the tale): “Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?” (H 5:254).

Vankirk's revelations sound, on the surface, rapturously profound, but if we look at what he says very closely, and note some of the exchanges between him and P., Vankirk's unexplained assumptions, circular logic, metaphysical jargon, and mystic-poetic epigrams, paradoxes, and oxymoron begin to look suspiciously like a parody of occult metaphysics.(13) Typical of Vankirk's answers to P.'s questions is his paradox, “Your objection is answered with an ease which is nearly in the ratio of its apparent unanswerability,” which is immediately followed by a dismissal of a difficulty by putting another paradox: “As regards the progress of the star [through the ether of space], it can make no difference whether the star passes through the ether or the ether through it” (H 5:248).

Vankirk's revelation begins with what would have been by Poe's time a conventionally topsy-turvy contention that the essence of the universe is matter. According to Vankirk, matter extends in “gradations” [page 154:] increasing in “rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a matter unparticled — without particles — indivisible — one. ... This matter is God” (H 5:245-46). P. wonders if “in this identification of mere matter with God” there is “nothing of irreverence.” Vankirk replies that there is no reason that “matter should be less reverenced than mind.” God, it seems, is the “perfection of matter”; thought is “matter in motion”; motion is thought; thought in the “universal mind” of God creates material things; God's thoughts create “new individualities” — for which “matter is necessary” (H 5:246-49).

P., a bit confused, initiates a comic exchange by objecting that Van-kirk now speaks of “mind” and “matter” “as do the metaphysicians.” “To avoid confusion,” Vankirk replies. He then explains that “mind, existing unincorporate” is “merely” God. God created “individual, thinking beings” and thus had to “incarnate portions” of his mind. “Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God.”

P., to make sure he has heard right, asks if Vankirk has said “that divested of the body man will be God.” Vankirk, “after much hesitation,” replies, “I could not have said this; it is an absurdity.” But P. refers to his notes. Vankirk then suggests that: “... man thus divested would be God — would be unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested — at least never will be — else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself — a purposeless and futile action” (H 5:249). P. is again confused. Vankirk explains that man has: “... two bodies — the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call ‘death,’ is but the painful metamorphosis. ... The ultimate life is the full design” (H 5:250). We are not normally aware that this is the cycle of human existence, argues Vankirk, because: “... our rudimental organs are adapted to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body; but not to that of which the ultimate is composed ... we perceive only the shell which falls, in decaying, from the inner form ... but this inner form [[,]] as well as the shell, is appreciable by those who have already acquired the ultimate life” (H 5:250; my italics).

This last statement is especially important since, as Vankirk's explanations get more rapturous and wild, he contradicts himself on this very point, which is supposed to provide a rationale for man's earthly existence. Vankirk explains that throughout the universe there is an “infinity” of “rudimental thinking beings” other than man, and that the “multitudinous conglomeration” of “rare matter” into “nebulae, planets, suns, and others” which are (naturally) “neither nebulae, suns, nor planets” is merely to supply “pabulum” for “an infinity of rudimental [page 155:] beings” (H 5:252). Thus, the stars that earthly man looks at with interest are not at all important; instead, what is truly important is the “substantive” space that “swallows up” the “star-shadows,” “blotting them out as non-entities from the perception of angels” (H 5:252). Vankirk seems not to notice that if the rudimental material of the stars is, as he says, blotted out from the perception of the angels, then the “full design” of the two-body system of existence is violated (much as the “specific form” of Eleonora is violated) since both the “inner form” and “the shell” are supposed to be appreciable by the angelic beings now in their ultimate bodies.

Vankirk's dialog ends here in the earlier version of the tale, and he dies ecstatically (H 5:326). Apparently thinking that the tale was too ambiguous in this form, however, Poe in the later version inserted a long paragraph in which he has Vankirk repeat his self-contradiction and add a further rationale for earthly existence that becomes perhaps the major irony of the tale. P. does not ask Vankirk about his contradictory statement (perhaps he does not yet perceive it, for P. is the involved narrator-mesmerist of the tale). Instead, he wonders what the “necessity” of all this complex “rudimental” evolution into the “ultimate” could possibly be. Vankirk answers that “organic life and matter” were “contrived” with the “view of producing impediment.” P., naturally enough, wonders why impediment was needed.

Vankirk's answer is roundabout: the “result of law inviolate is per-fection — right — negative happiness”; but the “result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain”; through the “impediments afforded” by the “number, complexity, and substantiality” of matter, the “violation of law” is rendered “practicable” and thus pain is possible (H 5:253). P. then points out that Vankirk has still not told him what the point of all this complexity, impediment, and pain is. Vankirk answers that “all things are either good or bad by comparison,” that pleasure “is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea.” We must suffer in order to know bliss; and since in the inorganic, ultimate life we do not suffer, we have first to suffer the pain of organic life (Vankirk is dying from consumption) so that we shall know that we are experiencing “the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven”; pain is “the sole basis” of bliss (H 5:253).

After this melancholy explanation of earthly life, which is painfully relevant to Vankirk's own condition, P. returns to the point on which Vankirk has contradicted himself, the “substantive vastness” of space and the unimportance (imperceptibleness) of the stars to the angelic beings. Vankirk's second rhapsody on the immaterial materiality of space begins with another blatant paradox. Infinity is substantive, [page 156:] Vankirk says, because substance is a “sentiment” (H 5:253). He has an explanation for this paradox, however: substance is the “perception, in thinking beings, of the adaptation of matter to their organization.” To “inorganic beings — to the angels — the whole of unparticled matter is substance ... the whole of what we term ‘space,’ is to them truest substantiality.” Just as we do not see the apparently immaterial material of the universe, angels do not see such material as the stars; it escapes “the angelic sense.” Having thus unconsciously confirmed the purposeless creation of sentient beings and having characterized all human feeling as only “negative pleasure” and “positive pain,” the mystic sleep-waker dies — the perception of the “full design” of the universe “irradiating his features” in a “bright smile.”

Poe's revision a year later, in which he inserted Vankirk's long, melancholy recontradiction just before his beatific death, subtly emphasizes the irony and parody basic to this “philosophical” dialog. But there is also a good deal of external evidence for Poe's irony. One of Poe's favorite critical pastimes was the debunking of attempts at rhetorical persuasion through mere “epigrammatism,” equivocation on words, and circular logic, as we have seen in his comments on William Newnham's Human Magnetism. “Mesmeric Revelation” begins with just such logic, and with an ironic clue. “Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession — an unprofitable and disreputable tribe” (H 5:241). The “facts” of the tale are, of course, that Vankirk attained a state between life and death through mesmerism and thus proved the rationale of mesmerism and the mystic-metaphysics therein revealed. But in the Marginalia Poe gleefully complains about English commentaries and reprintings of “Mesmeric Revelation” and the significantly titled “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The Popular Record of Modern Science had claimed that the revelations in these tales bore “internal evidence of authenticity!” Poe's comment on the circular logic of this internal “evidence” (especially in “Valdemar,” to be discussed momentarily) is sarcastic: “... all this rigmarole is what people call testing a thing by ‘internal evidence.’ The Record insists upon the truth of the story because of certain facts. ... To be sure! The story is proved by these facts. ... And now all we have to do is to- prove these facts. Ah! — they are proved by the story.”(14)

We have seen also that in Eureka the rationale of mesmerism is, for Poe, but a “delicious ism” of a certain “species” of people. In the middle of 1844 Poe is supposed to have attended lectures on “mesmerism, transcendental theories, and psychic phenomena” given in [page 157:] New York by Andrew Jackson Davis, “a noted spiritualist and clairvoyant of that day.”(15) Davis, in The Magic Staff (1857), wrote of a visit from Poe during which they discussed “Mesmeric Revelation.” Davis had assured Poe that although Poe “... had poetically imagined the whole of his published article upon the answers of a clairvoyant, the main ideas conveyed by it concerning ‘ultimates’ were strictly and philosophically true. At the close of this interview he departed, and never came again” (p. 317). But Poe in No. 11 of “Fifty Suggestions” wrote of the “Poughkeepsie Clairvoyant”: “There surely cannot be ‘more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of(oh, Andrew Jackson Davis!) ‘in your philosophy’ ” (H 14:173). Moreover, to “Mellonta Tanta” (1849), a satire on logic, on culture, and on American concepts of progress (in great part adapted from a section of Eureka), Poe added a notation to the editors of Godey's Lady's Book (in which the tale appeared). He wrote that the article, which “I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself,” was (parodying a similar reference in “Eleonora”):

Perhaps the most direct external corroboration of Poe's ironic skepticism regarding the whole business of “Mesmeric Revelation” is provided by his gleefully sarcastic response to being taken seriously by the occult mystics in general. In the Marginalia he wrote:

 

IV

In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) Poe explored, in a sense, the “opposite” possibilities of mesmerism and death-sleep, carrying the nightside writings of Justinus Kerner to an extremity of horror that yet suggests a comic grotesquerie, a weird combination of harmoniously [page 158:] blended contradictions.(17) M. Valdemar, like Vankirk, dying of consumption, agrees to summon the narrator when he knows that he is near death. In this instance, the narrator is supposed to arrest the “encroachments of Death” through mesmerism. The experiment is ambiguously successful, and Valdemar is suspended in a state of life-in-death sleep. When the narrator tries to communicate with him at the end of a seven-month period, Valdemar cries out in anguish, asking either to be put back into a deeper trance or to be “awakened” into final death (a piquant paradox). The narrator brings him out of the trance and watches with horror as Valdemar's body immediately crumbles and rots away into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity” (H 6:166). Thus, even if “Mesmeric Revelation” is not read as a parody on the beatitudes of the psychal mystics, we are still faced with an apparent about-face on Poe's part the very next year in the horror of “Valdemar.” Such a twist of apparent intent and belief, however, is characteristic of Poe's Romantic Irony.

One of the prominent features of “Valdemar” is its apparent verisimilitude, which caused the tale to be taken for a time as fact in both England and America. Poe describes the arrested death of Valdemar in grisly detail. As he slips into a deep trance, Valdemar's eyes roll upward to leave only the staring whites, his cadaverous skin takes on the hue of thin white paper, his upper lip writhes away from his teeth, his lower jaw falls with an audible jerk and locks, leaving the mouth widely extended and exhibiting a swollen and blackened tongue. From these gaping, motionless jaws comes (with a faint quiver of the swollen tongue) the harsh, broken, distantly hollow (as from a cavern deep in the earth), somehow “gelatinous” yet still distinct voice of Valdemar, claiming that he has died (H 6:160-63). Later, when Valdemar awakes, his rapid disintegration into a liquid mass on the bed is signaled by a yellow, pungent fluid issuing from his eyes (H 6:165).

Yet such horror has, nevertheless, touches of the comic, illustrative, presumably, of what Poe meant by the “ludicrous heightened into the grotesque.” At the beginning of the tale, we are told that Valdemar is: c’... particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person — his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair — the latter in consequence, being very generally mistaken for a wig” (H 6:155). Moreover, Valdemar is described as the “well-known compiler of the ‘Bibliotheca Forensica,’ and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of ‘WUllen-stein’ and ‘Gargantua’ ” (H 6:155). The exact point of the apparently satiric references to Randolph, Schiller, and Rabelais is a bit ambiguous. [page 159:] But to have labored like Issachar, described as an ass bowed down between two burdens (Gen. 49:14), in translating on the one hand Schiller's heroic play and on the other Rabelais's burlesque prose epic, and to have startling white whiskers in violent contrast to black hair, certainly suggest some kind of not completely serious symbolic doubleness.(18) Again, Poe is indulging in the hoaxer's jest, combining the comic with effective and apparently realistic grisly details — details which, if examined, are absurd.

Medical jargon, especially, serves Poe's double purpose of suggesting the real while actually writing absurdity. “The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality” (H 6:157). All but the lower half of the “right lobe” also exhibits this ossified state; and the small portion left is full of “extensive perforations” and has undergone “permanent adhesion to the ribs”; in fact, the whole of the functioning region of the right lung “was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into another” (H 6:157). In addition to these difficulties, Valdemar apparently has “aneurism of the aorta,” although the “osseous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossible” (H 6:157). Not only has Poe's narrator given us an impossibly exact diagnosis of internal tissues in a still-living being, he has also made an impossible condition sound almost plausible: three-quarters of Valdemar's lungs has turned to bone, the other quarter (on which Valdemar relies for “purposes of vitality”) is a mass of pus, adhesions, and holes — and he has a fatal aneurism. Despite this rather extreme condition, despite the fact that he has been given twenty-four hours to live, despite his ghastly appearance (his face “leaden” hued, his eyes “lustreless,” the paperish skin of his face “broken through by the cheekbones,” his “emaciation extreme,” his “expectoration excessive,” his “pulse barely perceptible”), Valdemar, when the narrator arrives, is sitting up in bed writing and conversing (H 6:157). Later (after Mr. L——l, a medical student, has swooned upon hearing the vibrating tongue quivering in the gaping jaws of Valdemar, and has been revived by several nurses), the narrator allows a grotesque pun (reminiscent of the Egyptian mummy's “mortification”) to escape him as he shifts Valdemar's position on the bed in an attempt to “recompose” his patient, who momentarily begins to decompose.

Aside from the contrast between the horror of “Valdemar” and the “radiant” joy of almost the same situation in “Mesmeric Revelation,” Poe's several comments about the two tales also put “Valdemar” into ironic perspective. We have already seen Poe's gleeful repudiation in the claim of the Popular Record of Modern Science that the two tales [page 160:] bore “internal evidence of authenticity!” In the same note, Poe also commented on the disbelief of the Morning Post. In insisting that the details of Valdemar's consumption are incredible and reveal the writer's ignorance, the Post, Poe said, missed the point of his verisimilitude, and displayed its own ignorance of pathology. Such symptoms, Poe continued, are plausible in the story and are based on actual diseases. Poe then pointed out that he had to “put an extreme case” lest the reader suspect that the victim survived without the help of the mesmerist.(19) Although by itself Poe's last comment is inconclusive, it does suggest Poe's awareness of multiple and deceptive meaning. In two letters, however, the point is clearer. Writing to Evert Duyckinck (March 8, 1849), Poe said that he thought the reason so many people believed in the reality of “Valdemar” was indeed the apparent “verisimilitude” of the tale (O 2:433). Moreover, Poe wrote, under the apparent verisimilitude of his Valdemar “hoax,” there lay, as in Defoe, “a tone of banter.” (This comment is surely reminiscent of A. W. Schlegel on verisimilitude in the “mixed” genre of the seriocomic.) In a letter replying to a query from one Arch Ramsay (December 30, 1846), Poe wrote: “ ‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case. The article was generally copied in England and is now circulating in France. Some few persons believe it — but I do not — and don't you” (O 2:337). Poe's skeptical attitude toward the nightside, despite his obsessive fascination with it, could hardly be clearer.

 

V

Human magnetism, mesmerism, metempsychosis, sleep-waking, electrical phenomena, spontaneous combustion, and the like figured prominently in the supernatural and horrifying tales of German, English, and American fiction writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and were staple elements in the pages of the influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Reviewing the German literature at the end of the eighteenth century, Oskar Walzel remarks that the common trait of the flood of Gothic (as opposed to grotesque) tales of chivalry, robber knights, ghosts, and general horror is the entanglement of defenseless characters with an incomprehensible supernatural power. This is how Gothicist critics, who insist that a nineteenth-century tale, because it is weird, must be a supernatural tale and nothing else, would have us read Poe. But to read a Romantic Ironist this way is to miss half the point, and nearly all the fun. For the German Romantic Ironists, in contrast to more regular Romanticists and Gothicists, used these materials, as did Poe, for double effect, [page 161:] half-mocking and half-serious, to develop the theme of the deceptiveness of appearances. Writers like Tieck, von Arnim, Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter took from Kantian philosophy the central idea of the limitations of human sense perceptions and used the weird and terrifying aspects of “nature” and mental aberration ambiguously to suggest both a transcendental world beyond human ken and the invariable deceptiveness of any human perception or thought, especially since the human mind is readily subject to emotional stress. Although regular Gothic tales frequently made use of misperception, the grotesque tales of the Romantic Ironists normally were concerned with a weirder sensory deception, with some deeper psychological subjectivity. While they touched a deep level of irrational fear, they also gave rise to a high level of philosophical perception of the absurd. Tieck and Hoffmann especially showed the supernatural to be subjective inner experience — irrational fear welling up from a subconscious, timeless abyss of guilt and superstition.

This brings us, for a final point of reference, to a writer we have barely mentioned in connection with the nightside or Romantic Irony, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, whose name is thoroughly associated with both. Jean Paul's comments on his own writing provide yet another dimension for approaching Poe's tales. Jean Paul has been taken as illustrative of one extreme of German nightside “depth-psychology,” especially the development of the Romantic idea of myth into a conception of the subconscious archetype. Meyer H. Abrams writes: “Richter, building on earlier suggestions of the chaos, the darkness, and the mysterious depths in the creative mind, develops the night-side of the unconscious ... in his writings we find ourselves half way from Leibniz to that later inheritor of the depth-psychology of German romanticism, Carl Jung.”(20) Jean Paul, according to Abrams, clearly foreshadowed Jung's theories about man's collective unconscious and archetypal experience when he wrote of the unconscious realm of the mind as an “abyss” of which “we can hope to fix the existence, not the depth,” and which “has a presentiment of ... objects ... beyond the reaches of time.” This well of unconscious activity contains, says Abrams, “the common origins of dreams, the sense of terror and guilt, demonology, and myth.” Although this realm of the subconscious and archetypal has many forms and names, its essential qualities are double, the terrifying and the sublime. Jean Paul wrote: “At one time it shows itself to men deeply involved [[enveloped]] in guilt ... as a being before whose presence ... we are terrified; this feeling we call the fear of ghosts. ... Again the spirit shows itself as The Infinite, and man prays.”(21)

More than one critic has intimated, as we have seen, that Poe projected [page 162:] from his subconscious mind the archetypal terrors of the race and probably did not have full conscious artistic awareness of what he had done. By this interpretation the ludicrous elements of Poe's “tawdry” Gothic style are proof of his incomplete awareness and control. But it should be clear by now that such a view, if valid in one dimension, is a distortion in another: it underestimates Poe's awareness of the literary ideas of his times, and also misconstrues the principal aim of Poe's kind of “serious” Romantic fiction, which is to explore, ambivalently, the irrational sources of man's terror and despair in order to master them (as Fichte suggested) through a doubled vision, through humor and irony.

Jean Paul's word, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, was humor (“annihilating” and “satanic”) rather than irony. “Humor,” according to Jean Paul, is the “Romantic comic,” the “sublime in reverse”; and rational statements alone, without the simultaneous comic sense of the irrational, are one-sided. “Annihilating” or “satanic” humor is in effect both objective and subjective. On a grand scale, the comic is “intuited infinite Unreason.” More narrowly, the subjective element of comedy lies in the contrast between the stupidity of the comic action and the good sense of the spectator who lends or projects upon a comic character his own sense of incongruity. This neatly describes the reader-character-author relationship we have seen in Poe. As Jean Paul puts it, the objective element in the comic is our freedom of choice between our own insight, and that of the comic figure, and that aspect of insight that we lend to the comic figure in his situation. The mind toys, says Jean Paul, with various possibilities, plays, and dances in “freedom,” and “genius” is the ability to harmonize contradictions and even to “annihilate” them. Jean Paul's theory of comic contrasts in Chapter IV of his Introduction to Aesthetics (1804, revised 1813) influenced Hazlitt (whom Poe read) in his essay on “Wit and Humour” in the Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819) and is perhaps indirectly the source of Poe's definitions of fancy, imagination, humor, and fantasy.(22) Moreover, like Schlegel, Jean Paul intruded songs and dreamlike or absurd narrative intermezzos into his fiction, as Poe does for similar reasons in tales like “Usher.” Such practice was aimed at producing a harmonious double effect of following “steam baths of emotion” with “cold showers of satire.”(23)

Reference to Jean Paul also brings us to yet one more aspect of the nightside in Romantic literature, the recurrent figure of the “double” or Doppelgänger. Insisting on a philosophical awareness of the doubleness of existence (especially the two extremes of the mind, conscious reflection and mysterious subconscious impulses), Jean Paul [page 163:] made weirdly humorous use of the Doppelgänger to suggest a split, dissociated ego, one part usually acting, the other part observing, again a typical situation in Poe's fiction. Jean Paul's characters become terrified of their images in mirrors, or they meet their doubles on the street, or they compulsively make their own wax likenesses. Looking at his body, one of his characters remarks, “Somebody is sitting there and I am in him. Who is that?”(24) The artist himself also should have a sense of doubleness. “In my consciousness,” Jean Paul wrote, “it is always as if I were doubled; as if there were two I's in me. Within I hear myself talking.”(25) This sense of doubleness, of acting and observing or being observed, is like Tieck's irony in his early plays; and, as in Tieck, there is also a further doubleness: on the one hand there is something sinister and destructive about the feeling, and on the other hand it is absurd and laughable, and may be productive of “freedom.” The motif of the double, or seeming double, thus has as its primary aim a suggested confrontation of the mind with itself, as we have seen in “Ligeia” and “Usher.”

This has yet a further extension particularly relevant to reading Poe either as a craftsman or as a self-indulgent Romanticist. Jean Paul, echoing Friedrich Schlegel's concept of Selbstparodie, offers definitions of the artist's role in the production of “annihilating humor” that provide a further context for what has seemed to the Gothicist critics of Poe a particularly problematic idiosyncrasy. Poe has often been criticized for his sometimes startling intrusions of apparently autobiographical elements into a number of his wilder tales (like the date of William Wilson's birth and his name and the place of his education; or like the cousin-wife and her mother in “Eleonora”; or like the supposed similarity of the portrait of Usher to Poe's own face; not to mention the ever-present “I” of the tales). But the Romantic-Ironic point of such a technique is made clear in Article 34 of Jean Paul's Aesthetics:

Thus, through self-parody, annihilating humor, and doubleness, one can achieve freedom from the depressing conditions of earthly existence. [page 164:] Through humor man can look tolerantly at the whimsy and the horror, the eccentricity and the madness of the world with a self-preserving laughter “wherein is sorrow and greatness.”(27) Jean Paul's concept of humor is essentially the same as Schlegel's concept of irony: the largest and freest view of the paradoxical and sinister world. And we may recall here that Friedrich Schlegel wrote of Jean Paul's “grotesques” that they were “the only romantic products of this unromantic age.”

Thus, the thrust of the philosophy, the criticism, and the literature of German Romanticism was, for a while, toward an ultimate harmony involving a unification of opposites, an annihilation of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations, and a merging of the subjective human personality and objective rational understanding into a penetrating view of existence from the height of the ideal — but always with an eye to the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, probably decaying, and possibly malevolent universe. The only attainable harmony out of all this deceptiveness and chaos was a double vision, a double awareness, a double emotion, culminating in an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession — in irony. Irony thus becomes a double-edged pessimism and skepticism engendered by the self-awareness of the subjective human mind reaching out toward an illusive certainty. It is hard therefore to see comedy entering into Poe's writings by way of “hysteria,” as previous critics have suggested, for humor, mockery, and irony were rationally planned elements in much of the best-known writing of the time. The comic rationale of Romantic literature had as its aim transcendence of self and self-generated fears through intellectual mastery of self. And comedy enters into Poe's “Gothic” writings not so much by way of hysteria as by way of a controlled, and therefore skeptical, philosophical despair.