Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 07,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 165-195 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 165:]

7

Romantic Skepticism

 

THE WHOLE of Poe's Gothic fiction can be read not only as an ambivalent parody of the world of Gothic horror tales, but also as an extended grotesquerie of the human condition. Nothing quite works out for his heroes, even though they sometimes make superhuman efforts, and even though they are occasionally rescued from their predicaments. They undergo extended series of ironic reverses in fictional structures so ironically twisted that the form itself, even the very plot, approaches an absurd hoax perpetrated on the characters. The universe created in Poe's fiction is one in which the human mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning. The universe is deceptive; its basic mode seems almost to be a constant shifting of appearances; reality is a flux variously interpreted, or even created, by the individual human mind. In its deceptiveness, the universe of Poe's Gothic fiction seems not so much malevolent as mocking or “perverse.” The universe is much like a gigantic hoax that God has played on man, an idea which is the major undercurrent of Poe's essay on the universe, Eureka.

Indeed, it is not too extravagant to claim that the basic structuring force of Eureka is an elaborate conceit on “nothing.” In searching for the key to unlock the secrets that lie just beyond appearances, the “Poe” persona finds (just as do the characters in Poe's tales) that the great discovery is of nothingness, of illusion only. Thus, the hoaxlike irony of Poe's technique has its parallel in the dramatic world in which [page 166:] his characters move and in the overall philosophical vision that structures at every level all of Poe's fiction.

The ultimate irony of this universe, however, is the “perversity” of man's own mind. The mind, and the mind only, seems to sustain Poe's heroes in their most desperate predicaments; yet in an instant the mind is capable of slipping into confusion, hysteria, madness — even while it seems most rational. From a more Gothicist point of view, Edward H. Davidson, without using the term irony, and without reading Poe's Gothic tales ironically or satirically, comes to much the same conclusion regarding Poe's universe. “Poe's nightmare universe,” Davidson writes, “is one in which ... people ... are condemned to live as if they are in some long after-time of belief and morality.” The evildoer is driven by “some maggot in the brain” that leaves him a kind of “moral freak” in a universe that also has some fantastic defect in it. In Poe's universe, Davidson suggests, evil and suffering are “the capacity and measure of man to feel and to know”; pain is the basis of life, and death is the only release from his “grotesque condition of ‘perversity.’ ”(1)

Poe's fiction developed from a basically satiric mode into an ironic mode in which a tragic response to the perversities of fortune and to the treacheries of one's own mind is contrasted by a near-comic perception of the absurdity of man's condition in the universe. Such a double perception, we have seen in Romantic theory, leads, through art, to a momentary transcendence of the dark chaos of the universe. If the artist (and through him the reader) can mock man's absurd condition at the same time that he feels it deeply, he transcends earthly or finite limits in an artistic paralleling of God's infinite perception. In Poe, however, such transcendence is always at the expense of the less perceptive mind. Poe plays a constant intellectual game with his readers; he tries to draw the reader into the “Gothic” world of the mind, but he is ready at any moment to mock the simplistic Gothic vision (under the trappings of which Poe saw man's real estrangement and isolation) that contemporary readers insisted on in the popular magazines.

In this concluding chapter, a brief chronological survey of Poe's Gothic works will help to suggest the basic ironic structures and tensions in each tale, with specific reference to the themes of perversity and nothingness as illustrative of the pervasiveness of the Romantic-Ironic consciousness in Poe. Three final works then will be examined in detail as touchstones of Poe's Romantic-Ironic skepticism. These are the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-38), the tale “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), and the prose cosmogony [page 167:] Eureka (1848), each of which critics have often placed at the “center” of Poe's philosophical vision.(2)

 

I

Under the Gothic surface of supernaturalism, Poe's major ironic themes of the perverse deceptiveness of experience, the propensity of the mind to abandon reason, the perverse impulse to act against oneself, and the absurdity of existence in a universe that does not provide for individual survival, appear with a remarkable consistency from his first “Gothic” tale in 1832 to his last in 1849. We have already seen that “Metzengerstein” (1832), which Poe intended to be a satiric parody of the supernatural horror tale, became his first Gothic hoax when his readers took the tale seriously. Its extended series of plot ironies, its caricatured fifteen-year-old Gothic villain, its dunderheaded Gothic narrator, and its melodramatic style all interweave to form a clear satiric pattern that mocks the few scenes of effective horror that Poe intrudes, as it were, into the satire. Moreover, the working out of an ominous prophecy is comically parodied by a confused curse, which also works out, ironically, in every detail, so that the plot as a whole becomes a kind of cosmic hoax, augmented by man's perverse propensity to act against his own best interests.

Poe's second “Gothic” tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), on the surface a supernatural adventure story, not only parodies its literary type through blatant absurdities (such as the narrator's dabbing desultorily at a sail with a tarbrush only to discover that he has spelled out DISCOVERY) but also through the development of an ironic distance between narrator and reader that mocks the narrator's supercilious conception of his unshakable rationality.(3) At the beginning of the tale, the narrator, in a crisp and fact-filled style, insists on his unemotional and rational character. On a simple “Gothic” level, this emphasis seems to confirm the reality of the supernatural events to follow. But Poe immediately subjects his narrator to a terrifying storm; and in contrast to the stoicism of an old sailor whom he contemptuously calls “superstitious,” the narrator himself becomes increasingly frenzied, and his style of narration highly cadenced and emotional. The machinations of fortune ironically preserve him from death at the very moment of apparent destruction by throwing him high into the air and into the rigging of a gigantic phantom ship, which we subsequently learn has been growing in the South Seas water like a living thing. The rest of the tale, in which the phantom ship with its silent statuelike crew sails [page 168:] into an opening at the pole and goes “down,” is rendered with an atmosphere of dreaminess that, combined with the narrator's proven untrustworthiness, suggests that the incredible events are the delusions of a man driven mad. Seen as a voyage of “discovery,” the ludicrous “supernatural” events act as a grotesquerie of the discovery of what lies beyond the normal world or beyond death, for the tale abruptly ends at the very verge of revelation in apparent final destruction and silence. Just as Arthur Gordon Pym journeys toward the great discovery of what lies “beyond” only to find the white blankness of nothingness, so the caricatured narrator of “MS. Found in a Bottle” discovers nothing. A further ironic twist is provided by the French motto to the tale, which insinuates that the narrator is a liar.

In “The Assignation” (1834), we have seen that it is the perverse fortune of the laughing and crying Byronic stranger to become united with his beloved only in death. The tale has seemed to most critics one of Poe's most intensely “Romantic” productions. But under its Romantic surface is presented a coded satiric allegory of burlesque parallels and contrasts to events in Lord Byron's life so that the tale is both a Romantic tale of dark passion and a burlesque of the genre. In “Berenice” (1835), another “serious” tale of compulsion which actually lampoons its literary type, it is the absurd obsession of the narrator with Berenice's teeth which leads to his grief, an obsession resulting from a temper of mind engendered by his grotesque birth and rearing. It has been his perverse misfortune to have been both born and brought up in a library, and thus he has become totally imbued with the Gothic horrors and weird philosophical (transcendental) mysticism of the day.(4) The major insinuated irony of the ostensibly supernatural “Morella” (1835) again lies in the suggested madness of the narrator, who, in a moment of perversity, names his daughter after her hated mother. Although the narrator tells us that through this error he had made it possible for the first Morella's spirit to take over the body of the second, Poe provides motive enough and ambiguity enough to suggest that the narrator may have murdered them both. External data surrounding the tale is especially suggestive. T. O. Mabbott writes that Poe probably got the name from some such current account as “Women Celebrated in Spain for the Extraordinary Powers of Mind,” which appeared in Godey's Lady's Book in September 1834, a year before Poe's tale. Poe, he suggests, must have read of the great learning of Juliana Morella. But the important point is the corroboration of the psychological reading given by the fact that Juliana Morel-la's father left Spain because he was charged with homicide.(5)

“Shadow” (1835) and “Silence” (1837), under their mystic and “poetic” [page 169:] (and flawed) surfaces, in substance and style seem to be parodies of pseudopoetic transcendental fictions, especially those of Bulwer-Lytton, De Quincey, and the “psychological autobiographists” (Disraeli's Contarini Fleming was at first subtitled A Psychological Auto-Biography) indicated in Poe's subtitle to “Silence.” “Shadow,” after developing a sense of the finality of death, concludes with an ironic turn in which the chilling immortality of the “shadows” of the narrator's friends is revealed to him, though, since he and his companions are dead drunk, it is hard to tell how truly revealing the transcendental sleep-waking revelation is. “Silence” develops the theme of a deceptive and illusory world, with shrieking water lilies, lowing hippopotami, graven rocks whose letters change. At the end, a Demon laughs hysterically at a confused human being, while a lynx stares steadily at the Demon's face. That the lynx is a symbol of the ironic vision peering unflinchingly into the face of perversity is corroborated by Poe's lynx metaphor in Marginalia. Poe writes in Marginalia: “It is only the philosophical lynxeye that, through the indignity-mist of Man's life, can still discern the dignity of Man.”(6) These, then, are the “Gothic” tales, published in the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837, that Poe intended to include in the burlesque Folio Club series, tales he considered to be of a “bizarre and generally whimsical character” (O 1:103).

Between 1838 and 1840, the middle years of his career, Poe published, along with the [[The]] Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, three of his most famous Gothic tales (as well as several counterpointed comic ones). “Ligeia” (1838), as we have seen, is only ostensibly a serious supernatural tale of metempsychosis; it can also be read as the story of the ambiguous delusions of a guilt-ridden madman who has probably murdered at least one wife and has hallucinated a weird rationalization of his crimes. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), we have seen, is, despite the supernatural atmosphere, actually the tale of the frenzied fantasies of both the narrator and Usher, fantasies engendered by a vague fear that something ominous may happen and by the disconnected, weird environment. “William Wilson” (1839), though lacking the complexity of “Ligeia” and “Usher,” exhibits Poe's continuing use not only of the double but also of double perspective. Although apparently a straight Romantic tale of a man's confrontation, supernaturally, with his own soul, the tale can be read as the delusive but perversely persistent confrontation of a guilt-ridden mind with itself. Whether the second Wilson, twin of the narrator, exists as a supernatural spirit or as a construct of the mind of the narrator remains ambiguous, as in other Poe tales, though the clues for a double reading are carefully planted. Again, the world that we perceive as [page 170:] readers is what is filtered through the subjective mind of the narrator, and it is this structure, along with some absurdist motifs (such as the precise timing of the second Wilson's entrances and his recurrent whisper), that gives rise to the dramatic irony of the tale. Certainly, if the second Wilson is the product of the imagination of the first Wilson, the first Wilson's behavior must seem to his companions, if not comic, very peculiar indeed. Ultimately, of course, the tale is a dramatization of the ultimate perversity of self-vexation and destruction; and the final emptiness of the mirror into which Wilson is left staring is a symbol of the illusory nothingness on the other side of appearances.(7) Each of these tales involves doubles and dramatizes a distorted universe as perceived by a totally subjective mind.

Of Poe's remaining fiction, nearly half (nineteen short tales of forty-two) are clearly comic; the twenty-three ostensibly Gothic and “philosophical” works, along with Pym, further extend the central theme of the subjective deceptiveness of the world in terms of nothingness and the perverse. “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), on the surface a tale about a lonely city wanderer who is weirdly suggestive of what Hawthorne called the Outcast of the Universe (in his own dark comedy, “Wakefield”), may be read also as the deluded romanticizing of the tipsy narrator, who perversely attributes a Romantic significance to an old drunk who wanders from bistro to bistro. Especially suggestive are the clues in the opening paragraphs and the misapplication of a quotation at the conclusion. The young man, after an entire night of following the old man from one crowded place to another, says that the old man is like the old German book which mysteriously would not “allow” itself to be read. T. O. Mabbott points out that it could not be read because it was so badly printed; thus, the allusion is a comic clue to the mocking irony under the Gothic surface. Mabbott also suggests parallels with two of Dickens's sketches by Boz, “Drunkard's Death” and “Gin Shops.” A motif of clouded vision and smoky windows further suggests that in seeing the old man through the lens of the narrator, we are seeing “through a glass darkly.”(8) We have seen that “Eleonora” (1841), ostensibly a story of metempsychosis, also suggests the Romantic imagination shifting the object of its passion or perhaps rationalizing a deep guilt; and we have seen that “The Oval Portrait” (1842), apparently a supernatural tale about the actual transfer of life from a living person to a painting, is also the delirious dream of a drug addict.

In “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), Poe emphasizes the traditional Western themes of transcendence from a petty involvement with “self” to submission to a larger “design” of nature. Giving up all [page 171:] sense of mere individual importance, the narrator feels a positive wish to see what lies at the bottom of the whirlpool. Although he survives (probably by mere accident rather than by his careful observation of and submission to nature, since the mechanics of the hydraulic effect on geometric forms is false), his incomplete confrontation with nothingness at the center of the whirpool (a “manifestation of God's power”) yet turns his hair prematurely white. Thus the tale ironically inverts traditional Western belief: the narrator's mystical experience of the magnificence of God is one of horror rather than of beatitude. The design of the terrifying violence of the natural world (see the motto from Glanvill) becomes an object of contemplation, much as in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and, similarly, involves a contrapuntal mental regression and progression from the rational to the hysterical and then absurdly back again to the rational without cause. His new rational state, however, is forever, as in so many of Poe's tales, hovering on the edge of madness. At the point of apparent destruction, an ambiguous revelation of “pattern” reverses the narrator's mode of thought from the emotional to the rational; but he is plagued ever afterward by the “mystery” of the whirlpool, which becomes his monomaniacal obsession.(9)

“The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) itself is one of Poe's clearest dramatizations of the futile efforts of man's will to survive the malevolent perversity of the world and to make order out of chaos. The tale has sometimes been read as the escape from madness through a descent into madness. Although the hero is mentally tortured until he confesses to himself that “all is madness” and that his mind has been “nearly annihilated,” he learns to rely on primal cunning and an instinctive sense of danger. Under the razor-edge of the pendulum, he recovers his ratiocinative power: “For the first time during many hours — or perhaps days — I thought” (H 5:81). But the narrator thinks of his avoidance of the pit as “the merest of accidents, and I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths” (H 5:79). Under the pendulum he becomes “frantically mad” and strains to force himself against the slowly descending blade. The irony, the grotesquerie of human dignity and rationality, here lies in the narrator's ultimately futile efforts to change his basic condition. He cannot hurry destruction and thus avoid the torment allotted to him. His mind suffers another radical shock and hysterically shifts to an opposite mode, moving toward the rational only because of his helplessness in madness. Then, escaping from the pendulum, he is, ironically, again faced with the pit. The walls become heated, and for “a wild moment” the [page 172:] narrator's mind “refused to comprehend,” although at length he says “it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason” (H 5:85). Thinking of the cooling waters of the pit he rushes to its edge, only to stop short, again in horror of such a death. Then as the walls begin to close in, he realizes that he had been destined by his tormentors for the pit in the first place (H 5:86) and that all his luck, all his cunning, and all his regained rationality have, ironically, trapped him into self-torment and increased his agony. The final irony comes with the sudden cessation of the movement of the walls, a rescue from outside that comes unexpectedly, independently, unconnected with his own personal fate at the last moment of his despair and defeat.(10) We shall have further reference to these two works momentarily.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), a study in obsessive paranoia, is yet another story of the mind watching itself disintegrate under the stress of delusion in an alienated world. It is the perverse fortune of the narrator to become fearful of the grotesque eye of a kindly old man, whom he says he loves. With a double perversity, he gives himself away to the police at the moment of success. Yet the narrator is caught in a weird world in which he loves the old man yet displays no real emotion toward him, in which he cannot let the “beloved” old man live and yet cannot kill him without remorse, in which he cannot expose his crime and yet must do so. The most blatant absurdist irony is that the apparent beating of his own heart which he mistakes, first, as the beating of the still-living heart of the old man, and which, second, seems to be an emblem of his own guilt (and which, finally, compels him to confess), may very well be initially the peculiar thumping of the wood beetles gnawing at the walls.(11) “The Black Cat” (1843) carries the same themes further and details more clearly the irrational desire, almost the ultimate irony, to act against oneself, with an ambiguous conclusion suggesting the agency of malevolent fortune at the same time that it suggests subconscious self-punishment. The major absurdist irony is similar to that of “The Tell-Tale Heart”: the murder the narrator commits is the result of subconscious remorse over the cat he has previously mistreated and thus ultimately the device of his self-torture.(12) “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), we have seen, is ostensibly a story of metempsychosis, but it is more probably a murder story in which all the characters (and possibly the murderer) are duped regarding the reality of events; and “The Premature Burial” (1844), though comically concluded, leaves us seriously entertaining the ghastly possibilities of an absurd situation.

One of Poe's less successful Gothic tales also fits this pattern of ironic mockery and perversity. “The Oblong Box” (1844), after a series [page 173:] of weird circumstances, concludes grotesquely with a commonplace explanation that is both absurd and upsetting. An artist brings aboard a ship a large, oddshaped box that contains, apparently, his paintings, but he is so vague and so melancholy in his replies to queries from the other passengers about the contents of the box that he and his wife become the center of quizzical and mildly malevolent gossip. His wife becomes the object of ridicule, because of her excessive chattiness, which strikingly contrasts with the excessive gloominess of the artist. The narrator conceives the idea that the artist is playing a pleasant joke on the passengers and in a bantering mood begins to insinuate to him that he knows what is in the box. But the artist reacts to his “witticisms” like a madman, laughing hysterically until he collapses. When the passengers are forced to abandon the ship in a storm, the artist insists that the oblong box be taken with them in the longboat. When the captain refuses, the artist lashes himself to the box and sinks with it into the sea. The captain gloomily comments that they will recover the box when the salt melts, thus mystifying everyone the more. Later the captain explains that the artist's wife had died; and, knowing the “superstitions” of the passengers, he and the artist had conveyed her corpse, packed in salt, aboard as merchandise. The woman's maid then acted the part of the artist's wife in order to forestall any suspicions about her absence and the presence of the box. But the deception ironically produced the unfortunate harassment of the artist, apparently driving him over the edge of madness. The grotesque effect of the whole tale is summed up in the final paragraph. The narrator concludes by saying: “My own mistakes arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. ... There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears” (H 5:289).

Poe's vision of the perverse becomes codified in “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), seemingly more an essay than a tale. It is another dark comedy of errors which clearly spells out Poe's fundamental conception that it is man's fate to act against his own best interests. But the dissertation on perversity has its dramatic irony, for the “rationality” of the narrator merely enmeshes him deeper in anxiety as he absurdly, helplessly, uses his imaginative intellect to will his own destruction by means of a mere whimsical thought. Having committed murder he reflects that he is “safe” — unless, of course, he be fool enough to confess. This foolish fancy immediately seizes him and he rushes out to confess his crime to passersby in the street. The recurrent confessional structure of other of Poe's tales is operative here too, for the narrator has apparently confessed to a priest in his cell the night [page 174:] before his impending execution. In an attempt to explain his obsession with the possibilitiy that some “imp” in the structure of the universe has victimized him, the narrator succeeds in convincing us not of his rationality but of his irrationality. The long prologue in its “circumlocution” does not directly make his point but instead seems to obscure the more direct and succinct conclusion. But the point of this circumlocutions inventiveness becomes clear when the narrator finally reveals to us his anxiety about his execution; his imagination immediately foresees additional possibilities for perverse speculation: in death he will be free of his physical chains and his cell — but what new torments yet await him, he wonders, in what afterlife?(13)

We have seen that “Valdemar” (1845), ostensibly a serious Gothic tale of the horror of prolonging life beyond the proper point of death, not only is a “verisimilitudinous” hoax, but also contains absurd and comic details suggesting satiric parody and mocking irony. Finally, after Valdemar's “life” has been preserved by modern “technology” (in this case, mesmerism), the last horrible details suggest the real, grisly finality of death. “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), on the surface a tale of successful and remorseless revenge, we have seen to be Montresor's deathbed confession, to an implied listener, of a crime that has tortured him for fifty years. At the conclusion of the tale, the apparently remorseless Montresor recounts the sudden sickening of heart he felt at the end “ — on account of the dampness of the catacombs,” he hastily supplies. But, ironically his “revenge,” as Montresor himself defines it, has failed on every count. Two other darker tales of the late forties have similar undercurrents of mockery. “The Sphinx” (1846), comes quickly to a comic conclusion after a frightening and weird but absurdly deceptive vision of a monster that turns out to be a bug dangling only a fraction of an inch from the eye. “Hop-Frog” (1849) is a compellingly ludicrous tale of horrible revenge told almost sweetly in a fairy-tale style, at the conclusion of which the dwarf declares to the burning king and his ministers that their death is but his last “jest.”

Poe's six ratiocinative tales of the 1840s represent the few successes of the acute mind in overcoming the bewildering deceptiveness of the perverse world. Five of the tales are ostensibly serious (“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Marie Rogêt,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Gold-Bug,” “Descent into the Maelström”) and one is comic and suggests self-parody (“ ‘Thou Art the Man”). The Dupin kind of mentality assumes a godlike omniscience; the narrative “I” and the reader, the role of dull-witted dupes. The major ironies of these tales are consistent with Poe's more clearly Gothic tales: their basis is the discrepancy [page 175:] between appearance and actuality; and the ease of Dupin's solutions contrasts with our mystification, as in the extravagant train of association in “Murders in The Rue Morgue” whereby Dupin guesses what his friend is thinking, or as in the absurdly simple irony in “The Purloined Letter” of hiding an object in plain sight where no one would think of looking for it. In “The Gold-Bug” we have yet another twist, for Legrand's ratiocination has nothing whatever to do with the final discovery of the treasure; instead a series of improbabilities and accidents lead to it, including such sardonic touches as having the weather-stained map specifically written in a water-soluble ink, pointing the telescope at the North Star instead of at the proper place on the cliff (if one checks the degree of angle carefully), and decoding a code riddled with errors in coding. Moreover, a coded allegorical burlesque of the alchemical tradition is interwoven with the main narrative so that it becomes, like “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849), a satiric hoax aimed at men's dreams of getting rich quick, paralleling Poe's mockery of the landscape artists who sought to create the Earthly Paradise.(14)

The four poetic landscapes, “Island of the Fay” (1844), “Landscape Garden” (1842). “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), and “Landor's Cottage” (1849), as we have already noted, ostensibly deal with the natural beauty God has created in the world but insinuate the melancholy facts of death, imperfection, purposelessness in contrast to man's futile imagining of an ideal state of harmony and beauty. Four philosophical dialogs, with and among bodiless spirits, “Mons and Una” (1841), “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), “The Power of Words” (1845), and “Eiros and Charmion” (1839), deal with the philosophic problem of the artistic creation, projection, or imagining of the universe, which Eureka shows to be incomprehensible, death-ridden, and absurd in the limited perception of man. “Mesmeric Revelation,” we have seen, is even a parody of occult metaphysics in its own terms. Each follows the same structural pattern of asserting some mystical meaning inherent in existence while quietly undercutting the assertion.

Poe's concept of the perverse functioning as both a world view and a psychology is, then, perhaps the ultimate grotesquerie to be found in his Gothic fiction. Poe's characters live in a cosmos where there are few certainties beyond that of individual annihilation. Indeed, in Eureka, Poe takes as his basic axiom the idea that the germ of “inevitable annihilation” is implicit in the original cause of existence. In a deceptive universe that does not provide for individual immortality, Poe's heroes and heroines struggle vainly to find order and to preserve their lives. Yet they are at the same time perversely fascinated with [page 176:] death as the ultimate fact of existence, and they yearn for knowledge of the secret that lies beyond death. But in Poe's universe, there is nothing beyond death, nothing beyond this life. In a sense, the true horror, the true Gothic quality, of Poe's tales lies in their substantive irony, for Poe's tales are more than ironic in mode, more than supercilious hoaxes perpetrated on the unsuspecting devotees of the Gothic romance, though such mockery certainly looms large. The insinuated burlesque, the ironic modes of language, and the ironic themes merge with ironies of plot and characterization in the creation of an absurd universe. Poe's characters move in a world in which events are often disconnected and in which meaning is opaque. Although clear possibilities for “opposite” meanings are indicated to the perceptive reader, they are, for the most part, denied the characters.

If the reader is perceptive enough not to be taken quite all the way into the “subterrene night,” he can achieve the same kind of sweeping and detached insight as that possessed by the “creator” of this fictional universe. The perceptive reader can, through a subjective involvement with the difficulties of the perverse creatures inhabiting the flawed and perverse universe, achieve an objectivity toward the perverse condition of man. This kind of ambivalent self-division and even self-parody is, of course, the philosophical irony of the German Romanticists — a sweeping, transcendental sense of the perverse duplicity of all things — and Poe's ironic rendering of the existential hoax that the perverse universe presents can be conclusively illustrated through three final works.

 

II

Certainly The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-38) is a clear example of the world view of the Romantic Ironist. The unifying theme of what seems to be a merely episodic narrative is the experience of the inner mind, the Romantic-Ironic theme of man's futile attempts to see through the deceptive illusoriness of the world and to discover the primal facts of existence and of the self. A perverse fate, augmented by man's own treachery and perverseness, repeaterlly overtakes the characters in a series of plot ironies which progressively reveals that the assumed consistency and reality of the world are capable at any time of immediate disintegration.(15) Moreover, Pym is filled with comic exaggerations in the midst of a superabundance of prosaic facts about sailing, geography, and marine life. As always, Poe calculates [page 177:] his effects so as to deceive the reader at first and then to insinuate that he has been duped regarding the reality of events, and, in fact, regarding the true action of the story.

The affinities of Pym with the techniques of Romantic Irony are perhaps more obvious (though no deeper) than in any other story Poe wrote, because they are on such a basic, indeed simple, level. Despite the hoaxlike verisimilitude of the details, Poe ironically emphasizes the fictionality of Pym while seeming to claim an “actuality,” a “factual” truth for it. Harry Levin notes, for example, that the world of Pym is, in the largest sense, a symbolic projection of the artist's mind subjected to self-scrutiny, a theme signalled by Poe's introduction of his hero as a man from “Edgar-town.”(16) Moreover, the narrative is prefaced by Arthur Gordon Pym's expose of Edgar Allan Poe's fictionalizing of what were Pym's “true-life” adventures. Pym says in the preface that he now offers the true narrative of what really happened, though he professes to be content with Poe's rendering of the first part of the adventure. Pym is, moreover, quite certain that the reader will have no difficulty in perceiving, through the differences between “Poe's” style and his own, where fiction leaves off and actuality begins (H 3:2-3). In addition to these ironic frames, the narrative is concluded with an appendix (apparently the “publisher's”) in which we are informed that Pym's recent disappearance has prevented him from telling the final truth about what happened and that “Poe,” the original editor, has failed to see the true significance of the narrative (H 3:243-44). The Romantic-Ironic frames could hardly be clearer.

In the narrative itself, the plot, augmented and corroborated by deception and perversity in the characters, moves through a symmetrical series of repeated ironies so extended that the perversity of ironical fortune, as variously misperceived by man, becomes integral to the central themes of man's futile quests for stable order and of his discovery of the ultimate secret of existence. The easiest way to see the extent of the deceptive quality of the perverse universe in Pym is simply to note the sequence of ironical turns in fortune and the counterpoint, in the characters, of deception, treachery, and mutiny against order or design. Perhaps no other story Poe wrote is so saturated with ironic reversals of events.

In the first of the three principal episodes, two boyhood friends, Pym and Augustus Barnard, slip out for a forbidden nighttime sail; but the harmless sail on the calm sea ironically turns into a nightmare: the boys drink too much, lose control of their boat, and are almost capsized in a sudden storm. Then a ship bears down on them, seemingly determined to cut them in two, but at the last instant turns to [page 178:] miss them. It sails away from them for a time, apparently abandoning them to the hostile elements. But at the moment of their greatest despair, the ship unexpectedly turns again and sends out a rescue party. Pym learns, however, that the mate had to threaten the captain with mutiny before he would put about. This first, very short, episode contains in small the themes and the types of the events that appear in the second episode. Deceptions, drunkenly erratic behavior, a sudden storm, a shipwreck, passing ships that promise rescue but bring only increased despair, and mutinies recur in the second part with a more intense sense of the perverse treacheries of man and the ironic twist-ings of an almost malevolent fortune.

In the second episode, Pym and Augustus decide to seek adventure on a real sailing ship, but to do so they must again deceive their families. Ironically, however, at the moment of apparently triumphant escape from parental control, they meet Pym's grandfather as they are about to board a ship called the Grampus. Pym manages to deceive his grandfather, however, by impersonating a drunken sailor, and the old man goes away convinced that appearances are indeed deceiving. Augustus is a member of the crew of the Grampus, but Pym must practice another deception. He stows away in an iron box in the hold to await the new freedom that will be his when Augustus can release him. But the perverse twistings of fortune transform Pym's hiding place into a prison, for the crew of the Grampus mutinies and imprisons Augustus.

Trapped in the hold, Pym becomes delirious under the influence of the foul air, the darkness, the lack of food and water, and the sense of confinement. He becomes increasingly subject to weird and terrifying dreams of death and burial alive. Unaccountably, his faithful dog, Tiger, appears in the dark hold. A double treachery occurs when the good dog, as though sensing the hungry Pym's treacherous thoughts, attacks him savagely. Pym manages to fight him off, however, and later the dog disappears as mysteriously as he appeared. During this period of hallucinatory imprisonment, Pym sinks into ever deeper despair as his rational mind fails again and again to conceive of a way of escape. Ironically, however, Pym for a long time never suspects that his apparent rationality has been distorted and decayed by the extremity of his predicament.

The clearest example of Pym's mental state is his discovery of a note that he is sure is from Augustus. Because of the darkness he cannot read it. The irony of his situation is obvious: he seems to hold the means of his escape in his hand, but cannot make use of it. Then his mind ingeniously devises a method of producing light; he rubs between [page 179:] his fingers some phosphoric dust that he has found in the hold. The feeble glow is enough to enable him to see the note. But there is nothing written on it. At this point the perverse fates of the universe seem to have mocked not only his predicament but also his almost superrational efforts to escape from it. But another, absurdist, irony is to come. Much later, it occurs to Pym that there are two sides to a piece of paper and that he has looked at only one. At this point Pym remarks that he found his “intellect ... in a condition nearly bordering on idiocy” (H 3:38). Then at the deepest point of his despair, rescue ironically is made imminent through a series of mutinies above decks that shifts the newly established order of command.

Augustus's imprisonment by the original mutineers seems to make Pym's predicament hopeless; but, ironically, through Augustus's imprisonment the secretly imprisoned Pym escapes violent death; and eventually Pym's original deception, since he is not known to be aboard, leads to his escape through yet another overthrow of “established” order. The original mutineers find themselves in the ironic position of fending off a second “mutiny.” But just as the second group of mutineers, under the leadership of Dirk Peters, seems about to wrest control of the ship from the “loyal” members of the first group, Peters is deserted by his followers in another perverse shift of loyalties. Peters then recruits Augustus to his side, and through him, Pym. Pym immediately decides to try another deception; he plans to work upon the “superstitions” of the leader of the original mutineers, the mate of the original crew. Pym's sudden emergence from the hold in the guise of the ghost of a man the mate has killed throws the mutineers into confusion; and Peters, Pym, and Augustus kill all but one of them, a man named Parker. But another perverse turn of fortune follows.

Although they now have human control of the ship, the actual control of the ship belongs to the elements. Damaged in the fighting and flooded in a storm, the ship is nothing more than a floating hulk. In the midst of a calm sea, Pym and his friends find themselves threatened with the perils of capsizing, not to mention thirst and hunger. Methodically, the now rational Pym explores the flooded hold in a series of dives that nets a bottle of wine. Pym continues his search but finds little; then when he asks for a drink from the wine bottle, he discovers to his outrage that his thirsty friends have treacherously drained it. But, ironically, Pym is thus spared the agonizing increase of thirst that the alcohol engenders.

The half-drunken state of Pym's “friends” is then echoed in the appearance of another ship. Rescue seems imminent, but the ship continually [page 180:] veers first away from them and then toward them again, as if the helmsman were drunk. As the ship comes closer, they see the passengers and crew standing at the rail; one of the figures nods at them and displays a brilliant smile. But the figures at the railing turn out to be a mockery of life. The men have died of some mysterious disease that has left them frozen in lifelike postures. The smiling figure is a grotesquerie of hope: “The eyes were gone,” Pym says after a bitter remark on the deceptiveness of appearances, “and the whole flesh around the mouth, leaving the teeth utterly naked. This, then, was the smile which had cheered us on to hope!” (H 3:113).

From this figure, a seagull takes a piece of human flesh and drops it at Parker's feet, which causes the hysterical Parker to conceive of a perverse way to escape individual death through the deaths of one another, through cannibalism. But another ship is sighted a few miles away, and again rescue seems imminent. After watching it for a time, however, the four men realize it is sailing away in the opposite direction. Parker then suggests casting lots for the cannibalistic feast, and of course it is his perverse fortune to become the first victim.

When Augustus dies shortly after, Pym and Peters are overwhelmed with the realization of the hopelessness of their condition; only the uncontrollable hulk of their ship separates them from death. With an almost perverse precision of timing, the ballast then shifts and the ship overturns. Pym and Peters manage to climb up onto the hull, however, and in utter despair sit weeping; Pym remarks at this point that their “intellects were so entirely disordered by the long course of privation and terror” that they “could not justly be considered ... in the light of rational beings.” Pym further remarks that afterward their subsequent adversities, though more dangerous, were not to reduce them so thoroughly to a state of “supineness” and “imbecility,” for it is the “mental condition” that makes “the difference” (H 3:144). But, again with absurd precision of timing, Pym discovers that the overturning of the ship is, ironically, “a benefit rather than an injury” (H 3:144), for they see that the hull is covered with enough barnacles to supply them with food for an inexhaustible period of time. But having seen this new possibility of survival, they are, of course, soon rescued by another ship, an “hermaphroditic brig,” paradoxically named the Jane Guy.

Patrick F. Quinn writes, about the symmetrically repeated twistings of the first two episodes, that Pym, “which is so strongly marked by conflicts of a very evident sort ... between man and man, and between man and nature” is also “... charged by an incessant struggle [page 181:] between reality and appearance. Pym is caught up in a life in which nothing is stable, in which nothing is ever really known; expectation and surmise can anticipate only false conclusions” (p. 181).

Certainly the deceptiveness of appearances and the inability of the mind to know, or even to surmise accurately, are points made abundantly clear in the third major episode, which repeats the thematic action of the first two, but with an ever-increasing intensity of the sense of ultimate “discovery” of a great secret. The captain of the Jane Guy sails farther and farther to the south, and Pym becomes progressively agitated. In fact, when the captain eventually decides to abandon his proposed polar explorations, Pym conducts a minor intellectual mutiny and persuades him to continue. In the white polar waters, teeming with pale white animals, the Jane Guy discovers, paradoxically, the black island of Tsalal, inhabited by black men, who, ironically (or perversely), have a morbid fear of the whiteness that surrounds them. An especially significant motif in this episode is that of reffection: the consternation of the white men over the nonreflecting water of Tsalal and the frenzy of Too-Wit when caught between two mirrors reflect the “fear of Nothing,” toward which they are all journeying.(17) The natives are terrified of the white sailors, but they succeed in luring the crew to the land, where (in a kind of mutiny) they bury the hated white men in a landslide. Pym and Peters, however, have strayed from the main party and have become desperately lost in a gorge — a “misfortune” through which, ironically, they escape burial alive. Yet, in another way, they are still threatened with burial alive, for they wander deep into a labyrinth of caves and crevasses. Eventually, however, Pym and Peters emerge from the earth and set off to the south in a native canoe. At the end, they disappear into a cataract of whiteness falling on a warm and milky sea — but they see ahead of them a gigantic, shrouded, human form “of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (H 3:242). And the narrative abruptly ends, without detailing the final “discovery” that Pym had anticipated with such excitement, though presumably they would have penetrated the veil of water and been buried alive. Yet Pym seems to have escaped.

The “perversity” of Pym's excitement is not only confirmed by the eventual deaths of nearly all the characters, but also by the remarks Pym makes at the beginning of the third episode. The memories of shipwreck and mutiny aboard the Grampus seem to Pym and Peters to be only a “frightful dream,” from which they have awakened, rather than “events which had taken place in sober and naked reality.” Pym says: “I have since found that this species of partial oblivion is usually [page 182:] brought about by sudden transition, whether from joy to sorrow or from sorrow to joy — the degree of forgetfulness being proportioned to the degree of difference in the exchange” (H 3:150).

The perverse tendency of the human mind to misperceive, or to fail to learn from experience, or to be overcome with sudden irrational impulse is emphasized at two symmetrically located points in the novel. In both instances, Patrick Quinn notes, the explicit statement of the theme of perversity is associated with burial alive, a significant point in light of the ultimate theme of the book and of all of Poe's fiction: Poe's image of man is that of a forlorn, perverse sentient being buried alive in the incomprehensible tomb of the universe. Early in the tale, Pym, considering himself lost and buried alive in the hold of the Grampus, has only a gill of liqueur as food. Actuated by what Pym himself calls “one of those fits of perverseness which might be supposed to influence a spoiled child in similar circumstances,” he drains the bottle at once and smashes it (H 3:44). Toward the end of the tale, descending the face of a canyon wall with Peters, Pym is possessed by what he calls “a longing to fall” that becomes “a passion utterly uncontrollable” and, swooning, he is saved only by Peters's quick action (H 3:230). Quinn notes also that Pym's concept of adventure is focused on images of shipwreck, desolation, and death. Pym's whole life pattern, Quinn writes (pp. 193-94), his flight from his family and an assured fortune, and his Romantic adolescent desires for shipwreck and famine, can be seen as a larger dramatization of the instinct of perverseness. But Pym's death impulse is also a Romantic desire to penetrate the ultimate secret; and the shipwreck image, Quinn notes, occurs with similar meanings in “Eleonora” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.” In “Eleonora,” as we have seen, the narrator writes that dream-explorers “penetrate however rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’ and again like the adventurers of the Nubian geographer” into the sea of darkness. In “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the narrator has a sense of “hurrying to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret whose attainment is destruction.”

Discovery of the great secret of the condition of the self in the universe is what Davidson, in what is probably the most insightful commentary of Pym we have had, suggests is the central subject of Pym's symbolic adventure back into time and timelessness. What Pym discovers at the pole, as he moves through a world before time, is a final deceptive perversity of fortune, the final grotesquerie in the journey toward “discovery” of the self. First, the journey from ignorance to knowledge involves an inversion of the usual concept of learning. Pym [page 183:] moves from “ignorance,” away from his complex and sophisticated social world, to a “primal” knowledge that is increasingly simple. Pym learns that the mind is one with the body, with thirst and hunger. Near the pole, the colors of the world become simplistically bifurcated into white (the sea, the animals, the sky) and black (the natives, the land). The constantly increasing whiteness of everything begins to suggest an original unity to all things, but it is a unity that Davidson calls the “negation of fact and shape.” Whiteness becomes a symbol of ultimate illumination: the primal quality of the universe is a chaotic fusion of Oneness and Nothingness. At the end of Pym's journey stands death, a gigantic figure in a shroud of blinding whiteness — an ironic inversion of the conventional metaphor of the blackness of death. The blinding “illumination” is the perception of the nothingness on the other side of death. “Nothing was all,” writes Davidson; “there was no other word for it but ‘white, — followed by abrupt silence. The “search for the self's true center,” Davidson continues, “ends in the death of the self”; for the “... hero finds himself only at the moment he loses himself; he dies the instant he is about to be born again; the blankness of eternal mystery engulfs him the moment he faces the white light of revelation” (pp. 174-77).

Pym's journey back into time also parallels an inversion of birth and maturation; as Pym sails the amniotic sea toward the warm and milky cataract of water at the pole, he is reabsorbed into the great womb of the world, buried alive as it were in eternal unbeing.(18) In this context, a peculiar quality to Pym, never adequately remarked by critics (though one, in his title at least, hints at the matter), is that thematically Pym also divides into two parts: the first part of the entire regressive journey takes place in what is apparently the waking state; then, in the middle journey, Pym climbs into his coffin (the “ironbound box” in the hold of the Grampus); the troubled dreams he suffers during the “letting go” constitute the second half of the narrative, wherein he seems to undergo a resurrection but actually regresses further and further into unbeing. This deceptive hoaxical structure to the romance wraps one further layer of irony around the whole system of ironic structures; and the gigantic hoax thus played upon rational man is made quite clear in the curious and bitter appended “explanation” of the symbolic chasms and caves of Tsalal, seemingly written by a gigantic hand in the rock, in the most ancient of languages. Whatever God there may be in the universe, if any, has moved Pym from darkness to whiteness, from nothing to nothing, and mockingly exacted a perverse vengeance for some unknown offense: “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within [[the]] rock” (H 3:245) [[(P 2:208)]]. [page 184:]

 

III

The tale “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841) seems at first a radical modification of Poe's view of the grotesque vengeance of God upon his perverse creatures. Davidson, for example, sees the tale as Poe's development of the concept of the primal “nothingness” beyond death in Pym into a concept of harmonious and even “loving” primal order — a sense of God's beneficence that is supposedly given further elaboration in “Mesmeric Revelation” and Eureka.(19) “Monos and Una” Davidson describes as “... an account of the passage of human consciousness from life through death to the life-beyond-death on the other side where occurs a final ‘merging’ into ‘Love’ or the harmonious principle uniting all things in the mind of God or the One” (p. 133). Through submission to the natural laws of the universe, man may attain true contentment, the tale seems to say. But like “Mesmeric Revelation,” “Monos and Una” and Eureka are deceptively ironic, — and quite chilling.

Instead of “affirming” meaningful order, purpose, and love as basic principles in the universe, Poe insinuates into these works a quiet ironic despair. On the other side of death, there still remains the perverse whiteness of nothingness. The only real intimation in “Monos and Una” that there may be something beyond death lies in the initial dramatic situation. Two spirits, lovers, discuss the great cycle of being which moves from an original “unity” in God, through matter, to a dispersion in individualized material creatures and back to unity again in unparticled matter. But the rest of the tale progressively focuses on the horror of living-death.

That Poe's use of spiritualistic ideas in his “occult” tales of the 1840s is ironic we have already seen. And like the beatific “revelations” of Vankirk, the perception of the “unity” of Monos and Una with the “One” involves a number of ironies, some further clue to which the reader familiar with Poe's works first sees in the motto: “mellonta tauta,” that which “is to come.” “Mellonta Tanta” (1849), we should recall, is the title of Poe's satiric tale about “progress,” the epigraph to which punctures Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Clair-voyant.”(20)

As “Monos and Una” begins, both “spirits” remark on the grim phantasm, Death, which in life seemed always to act as “a check to human bliss — saying unto it ‘thus far, and no farther!” (H 4:200). Monos, apparently the “male” spirit, is asked by Una to recount “the incidents” of his “own passage through the dark Valley and Shadow.” But Monos replies, “One word first, my Una, in regard to man's general condition [page 185:] at this epoch” (H 4:201). The suspicion that Poe's awkwardness in thus introducing “a philosophical” view of human existence is consciously comic finds immediate corroboration in the sarcastic comments that Monos next makes (in elevated “Romantic” language) about transcendentalism, art, the progress of culture, and — Jacksonian democracy. In vain had men of “poetic intellect” like Monos himself warned mankind of the “misrule” of the “utilitarians” and of the falsity of the progressive and optimistic transcendentalists. Although the arts, or art itself, “arose supreme,” such men managed to “cast chains upon the intellect” which had first elevated art. Man failed to perceive that nature was his true teacher, and that submission to the great design of nature would save mankind from false philosophies. Instead, man

After a lengthy description of similar perversions of nature, and some Vankirkian observations on the materiality of mankind, which should eventually be “Death-purged” (H 4:205), Monos finally gets around to Una's question — what his “sensations” of death had been — reminiscent, of course, of the Blackwood's style and Poe's early satires on sensation tales. After several days of “dreamy delirium,” he says, “there came upon me ... a breathless and motionless torpor” that “was termed Death by those who stood around me” (H 4:206). But he retained “sentience”; his senses were still “active, although eccentrically so — assuming each other's functions at random.” The rosewater that Una applied to his lips, for example, affected him as a vision of flowers, more beautiful than those on earth, but whose “prototypes” now “bloom” around the two spirits (H 4:207).

After much detail about his rather grotesque synesthesia, and the gradual “wreck and chaos” of his senses, as well as his awareness of the weeping and the grief-stricken looks of Una, Monos comes to the matter of time. Time seemed to become a sixth sense, perfect and harmonious, a “mental pendulous pulsation” that seemed to be the very “moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time,” attuned to the “cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves” (H 4:209). Monos became aware, as he lay dead upon the bed, of the “irregular” tickings of the clock on the mantel and of the watches of the attendants. They were [page 186:] “omni-prevalent” “deviations” from “the true proportion” of time and affected him just as “violations of abstract truth were wont, on earth, to affect the moral sense.” He then realized, he says, that this grotesque experience of irregular tickings was the first step of his timeless soul upon the time-structured universe of eternity — a paradox to be horribly worked out and “affirmed.”

Monos then describes his sensations at midnight in the coffin. A dull electrical sensation numbingly pervaded his body, a vague sensation which became a sense of the “loss of the idea of contact.” All that was left was the sense of “duration”; and Monos realized that his body had begun to decay:

Surely Poe's ironic technique here is obvious. Poe begins the tale with Monos's denial of the ultimate grimness of death, which merely seems to check all human bliss, especially that of true love. Then, after Monos's awkward railing against any abstract systems not conjoined with “natural” processes, there follows a reverent abstract system based solely on the “natural” process of decay. The “sentience” of the dead body is thus the substance of over half the tale. Gradually, the sense of mystic unity with the great design of the universe is undercut by increasingly horrible details. The soul lying passive in its grave is aware only of decay and the gradual annihilation of itself in its only form, the material “sentience” of the body.

The seminothingness after death is in this tale something more horrible than mere nothingness — burial “alive” in which an eternity passes before the “peace” of nothingness comes. The final four paragraphs of the story deepen the contrast between upper and insinuated meaning, as we are led to suspect that the spiritual region from which the two spirits speak is still that of the mouldering grave itself, the “prototypes” of flowers around them mere seed and roots, the voices of the spirits perhaps the abstracted voices of the elements. Monos mentions [page 187:] the passing of a year, during which time his “consciousness of being had grown hourly more indistinct, and that of mere locality had, in great measure, usurped its position. The idea of entity was becoming merged in that of place” (H 4:211). This abstract “philosophical” language is immediately followed by connotatively contrasting details: “The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been the body, was now growing to be the body itself.” If Poe had wanted to emphasize the true pleasure of unity with the material essence of the universe, he surely would not have chosen such details or such words as “blackness,” “corruption,” “sad,” “worm,” “darkling,” “damp,” and “mouldering.”

But, vaguely stirred by a disturbance above his grave, Monos had briefly a sense of “nebulous light” amid the darkness, that of “Love.” “Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp earth. Upon my mouldering bones there descended the coffin of Una.” But then the nebulous light faded, the “feeble thrill” of recognition “vibrated itself into quiesence”; and all became again “void.” “The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead ... dominant and perpetual — the autocrats Place and Time.” Monos concludes with the observation that what he was then “was not,” that he had “no form,” had “no thought,” had “no sentience,” and was “soulless,” though obviously he has regained sentience at the time of this colloquy. “For all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates” (H 4:211-12; my italics). To this Una does not reply. There is only silence. Thus ends Poe's tale of the “union” of true lovers, who need not have feared the grim finality and isolation of death. The silence of final nothingness is as central to the meaning of the tale as is the final discovery of the blankness of nothingness to Pym. The tale of “Monos and Una” is an about-face consideration of the perverse possibilities of immortality: here the eternal rotting away into “unity” with the essence of the universe — which is nothingness.

 

IV

We come now to our final major test case, Poe's long essay on the design of the universe, Eureka. Poe's ironic “philosophy” is nowhere more poignant than in his “affirmation” of order and purpose in the universe of Eureka. Despite the uppercurrent of hopefulness, however, the undercurrent of insinuated meaning is pessimistic. At one point, Poe [page 188:] argues that “the Universe is a plot of God” and that the “plots” of God must be perfect (H 16:292). Imperfections must only be seeming. Man's “finite intelligence” (though a reflection of the creative power of God) can construct only imperfectly. Obviously, therefore, man cannot construct perfect theories of the universe. Moreover, limited man is faced with an ultimate fact, his “inevitable annihilation.”

Richard Wilbur has observed that Poe's basic thesis in Eureka is that the Universe is some kind of “a work of art ... which men are intended to grasp esthetically rather than rationally.” This thesis is, paradoxically, derived from Poe's first proposition in Eureka that inevitable annihilation is the basic fact of all existence. In the act of destroying, according to Wilbur's interpretation of Poe, man abets the destructive phase of the design of the pulsating universe, endlessly creating (in expanding) and destroying (in contracting).(21) Such a reading is, of course, another version of the shift toward harmonious “love” that Davidson sees in Poe's later works, and this reading has recently received further support.

Since the sublime symmetry of design thus makes conventional evils beautiful to contemplate as part of the cosmic pattern, and since a tendency toward destruction is evidence of a return to the original unity of all things in God, we can, according to Joseph Moldenhauer, understand Poe's ecstasy at the conclusion of Eureka. For we perceive the final aesthetic and moral vision implicit in Poe's fascination with death in the tales and poems. “Life, in Poe's value system, is inimical” to the “aesthetic bliss” of the ultimate unity of death, according to Moldenhauer; and he points out that most other critics have seen nature and death, as well as madness, perversity, and terror, in Poe's works as disharmonious rather than the harmonious elements in the grand design that they actually are. Previous critics, in reading man's condition as diametrically opposed to the harmonious condition of art, have, in Moldenhauer's view misread Poe's “transcendental” vision.(22) But Moldenhauer's view of Poe and his critics is surely but a partial truth. Partial too, I will agree, is the older view that nature for Poe is merely destructive. But one cannot claim for the fascinated vision of death and dissolution in Poe's writings a totally ecstatic and beatific vision. To claim such would be as serious a misreading of Poe as that of those critics Moldenhauer wishes to correct.

The problem for any critic who would deal with Eureka is its complexity of tones: for it is at times comic and satiric, at times melancholy, at times coldly and precisely rational, at times intuitional and ecstatic. Yet, oddly, no one but Patrick F. Quinn has ever given serious thought to the equivocal note of Poe's concluding “optimism.”(23) And [page 189:] to those critics, like Davidson and T. S. Eliot, who have tried to confront Eureka in the context of Poe's career, the essay represents an inconsistent shift from the bleak world view informed by death, destruction, or burial alive to a vision of a universe informed by Divine Love — a vision that did not logically develop out of the life's work of the author.(24) And Quinn, too, finally sees Eureka as inconsistent, call-it [[calling it]] an “unintentional poem of death,” since it contains under the surface affirmations of Divine Love a consistent vision of horrible annihilation.

The difficulty is the word “unintentional,” for Eureka presents the kind of ironic complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence that is to be found in all of Poe's creative works: a tension between the creative and the destructive impulses of the universe as perceived (and misperceived) by the questing “philosophical lynxeye.” And the ambiguities, the parody, the melancholy, the humor of Eureka are all part of a skeptical entertaining of ideas about the nature of the universe and about the methods of attaining knowledge. The tension between the sense of the creative and the sense of the destructive in Eureka and in Poe's other works results in what, I believe, cannot be called other than skepticism. Although assuredly Romantic in the quest for aesthetic consistency and design, Eureka presents a skepticism that results from the appalling possibility that the essence of the universe is neither creative nor destructive in any design — but simply void. Or to use the recurrent word of Eureka — nothingness.

Poe seems to believe finally in neither the creative nor the destructive per se, nor even in “design” (whether teleological or statically self-perpetuating). It is only in the vision of void that Poe comes close to “belief.” It should be perfectly clear by now where all this is tending, for I have been insisting throughout that the vision of void — or rather its possibility — is at the bottom of all of Poe's fiction, and that this theme of nothingness needs to be more fully recognized for its true significance in such central works as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.(25)

The scheme within which Poe believed man might reasonably think his existence purposeful involves a paradox that is partially reconciled by the Romantic theories of the aesthetic imagination to which Poe subscribed. It is important to emphasize, however, that Poe's Romantic conception of the imagination is characteristically melancholy: only through an artistic imaginative power can man, by perceiving some overall design, find any hope of purpose to his existence in the face of nearly overwhelming doubt. The perception of design in Eureka is a desperate, intuitive leap, the final act of the rational mind confronting horrible doubt — much like that of the narrator of “A Descent into [page 190:] the Maelström,” who tries in his quiet desperation to perceive some design, or order, or Divine Will, in existence.

Because the basic proposition of Eureka declares that inevitable annihilation is built into the structure of the universe, man's belief in a designed universe has to be reconciled with ultimate annihilation. Poe claims in Eureka to have found in the universe a design both scientific and aesthetic. The current discoveries of astronomy (which are not our subject here) corroborated, in Poe's view, the current Romantic literary analogies of God as an Artist shaping the cosmos, with divine symmetry, to his own end. But Poe puts forward this argument with deceptive irony, especially when he writes in Eureka that the universe is a “plot of God” and that this plot consists of “cycles” of creation and annihilation. “Novel universes” swell into “objectless” existence, he says, and then subside into nothingness.

If it were not for this grand design, Poe suggests, seemingly with a straight face, if the whole structure of the larger Universe of universes actually had a “conceivable end,” then existence would have to be regarded as a badly contrived romance: “We should have been forced to regard the Universe with some such sense of dissatisfaction as we experience in contemplating an unnecessarily complex work of human art. Creation would have affected us as an imperfect plot in a romance, where the dénoûment is awkwardly brought about by interposed incidents external and foreign to the main subject” (H 16:306). Poe raises the metaphor of the universe as an artistic creation to analogical “evidence,” and it is the perception of some overall design that gives rise to his apparent ecstasy at Eureka's end. But Poe makes the metaphor serve another function, for with it he has cast doubt upon the perfection of the universe as a work of art: the universe just may be an imperfect plot in an awkwardly designed romance.

Divorced from the apparently ecstatic (but ambivalent and possibly ironic) affirmations that mankind must trust in an animate God shaping the universe with love, Poe's logical argument is that even endlessly repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation make a design that provides mankind with some hope that the universe is not chaos. Only with some view of aesthetic design in the universe, Poe suggests, can we “comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice.” Only with some sense of aesthetic design does the “evil” manifest in the universe become “intelligible” and “endurable” (H 16:313).

These remarks have never been emphasized by critics of Poe's thought, with the result that the implicit melancholy skepticism of the essay has never been seriously considered. Despite the uppercurrent of ecstasy at the conclusion of Eureka, the moral undercurrent of meaning [page 191:] reaffirms the bleak world view that had been the consistent vision of his career — the vision of the appalling possibility of void at the bottom of existence.

The birth, death, and resurrection of the universe as stated in Eureka has a further (aesthetic) twist ignored by Poe's readers. The specific design that Poe sees is a melancholy symmetry of nothingness. According to Poe, the present material universe is an expression of God's original “nihility.” When God's present expansiveness concentrates again into primal “unity,” the universe will “sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be — into that Material Nihility” from which it was evoked (H 16:310-11). What will then remain will be God in his original state: nothingness.

The larger point, however, is that because the final nothingness is a return to the original state of the universe, the “end” of the universe is not a finite end. The grand aesthetic design to existence, then, is this cycle of nothingness. The origin of the universe lies in nothingness, its present material state is but a variation of the original nothingness, and its final end is a reconstitution of the original nothingness. It is in such a universe, rather than that informed by the conventionally benign oversoul of the transcendentalists (or unconventionally as interpreted by Moldenhauer as “blissful” aesthetic unity), that all sentient being finds itself buried alive.

The Romantic skepticism implicit in the pun-sprinkled, multitoned, and intricately ironical text of Eureka is perfectly caught by the first part of Poe's beautifully ambiguous sentence on consistency and symmetry (H 16:302): “A perfect consistency,” he implies, “can be nothing. ...” The perfect consistency of the design of the universe which Poe sets up in Eureka is its cycle of nothing: the absolute truth. The nihilism of this vision leads to the paradoxical creation of the elaborate form of words which (expressed unequivocally in the tale “The Power of Words”) is the universe, the work of art which refers to nothing outside itself — indeed, which is a facade for the nothingness from which it is evoked. Poe's version of a single universal mind is solipsistic, and follows from his epistemological skepticism. Except by aesthetic analogy with creative imagination in man, we do not know what the universe is, nor do we know that we know anything. Seen whole, in its Romantic context of aesthetic analogy, the philosophical vision of Eureka presents the void, but expresses it as ambivalent skepticism, neither quite theistic nor quite atheistic. The canon of Poe's work is, I must emphasize, a literature of overwhelming negative possibility: the possibility that beyond the elaborate art of the game there is nothing. [page 192:]

 

V

We may recall again that ten years before Eureka, Poe sent Arthur Gordon Pym on a symbolic voyage that goes back in time toward the primal state of the world and ends in void. Pym's ultimate revelation about the structure of the world occurs with his disappearance at the pole before the strange figure in the white shroud. The enigmatic conclusion of the novel is itself emblematic of Poe's melancholy skepticism. Whiteness in Pym, we have seen, is an ironic, double symbol of both the white light of revelation and the blankness of nothingness. Pym moves from the complexity of the subjectively created world of men toward the simplicity of natural nothingness. Pym's final revelation is of nothingness; and it is at the moment of final knowledge that the main narrative breaks off — leaving the reader with the odd double sensation of having discovered something he has somehow missed.

That the possibility of an ultimate nothing is the consistent and conscious vision of Poe's writings is confirmed by journeys toward destruction (or perhaps unbeing) in other of Poe's works. Much as Pym does, the narrator of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” we remember, disappears into the void at the pole just as he is on the verge of what he considers to be some fantastic “discovery” about the world. Similarly, the narrator of “A Descent into the Maelström” journeys into the void. In the vortex of the whirlpool, he sees the moon peering, like the eye of some inhuman god, down into the whirling funnel of waters which in turn seem to send up an eerie “yell ... to the Heavens” (H 2:243). Yet it is clear that the objective correlative of his psychological state is still but a pathetic fallacy. He returns from the journey, but his “raven-black” hair has, significantly, turned an eerie white overnight.

The horror of horrors, which Poe leaves purposely unstated and which so appalls the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” is the same unknown yet half-known nothingness, lurking at the bottom of the pit (like darkness over the waters in Genesis). The ultimate horror of nothingness is anticipated early in the story when the narrator, having just been cast into the dungeon, at first refuses to open his eyes for fear that “there should be nothing to see” (H 5:71). The full passage emphasizes the ultimate horror of the possibility of nothingness: “It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see” (first italics mine).

This early incident in the tale is itself anticipated in the four opening paragraphs, wherein the narrator speculates on death and immortality in association not only with the conventional image of darkness, but also with nothingness, whiteness, blankness, and silence — the image [page 193:] system of Pym, Eureka, and other works. In the room of judgment, as the narrator begins to reconcile his spirit to what he hopes will be the “sweet rest” of the grave, he sees the white candles before him as white angels. Then as his spirit comes “at length properly to feel and entertain” the possibility of benign “rest,” the opposite possibility overwhelms him, and the candles become to him “meaningless spectres” instead of saving angels. Then, the spectral candles sink “into nothingness” while the white-lipped, black-robed judges “vanish” — leaving “silence,” “stillness,” and the “blackness of darkness” (H 5:68-69).

The details of the story are worth yet a further look as corroborative imagery for the theme of the horrible possibility of nothingness. The original pronouncement of the priestlike, godlike, specterlike judges issues from their grotesque white lips as silence: “I saw [their lips] writhe with a deadly locution,” the narrator remarks, “I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded” (H 5:68). The symbolic significance of a death sentence pronounced on a victim, the pronunciation of whose name by his judges yields no sound, can hardly be other than the theme of nothingness. When the narrator next loses consciousness, to awake in the dark dungeon, his “awakening’ is so gradual that he seems to himself to be in a state of numbed sentience, or, in his exact words, in a “state of seeming nothingness” (H 5:69). The implicit theme of void is so nearly explicit as to leave no doubt of Poe's own clear-sighted vision. Particularly important to notice, however, is the precise phrasing — ‘seeming nothingness” — the true, recurrent, psychological horror of the tale.

Eureka represents not an inconsistent shift of Poe's bleak world view toward hope and a sense of Divine Love, but instead the further ambivalent, uncertain entertaining of the possibility that the design of the universe is but a symmetrical cycle of journeys out of, and back into, void. One needs, really, only to consider the number of Poe characters whose origins are unknown and who journey toward physical, mental, and spiritual destruction to realize how deep-seated an apprehension it was for Poe.

Paul Valéry saw long ago that the essence of Poe's dramatic and philosophical world view was this tension between nothingness and existence, partially reconciled by an aesthetic cosmogony. In a letter to Gide (June 13, 1892), Valéry praised Poe for his vision of vertige (void or vertigo) given synthèse (form or design) by the artist of the beautiful.(26) T. S. Eliot, in puzzlement over Valéry's admiration for Poe, tried to account for the phenomenon by declaring that Poe had the “powerful intellect” of a “highly gifted young person before puberty,” [page 194:] an intellect that delighted in “entertaining” ideas rather than believing them. Valéry, as a mature skeptic, had what Poe did not: a “consistent view of life,” for “Poe was no sceptic.” It was, therefore, Eliot said, probably the “contrast” between Poe's “entertained” ideas and Valéry's mature skepticism that accounted for “Valery's admiration for Eureka.”(27) Eliot perhaps suspected more than he wanted to admit. For these words echo a passage from Eureka, wherein Poe himself comments on the emotional difficulties of his speculation that the symmetry of nothingness is the design of the annihilating universe: although such speculation has the aesthetic consistency of truth, Poe suggests, it is yet an idea so startling that even the most “powerful intellect” cannot readily “entertain” it even on abstract grounds (H 16:309).

In Poe, murder is an aesthetic act beautiful to behold only in the same sense that a desperate victim, confronting destruction, seeks solace in submitting to what he hopes is Divine Will — as does the desperately observant but submissive narrator of “A Descent into the Maelström.” But even if one survives for a time, his hair still turns white from the confrontation. In Poe's tales, we feel a skeptical tension between disorder and hope, madness and rationality, uncertainty and knowledge, despair and hope. It is this that animates all of Poe's writings — from a single weird tale to a philosophical essay on the universe.

For the Romantic Mr. Poe, the most “powerful intellect’ was the faculty of aesthetic imagination. And only the most “powerful intellect” has the stoic fortitude to “entertain” speculation on the melancholy symmetries of birth, death, and resurrection. But even the most powerful of intellects can never know. At best, it can only guess, or glimpse, or suspect. The undercurrent of argument in Eureka (a work in which conventional humanistic assumptions are reversed) contradicts the uppercurrent of benign affirmation. The result is Poe's most colossal hoax — just as the universe may be God's hoax on man (cf. H 16:306, 161; 7:16, 14:228). The aesthetic vision of Eureka easily translates into a solipsistic cosmogony of art for art's sake alone. Existence is but a “poem” for the sake of the poem. The essay is itself an elaborate art structure, which, like the universe it describes, refers ultimately to nothing outside itself but the Nothing outside itself.

The quiet despair under the surface of Eureka thus mocks the poetic affirmations of the yearning imagination at the same time that they are asserted most emphatically. Seen in the general Romantic context we have been examining in this study, Poe's point is clear; the “effect” [page 195:] aimed at in Eureka is an almost mystical, poetic perception of and simultaneous transcendence of the absurd hoax of individual existence. Such self-division and self-parody the German Romanticists would have applauded as irony, the consummate fruit of the artistic and philosophical mind.

In Poe's world view, then, it is the perverse nature of things that man, as an individual, thinking creature, is subject to the “indignities” of ignorance and of ultimate annihilation of the self. But through a “lynxeyed” vision of the demonic (of the perversity of the universe and of one's own mind), man may still retain some of the dignity he feels in himself as a rational and feeling entity buried alive in the vast impersonal or malevolent system of the universe. This is the Romantic-Ironic vision. We have already noted the lynx image in the Folio Club tale, “Silence,” and in the Marginalia. In “Silence” the Demon laughs hysterically at man's confusion in an absurd world of weird, shifting appearances. But the lynx comes out of the cave and stares steadily into the Demon's face. And in Marginalia, as we have seen, Poe calls what can only be the ironic vision of existence the “philosophical lynxeye that, through the indignity-mist of Man's life, can still discern the dignity of man.”

Thematically, Poe's Gothic and philosophical works suggest that the deceptive perversity of the universe and of the mind can only be transcended by the godlike imagination of the ironic artist, who yokes together contrarieties and sees beyond hope and despair, beyond good and evil, by deceptively intruding the comic into the tragic, the satiric into the demonic. Through such simultaneous ironic detachment and involvement, the German ironists thought, the Romantic artist achieves a liberating transcendental perception of the dark paradox of human existence.