Text: David Ketterer, “Protective Irony and The Full Design of Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 46-55 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 46, continued:]

If, in Eureka, Poe claims to have discovered the secret mechanics of the universe, his critics believe they have discovered in it a key to his writings. Although this work is more valuable as revelatory of Poe's [page 47:] personality than as a contribution to modern science, insofar as readers place the cart before the horse and interpret the tales and poems in the light of his cosmology they obscure his philosophical development.[[(1) ]] Originally Poe understood reason to be largely creative of man's deceptive material condition, which process could be overcome only by means of the dissolving “half-closed eye” (VII, xxix; VIII, 215)(2) of the imagination. The kind of truth associated with reason he confined to prose expression and kept apart from beauty, which is the province of poetry. But he offers Eureka as a “Book of Truths” on account of “the Beauty that abounds in its Truth” and “as a Romance; or if I be urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem” (XVI, 183), the dichotomies of reason and imagination, truth and beauty thus being reconciled.

In the final pages, this surprising affinity is attributable to a common dependence upon “consistency” or “symmetry”: “It is the poetical essence of the Universe.. .which, in the supremeness of its symmetry is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms: — thus Poetry and Truth are one. . . . A perfect consistency.. .can be nothing but an absolute truth” (XVI, 302). The assumption is that as an explanation of the past, present and future conditions of the universe, Eureka itself displays a perfect consistency and not just Poe's overweening paranoia and megalomania. He proposes to explain the ways of God to man in accordance with his formulation of 1836: “To look upward from any existence, material, or immaterial, to its design, is, perhaps, the most direct, and the most unerring method of attaining a just notion of the nature of the existence itself” (VIII, 281). Eureka will provide “the full design” (V, 250) briefly anticipated in “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844).

Poe's correspondence similarly bears witness to his confidence in the literal truth of his theory. He tells George W. Eveleth (February, 1848), apparently without irony, “What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science.”(3) in a letter to Charles F. Hoffman, he grandly diminishes the extent of his debt to the nebular theory of Laplace: “the ground covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats.”(4) In fact, as science, Eureka is a hit-and-miss hotchpotch, largely indebted to the work of Laplace, Newton and Humboldt and, accidentally, anticipative of the theories of Eddington, Einstein and Meyerson.(5) But Eureka is less important as science than as a cosmological structure based on aesthetic principles. As such, it develops Poe's epistemological philosophy and makes strangely compelling reading. If the tales of ratiocination represent a demonstration that reason and imagination go hand in hand during the artistic process, an item in “A Chapter of Suggestions” (The Opal, 1845) indicates that, at this point in his career, Poe regarded intuition and imagination as synonymous terms: “That intuitive and seemingly casual perception by which we often attain knowledge, when reason herself falters and abandons the effort, appears to resemble the sudden glancing at a star, by which we see it more clearly than by a direct gaze; or the half-closing the eyes in looking at a plot of grass the more fully to appreciate the intensity of its green” (XIV, 189-190). Previously, the half-closed-eye image was equated only with the imagination. But in Eureka Poe slides over the distinction between reason and imagination by using the concept of “intuition, “whether with the idea of incorporating reason silently or throwing it out altogether. Poetic truth is the province of intuition.

II

An earlier metaphysical piece, “The Power of Words” (Democratic Review, 1845) sets the stage for Eureka.(6) At the back of it is the notion of the artist as creator, or even as God, the role which Poe elects for himself in his cosmology. As in the two previous colloquies, the time is post-apocalyptic. Oinos is told by Agathos that “Not even here is knowledge a thing of intuition” (VI, 139): [I]s not “the spiritual vision” “arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?” As I have indicated, not until Eureka does Poe claim access to intuitive knowledge. As they speed through the universe, Agathos explains “secondary creation” (VI, 141), the prerogative of man. Because any movement sets up an endless radiation or vibration which “must, in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe” (VI, 142), thus modifying the old and creating something new, and because “a true philosophy has long taught that the source of all motion is thought” (V, 143), Agathos concludes that words effect creation. The fertile but volcanic planet over which they pass is an example. Apparently, the words which Agathos uttered three centuries back at the feet of her lover, possibly Oinos, brought this world into existence. If one need only to say something in order to make it so, no wonder Poe had such confidence in the cosmology of Eureka, a work of “secondary creation.” In “Marginalia” he affirms his “faith in the power of words” to the extent of compelling “the Heaven into the Earth” (XVI, 89). And in Eureka he pauses to reflect: “If I venture to displace, by even the billioneth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator” (XVI, 218). [page 48:]

As we have just seen, Poe's awe at the responsibility often takes the form of mumbo-jumbo. But the problem remains: “What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity — sufficiently sublime in their simplicity — for the mere enunciation of my theme?” (XVI, 185). Definitely not the old terms associated with inductive and deductive proof because — and the statement provided a crucial gloss on all that follows — ”there is in this world at least, no such thing as demonstration” (XVI, 185). Truth is to be perceived intuitively. The notion of intuition can be seen in Poe's instruction that the seeker after truth ascend Mount Aetna and, when at the top, spin on his heel in order “to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness” (XVI, 186). If he remains stationary he is conscious only of “the extent and diversity of the scene” (XVI, 186). Had Poe forgotten that Mount Aetna is an active volcano? His ironic point is that the attainment of the state of oneness involves individual death and universal apocalypse. In connection with another mountain panorama, later on, he points out that “The extent of such a prospect, on account of the successiveness with which its portions necessarily present themselves to view, can be only very feebly and very partially appreciated: — yet the entire panorama would comprehend no more than one 40,000th part of the mere surface of the globe” (XVI, 282). Man's customary perception is hopelessly strait-jacketed. Consequently, “we require something like a mental gyration on the heel” to destroy the deceptive material world by a strategy of fusion: “We need so rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight that, while the minutiae vanish altogether, even the more conspicuous objects become blended into one. Among the vanishing minutiae in a survey of this kind, would be all exclusively terrestrial matters” (XVI, 187). Poe assumes that the unity thus revealed constitutes the primal ideal state of the universe. This solipsistic process, which he calls intuition, leads to his general proposition: “In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (XVI, 185-186). A total conflation of ends and means seems basic to Poe's theory.

Further clarification of his notion of intuition is provided by a letter “found corked in a bottle” (XVI, 187). Since it is dated “the year two thousand eight hundred and forty-eight” (XVI, 188) (Poe was writing in 1848) and contains the information included in the letter-tale “Mellonta Tauta”, set in the same year, we are to assume that subsequent history has vindicated Poe. Incidentally, Pundita, in “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), puts her letter into a bottle and throws it into the sea. The letter-writer, as reproduced in Eureka, explains that, for a long time, “but two practical roads to Truth” (XVI, 188) existed, the deductive or a priori method associated with Aries Tottle (Aristotle) and the inductive or a posteriori method associated with Hog (Bacon). However, the greatest advances in science are made “by seemingly intuitive leaps” (XVI, 189)-the writer uses the adverb “seemingly” because he is not creating a distinct third category if intuition is a matter of the combination or fusion of reason and imagination, or of imaginative synthesis. While the merely inductive and deductive approaches held sway scientific progress was reduced to a crawl. Some truth inevitably was discovered but “the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced even by absolute certainty in the snail process” (XVI, 190).

With some ingenuity, the letter-writer disposes of the “a priori path of axioms” (XVI, 192) by allowing only one to stand: “Ability or inability to conceive.. .is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth, “which, of course, provides the basis of Poe's assumptions about human liability to deception. “If ability to conceive be taken as a criterion of Truth, then a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe; and ninety-nine hundredths of what is undeniable in Heaven would be demonstrable falsity upon Earth” (XVI, 193), a point which recurs in the main body of Eureka (XVI, 240-241). All this brings the letter-writer to contrast “those regions of illimitable intuition” (XVI, 195), “the majestic highway of the Consistent” (XVI, 196). Two examples are offered: the method by which “the cryptographist attains the solution” and the laws of Kepler which he “guessed — that is to say, he imagined” (XVI, 197) but which, as Poe later points out, were “subsequently demonstrated and accounted for by the patient and mathematical Newton” (XVI, 279).

Kepler himself attributed his discoveries to “mere dint of intuition” (XVI, 197) and the letter-writer will not allow any qualification. With heavy irony he asks, “Could not any metaphysician have told him what he called ‘ intuition’ was but the conviction resulting from deduction or inductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity of expression?” (XVI, 197). Such, then, is not the letter-writer's view. For him, intuition is totally a matter of visionary awareness. Yet, a few pages on, without irony, Poe defines intuition not at all in terms of visionary power, although with reference to the previous passage: “We have attained a point where only Intuition can aid us: — but now let me recur to the idea which I have already suggested as that alone which we [page 49:] can properly entertain of intuition. It is but the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity of expression” (XVI, 206). This contradiction is the most illuminating aspect of Eureka, revealing Poe torn between the desire to throw out reason entirely in favour of imagination or to accommodate reason, in disguise, by an ambiguous conception of intuition.

In “Mellonta Tauta” this divided attitude is almost flaunted. On the one hand, Poe is arguing that man lives in an inevitable and total state of time-bound deception. On the other hand, Pundita argues that the highway of intuition can penetrate to the truth. Yet Pundit and Pundita give no evidence themselves of possessing it. Thus historical errors and the misnaming of philosophers, while representative of Poe's often banal humour, also indicate that the knowledge which the “intuitive” people of 2848 possess is generally erroneous and, if error is to be attributed to inductive and deductive reasoning, we must conclude such to be the basis of their misunderstanding. Must we say then that if intuition is to work consistently, it must, as a form of exalted imagination, be entirely divorced from reason? Such, at least, is a conclusion to be drawn from “Mellonta Tauta” and the introduction to Eureka. Yet the kind of argument which Poe indulges in throughout the main body of the latter is not independent of reason. He seems to accept the involvement of induction, deduction and intuition, or the fusion of reason and imagination. After all, the initial axiom involved in deductive reasoning is said to be a matter of intuition or imagination.

Indeed, Poe speaks of the introductory letter as a “somewhat impertinent epistle” and refers to “the chimerical, not to say revolutionary, fancies of the writer — whoever he is — fancies so radically at war with the well-considered and well-settled opinions of the age” (XVI, 198). Is Poe being ironic? We cannot be sure. Similarly, we cannot be certain about the identity of the letter-writer. Poe does not admit to the authorship of the letter and, consequently, he allows for further ironic license because we are not justified in assuming the views expressed by the writer — ”whoever he is” — to be Poe's. Because of the uncertainty of the irony, particularly that surrounding the term “intuition” the apparent contradictions in Eureka cannot be pinned down. By means of an ambiguous irony Poe has resolved aesthetically, if not philosophically, the central paradox of his nature. Eureka then is a work of complex irony and, insofar as it has value, Poe is the creator of that irony and not the victim of it.

The existence of irony in Eureka has been observed but otherwise accounted for by G. R. Thompson,(7) who also points to the existence of irony in the tales although — and the omission is revealing — not in the poetry. In Thompson's view, it serves not only to burlesque the gothic machinery of the tales, but also to mock what often appears to be a positive belief in a transcendent state of unity. Thus Eureka is actually about “nothingness”: “It is only in the vision of void that Poe comes close to ‘belief.’”(8) Certainly this reading would be hard to support from the poetry, operating as it does largely beyond the realm of intellectual argument, which allows for that demonstration of the kinds of contradictions on which the only “hard” case for irony can be built. All else must depend upon the tricky identification of tone which can never be entirely free from the charge of existing only in the irony-cued mind of the reader. Poe probably couched a visionary philosophy in the trappings of Gothic horror partly because of market considerations. Consequently an element of irony appears in his tales at the expense of Gothic formulae as well as a genuine melancholy and horror stemming from his realistic recognition that he may after all be wrong, that the deceptive material world may be either the only reality or, at least, preferable to any alternative, subsequent reality. But this apprehension is secondary to his faith in ideality.(9) Our own doubt and apprehension, not Poe's literary accomplishment, make him a writer of horror stories and now, for Thompson, a proponent of the nihilist absurd.

The kind of irony in Eureka which can be “proven” serves a “protective” function in view of the possible alternatives to the primarily positive position taken. Another sense in which Poe's irony may best be viewed as protective is suggested by The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, wherein Poe considers language to be an important aspect of the fabric of deception in which man is trapped.(10) In the circumstances he could not, in good faith, write expository prose without a sense of irony. And only by means of an intricate play of protective irony could he create the verbal equivalent of that “perfect consistency” which he hoped characterizes the true nature of the universe.

III

When Poe opens his main argument by speaking of “two modes of discussion” (XVI, 198), one of ascent and one of descent (compare the mountain analogy), one is reminded of the two paths referred to in the letter [page 50:] I led to equate the mode of ascent with induction and the mode of descent with deduction. In combining the two modes of discussion to which I have referred, I propose to avail myself of the advantages peculiar to both — and very especially of the iteration in detail which will be unavoidable as a consequence of the plan (XVI, 199). A combination of what is best in the two methods would presumably amount to Poe's definition intuition. The triadic plan of the letter is the key to the triadic structure of the entire work. The discourse breaks respectively into three parts: the past, present and future condition of the universe.

In each the three methods of understanding are utilized. In dealing with the past, Poe begins with a descent, then balances it with an ascent and, from this balance, an imaginative tension emerges which might be called intuition. In discussing the present state of the universe, he begins with the deductive nebular cosmogony of Laplace and, afterwards, goes on inductively to speak of “more definitive conceptions” (XVI, 277) again enabling a third mode to emerge from the contrast. The same three methods may be discerned in the third part — although they are now interwoven. This thesis/antithesis/synthesis development, while working within each part, also works overall. Because the first part is concerned with the past, the process of deduction predominates. In the second, the concern being with the present, the process of induction predominates. And, naturally enough, in envisioning the future, imagination or intuition comes to the fore, Only be failing to see this plan can Carol Hopkins Maddison criticize the rhapsodic conclusion as out of lace. Admittedly, the intentional repetitive effect almost obscures the plan but it does provide a tension which, while inhibiting understanding, makes for vitality. And, as we shall see, Poe's conception of human existence and the universe depends upon tension.

In the first part of his discussion, Poe begins with a descent, analogous perhaps to the descent of the universe from a state of unity to a state of multiformity. The conception of the infinity of space is dismissed is “one of those phrases by which even profound thinkers . . . have occasionally taken pleasure in deceiving themselves” (XVI, 200). In his own use of the term, Poe directs that he is referring to “the ‘utmost conceivable expanse’ of space — a shadowy and fluctuating domain, now shrinking, now swelling, in accordance with the vacillating energies of the imagination” (XVI, 204). This is almost to say that man's imagination creates the dimension of space, or that man is God. Towards the conclusion of Eureka, Poe uses similar imagery to pose his conception of a pulsating” novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine” (XVI, 311). God is designated as spirit, and spirit as apart from matter, in spite of Poe's previous insistence, in “Mesmeric Revelation, “that the spiritual is matter in an extreme state of rarefaction.

After this definition of terms, Poe comes to “the sole absolute assumption” (XVI, 206) of the work: matter originally existed in a state of simplicity or oneness. Presumably, this opinion is to be attributed to the operations of intuition. At any rate, in maintaining that “no human conclusion was ever, in fact, more regularly — more rigorously deduced: — but alas! the processes lie out of the human analysis — at all events are beyond the utterance of the human tongue” (XVI, 206), Poe is defining intuition for the third time. The present condition of the universe results from the diffusion of the “normally One into the abnormal condition of Many” (XVI, 207). The diffused atoms are imagined as “heterogeneous, dissimilar, unequal, and inequidistant” (XVI, 208), and such is the human state. However, “on withdrawal of the diffusive Volition” (XVI, 210), a subsidence into one would take place. In order to understand the “completion of the general design” (XVI, 210), Poe is forced into the further assumption, which he calls “an intuitive conviction” (XVI, 212), that God has interposed by providing a repulsive tendency. The impulse towards unity is identified as Newtonian gravity and the repulsive influence as electricity, which is characterized by “heterogeneity” in that “Only where things differ is electricity apparent” (XVI, 212).

Thus far the logic is straightforward. But Poe continues with a series of equations which insidiously and ironically undercut the distinction. Initially, to the “strictly spiritual principle” of electricity, he attributes the “phaenomena of vitality, consciousness and Thought” (XVI, 213). Insofar as thought is a consequence of reason, reason would seem to be responsible for maintaining the state of heterogeneity. If so, the association of reason and spirit is apparently contradictory, unless it is postulated that, as an extension of the argument of “The Power of Words, “thought may be creative. Consistent with the equation of thought and spirit, Poe, dropping the terms “gravitation” and “electricity, “states categorically that attraction is the body while repulsion is the soul: “the one is the material; the other the spiritual, principle of the Universe” (XVI, 214). By allying the pejorative associations of repulsion with the soul, Poe again apparently inverts expectations, this time traditional Christian values, by making the soul responsible for man's fall [page 51:] from unity to diversity, concluding that “only as attraction and repulsion” is matter “manifested to Mind “that attraction and repulsion are matter” (XVI, 214). If the mind is to be linked with thought and the soul, then matter is only appreciable in spiritual terms. As with the contrary processes of induction and deduction, Poe's perverse and ironic logic moves towards an imaginative synthesis or mystical paradox.

At this point, he abandons deduction for induction and turns to an examination of “what it was that Newton proved — according to the grossly irrational definitions of proof prescribed by the metaphysical schools” (XVI, 215). Poe points out that Newton's observations demonstrate that “each atom is attracted to every other atom, in the attempt to return to the primal condition of unity. He then moves on to the modus operandi of gravity, “an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing.. .when we regard it from the proper point of view” (XVI, 224). What this means, in effect, is that his method is now intuitive, or a combination of induction and deduction. As “a connection between these two ideas — unity and diffusion, “Poe proposes a third, the idea of irradiation: “Absolute unity being taken as a centre, then the existing Universe of stars is the result of irradiation from that centre” (XVI, 225). Poe's intuitive perception being largely a matter of analogy, he consequently explains the concept of irradiation (or radiation, his preferred later term in the “Notes”) by means of a ray of light. This analogy, however, suggests to Poe an “inequability” of distribution which is not found in the present condition of the universe. Apparently, a further flight of intuition is called for, but first Poe observes that it is by grappling with such anomalies that truth is revealed. Thus we are encouraged, almost obliged, to accept as true his in no way startling proposition of a determinate radiation occurring in concentric rays, or for that matter, as the “Notes” emend, in “one instantaneous flash” (XVI, 326).

Clearly, intuition, to some extent, is a matter of faith. What Poe cannot explain inductively or deductively, he attributes to divine volition: “The Thought of God is to be understood as originating the Diffusion — as proceeding with it — as regulating it — and, finally, as being withdrawn from it upon its completion” (XVI, 238). So Poe concludes the first part of his argument by recalling the affinity of attraction and repulsion: “Thus The Body and the Soul walk hand in hand” (XVI, 244).

IV

All the information which Poe musters in the second part derives from looking out at the present condition of the universe. In rehashing the nebular cosmogony of Laplace, he once again engages in a deductive descent. Painstakingly, he describes the development from agglomeration to solar system, introducing the whirlpool image which figures so prominently in his work: “Now, the condition of this mass implies a rotation about an imaginary axis — a rotation which, commencing with the absolute incipiency of the aggregation, has been ever since acquiring velocity” (XVI, 246). He labours the whole business. After explaining in detail the formation of Neptune, is it really necessary that he explain in detail the formation of the other planets, sixteen in all (including the eight asteroids and allowing for the fact that Pluto was, in Poe's time, undiscovered)? Typically, Poe prophesies that the inconsistent revolutions of the satellites of Uranus “will, sooner or later, be found one of the strongest possible corroborations of the general hypothesis” (XVI, 252). And, typically again, in a footnote he speaks of the matter as a possible “perspective anomaly arising from the inclination of the axis of the planet” (XVI, 253). Meanwhile, the terms “attraction” and “repulsion” have gathered further associations. The first is now equated with centripetal force and repulsion with centrifugal force. Because one cannot exist without the other, he repeats his intuitive maxim, “the Body and the Soul walk hand in hand” (XVI, 256).

True to his belief that by understanding apparent inconsistencies the truth will out, he next takes up the question of some of the nebulae which, though originally thought to be stars in Laplace's process of condensation, upon closer observation were revealed to be star clusters in no way concordant with Laplace's hypothesis and, therefore, in Dr. Nichol's view, evidence to overthrow the hypothesis. Ever contrary, Poe asserts “it will be seen that, in my view, a failure to segregate the ‘nebulae’ would have tended to the refutation, rather than to the confirmation, of the Nebular Hypothesis” (XVI, 263). He argues that just as systems of atoms are drawn together to form an assemblage or cluster, so planetary systems form nebules. At present, we stand poised “on the awful threshold of the Future,” when “the increase of inequability” (XVI, 269) reaches the point of inconsistency attributed to the structure of the house of Usher. Following these “incipient stages” of consolidation, the universe will return to the condition of unity. The largest nebulae will absorb all the others.

Poe then turns to our own nebula, the Galaxy or Milky Way, to point out that it is flat and circular, although, from the perspective of our solar system situated “near the shore of the island, “it appears to be [page 52:] shaped like a capital Y. Similarly our universe, which consists of an agglomeration of nebulae, forms “one supreme and Universal sphere”, surrounded by space and “to all human perception untenanted (XVI, 275). But, arguing analogically and urging the fondness of the human brain for the infinite, he points to the possibility of “a limitless Succession of Universes” and “a class of superior intelligences, to whom the human bias alluded to may wear all the character of monomania” (XVI, 275-276) — a mania for oneness? Poe is even willing to allow, indirectly, that his intuition of unity may be referable to idiopathic factors. This sentence, then, must be considered a part of the delicate web of irony by which Poe endeavors to maintain his integrity in Eureka.

Poe's generally deductive approach towards the present condition of the universe is followed by a concern with “specification” and “more definitive conceptions” (XVI, 277), or a generally inductive approach. Heavenly bodies, we are told, move in ellipses in accordance with “the three immortal laws guessed by the imaginative Kepler” (XVI, 279) and subsequently ratified by Newton — an example of the process of intuition, deduction and induction working as one: “the suggestion of these laws by Kepler, and his proving them à posteriori to have an actual existence, led Newton to account for them by the hypothesis of Gravitation, and, finally, to demonstrate them à priori, as necessary consequences of the hypothetical principle” (XVI, 279). The distinction between intuition and deduction is particularly fine here. Poe's main object, during the ascent, is to convey some impression of the physical dimensions of the universe, to “bring the matter more distinctly before the eye of the mind” (XVI, 285), by a consideration of ever-increasing distances which, in ironic asides, are dismissed as trivial (XVI, 283, 284, 289). The expansive effect is dizzying. He concludes that the actual distances are inestimatedly greater than our powers of perception, dependent upon the establishment of a measurable parallax, can possible handle.

Incidentally, various similarities in this section between Poe's description of the awesome magnitude of the universe and Melville's description of the size and nature of the white whale suggest that, in all probability, Melville had read Eureka before, or while, writing Moby-Dick. The whale is, after all, a symbol of the external universe; and a poetically-oriented study of God's creation, along the lines of Eureka, would undoubtedly have fired Melville's imagination. The following occurs in Eureka: “But if the mere surface of the Earth eludes the grasp of the imagination, what are we to think of its cubical contents?” (XVI, 282). A similarly phrased rhetorical question occurs in Moby-Dick: “But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? Much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?”(12) Speaking of the colossal force required to move Jupiter, Poe exclaims: “The thought of such a phaenomenon cannot well be said to startle the mind: — it palsies and appals it” (XVI, 283). In the chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale, “Melville identifies that colour as “the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind” and concludes that “the palsied universe lies before us a leper.”(13) Patrick Quinn has pointed to similarities between the Narrative of A, Gordon Pym and Moby-Dick.(14) The imaginative reach of Eureka was an equally potent influence.

V

The remainder of Eureka envisages the future condition of the universe. In this part, the line between induction and deduction is less easily drawn because the two processes are now subsumed under the process of intuition. Poe opens with the insight anticipated in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841): “Space and Duration are one” (XVI, 290). The immensities of mere void or space in the universe are referable to the extreme length of time during which consolidation has been taking place. The intervening space has increased with consolidation. This brings Poe to the subject of divine adaptation, whereby it becomes impossible to distinguish cause from effect, because the one is equally dependent upon the other. Thus — and the point is crucial to my entire argument — the confusion and contradiction in Poe's terminology are ironically defensible in terms of “the complete mutability of adaptation” (XVI, 291). “In Divine constructions the object is either design or object as we choose to regard it — we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse — so that we can never absolutely decide which is which. “The example given was first expressed in the Marginalia for November, 1844: “In polar climates, the human frame, to maintain its due caloric, requires, for combustion in the stomach, the most highly ammoniac food, such as train oil. Again: — in polar climates, the sole food afforded man is the oil of abundant seals and whales. Now, whether is oil at hand because imperatively demanded? — or whether is it the only thing demanded because the only thing to be obtained? It is impossible to say. There is an absolute reciprocity of adaptation, for which we seek in vain among the works of man” (XVI, 9). A writer, Poe explains, aims at a similar reciprocity between incidents, or elements, in constructing a plot but only God's are perfect in this respect: “The Universe is a plot of God” (XVI, 292). Nevertheless, the reciprocity of adaptation in Eureka is almost perfect. [page 53:]

According to Poe, the symmetrical instinct of humanity, “if the symmetry be but a symmetry of surface, “demands “an endless extension of this system of cycles. Closing our eyes equally to deduction and induction, we insist upon imagining a revolution of all the orbs of the Galaxy about some gigantic globe which we take to be the central pivot of the whole” (XVI, 293) and upon all the nebulae revolving around a proportionally larger orb. But a thin dividing line separates an analogical argument, such as Poe says this is, and genuine intuition: “we have reached a point at which the intellect is forced, again, to struggle against its propensity for analogical inference — against its monomaniac grasping at the infinite (XVI, 202, my italics). Analogy appeals to the fancy and intuition to the imagination. On this basis, Poe rejects Nadler's hypothesis of a non-luminous “stupendous globe” (XVI, 294) or “an immaterial centre of gravity” (XVI, 295) around which the universe revolves, for neither of which, Poe maintains, is there an analogical basis in the universe. But he will agree with Sir John Herschel in seeing the universe as “in a state of progressive collapse” (XVI, 297).

In order to account for the decrease in the orbit of Enck's comet and the apparent decrease in the orbit of the moon (disproven by Lagrange), scientists declared the existence of a retarding ether. As in “Mesmeric Revelation,” Poe denies it, while admitting an ether of a different kind associated with the force of repulsion with its “various phaenomena of electricity, heat, light magnetism; and more — of vitality, consciousness, and thought — in a word, of spirituality” (XVI, 305-306). Poe's is not material but spiritual. If a material retarding ether were to exist, he asserts, that “Creation would have affected us as an imperfect plot in a romance, where the denotement is awkwardly brought about by interposed incidents external and foreign to the main subject” (XVI, 306).He proposes that as a reaction to the original radiation, all bodies of the universe are at present moving inwards in generally straight lines. When he speaks of the moment of apocalypse as “a common embrace” (XVI, 308), one is tempted to see the image in terms of the sexual union of Usher and Madeline. All this comes under the heading of “a not irrational analogy” (XVI, 307). The distinction between a surface and a genuine symmetry and this corresponding distinction between irrational and rational analogy must, I think, be considered the flimsiest portion of the argument.

To conclude his case, he picks up a matter anticipated a few pages previously, namely, that “when the irradiation shall have returned into its source — when the reaction shall be completed — the gravitating principle will no longer exist” (XVI, 301). As a corollary, matter will also no longer exist since Poe declared, “it an à posteriori consideration” (XVI, 309-310), and now repeats, “Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion” (XVI, 310). If the achievement of unity nullifies attraction, it is now clear why Poe considers attraction to be the body and repulsion the soul. Overturning the conventional cause-and-effect relationship, he states that ether does not exist for the sake of matter but the reverse. In “Mesmeric Revelation,” spirit, which is unparticled matter, is now defined as “Spirit individualized” (XVI, 309). In the context of his argument, no contradiction is possible — whether God is designated to be material or spiritual. His ironic principle of reciprocity has eradicated any meaningful distinction between the two states and, by implication, any between man and God. We are God or God is man.

In a rapturous epilogue, he declares that “During our Youth” we are conscious of our divine destiny until “a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dreams” (XVI, 312). If intuition exists. its form is Wordsworthian memories. The letter introducing Eureka opens with a reference to “the night of Time” (XVI, 188) when Aristotle lived. At the conclusion, the voices of memory refer to “an epoch in the Night of Time” (XVI, 313) when God created a self-projected universe. In aesthetic terms, then, Aristotle, a man, and God are being equated and in aesthetic terms, Eureka is a spectacular success. By means of irony and the principle of perfect reciprocity (an ironic principle itself in that it allows at any point for an overturning of the argument) Poe creates a vital universe in which deduction, induction and intuition; past, present and future; radiation, repulsion and attraction exist in a web of tensions created by their mutual dependence. In terms of length, the first part of the main argument balances the second. Likewise, the balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces maintains the status quo. In the shorter third part, the tension is collapsed, and any basis for distinction is lost. Similarly it is impossible to distinguish between the possible targets of the irony that pervades Eureka and is its final effect. To the extent that Poe is self-deceived about the powers of his intuition, he is the object of that irony, while to the extent that Eureka is a work of intuitive truth, the irony may be directed at readers. To the demonstrable extent that Poe is a conscious artist, Eureka is deliberately ironic at the expense of the limitations of language and an untractable reality. [page 54:]

VI

If the conclusions Poe reaches are the product of genuine intuition, then, by definition, they must be true. What seems intuitive might be taken as analogic monomania were it not that Poe is aware of this possibility. Indeed, he himself raises every logical objection to his own conclusions. Thus although Eureka shows evidence of Poe's paranoia, he is artist enough not to be ruled by it. Indeed, one sentence suggests that the universal situation may be analogous to his personal one. Regarding the diffused atom's compulsion toward unity, he writes: “This is their lost parent” (XVI, 330). Poe had lost his own parents — his father, it would seem, quite literally. Conceivably, the God-projected universe of Eureka reflects his own orphaned condition.

In fact, Poe's feeling of alienation is national as well as personal.(16) America's separation from England and Europe is somewhat analogous to the movement from unity to diffusion in Eureka, which can be read as an historical “allegory.” Certainly Poe believed that America was characterized by the kind of division and heterogeneity exemplified in the clique-ridden magazine world with which he was intimately associated. He would have noticed the tendency of periodicals and newspapers — like the New York Arcturus, the New York Sun, the Boston Galaxy, and the Boston Universalist — to look towards astronomy for their titles. In describing the state of literary America, moreover, James Russell Lowell anticipated the terminology of Eureka in Graham's Magazine for February, 1845: “The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its sun, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-watery way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which life and vigor radiate to the extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus, stuck down as near as may be to the centre of the land, and seeming rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to serve any present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its literature almost more distinct than those of the different dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one of her own, of which some articulate rumour barely has reached us dwellers by the Atlantic” (I, 367). In his “Marginalia” Poe writes: “The United States’ motto, E pluribus unum, may possibly have a sly allusion to Pythagoras’ definition of beauty — the reduction of many into one” (XVI, 71). The areas of literary satire directed at the Transcendentalists, which may be tricked out of the pun-encrusted and devious text of Eureka, should, therefore, be understood as an aspect of this historical dimension.(17)

In general terms, Poe's cosmology, with its polarities of a divisive, deceptive material existence and a potential unity, attraction and repulsion, the limitations of reason and the senses as opposed to its symmetry achieved by intuition, recalls that of William Blake. Poe is an American Blake whose irony keeps his alternatives open.

Sir George Williams University

[[Footnotes]]

1. For example, Richard Wilbur's approach to Poe in his Introduction and Notes to Poe: Complete Poems (N.Y.: Dell, 1959), depends upon the cosmology of Eureka, and Geoffrey Rans in his treatment, Edgar Allan Poe (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1965) discusses Eureka before the poetry and the fiction with, presumably, the idea of implying connections he does not quite make. The poorest example of this critical approach is Louis Broussard's The Measure of Poe (Norman, Okla.: Univ, of Oklahoma Press, 1969). John F. Lynen's chapter, “The Death of the Present: Edgar Allan Poe,” in The Design of the Present: Essays on Time and Form in American Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 205-271, is considerably more successful.

2. All parenthetical references may be located in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (N.Y.: AMS Press, 1902).

3. See The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom, rev. ed., 2 vols. (N.Y.: Gordian Press, 1966) II, 362.

4. Ibid., II, 380.

5. The following studies are concerned with the “scientific” aspect of Eureka: Frederick Drew Bond, “Poe as an Evolutionist,” Popular Science Monthly, LXXI (Sept., 1907), 267-274; Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, (Iowa City; Univ. of Iowa Press, 1925), pp. 112-122, 132-169; George Norstedt, “Poe and Einstein,” Open Court, XLIV (March, 1930), 173-180; Philip P. Wiener, “Poe's Logic and Metaphysic,” Personalist, XIV (Oct., 1933), 268-274; Clayton Hoagland, “The Universe of Eureka: A Comparison of the Theories of Eddington and Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, N.S., I (May, 1939), 307-313; (for Eddington's comments on Eureka, see A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography [N.Y.: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1941], pp. 555-556); Frederick W. Connor, “Poe's Eureka: The Problem of Mechanism,” Cosmic Optimism (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ, of Florida Press, 1949), pp. 67-91; and Haldeen Braddy, “Poe's [page 55:] Flight from Reality,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, I (Autumn, 1959), 394-400.

6. There are four earlier metaphysical pieces: “Shadow: A Parable” (1835), “Silence: A Fable (1838), The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841). Oinos in The Power of Words” is a survivor from “Shadow: A Parable.”

7. See Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison, Wise.: Univ, of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 187-195.

8. Ibid., p. 189. On p. 191, Thompson aims to advance his case by, in effect, putting words into Poe's mouth in failing to complete the quotation, “A perfect consistency. . .can be nothing. . .”which continues “but an absolute truth.”

9. The most succinct account of what I believe to be Poe's central concern is provided by Joseph J. Moldenhauer's “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA, LXXIII (May, 1968), 284-297.

10. See Patrick F. Quinn, “Arthur Gordon Pym: A Journey to the End of the Page?” Poe Newsletter, I (April, 1968), 13-14.

11. Carol Hopkins Maddison, “Poe's Eureka,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, II (Autumn, 1960), 359.

12. The Works of Herman Melville, Standard Edition, 16vols. (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1922-1924), VII,”244”

13. Ibid., p. 123.

14. The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: So. Illinois Univ. Press, 1957).

15. Although it cannot be proved, Thompson notes that this quotation allows for the ironic possibility that Creation is “an imperfect plot in a romance” (p. 190). By citing the passage out of context Thompson makes this seem Poe's primary intention, which is unsupported in Poe's own context.

16. Marshall McLuhan sees Poe as a man cut off from his traditional European origins: “Poe's tones and accents are those of a man conscious of possessing a European and cosmopolite heritage.” In America, Poe, the Renaissance man with the Ciceronian ideal, “Objectified the pathetic cleavages and pressures of the age in a wholly unprovincial way” (“Edgar Poe's Tradition,” Sewanee Review, LII, January-March, 1944, 24-25).

17. See Harriet R. Holman, “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and other Savants in Eureka: Notes Toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter, II (December, 1969), 49-55; and “Splitting Poe's ‘Epicurean Atoms’: Further Speculation on the Literary Satire of Eureka,” Poe Studies, V (December, 1972), 33-37. I cannot, however, accept the implication that such satire constitutes the central raison d’ etre of Eureka.