Were we to follow the metamorphoses of these images through all of Poe — grotesque, or Gothic; arabesque, or Islamic; classical, or Graeco-Roman — we would discover an articulate grammar of symbols, a new, as yet unread Poe. What we shall need to understand is the meaning of the symbols, and why they are constantly being translated from one imagistic idiom to another.
The clues are not difficult, or particularly arcane. Israfel for instance is an arabesque, and Roderick Usher a grotesque Orpheus; Orpheus himself does not appear in Poe in his native Greek self. But once we see Orpheus in Usher, we can then see that this masterpiece is a retelling of his myth from a point of view informed by a modern understanding of neuroses, of the inexplicable perverseness of the human will. That lute, that speaking guitar, all those books on Usher’s table about journeys underground and rites held in darkness — all fit into a translation by Poe of a classical text into a Gothic one. “The Gold Bug,” as Northrop Frye has seen, is strangely like the marriage of Danaë; the old black who lowers the gold bug is named Jupiter. Danaë was shut up in a treasure house and a riddle put her there.
Where do these images come from? The Mediterranean in the time of Columbus was from its western end and along its northern shore Graeco-Roman, what historians call the Latin culture, and at its eastern end, and along its southern shore, Islamic. So two thirds of Poe’s triple imagery sums up the Mediterranean, and fed his imagination with its most congenial and rich portion. The Gothic style has its home in northern Europe, “my Germany of the soul” as Poe put it. He was always ambiguous about the culture with which, ironically, he is identified. Death, corruption, and dreariness inhere in the Gothic. Poe relates it to melancholia, hypersensitivity, madness, obsession, awful whirlpools in the cold sea, ancient houses spent and crumbling. Is there some pattern here from his own life? There is a real House of Usher, still standing, not in a gloomy Transylvanian valley by a black tarn, but in Boston, Massachusetts, where Poe was born, and where his barely remembered mother played the first Ophelia on an American stage, a rôle definitively Gothic in Poe’s scheme of modes.1
Poe’s sense of Islam, which we can trace to Byron and Shelley, derived as well from the explorers Burckhardt, Volney, and John Lloyd Stephens. The angel Israfel is not, as Poe wants us to believe, in the Koran, but from George Sale’s introduction to his translation of the Koran by way of Thomas Moore.
The classical was being restated before Poe’s eyes in Charlottesville by an old man who said he loved a particular Greek temple as if it were his mistress. Jefferson had the undergraduates up to dinner at Monticello two at a time, in alphabetical order. P is deep in the alphabet; Poe was expelled and the old man dead before the two most astute readers of Alexander von Humboldt in the United States could face each other over a platter of Virginia ham.
Poe’s imagination was perfectly at home in geographies he had no knowledge of except what his imagination appropriated from other writers. We might assume, in ignorance, that he knew Paris like a Parisian, that Italy and Spain were familiar to him, and even Antarctica and the face of the moon.
The brothers Goncourt wrote in their journal as early as 1856 that Poe was a new kind of man writing a new kind of literature. We have still to learn that his sensibility was radically intelligent rather than emotional.
When he compares the eyes of Ligeia to stars, they are the binary stars that Herschel discovered and explained in the year of Poe’s birth (the spectroscopic double Beta Lyra and the double double Epsilon Lyra, to be exact), not the generalized stars of Petrarchan tradition. We have paid too little attention to this metaphysical Poe; and we scarcely understand Europeans when they speak of the passion they find in his poetry. What are we to think of the Russian translator of Poe, Vladimir Pyast, who, while reciting “Ulalume” in a St. Petersburg theater, went stark raving mad? Russians treasure the memory of that evening.
Night after night, from 1912 to 1917, a man who might have been the invention of Poe, sat in a long, almost empty room in a working-class district of Berlin, writing a book by candle light. Might have been the invention of Poe — he was basically a classicist, his doctoral thesis was on Heraclitus, his mind was shaped by Goethe, Nietzsche, von Humboldt, and Leo Frobenius, the anthropologist and cultural morphologist. Like Poe, he thought in symbols.
He was Oswald Spengler. His big book, The Decline of the West, was meant to parallel the military campaigns of the Wermacht in 1914-1918, which by pedantic adherence to tactics and heroic fervor was to impose German regularity and destiny upon Europe. Spengler’s book, like the Wermacht, imposed only a tragic sense that history is independent of our will, ironically perverse, and, a nightmare.
The value of The Decline of the West is in its poetry of vision, its intuition of the rise, growth, and decline of cultures. By culture Spengler meant the formative energy of a people, lasting for thousands of years. A civilization is the maturity of a culture, and inevitably its decline. His feeling for the effeteness of a finished culture was precisely that of Poe in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” — both stories about the vulnerability of order and civilized achievement.
Spengler’s most useful intuition was to divide world cultures into three major styles: the Apollonian, or Graeco-Roman; the Faustian, or Western-Northern European; and the Magian, or Asian and Islamic. Historians instantly complained that the cultures of our world may not be divided into three but into seventy-six distinct groups.
What interests us, however, is that Spengler’s categories are exactly those of Edgar Allan Poe.
And those of James Joyce. Look at the first three stories of Joyce’s Dubliners. The first is concerned with a violation of rites that derive from deep in Latin culture by way of the Roman Mass, the second takes its symbols from chivalry, the moral codes of Northern knighthood, and the third is named “Araby.” This triad of symbolic patterns is repeated four more times, to achieve fifteen stories. The first three chapters of Ulysses also follow this structure, even more complexly; and the simplest shape to which we can summarize Ulysses is to say that it is about a man, Leopold Bloom, in a northern European, a Faustian-technological context, who is by heritage a Jew of Spengler’s Magian culture, who is made to act out the adventures of Ulysses, exemplar of classical man.
“We have museum catalogues but no artistic atlases,” the great French historian and cultural geographer Fernand Braudel complains in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, “We have histories of art and literature but none of civilization.”
He suspects that such a map of the arts would disclose the same kind of historical structure that he has demonstrated for food, clothing, trade routes, industrial and banking centers; and that our understanding of our imaginative life would take on as yet unguessed coherence and hitherto uncomprehended behavior.
Such a map would presumably display such phenomena as the contours of the worship of Demeter and Persephone, coinciding with grain-producing terrain, and with the contours of Catholicism. This would not surprise us. It might also show how the structure of psychology and drama nourished by grain-producing cultures persists outside that terrain, continuing to act as if it were inside, because its imaginative authority refuses to abdicate.
How else can we explain a story like O. Henry’s “The Church with the Overshot Wheel”? In this poignant little tale, set in the pinewoods of North Carolina, a miller’s daughter named Aglaia (a name commensurate with the style of naming girls in the Fancy Names Belt) is kidnapped by shiftless rovers who take her to Atlanta. The miller in his grief moves away to the Northwest, becomes prosperous and a philanthropist, naming his best brand of flour for his lost daughter whom he supposes to be dead. In her memory he has his old mill rebuilt as a church, endowing it handsomely, but keeping its overshot wheel. The community becomes a summer resort for people of modest means; and of course O. Henry has the orphan daughter come to it as a grown woman, and in a typical denouement, her memory of a son
g she used to sing as a child, together with an accidental spill of flour over her father, who is visiting the old mill, reunites them. O. Henry, perhaps unconsciously, has retold the myth of Persephone, using a name, Aglaia, “the bright girl,” which was one of the epithets of Persephone, deification of wheat, and all the elements of the myth, transposed to twentieth-century America: the rape that brought devastation, the return and reunion that brought healing and regeneration.
I find an explanation of this story according to the theory of Jungian archetypes — patterns imprinted in the mind — unsatisfactory. It is better to trace O. Henry’s plot and symbols backward along geographical lines, through myths brought across the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, through books and schoolrooms, through libraries and traditions, and to assess his story as a detail in the structure of a culture of strong vitality which decided on the expressiveness of certain symbols five thousand years ago, and finds them undiminished and still full of human significance.
The appeal of popular literature must lie precisely in its faithfulness to ancient traditions. The charming little children’s book by Carlo Collodi, Le Avventuri di Pinocchio, can scarcely claim to be included in a history of Italian literature, and yet to a geographer of the imagination it is a more elegant paradigm of the narrative art of the Mediterranean than any other book since Ovid’s Metamorphoses, rehearses all the central myths, and adds its own to the rich stock of its tradition. It reaches back to a Gnostic theme known to both Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson: “Split the stick,” said Jesus, “and I am there.” It combines Pygmalion, Ovid, the book of Jonah, the Commedia dell’Arte, and Apuleius; and will continue to be a touchstone of the imagination.
The discovery of America, its settlement, and economic development, were activities of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Mediterranean tradition and northern acumen. The continuities of that double heritage have been longlasting. The Pequod set out from Joppa, the first Thoreau was named Diogenes, Whitman is a contemporary of Socrates, the Spoon River Anthology was first written in Alexandria; for thirty years now our greatest living writer, Eudora Welty, has been rewriting Ovid in Mississippi. “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was a turn for a fifth-century Athenian mime.
A geography of the imagination would extend the shores of the Mediterranean all the way to Iowa.
Eldon, Iowa — where in 1929 Grant Wood sketched a farmhouse as the background for a double portrait of his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, who donned overalls for the occasion and held a rake. Forces that arose three millennia ago in the Mediterranean changed the rake to a pitchfork, as we shall see.
Let us look at this painting to which we are blinded by familiarity and parody. In the remotest distance against this perfect blue of a fine harvest sky, there is the Gothic spire of a country church, as if to seal the Protestant sobriety and industry of the subjects. Next there are trees, seven of them, as along the porch of Solomon’s temple, symbols of prudence and wisdom.
Next, still reading from background to foreground, is the house that gives the primary meaning of the title, American Gothic, a style of architecture. It is an example of a revolution in domestic building that made possible the rapid rise of American cities after the Civil War and dotted the prairies with decent, neat farmhouses. It is what was first called in derision a balloon-frame house, so easy to build that a father and his son could put it up. It is an elegant geometry of light timber posts and rafters requiring no deep foundation, and is nailed together. Technically, it is, like the clothes of the farmer and his wife, a mail-order house, as the design comes out of a pattern-book, this one from those of Alexander Davis and Andrew Downing, the architects who modified details of the Gothic Revival for American farmhouses. The balloon-frame house was invented in Chicago in 1833 by George Washington Snow, who was orchestrating in his invention a century of mechanization that provided the nails, wire-screen, sash-windows, tin roof, lathe-turned posts for the porch, doorknobs, locks, and hinges — all standard pieces from factories.
We can see a bamboo sunscreen — out of China by way of Sears Roebuck — that rolls up like a sail: nautical technology applied to the prairie. We can see that distinctly American feature, the screen door. The sash-windows are European in origin, their glass panes from Venetian technology as perfected by the English, a luxury that was a marvel of the eighteenth century, and now as common as the farmer’s spectacles, another revolution in technology that would have seemed a miracle to previous ages. Spectacles begin in the thirteenth century, the invention of either Salvino degl’Armati or Alessandro della Spina; the first portrait of a person wearing specs is of Cardinal Ugone di Provenza, in a fresco of 1352 by Tommaso Barisino di Modena. We might note, as we are trying to see the geographical focus that this painting gathers together, that the center for lens grinding from which eyeglasses diffused to the rest of civilization was the same part of Holland from which the style of the painting itself derives.
Another thirteenth-century invention prominent in our painting is the buttonhole. Buttons themselves are prehistoric, but they were shoulder-fasteners that engaged with loops. Modern clothing begins with the buttonhole. The farmer’s wife secures her Dutch Calvinist collar with a cameo brooch, an heirloom passed down the generations, an eighteenth-century or Victorian copy of a design that goes back to the sixth century B.C.
She is a product of the ages, this modest Iowa farm wife: she has the hair-do of a mediæval madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore.
Martin Luther put her a step behind her husband; John Knox squared her shoulders; the stock-market crash of 1929 put that look in her eyes.
The train that brought her clothes — paper pattern, bolt cloth, needle, thread, scissors — also brought her husband’s bib overalls, which were originally, in the 1870s, trainmen’s workclothes designed in Europe, manufactured here by J. C. Penney, and disseminated across the United States as the railroads connected city with city. The cloth is denim, from Nimes in France, introduced by Levi Strauss of blue-jean fame. The design can be traced to no less a person than Herbert Spencer, who thought he was creating a utilitarian one-piece suit for everybody to wear. His own example was of tweed, with buttons from crotch to neck, and his female relatives somehow survived the mortification of his sporting it one Sunday in St. James Park.
His jacket is the modification of that of a Scots shepherd which we all still wear.
Grant Wood’s Iowans stand, as we might guess, in a pose dictated by the Brownie box camera, close together in front of their house, the farmer looking at the lens with solemn honesty, his wife with modestly averted eyes. But that will not account for the pitchfork held as assertively as a minuteman’s rifle. The pose is rather that of the Egyptian prince Rahotep, holding the flail of Osiris, beside his wife Nufrit — strict with pious rectitude, poised in absolute dignity, mediators between heaven and earth, givers of grain, obedient to the gods.
This formal pose lasts out 3000 years of Egyptian history, passes to some of the classical cultures — Etruscan couples in terra cotta, for instance — but does not attract Greece and Rome. It recommences in northern Europe, where (to the dismay of the Romans) Gaulish wives rode beside their husbands in the war chariot. Kings and eventually the merchants of the North repeated the Egyptian double portrait of husband and wife: van Eyck’s Meester and Frouw Arnolfini; Rubens and his wife Helena. It was this Netherlandish tradition of painting middle-class folk with honor and precision that turned Grant Wood from Montparnasse, where he spent two years in the 1920s trying to be an American post-Impressionist, back to Iowa, to be our Hans Memling.
If Van Gogh could ask, “Where is my Japan?” and be told by Toulouse-Lautrec that it was Provence, Wood asked himself the whereabouts of his Holland, and found it in Iowa.
Just thirty years before Wood’s painting, Edwin Markham’s poem, “The Man with the Hoe” had pictured the farmer as a peasant with a life scarcely different from that of an ox, and calle
d on the working men of the world to unite, as they had nothing to lose but their chains. The painting that inspired Markham was one of a series of agricultural subjects by Jean François Millet, whose work also inspired Van Gogh. A digging fork appears in five of Van Gogh’s pictures, three of them variations on themes by Millet, and all of them are studies of grinding labor and poverty.
And yet the Independent Farmer had edged out the idle aristocrat for the hand of the girl in Royal Tyler’s “The Contrast,” the first native American comedy for the stage, and in Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” it is a battle-line of farmers who fire the shot heard around the world. George III, indeed, referred to his American colonies as “the farms,” and the two Georges of the Revolution, Hanover and Washington, were proudly farmers by etymology and in reality.
The window curtains and apron in this painting are both calico printed in a reticular design, the curtains of rhombuses, the apron of circles and dots, the configuration Sir Thomas Browne traced through nature and art in his Garden of Cyrus, the quincunxial arrangement of trees in orchards, perhaps the first human imitation of phyllotaxis, acknowledging the symmetry, justice, and divine organization of nature.
Curtains and aprons are as old as civilization itself, but their presence here in Iowa implies a cotton mill, a dye works, a roller press that prints calico, and a wholesale-retail distribution system involving a post office, a train, its tracks, and, in short, the Industrial Revolution.
That revolution came to America in the astounding memory of one man, Samuel Slater, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1789 with the plans of all Arkwright’s Crompton’s, and Hargreaves’s machinery in his head, put himself at the service of the rich Quaker Moses Brown, and built the first American factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 24