Poe’s characters are largely psychic types. However precisely they represent mental disorientation, the tales do not locate these images of insanity within particularized individuals. All Poe’s narrators speak roughly the same language. Unconcerned with the ways in which mental states shape personalities or events, Poe treated all disorientation as the same, whether it derived from guilt, anger, fear, or stupidity; and there is little tonal difference between the murderer in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and the innocent prisoner of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The tales show no fascination, as do Freud’s case-studies, for how inner turmoil gets expressed differently by individuals, and, in the absence of such personalizing idiosyncrasies, the Usher twins seem much less fully imagined characters than Wolf-Man or Dora.
Poe was no more concerned with plotting than with characterization. According to his celebrated theory about the ‘unity of effect’, every element of a tale must contribute to the overall purpose. In reviewing Hawthorne’s tales, Poe explained:
in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of great importance…. [The skilful literary artist] has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.
Attempting to professionalize writing, the theory glorified artistic wholeness or ‘integrity’, by insisting that a work which did not from its very first sentence start doing whatever it intended to do did not deserve the name of ‘art’.
The apparent singularity of these ‘effects’ misled both his readers and occasionally even Poe himself to confuse artistic consistency with narrative surprise. In the very obviousness of their ironic reversals, his endings are often the weakest parts of the tales. His detective stories are compelling in every way except as ‘whodunits’, and in horror tales like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ or ‘The Black Cat’, the reader is swept along by the psychological or philosophical intensity and simply ignores the moralizing conclusions. Other tales disguise less well the mechanics of their plotting. In tone-poems like ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, the admirable stylistic unity cannot hide the fact that too much symbolic machinery is expended on the platitude that one cannot cheat Death. And Poe’s leisurely pacing can make for slow and attenuated tales: some readers find ‘Hop-Frog’ preachy and predictable, and the ironies of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ can seem more arch with each rereading.
Poe’s indifference to character and plot is apparent even in the finest of the moral tales, ‘William Wilson’. An immoral man is haunted by a double who shares his name but not his dishonesty. The profligate’s hostility to this better self leads him to murder what he at last discovers to be his own conscience. While not a bad narrative idea, the purported ‘mystery’ of the second Wilson accounts for none of the tale’s power. There is no real suspense. Readers guess the double’s identity long before its ‘revelation’ in the final sentence. Nor is the moral particularly compelling. By the end of the tale, we find ourselves siding with the wastrel Wilson, and rejecting his alter ego as a tiresome nag. More important, it is hard to figure out exactly what that moral is. Although the name ‘Will, son of Will’ accuses the protagonist of wilfulness, the charge seems both trivial and a poor description of someone who wanders aimlessly throughout the story. Nor is it clear how his conscience represents a moral advance. Usually in doppelgänger stories, the double shows the central figure a new side to himself. In a highly moralistic version like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, a picture reveals the corruption that the protagonist attempts to hide. In Poe’s account, however, the twin teaches the narrator nothing about his inner nature, both because Wilson understands his villainy pretty well from the beginning and because he does not have much of an inner nature to understand. If anything, the tale’s allegory discomfortingly suggests that people’s desire to be good causes them to be bad. With nothing to illumine, Wilson’s conscience turns tattle-tale, driving the bad Wilson on to greater sins if only to escape his own inner dullness.
The moral ambiguities of ‘William Wilson’ are illumined by Poe’s more detailed exploration of ‘will’ in ‘Ligeia’. Here too the tale’s triumph lies in neither plot nor character. As Richard Wilbur observed long ago, the story is coherent without making the least bit of sense.2 A man marries a woman; they study arcane knowledge; she dies. He marries a second, very different woman; she dies, but arises from her funeral bier in the shape of the first wife. Such a narrative is structurally balanced but devoid of incident or individuals. Rowena has no identity except as second wife, and the narrator lacks even a name. The final character, Ligeia, is explicitly defined in terms of this absence of characteristics—the narrator’s inability to remember anything about her except some vague physical features. The two death scenes and the exposition that separates them flesh out the situation without making it more comprehensible. What, after all, is the point of parallels between the two marriages, and especially of the final resurrection of Rowena as Ligeia? Why does so sketchy a plot waste time on detailed descriptions of background material, like Ligeia’s relation to astronomy, the oriental decor of Rowena’s bridal chamber, and the narrator’s fruitless ministrations to her corpse? Psychoanalytic and symbolic readings only compound the confusion by making the narrative too sensible—a lunatic’s compulsive confession of killing two wives—or senseless in a different way—a Neoplatonic allegory of cosmic reunification into the Primal One. Such readings prove that the plot does not mean what it says and that it does not mean anything else either.
By discarding characterization and narrative, this stripped-down tale, from its epigraph on, focuses exclusively on Ligeia’s stupendous will to life. This preoccupation might have made Ligeia more personable. Will is traditionally considered the quintessential human faculty, what distinguishes us from unselfconscious beasts. But Poe was not interested in anything so sentimental as volition or agency. Like the Puritans before him, he doubted humans’ ability to shape their destinies through conscious choice. People fail to get what they want in the tale. Ligeia’s will does not prevent her death, and in the farcical final scene, human intentions are treated as pointless, virtually comic. Bobbing up and down on its funeral bier, Rowena’s body responds adversely to her husband’s caretaking: only when, abandoning all will, he collapses in an unconscious stupor, can the body revive. Still, the tale’s scepticism about the efficacy of will should not obscure its recognition that conscious desire is one of the ways humans identify themselves. If will does not control the universe, it does define who we are; and whether or not wishes are fulfilled, Ligeia’s personality resides in her ‘wild’ desire to live, and the narrator’s in his ‘mad’ desire to resurrect her.
Ligeia’s will was for Poe only a specific case of a more fundamental problem—the meaning of ‘personal identity’ itself. By ‘identity’ he did not mean personal essence, some defining trait or temperament. Identity addressed not who a person really was but how a person could be a unit—how we wake up in the morning knowing ourselves to be the same consciousness that went to sleep the night before. In the early ‘Morella’, the heroine embraces the identity theory of John Locke:
That identity which is termed personal, Mr Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the sameness of a rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all to be that which we c
all ourselves—thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal identity.
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke questioned how persons knew themselves to be the same entity from one moment to the next. The answer could not lie in bodily integrity: all living things change size and shape, constantly losing thousands of dead cells and growing thousands of new ones without any sense of discontinuity. Instead unity had to rest in consciousness itself, especially as measured in terms of memories and of striking moments of self-consciousness, such as exercises of individual will. Yet, Locke wondered, was the unity of consciousness enough to guarantee personhood? If a man were born with Socrates’ memories, would he too be Socrates? Was the stability of identity jeopardized by the radical differences of consciousness in the same individual drunk and sober?
The relation between Locke’s unifying ‘identity’ and Ligeia’s will is underscored in a companion piece, ‘The Man that was Used Up’. Cast in the journalistic form of a celebrity profile, this little-known comic sketch recounts an admirer’s attempts to know fully a famous military hero by interviewing both the general and his friends. The narrator discovers finally that the Indian fighter is nothing more than inflated reputation and artificial limbs, a triumph of publicity and prosthetics. Taken on its own, the tale is a delightful (and still timely) satire on imperialist politics and the roles of gossip and the media in popular myth-making. Yet the piece also comments explicitly on the ‘Ligeia’ narrator’s entirely more serious attempt to know his wives. The tales open identically: the one man’s tortured confession that he ‘cannot, for his soul, remember’ where he met Ligeia is deflated by the other’s offhand admission that he ‘cannot just now remember’ where he met the warrior. The general’s literal dismemberment stands emblematically for the philosophical incoherence of personal identity as a concept. Just as the general is exposed to be without his cosmetics only an ‘odd looking bundle of something’, so all ‘self’ may be (as Hume feared) merely a random ‘bundle’ of sensations. When placed alongside its political twin, the psychological ‘Ligeia’ appears as a similarly bleak meditation on how personal identity works—an exploration of the boundaries not between consciousness and unconsciousness but between self and other. We cannot trust our ability to remember people in their absence, even after their bodies have disappeared. Will and memory maintain Ligeia’s integrity no better than reputation held together the general’s body parts. The final transformation of one wife into another only concedes the instability of all ‘others’, and of the perceptions which defined them as separate entities in the first place.
Poe’s preoccupation with personhood helps explain the lifelessness of his female characters. Obviously Poe had no concern for gender as such: his famous statement that the most poetic theme was the death of a beautiful woman came dangerously close to claiming that the only good woman was a dead one. Poe’s Ligeia is not meant to represent a real individual of whatever gender. She is not even an allegorical figure, like the Red-Cross Knight or Mr Smooth-It-Away, standing for a single moral position. She is less a person than an idea about personhood. In no sense an imitation of life, her story artificially isolates one aspect of personal identity to test the relation between will and personality. The strangeness throughout the ‘women’ tales—their treatment of people as hypotheses and events as experiments testing those ideas—suggests a model for reading all Poe’s characters and plots. Shifting the philosophical focus from ethics to metaphysics, the ‘women’ tales make clear, as ‘William Wilson’ did not quite, that Poe’s intellectual categories were not primarily moral. It may make some sense to wonder whether or not Wilson was right to cheat at cards. It makes no sense, however, to ask whether one should yank out a lover’s teeth or turn one’s second wife into one’s first. These ‘events’ do not represent real-life physical situations but approximate a meta-physical condition of disunity. Everywhere in Poe, the Gothic is used to question the integrity of human existence, while twins and doubles blur the distinctions between self and other.
Metaphysical analysis may even redeem ‘William Wilson’ from the limitations of its moralizing. Although a superficial analysis of the Id and the Super-ego, ‘William Wilson’ offers an interestingly revisionist account of will and identity. Specifically, the narrator’s confusion dramatizes the incoherence of models that represent free will or agency as an internal disagreement over alternative responses—the commonplace belief that one can be ‘of two minds’ about something. As Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley warned Locke, if such a thing as will existed, the self could assert its freedom only by choosing badly. Were Wilson to accept his double’s morality he would become a pale copy of society’s conventionalism; to believe in his intellectual independence he must reject logical reasoning as imposed from outside, a kind of doubled ‘other’. More generally, the story asks, ‘How could you tell if someone was yourself or not?’ In terms of so broad a scepticism, the unsatisfactoriness of the tale’s conclusion is philosophically astute. The sole solution to such cosmic self-doubt is not to ask the question in the first place, and to his fear that ‘he’ might be ‘me’, the narrator can only respond, ‘Not any more, he isn’t.’
Despite Poe’s preference for his poetry, it is the tales, with their leisure to linger over thoughts, that have most impressed subsequent readers. Poe’s modern appeal derives most from his ability to give an almost palpable immediacy to abstract questions about will, choice, and personality. Psychoanalytic readers rightly see his explorations of the mental as a kind of proto-psychology, although one concerned more with otherness than with unconsciousness, more with Locke than with Freud. Post-modernists correctly sense that his disinterest in characters or plots avoids the presence and subjectness that prevent the free play of meaning in traditional writing. For Poe, however, problems of identity did not originate in consciousness but resulted from the foreignness of the environment in which mentality found itself. Minds did not imagine horrors but saw clearly the horribleness of their universe.
Starting with his early prize-winning ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, Poe defined minds in terms of the landscape through which they passed. His two most extended works both subordinate people to place. The novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym uses minimal characterization and disjointed plotting to chart a voyage ‘southward’ into annihilating whiteness. Even more extreme is the late non-fiction Eureka, which entirely discards people and plot to cobble together out of scientific treatises by Newton, Laplace, and eighteenth-century natural theologians a ‘poetic’ account of the formation of the material universe. Such cosmologies and travel narratives only underscore the importance of place or environment throughout the fiction. Poe’s very notion of ‘other worldliness’ is predicated on a strong sense of this one, the physicality of the here and now. In ‘The Domain of Arnheim’, the particular subsumes the abstract; and Poe depicts an aesthetics of the Beautiful and the individuality of the aesthetician entirely through descriptions of a landscape garden. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is scarcely less dependent on setting. Naming in its title not the hero Roderick but the ‘house’ that is both his dwelling and his bloodline, the tale attributes its peculiar ‘atmosphere’ more to the brooding building and its engulfing tarn than to the tormented inhabitants. Given this preoccupation with place, it is not surprising that one of his final publications, ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’, satirizes the very local phenomenon of the California Gold Rush.
Although it is customary to read setting in Poe as the externalization of mental states, it might be more appropriate to read the mental as an internalization of environment. Paradoxically, Poe’s realistic details are often more memorable than his outré effects. Setting ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition may not have made its horror more effective than the less localized Gothicism of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. It does, however, remind his audience that mental anguish has historical as well as psychological s
ources. As Walter Benjamin explained, ‘The Man in the Crowd’ admirably attributed what elsewhere seemed mere ‘perverseness’ to the alienation and anomie born of industrialization.3 In juxtaposing the symbolism of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ to the social privilege that allowed the elite to flee medieval plagues and nineteenth-century cholera, Poe warns that to emphasize aesthetics over class politics is to repeat as readers that blindness that betrayed Prince Prospero. Even the metaphysics of ‘William Wilson’ are grounded in social reality; and whatever they say about his schizophrenia, the pages on Wilson’s early (mis)development offer great insight into nineteenth-century school-life, fully as moving as anything in David Copperfield or Jane Eyre.
Traditionally viewed as apathetic or even conservative, Poe was in fact intensely political. He rarely focused on specific events, although his allusions to cholera and to the California Gold Rush did challenge the territorial and class assumptions of his generation. More commonly, Poe explored what we have come to call the politics of knowledge—the ways in which the act of knowing structures and controls what can be known. His travel narratives exposed the imperialist motives behind anthropology; and passages like the Tsalal episode of Pym obviously influenced Melville’s more extended critiques of racial politics in Typee and ‘Benito Cereno’. Similarly, his psychological narratives implied the prejudicial character of both what gets known and how it is learned. In his tale of metempsychosis, ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, Poe offers first an isolated image of the Orient, and only afterward identifies the moment as a failed attempt at native self-determination. As a result, readers not only find themselves uncomfortably aligned with British colonialism; they are forced to confront the cultural condescension which allowed the West to appropriate Eastern ideas like reincarnation in the first place.
Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) Page 2