The Broadway Journal of June derided ‘the hideous and distasteful’ fountain, reckoning that the artist who designed the rock work went ‘raving mad’.
14. (p. 167) the city of Aznac: A palindrome of Kansas, perhaps, modelled on ‘Carnac’.
15. (p. 168) a copy of a book called the ‘Dial’: The Dial (July 1840-April 1844), a quarterly of literature, philosophy and religion, was the mouthpiece of the New England Transcendentalist movement – always fair game for Poe. Since July 1842 it had been edited by Emerson.
16. (p. 169) the invention of Hero, through Solomon de Caus: Or Salomon de Caux (1576–1626), French engineer, whose Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines (1615) is an early exposition of the principle of steam power.
Heron, far from an ancient Egyptian, was an Alexandrian (c. 50–150 A.D.). Called δ μηχανικός, he is associated with works on Automata-making and the Mechanica (three books extant in Arabic). The Pneumatica describe an invention known as ‘Hero’s fountain’, in which a jet of water is maintained by compressed air, and a steam-engine acting on the principle of Barker’s Mill.
17. (p. 170) Ponnonner’s lozenges, or Brandreth’s pills: Both brand-names, presumably, of patent medicines. One of the first makers of patent medicines in the United States, Benjamin Brandreth emigrated from England in 1834.
So what began with indigestion concludes with emetics.
Select Bibliography
LUCILLE KING, ‘Notes on Poe’s Sources’, University of Texas Studies in English vol. 10 (1930), pp. 128–34
ROBERT LEE RHEA, ‘Some Observations on Poe’s Origins’, University of Texas Studies in English vol. 10 (1930), pp. 145–6
BURTON R. POLLIN, ‘ “Some Words with a Mummy” Reconsidered’, Emerson Society Quarterly vol. 59 (1969), reprinted in New Approaches to Poe: A Symposium, ed. Richard P. Benton (1970), pp 60–67
THE POWER OF WORDS
First published
United States Magazine and Democratic Review (June 1845)
Reprinted
Broadway Journal (25 October 1845)
Translated
Baudelaire, ‘Puissance de la Parole’, Le Pays (August 1854)
No thought can perish. The conservation of force – whether as waves, or words – is everlasting, ‘upward and onward for ever in their modifications of old forms’ – that is ‘in their creation of new’.
This rhapsody is the ultimate link between the angelic dialogues and Eureka: the poet-creator confronting his Creator as poet. His special trial-ground is ‘the very brink of sleep’, ‘where ‘the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams’. There he must attempt to detain, control and memorize his ecstatic visions:
… I so regard them, through a conviction (which seems a portion of the ecstasy itself) that this ecstasy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the Human Nature – is a glimpse of the spirit’s outer world; and I arrive at this conclusion – if this term is at all applicable to instantaneous intuition – by a perception that the delight experienced has, as its element, but the absoluteness of novelty. I say the absoluteness – for in these fancies – let me now term them psychal impressions – there is really nothing even approximate in character to impressions ordinarily received. It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality.
Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that, at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe… In saying this I am not to be understood as supposing that the fancies, or psychal impressions, to which I allude, are confined to my individual self – are not, in a word, common to all mankind – for on this point it is quite impossible that I should form an opinion – but nothing can be more certain than that even a partial record of the impressions would startle the universal intellect of mankind, by the supremeness of the novelty of the material employed, and of its consequent suggestions. In a word – should I ever write a paper on this topic, the world will be compelled to acknowledge that, at last, I have done an original thing.
‘Marginalia’ no. 5, Graham’s Magazine (March 1846)
1. (p. 171) a spirit new-fledged with immortality! : The weakness of Oinos (Greek, ‘wine’) is the confused intoxication of a fledgling spirit. In ‘the acquisition of knowledge’ angels ‘are for ever blessed’ (Agathos, ‘good’).
2. (p. 171) There are no dreams in Aidenn : As there are for Poe, bodybound on earth:
I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that this condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time – yet it is crowded with these ‘shadows of shadows’; and for absolute thought there is demanded time’s endurance.
‘Marginalia’ no. 5
A cri de coeur he was to repeat on attempting his great poem ‘On the Cosmogony of the Universe’ :
These ideas – conceptions such as these – unthought-like thoughts – soul-reveries rather than conclusions or even considerations of the intellect: – ideas, I repeat, such as these, are such as we can alone hope profitably to entertain in any effort at grasping the great principle, Attraction.
Eureka, pp. 236–7
3. (p. 171) the loud harmony of the Pleiades: Centre of the universe, according to one astronomical theory (to be dismissed by Poe), and thus ‘the throne’ of God. cf. ‘the hypothesis of Mädler – that there exists, in the centre of the Galaxy, a stupendous globe about which all the systems of the cluster revolve’. He even went ‘so far as to designate a particular star, Alcyone in the Pleiades, as being at or about the very spot around which a general revolution is performed’ (Eureka, p. 294).
4. (p. 172) for pansies… the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns: For ‘pensées’ rather : ‘… and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ (Hamlet IV, v, 176)
5. (p. 172) as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result: The idea derives from Pascal:
Le moindre mouvement importe à toute la nature; la mer entière change pour une pierre. Ainsi, dans la grâce, la moindre action importe par ses suites à tout. Donc tout est important.
En chaque action, il faut regarder, outre l’action, notre état présent, passé, futur, et des autres à qui elle importe, et voir les liaisons de toutes ces choses. Et lors on sera bien retenu.
Les Pensées, 505
The least movement affects the whole of nature; the entire sea is changed by one stone. So it is with grace: the least action affects everything in its train. Everything, then, is important.
In all we do, we must look beyond the action to our present, past and future state, as well as to others whom it affects, and perceive the interaction of all these things. And so we shall keep ourselves well in check.
A tossed pebble changes the whole sea. In our actions, then, we must consider a whole web of moral cause and effect. Thus the need for self-control. Yet Poe ignores this control. Ignoring this moral responsibility – typically enough, as Allen Tate noted – he concentrates purely on Pascal’s ‘physical analogy for divine grace’ (‘The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words’, p. 127). Even the mathematical underpinning is delusory: ‘the results of any given impulse’ are not ‘absolutely endless’. Though Poe was to expand on its poetic potentiality:
If I propose to ascertain the influence of one mote in a sunbeam on its neighboring mote, I cannot accomplish my purpose without first counting and weighing all the atoms in the Universe and defining the precise positions of all at one particular moment. If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now on the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have adventured? 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.
Eureka, p. 236
6. (p. 174) the source of all thought is – God: Echoing John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
i, 1–3
7. (p. 174) this fair star – which is the greenest and yet most terrible: As recently as 1832 Sir John Herschel had first observed the orbits of double stars. It is the smaller of two double stars that appears greenish or blueish green.
Select Bibliography
ALLEN TATE, ‘The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words’, Kenyon Review vol. 14 (1952), pp. 455–75; reprinted in The Man of Letter’s in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), pp. 113–45
THE SYSTEM OF DR TARR AND PROF. FETHER
First published
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1845)
Translated
Baudelaire, ‘Le Système du Docteur Goudron et du Professeur Plume’, Le Monde Illustré (January 1865)
Not science fiction exactly, this story is included here as a psychiatrical hoax: with its dire projection of the effects of unbridled self-expression both on mentally disturbed patients and their permissive keepers.
But racial threats, too, lurk in this southern asylum. The new ‘soothing system’ that would abolish all punishments and confinements inevitably ricochets, it seems, on its progenitor, driving him mad. Once mad, moreover, he devises a second system, its diametrical opposite: that of tarring and feathering – lynching in other words, as Negroes and suspected Abolitionists were regularly lynched in the South. Thus the guardian–abolitionists of system 1, so indulgent to their childish wards, inevitably become the scapegoat–victims of system 2 But that is still not the end of this fatal cycle. Such violence too must inevitably rebound; the very keepers be degraded to stereotypes of bestial lust: ‘Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good Hope’. Howling vengeance they burst in – a leaping, lunatic mob of blacks.
This is no simple paradigm of slaves tired of slavery dispossessing their masters. Both Abolitionism and Negro slavery converge on this battlefield in lunatic terror. Such is Poe’s vision of America – that asylum of the unlicensed free, mankind’s last ‘Good Hope’: a mad-house, a lynch mob tarring and feathering to the discordant strains of ‘Yankee Doodle’, with wily blacks in the cellars plotting revenge. If system 1 (of the Abolitionist North) naïvely compounds the danger, system 2 (of the ‘extreme’ South) is suicidal.
1. (p. 176) what is vulgarly termed the ‘system of soothing’ : Poe was personally acquainted with Dr Pliny Earle who had served as resident physician at the asylum of Frankford, Pennsylvania, and Bloomingdale, New York. Both had introduced the ‘Moral Treatment’ that Dickens had so enthusiastically endorsed, on his visit to the State Hospital for the Insane in South Boston, as ‘admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical…’:
‘Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people,’ said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a Juryman on a Commission of Lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should certainl find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
American Notes (1842), ch. 3
Instead of the so-called ‘mechanical confinement’ – of chaining and straitjackets, that is – ‘Moral Treatment’ was based on a system of mutual confidence and self-respect. Poe’s tale was possibly conceived as a direct parody of such Dickensian good cheer : ‘Besides… the visitor, the doctor and his relatives, the music, and the use of the “soothing system” – there is the discussion of the banquet or meal, the presiding officer’s attempt to humor the deranged as the doctor humored the would-be queen in Dickens’ account, and there is the ridicule of Dickens’ belief that each insane person was tolerant of the fancies of all but his own’ (William Whipple, p. 132).
An even closer model, however, was a private asylum at Palermo, run by ‘a whimsical Sicilian Baron’ in a converted castle, visited by Nathaniel Parker Willis in 1834 (Letter 69, Pencillings by the Way, 1835). This account was turned into a story, ‘The Madhouse of Palermo’ (1834, reprinted 1836), reviewed by Poe in the Southern Literary Messenger (August 1836). That southern retreat – a Casa dei Pazzi rather than a Maison de Santé, as Richard P. Benton ingeniously argued – may well be Poe’s ultimate source.
2. (p. 181) meats enough to have feasted the Anakim : ‘And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants…’ (Numbers xiii, 33)
3. (p. 182) ‘monstrum horrendum… cui lumen ademptum’: Of Polyphemus: ‘a monster fearful and hideous, vast and eyeless’ (Virgil, Aeneid III, 658).
4. (p. 184) Demosthenes’ from the top… Lord Brougham from the mouth: Like a phrenological composite portrait, that is, or a living embodiment of Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1775).
Lord Brougham, Lord Chancellor (1830–35) – one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and of the University of London – was another of Poe’s pet peeves. He had written a scathing review of his Critical and Miscellaneous Writings:
The Broughams of the human intellect are never its Newtons or its Bayles… His whole design consists in an immethodical collection of the most striking and at the same time most popularly comprehensible facts in general science.
Graham’s Magazine (March 1842)
The head, then, is part oratorical genius, part versatile quack.
5. (p. 185) the tee-totum… You would have roared with laughter to see him spin: Originally ‘T totum’, a small four-sided disk, having a capital letter inscribed on each of its sides. It was twirled like a top. The letter uppermost when it fell decided the fortune of the player. The letters were once the initials of Latin words: T totum, A aufer, D depone, N nihil. Later they became the initials of English words: T take-all, H half, N nothing, P put down.
6. (p. 188) bellowed like so many brazen bulls of Phalaris: Tyrant of Agrigentum in Sicily (c. 550 B.C.) who burnt his victims alive in a brazen bull.
7. (p. 189) a sort of Pandemonium in petto: Literally ‘in the breast’, viz. undisclosed for personal contemplation. But the Italian ran away with Poe. What he must have meant was a ‘petty Pandemonium’.
8. (p. 190) as he had gammoned him sufficiently: Slang, for humbug or hoax.
Select Bibliography
WILLIAM WHIPPLE, ‘Poe’s Two-Edged Satiric Tale’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction vol. 9 (1954), pp. 121–33
RICHARD WILBUR, The House of Poe’, 1959 (in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 275
RICHARD P. BENTON, ‘Poe’s “The System of Dr Tarr and Prof. Fether” : Dickens or Willis?’, Poe Newsletter vol. I (1968, pp. 7–9.
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR
First Published
American Whig Review (December 1845)
Reprinted
Broadway Journal (20 December 1845)
Morning Post (London : 3 January 1846), as ‘Mesmerism in America’
Popular Record of Modern Science (London: 10 January 1846), as ‘The Case of M. Valdemar’
Mesmerism ‘In Articulo Mortis’. an Astounding and Horrifying Narration Shewing the extraordinary power of Mesmerism in arresting the Progress of Death. By Edgar A. Poe, Esq. of New York (London : Short & Co., 1846). A pamphlet, priced three pence
Boston Museum (18 August 1849)
Translated
Baudelaire, ‘Mort ou vivant, cas de Mr. Valdemar’, Le Pays (Septembe
r 1854); retitled, ‘La Vérité sur le cas de M. Valdemar’
This story took the world by storm. In the very month of publication a mesmerist from Boston, Robert H. Collyer, wrote to Poe:
Your account of M. Valdemar’s case has been universally copied in this city, and has created a very great sensation… I have not the least doubt of the possibility of such a phenomenon; for I did actually restore to active animation a person who died from excessive drinking of ardent spirits… I will give you the detailed account on your reply to this, which I require for publication, in order to put at rest the growing impression that your account is merely a splendid creation of your own brain, not having any truth in fact.
A year later Poe was proudly reporting to the editor, Evert A. Duyckinck, that the ‘Valdemar Case’ had ‘fairly gone the rounds of the London Press’. It was pirated in England. It was even circulating in France. On his dedicating The Raven and Other Poems (1845) ‘To the Noblest of her Sex – Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, she replied:
there is a tale of yours which I do not find in this volume, but which is going the rounds of the newspapers, about Mesmerism (‘the Valdemar Case’), throwing us all into – dreadful doubts as to whether it can be true, as the children say of ghost stories. The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar.
So generally was ‘M. Valdemar’ accepted as a scientific description of a real event that Poe had eventually to fend off fan letters with ‘the facts’. ‘ “Hoax” is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case,’ he replied to a Scots admirer from Stonehaven. ‘Some few persons believe it – but I do not – and don’t you.’ (30 December 1846). ‘ “The Valdemar Case” was a hoax, of course,’ he informed a young medical student from Brunswick, Maine (11 March 1847)
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe Page 46