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 ‘otherworldliness’ 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 hut 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 outre 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 sources. As Walter Benjamin explained, ‘The Man in the Crowd’ admirably attributed what elsewhere seemed mere ‘perverseness’ to the alienation and anomie born of industrialization. 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.
Poe is less interested in solving puzzles than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem ‘mysterious’ in the first place.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.
In the even more ambiguous comic tale ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, the desire to know the mind is literalized as a visit to a French insane asylum. As with Delano’s racism in ‘Benito Cereno’, the narrator’s assumptions about the nature of madness prevent him from realizing that madmen are running the asylum. Poe’s tale, however, goes further to question not only the origins of and cures for madness, but the very project of ‘seeing’ sanity. The French historian Michel Foucault has shown how the asylum reforms of Phillipe Pinel and William Tuke attempted to ‘master’ unreason. So, in Poe’s tale, the very idea of visiting the insane smacked of the same cultural condescension that marred anthropology. Rejecting as self-deceived the narrator’s search for the most efficacious ‘system’, the tale judges all systems as attempts to control rather than to understand, and asks to what the extent the very science of psychology is merely a species of internal tourism.
Similar reservations about the politics of knowing informed Poe’s attitude toward detection. Although Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth employ some of the suspense techniques associated with contemporary mysteries, Poe wrote the first stories to achieve popularity primarily for their ingenious solutions of puzzles. He also employed many of the motifs still common in such stories—the murder in the locked room, the unjustly accused suspect, analysis by psychological deduction, and the complementary solutions of the least likely person and the most likely place. Most important, Poe created in C. Auguste Dupin a model for the detective that continues to dominate mystery writing. Dupin’s eccentric personality and especially his relation to his two foils—a sympathetic but move narrator, nameless throughout the series, and an unsympathetic professional investigator, the Prefect of Police Monsieur G. were explicitly reproduced in such detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
Yet despite his invention of the genre, Poe’s mysteries are not traditional tales of detection. As their lengthy philosophical digressions make clear, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem ‘mysterious’ in the first place. For all their obvious interest in the mechanics of problem solving, the tales themselves scarcely offer solutions. By withholding evidence, Poe makes second-guessing impossible. In none of the tales is the reader permitted to solve the mystery along with the detective. Nor do the tales concern crimes in any narrowly legal sense. Only in the first Dupin tale is there even an identifiable murderer. Most important, the tales’ solutions lack the moral dimension by which mysteries customarily celebrate the detective’s ability to right wrongs or restructure a disordered society. These are not tales of chivalric retribution. The stolen goods of ‘The Gold-Bug’ are never returned to their rightful owners. In the first two Dupin tales all misdeeds go unpunished, while in the third Dupin’s response to the villainous but hardly illegal theft of a love-letter is merely to repeat the original crime in a morally ambiguous way.
We…teach ourselves to see Poe as otherworldly for fear that what he says about the world might actually be true.Readers were wrong to focus on the cleverness of the stories. ‘Where’, Poe wondered, ‘is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself [the author] have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?’ Far from an unambiguous elucidation of Truth, detection was for Poe merely a specialized way of thinking, and one somewhat at odds with the epistemologies of the other tales. Implicitly ratiocination announces the total explicability of what remains unintelligible everywhere else in Poe. For this very reason it seems unsatisfactory and incomplete. The linguistic literalism Legrand uses to solve the cryptogram in ‘The Gold-Bug’ marks his intellect as second-rate, no more admirable than his greed. Even Dupin’s more imaginative logic clarifies reality by oversimplifying it. In interpreting the Rue Morgue murders, Dupin blithely explains away the very strangeness that the Gothic tales celebrate. And ‘The Purloined Letter’, the most sophisticated and non-linear of the detective stories, represses Dupin’s support for the kind of aristocratic libertinism and monarchial politics which Poe and his middle-class readership customarily opposed.
The limitations of detection as a way of knowing the world are clearest in what appears the weakest of the detective tales, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’. Trying to explain in fiction the real-life death of shop girl Mary Rogers, Dupin (and Poe behind him) trade on the right to knowledge afforded them by their culturally privileged position. The comparative failure of their explanations not only challenges that right to know others, it exposes the discriminatory ideologies that make the event inaccessible to them and so gives voice to the very minority identities that privilege seeks to repress. The tale records without comment how the media’s manufacture of a culturally acceptable meaning makes class and gender into ‘mysteries’ .Yet by the most successful of Poe’s ironic effects, the implausibility of the ‘romantic’ explanation of Mary’s death makes the realities of class prejudice, sexual harassment, and reproductive politics all the more visible. Marie Roget becomes, in her resistance to Dupin, Poe’s only gendered character, her narrative his most fully realized world, her murder his sole sexualized event. And in its inability to say the word, the tale stands as our first piece of abortion fiction.
These least known tales show us Poe best. In ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin argued that even madmen ‘are of some nation’. So too with Poe himself. The extravagance of his narratives encouraged readers to divorce Poe from intellectual and social issues and to imagine that he lived with his characters in some ‘ultimate dim Thule’, a dream-land ‘out of SPACE—out of TIME’. Cut off from his thoughts, Poe not only has no chance of finding a place in our cultural histories. He is robbed of the power to say anything significant to those of us who continue to live within culture. Beyond space and time he is also beyond reach, able to thrill but not to touch us. In this respect our first adolescent reading of Poe may have also been our most courageous. Innocent of subjectivity and unimpressed by symbolism, youths find in Poe’s universe the same strangeness that astonishes them in their own. We later teach ourselves to see Poe as otherworldly for fear that what he says about the world might actually be true. Until we can learn once more to read the world back into Poe, we cannot read him seriously at all.
__________________________________
Excerpted from the introduction to THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM AND OTHER TALES, a new edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, edited and introduced by David Van Leer. All rights reserved. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2018 by David Van Leer.
