Critical Reassessments

Abstract

Writing in the Georgia Review in 1964, Charles Thomas Samuels provocatively inquired, “How can a bad writer be a major figure? About Edgar Allan Poe, no more important question can be asked.”1 Samuels’s question reflects his—and many critics’—uneasiness at the time with what he describes as the baffling paradox of Poe’s iconic cultural status despite “anything like a critical consensus”2 regarding the meaning and artistic merit of his literary works. To twenty-first-century ears, Samuels’s remarks may simply sound old-fashioned, expressing sentiments similar to T. S. Eliot’s infamous (and later somewhat revised) derisive judgements about Poe’s writing and intellect.3 However, Samuels’s jarring provocation and Eliot’s studied ambivalence both make reference to what might diplomatically be called the twentieth century’s “Poe problem”: the fact that Poe presented “a stumbling block for the judicial critic.”4 While there was no doubt among scholars that Poe’s cultural influence was equal to or even surpassed that of many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, his exact position in the American literary canon was subject to intense debate.5 Although much ink was spilled in analyzing Poe the man, Poe the writer continued to languish as “a scholarly and critical orphan.”6 One might suggest that the eventual solidification of Poe’s reputation as a literary artist has, quite literally, depended on scholars figuring out how to read his works. As David Ketterer acknowledged in 1979, the real “breakthrough” in reevaluating Poe’s writing coincided with G. R. Thompson’s founding of the Poe Newsletter at Washington State University in 1968. That moment marked the inception of what turned out to be a true “Poe renaissance,” characterized by the “considerable resurgence of American academic interest in the actual words that Poe committed to paper.”7 It is in this dynamic context that Thompson’s groundbreaking study Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) appeared, offering a new and influential set of critical interventions and interpretive frameworks with which to approach Poe’s fiction—in short, a “new way of reading Poe” (8).In prefacing his study, Thompson describes the “uncomfortable” situation facing scholars as one of accounting for the apparent unevenness and inconsistency in Poe’s oeuvre, noting that “the body of [Poe’s] fiction splits disturbingly into two large, seemingly inconsistent, groups: flawed Gothic tales on the one hand and flawed comic and satiric tales on the other” (4). Equally important, Thompson suggests that, historically, apparent inconsistencies and failures in Poe’s works had been explained by critics as reflections of the author’s own psychological fragmentation. Citing the failure of outmoded biographical and psychoanalytically oriented approaches, which, as David Halliburton has suggested, “tend to regard the text as a clinical phenomenon,”8 Thompson observes: Indeed, it has come to be conventional to explain the curious incongruities in Poe’s works by means of a pseudo-Freudian biographical approach, as proceeding from his lack of self-identity (Poe as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving father). This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks or guises and to spend his life in “role playing.” (5) Thompson’s inventive solution is to challenge the myth of Poe—the “merely . . . schizophrenic genius of the demonic imagination” (7)—with the portrait of a writer deeply informed by the aesthetic and philosophical currents of his milieu, namely the German school of Romantic Irony. From this perspective, apparent inconsistencies (and even deficiencies) in Poe’s writing may be viewed as the hallmarks of an ironic “multiple vision” (17) that allowed him to transcend personal obsessions and genre limitations.Central to Thompson’s thesis is that Poe inherited from the German Romantics not only their “Gothic gloom and horror” (20) but also their “theories . . . about the subconscious mind, about ‘objective subjectivity,’ about the ultimate ‘annihilation’ of contradictions through ironic art, and about the idealistic ‘transcendence’ of earthly limitations through the Godlike immanence and detachment of the artistic mind” (20). Thus, influenced by the German Romantic Ironists, Thompson argues that Poe developed peculiar forms of self-parody in his fiction that allowed him to transcend “mere selfness” and view circumstances from a “mystical” or “ideal” perspective (10). Although Thompson frames Poe’s relation to the German Romantics—especially Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and others—in terms of their broad metaphysical speculation, his discussion, for much of the book, specifically addresses the ways in which Poe’s aesthetics seek to accomplish a “transcendental mastery of the world and oneself through simultaneous detachment and involvement” (23). In this light, Poe is, in effect, rediscovered as a masterful ironist and brilliant hoaxer; his works—when traced to their obscure sources—often reveal a winking self-parody or a highly nuanced critique. One at least implicit goal of Thompson’s book, then, was to account for the troubling ambiguity surrounding Poe’s works and thereby re-present the author, himself, as a more self-aware, deliberate, and respectable literary figure.At the time of its publication, some reviewers found in Poe’s Fiction a much-needed supplement to traditional Poe scholarship, while others perceived a potential threat in Thompson’s approach. Nina Baym, for example, observed that Thompson’s method was a “good corrective to the excesses of the Weltschmerz tendency” in Poe criticism.9 J. Gerald Kennedy, who found merit in Thompson’s attempted synthesis of the comic and Gothic strains of Poe’s work, enthusiastically asserted that if the “implications of Thompson’s study are accepted,” it would require a “thorough reassessment of Poe’s art and his position in our literature.”10 There were others, however, who resisted Thompson’s “new” way of reading. In his lively assessment of Thompson’s study, David H. Hirsch remarked: Poe, according to Mr. Thompson, is a super-conscious super-rational super ironist who never meant any of the things that, for some hundred years, scholars, critics, and general readers thought he was saying. All these years the real Poe has been lurking contemptuously behind his masks of “mocking irony,” “ironic mockery,” “hoaxlike mockery,” “hoaxing satire,” “satiric hoax.”11 One gets the sense, when reading Hirsch’s (what may as well be described as a) diatribe against the book, that something valuable risked being lost in revamping Poe’s image and re-presenting him as a self-conscious ironist. Hirsch’s frankly emotional response to Thompson’s work reflects not so much the rejection of a critical methodology as a reaction to the idea of Poe that emerges through the application of that method. For Hirsch—who was also experimenting with a new, existentialist way of reading Poe—the ambiguity was the point.12 In response to Thompson, Hirsch concludes, “If the key to reading Poe lies in the concepts of tension and irony, then what happens to this key when contradictions (that is to say, tensions) are annihilated? The answer is that Poe (Mr. Thompson’s Poe, that is) becomes a dull boy.”13 From this perspective, Poe’s ambiguity, his darkness, to which the reader has become accustomed through careening tales of madness, sensation, and uncanniness, are no longer evidence of a mind or artistry on the brink. Rather, in gazing into the abyss of the “ultimately incomprehensible, absurd, or . . . possibly malevolent universe” (Thompson 12), Poe, the Romantic Ironist, seeks (only) to attain, through aesthetic means, “an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession and intellectual control” (13).14There are moments in the early chapters of Poe’s Fiction when readers might tend to agree with some of Hirsch’s concerns. Thompson’s discussion of several of Poe’s early comic tales, for example, presents Poe as a sly and occasionally sophisticated satirist, but one whose objects of parody would have been obscure to most nineteenth-century readers and virtually undetectable by modern ones. Thompson’s overview of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier tales of 1831–32 is ostensibly meant to make the case that Poe’s use of ironic parody is, in fact, “deep-seated and all pervasive,” even in Poe’s earliest works (39). Although Thompson admits that Poe’s satiric aim was “only vaguely understood by his contemporaries” (42), the proof of his intention may be discerned through the meticulous textual excavation of primary sources and corroborating marginalia. “The Duke de L’Omelette,” for example, is revealed to be Poe’s mocking satire of a contemporary editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. One would only realize this, however, if one recognized Willis’s signature affectations of refinement in the tale’s imagery. Thompson points out, for instance, that the roasted Peruvian ortolan served to the Duke represents Willis’s pet bird (45). Likewise, Thompson notes that “olives and ottomans” are meant to caricature Willis’s “symbols of refinement,” while the French phrases sprinkled throughout the tale are allusions to his pretentious style (45). Another Courier tale, “A Tale of Jerusalem,” performs a similarly veiled satire of the nineteenth-century “rage for didactic historical novels set in the Holy Land” (46). By imitating and even plagiarizing elements of such popular works as Horace Smith’s Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (1828), Thompson argues, Poe achieves a “remarkable phony style” (46), and he offers this as proof that Poe must be “satirizing something, even if only the Jews themselves” (46).15 Such erudite analyses of Poe’s early comic works are plentiful in Poe’s Fiction and ultimately valuable in that they offer plausible interpretive strategies for approaching idiosyncratic texts that would otherwise remain indecipherable for most readers. For as Thompson himself observes, without the addition of such esoteric contexts, some of Poe’s early comic tales “see[m] simply pointless” (45). But while such readings prove that Poe was indeed capable of satire, they also suggest that most readers would likely never comprehend the targets of his parodic jabs without professional help.It becomes clear that exposing the subtle (and sometimes even offensive) satire in Poe’s early comic tales is not really the point of Thompson’s study. Rather, Thompson highlights the techniques involved in these early comic pieces (satires, hoaxes, burlesques) in order to trace Poe’s passage from satire to irony, specifically with regard to his view of the Gothic genre, as his title indicates. Thompson maintains that the early Gothic performance “Metzengerstein,” which had previously been viewed by critics, who regarded Poe only as a Gothicist, as a “false start” (67), can instead be viewed as a transitional text in Poe’s development as a writer and a “paradigm for [his] subsequent Gothic hoaxes” (67). Even with its convoluted plot line, (involving a blood feud between the Berliftzing and Metzengerstein families, superstitions concerning the occult doctrine of metempsychosis, and the supernatural appearance of a colossal and ghostly white horse), it reflects Poe’s serious philosophical consideration of the Gothic aesthetic universe while, at the same time, maintaining a skeptical stance against a “society that believes in such things” (67). Thompson points out, however, that because the tale’s satire is often subtle and Poe’s approach apparently serious, to many critics it seemed to be merely a failed Gothic tale. Thompson provocatively maintains that “Metzengerstein” is, on the contrary, a “carefully flawed” (67) tale by design, intended, precisely for that reason, as a hoax. Moreover, the critical confusion over the tale results from the fact that the ironic perspective is “somewhat blurred” (67). The careful consideration of how Poe’s ironic perspective comes into focus throughout his career—both in terms of its aesthetic refinement and its philosophical aims—emerges as the compelling primary focus of Thompson’s study.Some of the most insightful moments in Poe’s Fiction occur when Thompson translates the Romantic Ironists’ interest in the “deliberate breaking of the illusion” (21) of a literary work into Poe’s adoption of the characteristic posture of “ambivalent self-division” (176). Poe both meets the public’s expectations for Gothic sensational effects while, at the same time, perversely undermining them through hidden clues, on the one hand, and outrageous self-parody on the other. His tales not only depict instances of psychological perversion in the forms of obsession, self-deception, and self-destruction but they also enact such perversion at a structural-aesthetic level. If, as Thompson argues, “the universe created in Poe’s fiction is one in which the human mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning,” the nature of that universe is, itself, deceptive and built on the “constant shifting of appearances” (165). Thompson describes Poe’s technique as a Gothic writer, then, as that of constructing a “deceptive tripleness” (77) in his tales, which he notes, reflects the peculiarly American version of the Gothic. In contrast to the English (Radcliffean) Gothic novel that depicts supernatural elements only to explain them away as the misperception of a character, the American Gothic retains an ambiguous attitude toward the supernatural (76). Poe’s tales are, within this tradition, meant to be viewed as “supernatural on one level, psychological on another, satiric and ironic on another” (77). It is the third, ironic element that offers something surprising for students of Poe.Thompson suggests that Poe’s readers, following Gothic conventions, may become “locked” into the delusional point of view of the narrator, notwithstanding the narrator’s explicit indications of his compromised perspective, “his madness, or nervousness, or terror” (77). However, Poe introduces a third position in relation to the psychological and the supernatural—the ironic—in order to disrupt the reader’s identification with the narrator’s perspective and establish a new, “transcendental” perspective—one that allows the reader to confront the deceptive nature of the human mind, literary texts, and reality itself. The “English” Gothic desire for rational explanation is fully apparent (“if the alert reader will look for it”; 82), though repressed in the text, displaced onto subtle symbolic imagery, obscure references, or barely perceptible frames. According to Thompson, then, the reader is essentially placed in the position of a ratiocinator searching for clues or, potentially, a member of Poe’s inner circle, sharing an inside joke with reference to the Gothic genre and his own works.In order to demonstrate this idea, Thompson offers the example of how multiple levels of irony operate in Poe’s popular tale “Ligeia” (1838). On the surface, the tale famously depicts the death and supernatural metempsychosis of the narrator’s lover, Ligeia, in the body of his subsequent wife, Rowena. Thompson suggests, however, that the tale’s real subjects are the narrator’s “delusive madness” and possibly even murder (82). According to Thompson, the perceptive reader may come to realize that Ligeia “exists [only] in the narrator’s mind” (80). It is clear enough that the narrator’s psychological state is being called into question when, in the opening of the story, he can remember neither the circumstances of meeting Ligeia nor her last name. Furthermore, as Thompson points out, the narrator’s mention of opium shifts from a potent metaphor for Ligeia’s “strange” beauty (she has the “radiance of an opium dream”; M 2:311) to a description of the narrator’s actual drug addiction (82). What is more profound in Thompson’s approach, however, is his insistence that Poe uses the term “arabesque” not only to describe certain odd features of the narrator’s Gothic interior but also to signify, from within the tale, a perspective of judgment on the events taking place. Citing, in particular, the description of the phantasmagoric effect of arabesque figures of Norman myth inscribed on the narrator’s draperies, Thompson argues that “the arabesque decor as Poe uses it is not merely the monstrousness of supernatural things but is a matter of appearance, of deceptiveness, of perspective and point of view in an overall design” (81). The interior details, in other a way of a of through which readers and thereby their own to In his analyses of several of Poe’s “The of “The and “The of the Thompson that such interior more the of Gothic explicit to the arabesque (and meant to the arabesque as an aesthetic be as to how a According to Thompson, who much to an historical overview of the of the terms “arabesque” and the for Poe, is with of odd and with and with and and with the of In Poe’s and symbolic then, “arabesque” with and represents and deceptive Gothic conventions, such as and to the status of the tale, itself, as an deceptive textual to and to the narrator’s into question while, the reader’s that the perspective is one in Thompson argues, Poe’s effects are “the of . . . a mind” In his reading of “The of Thompson that Poe the ironic self-parody of “Ligeia” to his ostensibly serious description of an home Poe’s of the of American ultimately the Gothic interior of his tale of is at in Poe’s Fiction is Thompson’s that Poe’s Gothic writing a a skeptical philosophical view of the universe is with and Thompson’s Poe, it out, is not simply to on his readers or them as the of his Rather, the Poe with his readers is to reveal of mind, namely the human to as a for the human of Thompson’s Poe of his His Romantic is not the of some of the the philosophical perspective in the of of (165). As Thompson observes, is only in the of that Poe comes to The effect of Poe’s aesthetic is the of an ironic tension between the of an mind . . . the of the and the reader’s “transcendental” that are Thompson suggests, in other that the of stoical and by Poe’s Romantic Irony is, itself, a merely of Poe’s of the Gothic of his own in its deceptive not offer the that there a for on which identity may be Poe’s ironic only to that the of a malevolent universe” can only be if it can at through a of the limitations of own The Thompson is “an ambivalent a of or irony, and as well a by the of the human mind out toward an