Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic short stories

Edgar Allan Poe wrote some forty short stories that have been variously categorized as horror, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and Gothic tales. Richard M. Fletcher, in The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe, and J. R. Hammond, in An Edgar Allan Poe Companion, both describe Poe's work as belonging to these categories. But Charles May's Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction and Scott Peeples's Edgar Allan Poe Revisited offer different categories that are as valuable and as sound as those previously mentioned. These are overlapping categories in some cases, particularly in fantastic stories that can be viewed as Gothic, horror, or mere fantasy, to say nothing of others that may have two or more conflicting interpretations, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." The reason for this ambivalence lies, no doubt, in Poe's poetics. His writing never seems to stand on the firm ground of a single style; rather, it fluctuates between or combines two styles, one serious and the other humorous. He always had the readers in mind, as he wrote to Thomas W. White: "To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are sought with avidity". These things refer to the morbid, the bizarre and the satiric - a favorite of American readers at the time.

Despite the surface variety, there are two underlying principles that link all his stories--unity and reason--which may account for the sometimes conflicting categories attributed to his works. As May rightfully indicates, "the single unifying factor in all of Poe's works is the concept of unity itself". Poe mentioned the principle of unity as fundamental to his fiction and poetry as he learned it from August Wilhelm Schlegel via Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The lack of unity implies that the reader's mind cannot be focused on a single plot and will not perceive the resulting final effect. The overall structure of the tale works actively in conveying this effect. The other tenet is the ratiocinative nature of his stories. Because his stories are detailed and consciously crafted, there always remains the sense that all of Poe's stories are guided by a rational principle that is a consequence of Poe's interest in science and of his own literary use of contemporary science. This is easily discernible in the mystery and science fiction stories, and it is present in his horror, Gothic, and fantastic pieces as well.

I am going to expose Poe's poetics regarding his fantastic stories relative to the whole of his fictional prose writings. I am interested in pointing out the narrative strategies that he uses for the accomplishment of the fantastic as well as the importance of the unity of effect and the ratiocinative principle in the most important fantastic pieces, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Ligeia" and "Berenice."

There is more than horror and terror in Poe's fiction, but as Vincent Buranelli says, "these are, as far as his short stories are concerned, the characteristics that seem most prominent and have attracted most attention". We must bear in mind that Poe took a genre that had already yielded its best works, namely the Gothic narrative, and transformed it into something new and suited to contemporary readers' tastes (and open to continuous renewal, demonstrated in Jorge Luis Borges's and Julio Cortázar's fantastic short stories). Scholars such as Clark Griffith and G. R. Thompson have suggested that Poe's tales are ironic twists of Gothic narratives.

What he masterfully achieves is the blending of the Gothic tale--regarded as a tale of "German terror" - and the tales of psychological derangement. He disregards the common idea that terror had a German origin; he believed it originated in the soul: "If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul" - the soul, or in other words the mind, as Poe exemplifies in most, if not all, of his stories. As I will argue later, most of Poe's characters suffer a kind of mania that makes them see a distorted reality and is the cause of the fantastic.

Poe was not interested in the Romantic fantastic of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or William Beckford's Vathek, much less in Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels. He realized that these were stages that had become outdated. If the fantastic was to be believable, it had to offer a new nature, a new narrator, and a new setting. It is true that, as Gerald Kennedy argues, "the supernatural paraphernalia of the Gothic, particularly phantasms of death and destruction, afforded a means of articulating this primal fear"; Kennedy refers to the "terror of the soul".

Before Poe started writing, the fantastic was considered a preternatural event that took place in a setting that was estranged from everyday life. It is one of Poe's great achievements to have made the fantastic part of common life and to have stripped away its supernatural features. His is a psychological fantastic in most cases. Tzvetan Todorov argues that the fantastic takes place in the hesitation between the natural laws and the supernatural event. The reader cannot tell whether the events have a natural origin or they are supernatural. We can include Poe's fantastic here, provided we add that he favors a psychological explanation, as can be seen in three representative stories, "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Ligeia." By psychological, I mean that real events are not as important as the manner in which the narrators perceive them. It is not really important that the main character in "The Black Cat" actually hears the cat's meow; what really matters is that he thinks he has heard it and confesses his deed. Similarly, in "Ligeia" the narrator sees Ligeia's eyes in Lady Rowena's face, and that is what really counts.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the mental derangement that the narrator experiences under Roderick's influence provokes the fantastic: "I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions". There is also another reason for the fantastic. Roderick thinks that the nature surrounding the house influences the building and exerts its influence upon its inhabitants:

This opinion was the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character. The belief was connected with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family.

Both "Berenice" and "Ligeia" are included within the psychological fantastic. Berenice is presented as a creature, if not actually created, at least heavily determined by the narrator's mind:

I had seen her - not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream--not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such being - not as a thing to admire, but to analyze - not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.

In the case of "Ligeia," the fantastic event, that is the appearance of Ligeia in the person of Lady Rowena, has a psychological reason as well, though in this case the opium administered to the narrator may also have distorted the perception of reality.

"The Black Cat" is one story in which the hesitation between the pure fantastic and the distorted perception of reality is most clearly present. The narrator does not fully explain if the cat's meow is heard by the policemen or whether he is the only person who hears and sees the animal. He simply says, "The corpse stood erect before the eyes of the spectators", obviously referring to his wife's corpse.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" presents a clear case of obsessive madness. The fantastic is purely psychological and is provoked by the narrator's obsession with the old man's eye and his assassination. When the policeman asks him about the old man's disappearance, he denies that he may have been involved in the murder, but he hears the old man's heartbeats: "It grew louder-louder-louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly and smiled. Was it possible they heard not?"

All these events have a psychological origin. Poe is greatly interested in the clinical representation of mental excitement, especially, as Robert L. Carringer argues, "those forms of terror that are aroused by the prospect of death or derangement for his narrators". Some critics, such as D. H. Lawrence or Marie Bonaparte, have linked Poe's obsession with the characters' state of mind to his own neurotic personality. It may be argued that Poe's obsessions are reflected in his narrative. But critics should not mistake Poe for his narrators for the sake of the analysis. Moreover, they should not dismiss the influence of eighteenth-century narrators. "The meaning of first-person narrative in stories by Poe becomes clearer in the context of his eighteenth-century precursors. The fictional `I' creates itself and, simultaneously, its frame". "First-person narratives, from Richardson to Poe, enact the unification of narrator and narrated, narration and event, creator and created". To my view, the analysis of the narrator as a character and not as the author's mask is much more important, as I will explain later.

In most of Poe's stories, narrators suffer from a type of mania, either melancholy or madness, that distorts reality. Poe was acquainted with contemporary scientific theories and was attracted to phrenology, mesmerism, and psychology. He frequently mentioned hysteria, melancholy, madness, catalepsy, and other diseases of the mind that were prevalent in his age. His descriptions of melancholic and mad characters indicate that he was acquainted with Thomas Willis's Two Discourses concerning the Soul of the Brutes, which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (1638), which was the first of a series of treatises analyzing madness and melancholy. Besides the medical description of both diseases, he indicated the features that they share. Among the books describing madness that Poe must have read are John Haslam's Observations on Madness and Melancholy (1809) and James Prichard's 1835 Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. The symptoms were instrumental in making the fantastic believable and in providing an explanation that might insert it into everyday life, while at the same time connecting it with the poetics of sensibility prevalent in Poe's time.

Not only did Poe use modern theories of psychology or David Hartley's theories about mental association; he was widely read in mesmerism and used it for his own literary purposes. Bruce Mills argues that Poe realized that mesmerism could be used to build "his short-story aesthetic on the foundation of human psychology". I would add that he built the poetics of the short story as well as that of the fantastic (which implies that both genre and mode went hand in hand in Poe's poetics). As Mills points out later, "the mesmeric turn of the era, then, followed the larger paradigmatic reorientation toward inward states". The orientation toward these states of the mind allowed mesmerism and psychology to play an important role in the creation of the fantastic. Since that time, the fantastic could be created in the narrator's mind and, to explain this, the writer would have a set of scientific explanations that were understood by the readers.

Important as the rational explanation may be, there is still a more important reason for the psychological origin of the fantastic. As May points out, Poe creates a type of narrator who controls the narrative tightly by consciously narrowing the point of view and focus. As May says, Poe employs "a teller so obsessed with the subject of his narration that the obsession creates the tightly controlled unit". This obsessed narrator, who focuses on his nightmarish reality exclusively, tells his experience not as it has been but as he has experienced it, meaning he narrates it as he thinks it has happened. The move from reality toward perception can be masterfully achieved, provided the narrator may have a sound cause that explains the shift. Indeed, narrators in Poe's stories can be divided into two groups, those who continually reject their madness and those who admit that they suffer from melancholy or a disease of the senses--called attentive in some stories. For example, in "Berenice," Egaeus says, "This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive ". Interestingly enough, there is an exception to these characters of great imagination. The narrator in "Ms. Found in a Bottle" admits that he lacks imagination: "a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime". This may be seen as a necessary feature for the fantastic in this story, a fantastic that is not caused by the imagination.

Readers should see the difference between the narrator and Poe as the real author. But this has not always been the case. A large number of critics have equated the two, and it was not until James W. Gargano's article "The Question of Poe's Narrators" that they were taken into account seriously as independent from Poe the real person. "Poe's narrators possess a character and consciousness distinct from those of their creator. These protagonists, I am convinced, speak their own thoughts and are the dupes of their own passions". More important still is Gargano's assertion that Poe "often so designs his tales as to show his narrators' limited comprehension of their own problems and states of mind". Since Gargano's article, other readers have focused on the importance of narrators in Poe's fiction (basically the fantastic). Gregory S. Jay argues that "the ordeals of Poe's narrators tell us much about the fallacy of equating `self' and `self-consciousness'". As Zimmerman says, there is "an aesthetic detachment from his protagonists", and Donald Barlow Stauffer, when analyzing "Ligeia," points out that "the predominantly emotional quality of its style may be defended by its appropriateness to both the agitated mental state of the narrator and the supernatural event he relates".

The narrator of "Berenice," asserts Scott Peeples, "lives mainly through his intellect, born in a library, where he spends seemingly all his time". "Yet differently we grew--I ill of health and buried in gloom mine the studies of the cloister--I living within mine own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation" and "my passions always were of the mind". This means that Berenice is a character partly real and partly created by the narrator's imagination. In fact, as Peeples has pointed out, they (Berenice, Ligeia, and other female characters) are in fact seeking their own identity, whereas the male characters project their subconscious desires or obsessions.

In "Ligeia," the narrator falls into a state of sadness caused by the loss of a beloved person. This leads him to seek a replacement in the person of Lady Rowena. He refuses to accept that he has lost Ligeia. Moreover, he confesses that he cannot remember her family's name or the details about their first meeting. He is forced to accept that reality cannot be avoided indefinitely. His obsession with Ligeia's eyes can be equated with the cousin's obsession with Berenice's teeth. In both cases, the narrators focus their attention on a part of the beloved's body as a substitute for their losses.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the narrator presents the reader with a landscape view that provokes in him a feeling of gloom. The narrator describes the shades of the evening, the melancholy they produce, the gloom that he feels, and the lack of sublimity in the scene. It is the whole atmosphere, gloomy and nightmarish, that creates the fantastic element in "Usher." This has to be seen in psychological terms, that is to say, subjective terms and not in terms of ambiguity or ambivalence, as Todorov argues. By creating a propitious state of mind in the characters, the fantastic may justifiably materialize. All this poses the problem of the narrator's reliability, discussed by Patrick F. Quinn and Thompson. Some critics have seen Roderick and Madeline as the narrator's projections of the mind. However, I would say that rather than projections he is influenced by the ambience that surrounds him, in which, we must not forget, Roderick and Madeline are the central characters.

There is also another problem, and this is the narrator's attitude. As Jay says, "the madness of the narrator would be his rationality in reading, his refusal to recognize the other inhabiting the text". This may be said of all the narrators. There is not a single narrator who accepts that he is mad. In fact, their failure to understand what is happening or has happened is greatly caused by their reading of reality. The narrators of "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are prime examples of this.

In "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrators are obsessed with their supposed madness, which they insistently deny. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" says, "True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?", and in "The Black Cat," "mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not". It is this obsession, along with the extremely narrow point of view of their narratives, that makes the fantastic appear.

In the first stage of his career, Poe favored those settings might be similar to those of British Gothic stories: that is, abbeys, castles, or ancient houses located in Europe. Examples include the locations in "The Oval Portrait," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "William Wilson," "Metzengerstein," "Berenice," and Ligeia." He would place fantastic stories in a remote country that was at the same time familiar so readers could identify them as Gothic or fantastic. He would also use a remote time to make it believable, not only because readers were accustomed to a sort of medieval age but also because the supposedly fantastic event could not be ascertained or denied. Gradually, Poe seemed to realize that settings need not be distanced from the readers' ordinary locations. Instead, the modern city could be a suitable scenario for the psychological fantastic. This was not a source external to the narrator, nor was it preternatural; consequently, the setting could be and should be as realistic as possible for contemporary readers. Otherwise there would not be a congruent relationship between the nature of the fantastic and the setting.

"The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are two good examples of this argument. They are not located in a distant somewhere or in a remote period, although there is the necessary ambiguity in both setting and time so that a too realistic description of either would not make the story unbelievable. We must keep in mind that Poe was writing in the Romantic period and that Realism would not come until the end of the century, despite the fact that he and other authors, Melville for example, took the first steps toward writing more realistic stories. As Carringer has stated, "the Poe protagonist is conspicuously within something the principal activity takes place within a single room, and within a series of rooms in two others. Most key moments of action in Poe conspicuously involve severely restrictive enclosures". There is no doubt that Poe is largely indebted to Gothic fiction, as J. Gerald Kennedy reminds us.

Conclusion

Among Poe's locations, the house stands as the most important. It is not merely the place people inhabit. There is a clear relationship between the house and the narrators' minds. This has been explained in terms of Freudian and Jungian theories (Bonaparte, Wilbur, and Knapp). The house is a symbol of the mind. As such, it may be understandable that the rooms may symbolize the brain's different areas and functions. Within the house, the library has particular importance. The library, so critical in Poe's fantastic fiction, represents the imaginative function of the human mind. In "Berenice," a story pervaded by the dreamy atmosphere of unreality and imagination, the narrator spends a large part of his life in the library, as he admits. Roderick Usher, the protagonist in "The Fall of the House of Usher," owns a library with a large number of books of fiction. He has not been in the open air for a long time, implying that his life experience is almost exclusively fed by such a room. These two are basically melancholic characters. Others, such as those in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," do not mention the library. Instead of an imagination stimulated by a room full of books, their madness is provoked by a cat and an old man's eye. In these two cases, the fantastic does not come from fancy as it was understood during the Romantic period. This poses the question of the power of imagination regarding fantastic fiction. Poe seems to be theorizing and practicing the limits of imagination. His insistence on some rational cause to explain the fantastic seems to indicate that he no longer believes in supernatural theories of the fantastic. At the same time his use of enclosed locations as the appropriate setting for the fantastic seems to point toward a psychological explanation, which is reinforced by the manic character of his narratives.

There are other stories, such as "Ms. Found in a Bottle" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom," located aboard ships at sea. Curiously enough, these stories do not have a psychological explanation for the fantastic. Instead, they are models of mastery in the creation of fantastic short fiction through skilled writing. However, they are distanced from Poe's other stories, since they do not propose a psychological cause to the fantastic. This is quite interesting, as "Ms. Found in a Bottle" was written in a very early stage of his career, probably when he was still hesitant to write about the fantastic. Poe did not, however, leave the psychological totally aside in the story; the narrator mentions opium: "We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium". "A Descent into the Maelstrom" is another example of Poe's interest in science as the source of the fantastic. It was also written at an early stage in his career. In the story, there is no hint of a psychological cause. It is in fact a sort of scientific riddle that makes the fantastic function.

The new fantastic, that is the fantastic as practiced by Poe, needed a narrator whose focus was tightly centered on a single event or character. The tight focus was thought of as a means to achieve the unity of effect that is characteristic of the modern short story. Poe examined the ratiocinative method in mystery and science fiction, which simply parallels the psychological aspects of fantastic stories since they all come from the same poetics of the story. Naturally, this implies that Poe had in mind the same ideas for his stories, no matter how they fell into one category or another.

References

1. http/ salempress.com/store/samples/critical_insights/poe_fantastic.htm

2. http/ poetryfoundation.org/bio/edgar-allan-poe

3. http/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe

4. http/ essortment.com/origins-short-story-34518.html

5. http/ spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/edgarpoe.htm

6. http/ macro-econom.ru/economs.html

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