All the Colors of the Dark: Personal Summations On The Exquisite Decay of E.A. Poe
Gothtober, Part I
by Noah Rymer
When it comes to acutely identifying and understanding smaller works pertaining to a poet's or writer’s larger corpus, I truly have a problem simply focusing on them from one to one. It’s easy enough to focus on a singular novel or film, something that speaks its breadth through its length, and thus engenders within itself a particular microcosm, and yet, Edgar Allen Poe himself was not the greatest at producing these long-form narratives, as the sole witness of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym can duly attest to. And indeed, it seems rather unfair, short-sighted, even, to merely dissect a limb when we can the parse the whole corpse, for is not the autopsy of a calf greater than the simple dissection of its eye? The exquisite corpse of Poe provides much fancifully ghoulish merit and intrigue, such that which cannot be extrapolated from a dry summary of one story to the next.
In the particular stories (The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Assignation) and poems (The Bells, The Valley of Unrest) I have gathered under my own peculiar classification, I have found my personal inclination goes towards the part of his oeuvre which most explicitly partakes within a decaying decadence (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Assignation), with the other tending more towards the more overtly psychological and wrathful (The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado) with, as Nat pointed out to me, the rather unusual leitmotif of a living burial.
Yet, I suspect that all proper horror (and adjacent) authors themselves favor their own little, idiosyncratic flavors of death, destruction, decay—I’m most partial to a good decapitation myself, the blood gushing from the stump of a neck like a mini-geyser—and that Poe’s penchant is nothing more than merely symptomatic of the general desire of all poets, playwrights, and drafters of prose that take part in his lineage to be known for that certain shade of night which we indeed all strive for. And so, perhaps, when one thinks of a live burial, one may think of Poe in particular, even en extremis, for what is Bacon without the all-consuming and atavistic sexual desire? What becomes of Tarkovsky when one separates the faith from his fictions? I believe all good authors have within themselves a pet obsession.
And Poe is nothing if not obsessive: his prose always betrays quite beautifully the feverish ramblings of a bleeding mind, even if his style be deft and economical, even if his prose be imaginative and grounded, that the minds of his protagonists are always on the verge of violent collapse, that their trembling hands are always aching towards the unthinkable, that that common madness than men and women must hide away from each other almost always finds itself as the very skin of his protagonists—and in this, Poe lets his obsessions take over, and from this, is both the formula for any good Poe story as well as its very sublimity, as I understand it.
Poe manages to wrangle the floridity, the baroque tapestry, of the antiquary gothic novel into a form that proves itself much more succinct, trimming the excesses of his predecessors while simultaneously allowing that same, sumptuous styling to lard our imaginations with his shimmering descriptions of that most luminous putrefaction he has made his epitaph, drawing up vicariously or viciously compelling characters who, despite their grotesqueries (which, in the more bloated, antiquary style of, say, The Monk, or even Melmoth The Wanderer,1 would form the composite of their character, more or less), have been bestowed a certain humanity that allows them to escape the role of something akin to a tritone in a symphony—discordant and with a demonic resonance no matter where they should be placed. And that isn’t to say that Ambrosio or Melmoth lacked distinction wholly as men from monsters, for the once-virtuous Ambrosio must have had been seduced before being transformed into the bête noire of his own lustful possession, and just as well, is it not true that Melmoth, damned to mark his unending days upon the earth, felt compassion and perhaps even love during the tenure of his curse?
But their respective authors only allow for such aspects of light so as to engage their shadows even further, like some sort of literary tenebrism—they do not seek to illuminate the man any further than to damn him, for what good is a defrocked monk if he were not so close to God to begin with? And what are the festering passions of an eternal flâneur if his desire for another be not enough to save him?
Thus Poe allows for this mixture of man and beast, never allowing either to take full course but presenting them more as constantly swirling into the other like an arabesque of oil and water, for this allows his tragedies to take on a fuller, more orchestral quality, to partake within that dynamic that the Gothic school, as a whole, falters to summon up, for lack of duality on the part of their characters, or the excess of melodrama, or the excising of the supernatural, a most unforgivable sin in a genre such as this (and we can blame a certain Anne Radcliffe for that last part, for her disdain of the ultimately unknowable, the mystery inherent within the mystical)!
And yet, just as well, as a man born in the wake of the Enlightenment, Poe allows himself the benefit of the rational, scientific solution (our protagonist reasons that the hideous portraiture of his dead cat imprinted just above his bed was merely some form of chemical reaction, accomplished after some neighbor threw the hanging beast against his wall), and yet, unlike any old Ann Radcliffe story, there exists no telling sigh of relief upon the banishment of these dusty ghosts of old, of clearing out the cobwebs of superstition in the way of science; indeed, there exists only the terror in realizing that the threat permeates nonetheless, that reason will get a man nowhere in the face of unspeakable dread and godless acts, the sublime fright of terror that Ms. Radcliffe so eloquently pits against the putrid baseness of horror, in her fantastic essay2 illuminating the goals of both within the Gothic Novel.
The man orchestrates tension like some fiend composer of the damned, and with devilish delight takes care to sprinkle in elements of black comedy, even (the ringing of the bells of Fortunato offer a ghoulish humor as he descends drunkenly to his fate, and that humor soon turning to horror as he offers the same hopeless jingle as his only reply when Montressor yells for him beyond the veil of the cemented wall, providing his true cerement) as well as a most touching sympathy for his own grotesques (Roderick Usher is described in a manner that wavers between the horrid and the fawning, with the narrator providing us with a “cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surprisingly beautiful curve…”) that stir within us a greater shock and tragedy when they meet our demise, for what is tragedy if not an arousal of fear and pity, to be Aristotelian about it all?
All of this is to say that, like any great talent, Poe triumphantly manages to free himself of that most barbarous cycle of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, and, in doing so, allows himself to become his own father—sublimating his masters to a greater art and becoming one of them in turn. And subsequently, in all horror writers, I suspect, there is something of Poe’s, even if one were to never have read him in the first place, as there is something of Homer’s, of Ovid's, and of Shakespeare’s all common to the practitioners of the literary arts, for their demiurgical significance in so canonically forming the world of letters as a whole. Indeed, I myself am not free of that very same influence, but rather find myself so lovingly chained to the grave of my master, that I am able to acknowledge that anxiety that Poe so strongly exerts upon me, now and forever.
In fact, it wasn’t until I read Poe for this project that I properly understood how much he composes me as I compose my own works, how his ghostly hand guides mine in this most damnable art, and how I could only wish for a sliver of the brilliance of his mind to be bestowed unto my own. Such is the solitary art of a critic—to know how much greater the men you admire are rather than yourself.
I feel I have already exhausted myself and yet truly said nothing all at once, that even in my summation the perfect analysis eludes me. In remembrance of Longinus, I must remember that the sublime is that which cannot truly be grasped, and so in practice of his theory, I must admit that the true greatness of Poe escapes my critic’s lens. But I know that he is one of The Greats, and he is great for a reason, perhaps even further than the ones I have already given.
Poe, perhaps most notably of all, unfortunately carries that most sordid reputation of representing the tedium of any high-school literary class, the October reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that becomes a standard and a trope of the autumnal season. But if I can implore you, the reader of any one thing, if I can convince you of the contrary, then I would beg you to please reassess the disregarded place E. Poe occupies in your mind, in your heart, in your personal collection.
He is not a stuffy, shelved read, the distinguished headstone marking a quaint and distant Romantic era, but rather, an architect of the unspeakable, a literary holy terror. Though the man be sepulchered for centuries, his prose be not as buried as he, but rather fresh and still-beating, and I implore you, dear reader, to hear that gasping breath, the harried heaving of your own impression of the man—buried alive and still clawing at the prison of his casket—and to let him out before he expires, for Edgar Allen Poe’s work is of the living, and he lives on vicariously, viciously, through his oeuvre!
This, I humbly beg of you, to renew your sight of those well-worn copies of his works, to plunge deeply into his library like a poisoned dagger into the breast. The only thing that be dead of Poe’s projects are the corpses that reside within them, and even of that, I must confess, I’m not so sure myself…
Melmoth was, in fact, published in 1830, but was part of a decaying (haha) literary tradition, as it was more of the Late Gothic style, making its author, C. Maturin, and E. Poe himself contemporaries in one sense of the word, and in the other, not much so.
The text in question is titled On The Supernatural In Poetry, and it should be stated that this 2 author (myself) rather enjoys more the horrific charm than the terrific (in the archaic sense of the word, naturally), and indeed, it is also pertinent in the fact that I reference M.G. Lewis’ novel (Radcliffe’s infamous archival of letters) rather than one of Radcliffe’s own, despite the fact that I do make the distinction using her essay. So, both of them win out in the end, but for different reasons.
Noah Rymer is a part-time dishwasher as well as the editor-in-chief of the literary outhouse Pere Ube, whose debut novella denouement is set to come out on Anxiety Press. His poetry, prose, and essays can be found in various sleaze joints such as BRUISER, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, and DO NOT SUBMIT!, and he is currently writing his thesis on Flannery O’Connor.
One of my favorite authors😊
Welcome back Noah! Excellent essay!