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Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph J. Moldenhauer
Joseph J. Moldenhauer*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract

The theories of art and the mind which Poe advances systematically in his criticism and elaborates into the cosmology of Eureka are also expressed in his literary works on all levels of theme and form, including recurrent actions, symbols, settings, patterns of characterization, and narrative stances. Despite his separation of beauty from truth and duty, and of the imaginative faculty from reason and conscience, Poe's aesthetic is a self-contained metaphysics and ethics. Unity, the essential condition and supreme value of art, is the condition likewise of death, as pursued by Poe's fictional characters through destructive acts which are vicariously and finally suicidal. Often literally artists or connoisseurs, these protagonists are motivated by a “perversity” indistinguishable in its goals and techniques from those of the divinely inspired imagination. In killing others, they impose unity upon the diverse and particular, assimilating into themselves identities which were tangible reflections of their own beings, and were, so to speak, imperfect art objects. When the hero is victim rather than aggressor, his passage into unconsciousness or mystic awareness is again governed by his longing for unity and attended by aesthetic insight. The relationship in Poe's essays between artist and critic illuminates the ratiocinative tales. Here, the detective's solutions arise from imaginative identification with the criminal and internal enactment of his deed. Obedient to the same intuitive forces, the critic-detective and the creator-criminal display a kinship which conforms to the doubling of aggressive and passive figures in the tales of terror. Life, in Poe's value system, is inimical to an aesthetic bliss; and the didactic implications of his poetry and fiction are reversals of conventional humanistic judgments.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , May 1968 , pp. 284 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 “The Angelic Imagination,” currently reprinted in The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York, 1955), p. 115.

2 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York, 1902), xm, 152. Quotations from Poe will hereafter be drawn from this edition and will be identified parenthetically in the text.

3 Tate, p. 115. See also D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923).

4 More, “A Note on Poe's Method,” in The Demon of the Absolute, New Shelburne Essays, ? (Princeton, N. J., 1928), 86; James, French Poets and Novelists (London, 1893), p. 60.

5 I have avoided reference to Poe's life in developing this argument; but I believe that my conclusions about his works—the life of his imagination—will not prove inconsistent with serious biographical interpretation.

6 Although Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, tr. John Rodker (London, 1949) distorts Poe's works in subordinating them to a preconceived conceptual formula, a less dogmatic application of Freud's psychology to Poe has obvious and widely tested merit.

7 Edward H. Davidson examines the ill-disguised obscenity of the “grotesques” in Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 137–155.

8 Poe's equivocations about “effect” betray a certain vagueness, if not confusion, in the concept. The poet chooses an effect; yet “Beauty” is the only valid effect of the poem (xiv, 194, 197–198). In some contexts Poe seems to refer to the mere mood which the work induces; in others to a total response of emotions, intellect, and “soul,” caused in part by its “leading idea”—though the validity of this central theme has no bearing on the work's artistic worth (xi, 83–84). Unity of effect, moreover, I take to mean not simple concentration of a mood (or mood-colored idea), but rather the completion or exhaustion of the effect which the work generates. Poe's affective unity consists practically in his carrying an intense effect through to a state of emotional and intellectual rest.

9 For studies of the relationship of unity, originality, beauty, “indefinitiveness,” “ideality,” and other key concepts, see George Kelly, “Poe's Theory of Beauty,” AL, xxvii (1956), 521–536, and “Poe's Theory of Unity,” PQ, xxxvii (1958), 34–44.

10 With other students of Poe's poetics, I take seriously his distinction between the “severe” language and “mode of inculcation” of “Truth” and the language and impressive mode of literature (xiv, 272). With them also—and with Poehimself (e.g., xiii, 151–152)—I regard his theory of “Poetry” as his essential aesthetics, applicable in its broad outlines to his practice of the prose tale.

11 Poe believed that the highest earthly beauty was always touched with strangeness, and he was fond of quoting Bacon to that effect. Further, he found “beauty heightened into the sublime, by terror” preferable even to “pure beauty” (xi, 77–78). The “ideality” of a literary work was also intensified by “grotesquerie” (xvi, 178), as “The pure Imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined … Even out of deformities it fabricates that Beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test” (xii, 38–39).

12 This point is made repeatedly throughout Poe's criticism; see esp. xi, 256,277; xiii, 131; xiv, 198; xv, 117.

13 A similar distinction between process and end underlies Poe's analysis of the cosmos in Eureka. The material universe (“plot of God”) is by definition “a difference from the normal—from the right” (xvi, 233–234), and the inevitable reaction to unitary spirituality “is the return from the condition of as it is and ought not to be into the condition of as it was, originally, and therefore ought to he” (xvi, 234).

14 Davidson makes what I regard as an equivalent point as he describes the movement of the poem in Poe's theory destructively “through” the “rational intelligible world” toward “ultimate meaning” located figuratively on the “other side” (p. 100; see also pp. 150–151, 258).

15 See also xiv, 290 (“The Poetic Principle”), and xvi, 183, 252 (Eureka).

16 Poe invites confusion by identifying gravity as the “material” principle and electricity as the “spiritual” one (xvi, 211–214, 305–306). But the difficulty can be resolved by noting that gravity is manifested because of the physicalness of the universe—the materialization of God. The tendency to return to undifferentiated spirit is inherent in matter qua matter, while electricity is an immaterial force imposed by God after the radiation of matter. See also v, 245–250, and The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. W. Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), i, 257, 260; ii, 361–364. A different interpretation is presented in Charles O'Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space,” PMLA, Lxxvii (1962), 86.

17 The post-cataclysmic state of consciousness is predicated fictionally in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” and “The Power of Words.”

18 Italics mine; until the universal collapse, the divinity of any individual can only be partial, just as the Poetic Sentiment is satisfied only in “glimpses” of supernal loveliness through art.

19 Wilbur, Introduction to Poe selections in Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller (New York, 1962), i, 379.

20 Cf. Robert Daniel, “Poe's Detective God,” Furioso, vi (Summer 1951), 47.

21 Cf. Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1961), pp. 46–50.

22 It is noteworthy that Poe rarely specifies a reasonable, concrete motive for his characters' destructive urges. He sometimes offers a vague allusion to an “offense” done the protagonist by his enemy, or allows the “cause” to be a simple object (e.g., the filmed eye or Berenice's teeth) behind which, for the criminal, lurks some obscure and unnamed abstract conception. A phrase from Eureka helps us to understand this motivational vacuum and to see the general condition of human separateness as the real source of these desires: “wrongfulness implies relation” (xvi, 233). Conversely, relation—which exists everywhere outside total Unity—implies wrongfulness. Also in Eureka, Poe declares that clusters of particles seek Unity “wherever it is even partially to be found,” namely, in other masses, and that in the final cataclysm they will realize their most intense wish—to be “even more than together” (xvi, 219–220).

23 Even though our suspicions to the contrary are confirmed by Poe's heroes' protestations of sanity, we find it difficult to view their acts from a “clinical” perspective. The mode of narration forces us to adopt the persona's outlook as the norm. See, in this connection, xvi, 165.

24 For a similar “psychomachic” reading of this tale see Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, 111., 1957), pp. 233–236.

25 An item in the “Fifty Suggestions” sheds further light on Montresor's personality : “An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty—a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity or disproportion. Thus a wrong—an injustice—done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. … the man who is not ‘irritable,‘… is no poet” (xiv, 175–176).

26 For another consideration of Dupin as resolvent artist see Davidson, pp. 216–222.

27 The Minister's theft can be related to the kinds of criminality discussed earlier by viewing it as an effort to gain complete (political) control over the royal lady. His possession of the letter is an internalization of the owner, by proxy or symbol.

28 The first of these motives reminds us of the “play” aspect of God's creation in Eureka; see also “Marginalia” (xvi, 123). The second is illuminated by another “Marginalia” entry about the artist (xvi, 121). The third is comparable to Montresor's.

29 See Wilbur, pp. 375–378.

30 Poe's attitude toward real nature is by no means appreciative. In “The Domain of Arnheim” he expresses a distinct preference for the artificial over the natural garden: the irregularity of “primitive” nature is indicative of the fragmented, mortal state of the world (vi, 183–184). The true landscape artist regularizes his materials, evoking from or imposing on them an aura of the strange and unearthly. “Ideality,” as induced by remoteness, exotic weirdness, and abstract design, is what Poe values in nature. See also iv, 238–239; vi, 190–196, 255–271; xiv, 291. His two catchwords forhis tales, “grotesque” and “arabesque,” denote just this avoidance of verisimilitude and subordination of natural shapes to formal designs.

31 Despite the biological absurdity, Poe suggests (iii, 288) that they are identical twins; and in two earlier versions of the tale, he writes that Madeline's figure, air, and features were “all, in their very minutest development … identically those” of Roderick (iii, 339–340). The notion of identical kinship is, of course, powerfully indicative of the theme under discussion in this essay.

32 A passage in Eureka describes the latter stages of the cosmic collapse in incestuous terms: “and now, with a thousandfold electric velocity, commensurate … with the spiritual passion of their appetite for oneness, the majestic remnants of the tribe of Stars flash … into a common embrace” (xvi, 308). See also the “lost parent” passage.

33 The infant girl delivered of Morella on her deathbed is the only child born in all Poe's plots. But the daughter is a reincarnation of the mother, and falls dead when the protagonist, moved by some “fiend,” names her Morella in a pre-adolescent baptismal ceremony. The opened tomb of the first Morella proves vacant. The protagonist's true “baby” is the beautiful dead woman, just as the poet's truest subject is the death of the beautiful woman.

34 It is the usual view of critics, expressed directly in Joseph M. Garrison, Jr.'s, “The Function of Terror in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” AQ, xviii (1966), 136–150, that madness, perversity, and terror are Poe's revelations by contrast, by antithesis, of supernal beauty. According to these readings, man's condition is diametrically opposed to the harmonious condition of art, and death is the ultimate human disharmony.