Edgar Allan Poe (14 page)

Here Poe broadens the meaning of the word ‘decorist’. And why not? He coined it. The earliest known usage of the word occurs seven years earlier in ‘The Visionary’, in which it means someone who takes a superficial attitude toward interior design. Poe’s review of
Night and Morning
adds a further nuance, suggesting the same word could be applied to personal appearance as well as home decor. People who are decorists create superficial personal appearances that do not necessarily reflect their personalities. The double meaning of the word ‘decorist’ reinforces the parallel between physiognomy and interior decor.

Poe coined many other words. Understanding that neologisms could revitalize the language and develop its expressive powers, he never hesitated to invent words whenever necessary. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, other words Poe added to the English language include: belaud, bemirror, bullyism, circum-gyratory, disenchain, elocutionary, elocutionize, Macauleyism, markedness, melodramatism, mispunctuate, multicolour, mystific, normality, overscore, paragraphism, pesty, phaseless, quotability, scoriae, sentience, Shelleyan, spasmodist, spherify, tintinnabulation, unanswerability, unclassifiable, unindividualized, unmined, unmouldered, and many, many more.

In his critical work, Poe sought to define literary terms more precisely. In the review of
Night and Morning
, for instance, he specifically defines the word ‘plot’: ‘that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole.’
²⁹
This definition helps explain the meticulous craftsmanship he brought to his own fiction. Coleridge said that in a poem every word counts. Poe went one better. Not only does every word count, but the
position
of each word also counts. Furthermore, this rigorous aesthetic applies to prose as well as verse. Few works better exemplify Poe’s definition of plot than ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.

Widely recognized as the first detective story in literary history, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ established the conventions of the genre. The tale is narrated by the comparatively slow-witted friend of master sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. Together the two men visit a crime scene to unravel the mystery of how two women were murdered inside a locked apartment. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a direct descendant of C. Auguste Dupin, and Dr Watson bears an uncanny resemblance to Poe’s narrator. Agatha Christie owes a debt to Poe as well. Hercule Poirot directly descends from Dupin, and Colonel Hastings follows Poe’s narrator. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin also resemble Dupin and Poe’s narrator.

Poe brought Dupin back for two sequels: ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’. Based on a true story, ‘Marie Rogêt’ retells the story of the mysterious death of Mary Rogers, a New York cigar girl who perished from a botched abortion. Poe changed her name and relocated the story to Paris, but contemporary readers easily recognized his inspiration. ‘The Purloined Letter’, a more effective tale, tells the story of a stolen letter the prefect of police cannot locate. The bumbling police detective is another convention of the detective story Poe introduced. Dupin, on the other hand, is able to locate the letter because he possesses the imagination the police lack. The ideal detective, like the ideal poet, has both reason and imagination.

In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin solves the mystery by asking a fundamental question. As he tells the narrator, ‘In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked “what has occurred”, as “what has occurred that has never occurred before”.’
³⁰
Dupin applies his question to solve a crime; Guy Debord has since recognized that the same question can be applied to plumb the mysteries of modern existence.
³¹
Poe may have isolated the anonymous individual in ‘The Man of the Crowd’, but the figure of Dupin offers man an escape or, at least, a way toward understanding. By discerning what occurs now that has never occurred before, man can find a path to truth and, possibly, a means of coping with the uncertainties of modern life.

Editing Poe’s short stories, Thomas O. Mabbott placed ‘Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling’ at the end of one major period of fiction and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ at the start of the next major period. In between he placed a short section of tales including ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd’. Labelling this section ‘Interlude’, Mabbott inadvertently revealed that he did not quite know what to do with the works that fell within this brief period. But there is a continuity that extends from the end of one major period to the start of the next across this so-called interlude. All these tales take for their subject the legibility of the modern world. The differences among them depend upon who is doing the reading.

Sir Patrick, the bumpkin-like Peeping Tom, gets himself in trouble with Mrs Treacle because he misunderstands her behaviour. He projects his feelings onto her, and she reflects back his desire, which he misinterprets as hers. The
flâneur
-like narrators of ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd’ have considerable ability to read others, though one has a significant advantage. The narrator of ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ watches an inhabitant imprinting himself onto the physical space of his living room, whereas the narrator of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ must interpret those he sees on the fly. His initial confidence disappears as he realizes the limitations of his ability to read others. Dupin combines the abilities of both. He can interpret the physical space of the crime scene, but he can also read others’ thoughts as they walk silently through the night-time streets.

The underlying reason for Dupin’s profound detective abilities remains uncertain in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, but in ‘The Purloined Letter’ Poe reveals why Dupin is such a good detective. When the prefect of police scoffs at the idea of being a poet, Dupin humbly admits that he has been ‘guilty of certain doggerel’ himself.
³²
In other words, Dupin is a poet as well as a detective. He personally combines the powers of reason and imagination, each of which enhances the other. In the detective process, reason can take the detective only so far. Assembling the facts and making all the necessary deductions initiates the detective process, but to solve a crime properly, the detective must make an imaginative leap. Viewing a crime scene, the man of reason sees what is, but the poet is the one who imagines what has happened.

Poe continued doing good work for
Graham’s
Magazine. ‘
A Descent into the Maelström’, a thrilling tale of life-threatening danger, appeared in the May 1841 issue. Structured as a frame tale, this story marks another advance in Poe’s narrative technique. Beginning in the voice of an outside narrator – an American tourist – the narrative gives way to an old sailor who has experienced first-hand the harrowing dangers of the famous whirlpool off the coast of Norway. In a structural variation, the outside narrator never returns to finish the story; the inside narrator gets the last word. ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ explores another new type of person who, like the businessman and the detective, was coming to define the modern world: the tourist.

The word ‘tourist’ had entered the English language in the late eighteenth century, but its meaning shifted in the early nineteenth. Initially synonymous with ‘traveller’, it slowly gathered negative connotations.
¹
Poe’s work tracks the shift. In 1840 he called his trail-blazing explorer Julius Rodman a ‘tourist’, but three years later he saw the tourist as a dandy in silk stockings. Discussing Charles Fenno Hoffman’s
Winter in the West
three more years later, Poe observed: ‘Its scenic descriptions are vivid, because fresh, genuine, unforced. There is nothing of the cant of the tourist for the sake not of nature but of
tourism.
’
²
During the half dozen years separating the Rodman story and the Hoffman article, Poe portrayed the tourist in several short stories, questioning the kind of leisure they symbolized.

Before coming to Norway, the outside narrator of ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ had seen America first. Admitting to, even boasting about his familiarity with Niagara Falls, he clearly identifies himself as a tourist. By 1841 the world-famous falls attracted thousands of visitors annually. One contemporary observer called Niagara Falls ‘the great magnet of the tourist’.
³
The narrator has also visited the American prairies, a destination for tourists with the time, cash, and patience to make the trip. Poe would link both destinations together under the general category of ‘natural lions of the land’.
⁴
The outside narrator’s trip to Norway seems similarly motivated. He has come to see another geographical lion: the Norway maelstrom.

Whereas the outside narrator’s travel constitutes a leisure activity, the inside narrator travels as part of his work. As the old fisherman explains why he and his brothers risked the maelstrom’s dangers, his words echo early American promotion literature. ‘In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if one has only the courage to attempt it’, he explains. ‘In fact, we made it a matter of desperate speculation – the risk of life standing instead of labor, and courage answering for capital.’
⁵
Like early American settlers, the fisherman was willing to endanger his life for the sake of his livelihood.

The old man leads the tourist to a lofty precipice overlooking the famous whirlpool, where he explains that his frightening encounter with the maelstrom had completely unnerved him. He asks, ‘Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting giddy?’
⁶
The tourist identifies a disparity between what the old man says and how he acts:

With these words Poe belittles the tourist in contrast to his guide. ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ celebrates the working man. Having risked his life to make a living, the sailor has undergone a metamorphosis. He says that the experience broke him, but he has really emerged with a new attitude toward danger. Unlike the tourist, the old fisherman thinks nothing of perching himself on the precarious edge of the cliff. The tourist, alternatively, is solely a sightseer. He comes to see something dangerous but has no wish to put himself in harm’s way. He wants risk-free sightseeing.

The contrast between the fisherman and tourist – work and leisure – captures one of the major tensions in Poe’s life. As a young man he had imagined being a gentleman of independent means with sufficient leisure to write poetry without having to worry how to make a living. Many of his literary friends were professional men, physicians and lawyers, for whom writing was a leisure activity. Since John Allan’s death, literature had been Poe’s livelihood, pitiful as it was. Poe identified with the old man in ‘A Descent into the Maelström’. He, too, encountered the sublime as part of his work. He, too, put himself – his health and his sanity – at risk for the sake of his livelihood.

‘The Island of the Fay’, a sketch that appeared in the next issue of
Graham’s
, can be read as a companion piece to ‘A Descent into the Maelström’. With the development of tourism, major attractions became more and more important. These extraordinary destinations gave people a way to separate themselves from everyday experience and subsequently served as markers of status.
⁸
Dropping the names of holiday destinations became akin to social namedropping. ‘The Island of the Fay’ implicitly questions the value of the major attraction. A natural setting need be neither sublime nor spectacular nor even famous to create a worthwhile natural experience. By venturing into some nearby woods alone, a person can enjoy nature fully. ‘The Island of the Fay’ celebrates the imaginative possibilities that come with the contemplation of natural scenery.

After some general comments on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, this sketch relates an afternoon in the life of its narrator. Enjoying the scenery, he watches the trees cast shadows across a nearby stream. The lengthening shadows create weird visual effects, letting him imagine a fairy encircling an islet in the stream. Though Poe enjoyed rambling through the wooded areas around Philadelphia, ‘The Island of the Fay’ is not based on personal experience. Technically, it is a plate article. Graham assigned him the task of writing text to accompany a fanciful engraving he planned to publish.

Plate articles suited Poe’s compositional process. As he explained in his
Graham’s
review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Twice Told Tales
the following year, an author imagines a single effect for a work, then creates incidents to achieve that effect. A plate article essentially imposed an ultimate effect, but it did give Poe the freedom to imagine incidents leading to it. Though ‘The Island of the Fay’ was based on a visual image instead of a natural scene, the actual source mattered little to Poe. The contemplation of art, like the contemplation of nature, could fire his imagination.