When Henry James made his famous remark that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of an extremely primitive stage of reflection,” he meant of course to denigrate. Yet now we might think that James had hit upon Poe’s particular genius, his gift of getting beneath the social surface of things to explore in his writing the primitive apparatus of the unconscious. Like other Europeans, Nietzsche understood Poe better than anyone did on these shores:
Those great poets…men like Byron, Musset, Poe…are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps.
Long before Freud had mapped the “swamps,” Poe roamed there, his tales and fables as odd and troubling as dreams.
It is curious that while most of us can remember vividly our first reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or “The Masque of the Red Death”—can remember the tale’s plot and the fascination, and the frightening effect, we rarely reread these stories, perhaps from a fear that the satisfying terror of first reading would now be stale and flat, or from reluctance to submit to it again, any more than we would willingly reread “The Little March Girl,” or any of the other painful tales of Hans Christian Andersen that stay so powerfully with us. The image of Red Death removing his mask to mock the arrogant revelers is too potent a metaphor to need repeating; we got it the first time and have never forgotten it. Nor can we ever recapture the effect of a first reading of “The Cask of Amontillado,” the horrid understanding dawning on us as we read; once known, the ending to which the whole thing is so cryptically pointed cannot surprise us again. Yet today we return to Poe to admire the brilliance with which he marshals his effects. The stories are shorter than we remembered, and decorated like plumcakes with symbols whose significance has been made familiar since Poe’s time, and whose directness could make the stories seem obvious in retrospect but does not. He continues to trouble us.
You cannot read the collected tales of Poe without being aware that you are in the hands of a most peculiar writer, perhaps a disturbed and clearly obsessed one, who gave us access to his own tormented unconscious with an openness possible only in preFreudian writers. But Poe wormed his way deeper than anyone had into the buried meaning of the sorts of tales and poems people were already familiar with. He touched on an underside of madness and rage that his readers—James included—were squeamish to acknowledge, and this is perhaps why he fixed himself with the reputation of being a monster, an injustice that literary historians have …
Copyright © Diane Johnson, 1991
