Text: G. R. Thompson, “Poe's Flawed Gothic,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 38-58

[page 38:]

The enigma of Poe's impact, Allen Tate suggests, is his ability to move us on a deep and primitive level despite (sometimes even through) clumsiness. Moreover, because of his view of the “Forlorn Demon” of the “Self,” Poe is impressive in the whole corpus of his work, for no other writer in nineteenth-century England, America, or France “went so far in his vision of dehumanized man.”(1) This thematic coherence, Tate maintains, is clearer in Baudelaire's translations of Poe into French since the characteristic blemishes of Poe's style do not show so clearly. But when the native English-speaking critic reads Poe, he finds that not one of Poe's works is unblemished, that the “decor” of Poe's Gothic world is often “ludicrous,” that the “trappings” of his nightmare world are “tawdry.” Tate writes: “I confess that Poe's serious style at its typical worst makes the reading of more than one tale at a sitting an almost insuperable task. The Gothic glooms, the Venetian interiors, the ancient wine-cellars (from which nobody ever enjoys a vintage but always drinks ‘deep’) — all this, done up in a glutinous prose, so fatigues one's attention that the best will in the world gives up, unless one gets a clue to the power underlying the flummery” (pp. 467-468). Tate also confesses that he is puzzled by this bad writing because Poe is often capable of direct, simple, unpretentious prose, as in his criticism and in a few of his tales. Tate thus delineates the opposition between Poe's important but narrow themes and horrible but affecting style. The primal fact of death, the perverse fascination of death, the horror of the inhuman and of dehumanized, and the dramatization and symbolization of subconscious feelings are all done up in a glutinous prose and with ludicrous stage-Gothic decor.

Is it not possible, however, that Poe somehow consciously insinuated this ambivalent effect into his Gothic tales? Many of the conventional “flaws” of his Gothic stories appear with comic exaggeration in his satiric tales; and in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and in several reviews and “Marginalia” pieces Poe pointedly remarks on the ludicrous overuse of dashes, “piquant” facts and expressions, “ineffables,” italics, exclamation points, recondite allusions, and mottoes, which he found rampant in the works of his contemporaries. His remark on mottoes, for example, in a review of William Gilmore Simms's The Partisan, is rather surprising in view of the fact that almost all of Poe's tales are beset with them. Simms, Poe writes, has “manufactured his own headings” rather than culling them from his reading. But, Poe continues: “We find no fault with him for so doing. The manufactured mottoes of Mr. Simms are, perhaps, quite as convenient as the extracted mottoes of his contemporaries. All, we think, are abominable.”(2) This is a “surprising” remark, that is, unless Poe had some satiric or ironic object in mind in so mottoing his own works.

It is too easy to forget that Poe, the writer of tales, began as a satirist — and easy also to overlook the significant fact that of Poe's seventy tales nearly half are comic and satiric in an obvious way. Only within the last fifteen to twenty years has the comic side of Poe come to seem in any way important for an adequate reading of the Gothic works. And only grudgingly (or so it seems) have critics begun to acknowledge the importance of the narrator as character in Poe's tales and to suspect that even his most famous Gothic works, like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia,” have ironic double and triple perspectives playing upon them: supernatural from one point of view, psychological from another point of view, and possibly burlesque from yet a third. It is time, however, for the traditional conception of Poe as Romantic sentimentalist and Gothicist to give way to a more firmly grounded and balanced conception of Poe as an existentialist, absurdist, and ironic writer.

How deep-seated and all-pervasive these comic, satiric, and absurdist elements are in Poe's Gothic tales is the general question I wish to explore here with special reference to Poe's earliest stories. I propose 1] to re-emphasize the importance of Poe's early plans for a sequential series of burlesque stories, variously called “Tales of the Arabesque” and “Tales of the Folio Club,” 2] to point up the comic technique and satiric thrusts of Poe's first group of comic tales, dating from 1831, in which the hoaxical and comically esoteric are significant factors, [page 39:] and 3] to demonstrate the same (but more deceptive) parody and irony in his first “Gothic” tale “Metzengerstein” (1831-1832). Poe's first Gothic tale illustrates in both its exaggerated first versions and in its more subtle revised versions Poe's development of the burlesque tale into the ironically ambivalent hoax. Moreover, “Metzengerstein” exhibits in embryonic form Poe's characteristic (but darkly ironic) themes of ultimate annihilation, of hostile and deceptive fortune, of human fear and perversity, and of the absurdity of human existence — but all in a deceptive burlesque form similar to that of his obvious satires. Poe's themes and techniques in “Metzengerstein” and in the four more clearly comic tales are, I believe, the touchstone for all of his subsequent fiction.

I

In May, 1833, Poe wrote to Joseph and Edwin Buckingham, the publishers of the New England Magazine, offering them a collection of sequential stories called “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque.” Critics have generally assumed that when, seven years later, he titled his 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he meant to separate the comic and satiric stories (grotesques) from the serious Gothic stories (arabesques). The never-published “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque, however, Poe intended as a burlesque collection. He included with this letter to the Buckinghams, as representative of the collection, his comic tale “Epimanes” (later called “Four Beasts in One — The Homocameleopard”), which recounts the story of a Syrian tyrant who runs wildly through the streets of Antioch disguised as an animal until the beasts become indignant at the imposture and break out of their cages and lead a protest march through the city, and contains many satiric thrusts at American “Democracy” and nineteenth-century concepts of “Progress.” Moreover, the whole series of tales, Poe explained, was a burlesque not only of contemporary styles of tale-writing, but also of current modes of criticism: “They are supposed to be read at table by the eleven members of a literary club, and are followed by the remarks of the company upon each. These remarks are intended as a burlesque upon criticism. In the whole, originality more than anything else has been attempted. ... If you like the specimen I have sent I will forward the rest at your suggestion — but if you decided upon publishing all the tales, it would not be proper to print the one I now send until it can be printed in its place with the others.”(3) The eleven “Tales of the Arabesque” were probably the five tales published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1832 to which Poe added the six tales submitted to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter sometime before October, 1833, as the “Tales of the Folio Club.” These eleven stories included the ostensibly serious Gothic works “Metzengerstein,” “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Silence,” and possibly “A Descent into the Maelström.”(4) The comic tales, besides “Epimanes,” would have been “The Duke de L'Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon” from the Courier, and “Lionizing,” unpublished. The “Folio Club” scheme thus was clearly in Poe's mind sometime prior to the spring of 1833 and may have been worked out even as early as 1831. Between 1831 and 1835, at any rate, Poe wrote a preface for the “Folio Club” tales, the manuscript of which survives on two leaves, written on both sides in Poe's small hand.(5) The first two pages give the preface essentially complete, though the style of the document, T. O. Mabbott feels, suggests notes to be more fully developed later.(6) The other two pages contain part of what has often been called a beautiful Gothic tone-poem, the tale “Siope” (later titled “Silence”). The latter two pages are numbered 61 and 62; a good deal of material therefore must have lain between the preface and the story, and the surviving fragment may be part of a manuscript, that Poe unsuccessfully sent around to various publishers in 1835 and 1836.

The Folio Club is a “Junto of Dunderheadism,” which meets once a month at dinner for a reading by each member of “a short tale of his own composition.” The author of the best tale becomes president for the month; the author of the worst tale provides dinner and wine for the next meeting. The writer of the preface represents himself as making an exposé of the Club after attending his first meeting. Under the title “The Folio Club” appears a motto from Samuel Butler: “There is a Machiavelian plot / Though every [n]are [nostril] olfact it not.” The implication seems clear: although some of the members' tales may at first seem no more ridiculous than the Gothic and sensational fiction popular at the time, the stories are actually parodies and satires. In fact, the intention of the Club, the narrator says, is “to abolish Literature, subvert the press, and overturn the Government of Nouns and Pronouns.” The membership of the Club is limited to eleven (because on April first, in the year three hundred and fifty before the Deluge, there were eleven spots on the sun). The membership includes, besides the newly elected author of the preface, ten “most remarkable men:” [page 40:]

Poe expanded the number of tales and members to seventeen in a letter to the Philadelphia publisher, Harrison Hall, on September 2, 1836, stating that all those recently printed in the Southern Literary Messenger were part of the “Folio Club” series: “At different times there has appeared in the Messenger a series of tales, by myself — in all seventeen. They are of a bizarre and generally whimsical character. ... I imagine a company of 17 persons who call themselves the Folio Club. ... The seventeen tales which appeared in the Messr are supposed to be narrated by the seventeen members at one of these monthly meetings. As soon as each tale is read — the other 16 members criticise it in turn — and these criticisms are intended as a burlesque upon criticism generally. The author of the tale adjudged to be the worst demurs from the general judgment, seizes the seventeen M.SS. upon the table, and, rushing from the house, determines to appeal, by printing the whole, from the decision of the Club, to that of the public. The critical remarks ... have never been published.”(7) At this time, Poe had actually published only fourteen tales in the Southern Literary Messenger, the five Courier stories of 1832, “Ms. Found in a Bottle” from the 1833 Visiter, “The Visionary” (later “The Assignation”) from the 1834 Godey's Lady's Book and seven previously unpublished tales, “Berenice,” “Hans Phaall,” “Morella,” “Lionizing,” “King Pest,” Shadow,” and “Epimanes.” In order of publication, the tales immediately following the fourteen in the Messenger were the comic “Mystification,” the seemingly serious “Silence” (which was part of the original “Folio Club” manuscript), the Gothic “Ligeia,” the four comic and satiric stories “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “A Predicament,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and the Gothic “Fall of the House of Usher.” Thus, of Poe's first twenty-two tales, from 1832 to 1839, only two (“Ligeia” and “Usher”) are not either clearly comic and satiric or deceptively ironic burlesques for the “Folio Club” — a remarkable corroboration of Poe's ironic intent in even his most “Gothic” tales. The next year, having added to the series two “serious” tales (“William Wilson” and “Eiros and Charmion”) and one comic tale “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling”) to make a total of twenty-five, Poe finally was able to get a book-length collection of his stories published: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

Poe's over-all ironic and satiric intent was only vaguely understood by his contemporaries, however, as is clear from several letters from 1835 and 1836, regarding the Tales of the Folio Club. Poe began the Messenger series of tales with “Berenice” in March, 1835, and White added by way of introduction the complaint that the story had too much “German” horror. The next month (April 30, 1835), Poe explained to White his ironic attitude toward “German” horror, though without reference to the “Folio Club.” He defends “Berenice” on the grounds that it is typical of the kind of absurd Gothic tale that sells magazines, and he remarks that “Berenice” had “originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular,” provided it was treated with an ostensible seriousness: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature — to Berenice ... I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exagerated [[exaggerated]] into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (Letters, I, 274). This statement is often taken by critics to indicate a series of different effects, but Poe's order and especially his punctuation [page 41:] suggests a continuum; the terms of the last sentence quoted here are linked by colons, not by semi-colons, nor by the commas that many critics have carelessly interpolated into the letter. The colon signifies a further development, a second thought, a subsidiary class: and the alternations of fearful, witty, and singular, of horrible, burlesque, and strange and mystical all derive from the ambivalence of the larger category: the grotesque, a genre allied primarily with the ludicrous and the ironic, but curiously fusing these comic qualities with the sinister.

The problem of context and therefore of “intent” is unquestionably the major difficulty in reading Poe's early fiction. This is largely the result of Poe's sometimes esoteric interests and his penchant for transmuting “satire proper” into hoax. The New York novelist James K. Paulding, was one of the first to recognize the satiric point of Poe's earliest tales. In 1836 Paulding wrote to Poe about the manuscript (presumably the “Tales of the Folio Club”) that had been sent to the Harpers for possible publication. Paulding said that the “quiz on Willis” (“Duke de L'Omelette” or “Lionizing”?) was “capital” but that Poe ought to apply his “fine humor” to “more familiar subjects of satire; to the faults and foibles of our own people and above all to the ridiculous affectations and extravagancies of the fashionable English literature of the day.” Paulding felt that there was “a degree of obscurity” in the tales that would “prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift, and consequently from enjoying the fine satire they convey.” Emphasizing this point, Paulding added that for his satire to be relished, it was necessary for it to be levelled at something with which readers were familiar.(8)

Even Poe's good friend, John P. Kennedy, the Baltimore novelist, did not fully comprehend the drift of Poe's first tales. In February of the same year that Paulding criticized Poe's “obscurity,” Kennedy had written that he doubted Poe really “intended” the satiric thrusts one could find in reading his stories; but Poe replied that Kennedy was “not altogether right” since his tales had indeed been “intended for half banter, half satire” — though Poe politely added that perhaps he would not have “acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself” in those tales not “satires properly speaking.”(9) But the mixed intention of satire, banter, and seriousness also seemed obscure to the Harpers, for they returned Poe's manuscript with the comment that one of the reasons they had decided not to publish the tales was that they “would be understood and relished only by a very few,” and that “the numbers of readers in this country capable of appreciating and enjoying such writings ... is very small indeed.”(10)

The five Courier tales of 1831-1832, then, prove to be especially significant in this regard, for the continuum of the comic, the satiric, the Gothic burlesque, and the Gothic hoax that these tales demonstrate has great importance for the interpretation of Poe's later fiction. In both theme and technique, we find a clear consistency between the light-hearted satiric spoofs “The Duke de L'Omelette,” “The Bargain Lost,” and “A Tale of Jerusalem” on the one hand, and on the other hand the Gothic parody “A Decided Loss” (later called “Loss of Breath”) and the seemingly serious Gothic tale “Metzengerstein.”

II

“The Duke de L'Omelette,” must have puzzled most of the Courier subscribers as much as it has the general twentieth-century reader, for the tale appears to be merely a comic exercise, and none too comic at that. A sensitive French nobleman dies in a paroxysm of disgust when served an “ortolan” (a small bird) without paper ruffles; finding himself in Hell, he plays cards with the Devil to win back his soul, succeeds by cheating, and takes his leave with the remark, in French, that if he were not the Duke de L'Omelette he would have no objection to being the Devil. Reconstruction of the context of the tale, however, reveals the story to be a satiric parody of the literary style and of the elegant manners and cultural pretensions of a contemporary editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. Poe exaggerates Willis' imitation of the “silver-fork” style of Benjamin Disraeli (thus hitting at Disraeli as well) in Willis' preciously written column, “The Editor's Table,” in the American Monthly Magazine. In this column, Willis represented himself as a man of culture, fashion, delicate thought, and exquisitely refined taste. He would invite his readers into his editorial apartments where he wrote at a “rosewood” desk, on which were Chinese cupid inkholders, velvet butterfly pen wipers, and a bottle of Hungary water to perfume his quill; when he was not working, he could be found reclining upon one of his treasured ottomans, reflectively eating an olive, while his pet [page 42:] South American “trulian” flew freely about the apartment. The first paragraphs of Poe's story are, as Kenneth L. Daughrity says, “replete with peppery hits” at Willis:(11) “Keats fell by criticism. Who was it died of ‘The Andromache’? ... Ignoble souls! — De L'Omelette perished of an ortolan. L'histoire en est breve. ... the Duc was to sup alone ... he reclined languidly on the ottoman for which he sacrificed his loyalty in outbidding his kind. ... The clock strikes! Unable to restrain his feelings, his Grace swallows an olive.”(12) Poe's reference to Keats reflects the “criticism” by other editors that Willis' career would be killed by his affectations; the Peruvian ortolan served naked (and roasted) to the Duke suggests, of course, Willis' pet bird; olives and ottomans were Willis' symbols of refinement; and little French phrases and literary allusions were the trademark of Willis' style.(13) In a moment, Poe has the Devil take the Duke, curiously scented, from a “rosewood” coffin. Ordered to strip, the Duke displays a dainty fastidiousness, mentions the fashionable tailors who have designed his lovely clothes, and objects that it is too much trouble to draw off his gloves. He then gives scrutiny to the bizarre arrangement of the Devil's “apartment,” lighted by a ruby hung from a blood-red chain whose upper end is lost (like, variously, Coleridge, Carlyle, or the City of Boston, depending on the version of the tale) in the clouds. Pushed eventually beyond what a gentleman can properly endure, the Duke invites his Majesty to fence — but must settle for cards. Poe's satire seems to be a criticism, like that of the editors suggested in his first sentence.(14) But through the structure of the tale he intimates that such criticism will not even touch Willis, just as the Duke is above “ignoble souls” like Keats and is able to outwit, politely, even the Devil. But without this context, the tale seems simply pointless.

Certainly, to the general reader of the time, the humor of the other three comic tales in the Courier could have seemed only a trifle clearer than that of “The Duke de L'Omelette.” The surface story of “A Tale of Jerusalem,” for example, in which the Jews (besieged in the Holy City by Pompey's legions) bargain for a sacrificial lamb but are given a hog instead, seems rather pointless, not especially amusing, and even unpleasantly anti-Semitic. The tale, however, is a satire on the rage for didactic historical novels set in the Holy Land, parodying in particular Horace Smith's Zillah, A Tale of Jerusalem, a three-decker published five years before in 1828. Poe lifts phrases and whole lines from the novel and fills his story with mock erudition on Hebrew customs, as well as with burlesque names like Abel Shittim, though the later versions of the story are cleaned up somewhat. Like the opening paragraphs of “The Duke de L'Omelette,” the first paragraph of “A Tale of Jerusalem” gives the situation entire and immediately achieves a remarkably phony style.

“ ‘Let us hurry to the walls,’ said Abel-Phittim [the revised name of Abel Shittim] to Buzi-Ben-Levi and Simeon the Pharisee, on the tenth day of the month Thammuz, in the year of the world three thousand nine hundred and forty-one — ‘let us hasten to the ramparts adjoining the gate of Benjamin, which is in the city of David, and overlooking the camp of the uncircumcised; for it is the last hour of the fourth watch, being sunrise; and the idolaters, in fulfilment of the promise of Pompey, should be awaiting us with lambs for the sacrifices.’ ”(15) The rest of the tale continues in this manner with, as James Southall Wilson has shown, an increasing number of lines from Smith. But although the style is obviously exaggerated, the story-line is plausible enough, up to the end, so that one could read the tale as a serious piece of Biblical fiction — if he were a bit obtuse to the nuances of English prose style. The conclusion, however, makes it clear even to the most unread that Poe is satirizing something, even if only the Jews themselves. The three “Sub-Collectors of Offerings” draw up a long rope hung over the City wall, expecting the Romans below to have placed a lamb in a basket. After an hour's tugging, Buzi-Ben-Levi exclaims: “Booshoh he! ... Booshoh he! ... Booshoh he! — for shame! — it is a ram from the thickets of Engedi, and as rugged as the valley of Jehosophat!” “It was not until the basket had arrived within a few feet of the Gizbarium, that a low grunt betrayed to their perception a hog of no common size. ‘Now EL Emanu!’ slowly and with upturned eyes ejaculated the trio ... ‘EL Emanu! — God be with us — it is the unutterable flesh!’ ” (i, 106). The last line is directly from Smith's Zillah, and those readers up on current “indigestible” fiction would have seen much more clearly than the reader a hundred years later, or even the casual reader of Poe's time, that Poe here is satirizing the currently popular brand of the historical novel.(16)

“The Bargain Lost” (later called “Bon-Bon”), tells the story of a philosopher chef, who, while completing an absurd metaphysical treatise, gets into a drunken [page 43:] conversation with the Devil (who is a kind of gourmet of philosophers' souls) and offers his own soul for his Satanic Majesty's delectation only to be turned down. The satiric point of the tale, with its metaphysical conversation, plentiful references to classical authors, and other recondite allusions, seems to be mockery of pretended scholarship in contemporary fiction.(17) This topic Poe takes up more directly six years later in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” a satiric tale in which Mr. Blackwood Blackwood advises Signora Psyche Zenobia to sprinkle her tales with learned quotations in various languages and to get herself into an impossible predicament.

Similar pretense as well as the whole genre of “sensation” tales, or “intensities,” featured in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine are the major satiric butts, along with Transcendentalism, of “Loss of Breath” (called “A Decided Loss” in the Courier). Despite vividly morbid passages, the absurdities of the tale are quite obvious; and the story in its several versions is worth recounting at some length, since it contains in burlesque form many of Poe's favorite themes (alienation and the crowd, perversity, the doppelgänger, burial alive, death-in-life, the absurd universe), and since its style approaches from time to time effective horror at the same time that it has in exaggerated comic form the supposed “flaws” of Poe's serious writing. Part of the technique of the Blackwood's style “sensation” tale is the affectation of literary and philosophical learning, most especially of the currently popular “German” metaphysical speculation. “Loss of Breath” has both a suitable “philosophical” theme and a “learned” style. The opening gambit of the tale is similar to that of the other Courier stories; the first sentences not only announce the ostensible theme, of bearing ill-fortune philosophically, but also suggest an overriding satiric theme through stylistic parody, here involving strained mock-erudite analogies that interrupt the narrative progression. “The most notorious ill-fortune must in the end yield to the untiring courage of philosophy — as the most stubborn city to the ceaseless vigilance of an enemy. Shalmanezer, as we have it in holy writings, lay three years before Samaria; yet it fell. Sardanapalus — see Dipdorus — maintained himself seven in Nineveh; but to no purpose. Troy expired at the close of the second lustrum; and Azoth, as Aristaeus declares upon his honour as a gentleman, opened at last her gates to Psammetichus, after having barred them for the fifth part of a century. ...”(18) That the absurd exaggerations of incident and predicament which follow, along with the digressive and inappropriately calm and reflective style, are intended to burlesque the sensation fiction of Blackwood's is made perfectly clear in the republication of the tale three years later in the Southern Literary Messenger by the addition of the subtitle “A Tale a la Blackwood.”(19) Moreover, the character of Windenough, the inverse double of the hero of the tale, Mr. Lackobreath, seems to fit Poe's impression of John Wilson (“Christopher North”), an editor of Blackwood's. Wilson had published a sentimental poem called “The Convict” in 1816, detailing the predicament of a man wrongly convicted of robbery and murder but rescued at the last moment by the discovery of the real criminal.(20) Poe extends the similar situation of “Loss of Breath” in order to burlesque much more than the predilection of Blackwood's and Wilson for predicament tales; Poe makes specific thrusts at the American theater, at contemporary philosophical and literary figures (including Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Godwin, St. Pierre, Crabbe, Coleridge, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and possibly by implication, Wordsworth); but most especially, Poe hits at the Transcendentalists.

The thrusts at the “sensationists” and the Transcendentalists begin soon after the opening incident, in which Mr. Lackobreath literally loses his breath in cursing his wife. Finding himself speechless, he retreats to his room and meditates on his misfortune, finding himself “alive, with the qualifications of the dead — dead, with the propensities of the living — an anomaly on the face of the earth — being very calm, yet breathless.” He considers at once the idea of suicide, but “it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and ready, for the far-distant and the equivocal.”(21) He then searches for his breath, like Adelbert Chamisso's “Peter Schlemiel” for his shadow, in the corners of his room, in his closet, in his drawers — for it might have a vapory or a tangible form, as “authorities” will confirm. “William Godwin ... says in his ‘Mandeville,’ that ‘invisible things are the only realities,’ and this, all will allow, is a case in point. I would have the judicious reader pause before accusing such asseverations of an undue quantum of absurdity. Anaxagoras, it will be remembered, maintained that snow is black, and this I have since found to be the case” (I, 108). Hiding his calamity from the sure indignation of his wife, the “multitude,” and the “virtuous,” Lackobreath regains some of his speech by practicing Indian tragedies in “frog-like and [page 44:] sepulchral tones,” giving out that he is interested in the theater and observing to himself that any part of the play Metamora applies “equally well to any particular subject.” Nor is he in his practice “... deficient in the looking asquint — the showing my teeth — the working my knees — the shuffling my feet — or in any of those unmentionable graces which are now justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer. To be sure they spoke of confining me in a straight-jacket — but, good God! they never suspected me of having lost my breath” (I, 109). Setting out for another city by mail-stage Lackobreath is crushed between “two gentlemen of colossal dimensions” and sat upon by a third “of a size larger,” which dislocates all his limbs. In a scene reminiscent of Fielding's Joseph Andrews, the passengers object to riding with a corpse and throw Lackobreath out of the stage at the Crow tavern, with no further injury to him than the breaking of his arms and the fracturing of his skull. The tavern-keeper sells the “corpse” to a surgeon, who, like the surgeons in Candide, proceeds to dissect the still-living body.(22) Lackobreath kicks and plunges, but the surgeon attributes this to the effects of a galvanic battery. Lackobreath then becomes interested in the experiments of the surgeon, though he cannot gather enough wind to “make reply to some ingenius but fanciful theories of which, under the circumstances, my minute acquaintance with the Hippocratian pathology would have afforded me a ready confutation” (I, 110). Then, tied up corpse-fashion and left alone in a garret “to silence and to meditation,” he repeats “some passages of the ‘Omnipresence of the Deity,’ as is my custom before resigning myself to sleep ...” (I, 111). Two cats contend for his nose, however, and he leaps out of the windowh into a prison-cart containing the mail-robber W——, to whom he bears a singular resemblance, though W—— is gaunt and is corpulent. Then W—— escapes and Lackobreath is hanged in his place.

In the latest version of the tale (Broadway Journal, 1846), Lackobreath forbears to depict his “sensations upon the gallows,” merely mentioning that the jerk of the rope gave a “corrective twist” to his dislocated neck and that he did his best to please the crowd: “My convulsions were said to be extraordinary. My spasms it would have been difficult to beat. The populace encored. Several gentlemen swooned.” He adds, however, that after the performance, “it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows; — this the more especially as the real culprit had in the meantime been retaken and recognized ...” (I, 112). But in the earlier versions, not only his “sensations” while standing on the gallows but also the philosophical speculation to which they give rise is detailed. The deleted passage contains a good deal of Poe's specific satire, unfortunately reduced only to implication in the 1846 version of the tale.(23) As Lackobreath waits reflectively for the trap to be pulled, profound Goodwin-like thoughts flood his mind: “I now reasoned, rapidly I believe — profoundly I am sure — upon principles of common law — propriety of that law especially, for which I hung — absurdities in political economy which till then I had never been able to acknowledge ...” (Works, II, 359). Then come ideas from Crabbe, St. Pierre, Bulwer-Lytton and, especially, Disraeli: “... synonymes in Crabbe — lunar-lunatic theories in St. Pierre — falsities in the Pelham novels — beauties in Vivian Grey — more than beauties in Vivian Grey — profundity in Vivian Grey — genius in Vivian Grey — every thing in Vivian Grey. ¶ Then came, like a flood, Coleridge, Kant, Fichte, and Pantheism. ... ¶ A rapid change was now taking place in my sensations. The last shadows of connection flitted away from my meditations. A storm — a tempest of ideas, vast, novel and soul-stirring, bore my spirit like a feather afar off. Confusion crowded upon confusion like a wave upon a wave. In a very short time Schelling himself would have been satisfied with my entire loss of self-identity” (Works, II, 359-360). When the rope twists his neck, he has the sensation that the event has occurred in another realm of existence, in “some other Ens.” He is then taken down and “laid out” in a small chamber, which yet “appeared of a size to contain the universe. I have never before or since, in body or in mind, suffered half so much agony as from that single idea. Strange! that the simple conception of abstract magnitude — of infinity — should have been accompanied with pain. Yet so it was. ‘With how vast a difference,’ said I, ‘in life as in death — in time and in eternity — here and hereafter, shall our merest sensations be imbodied!’ ” (Works, II, 360). As night comes, Lackobreath has the horrible sensation that perhaps his state of limbo is actual death: “... this darkness which is papable [[palpable]], and oppresses with the sense of suffocation — this — this — is — indeed death. This is death — this is death the terrible — death the holy. ... thus, too, shall I always remain — always — always remain. Reason is folly, and Philosophy a lie. No one will know my sensations, my horror — my despair. ... This — this — this — is the only Eternity! — and what, O Baalzebub! — what an Eternity! — to lie in this vast — this awful void — a hideous, vague, and unmeaning anomaly — motionless, yet wishing for motion — powerless, yet longing for [page 45:] power — forever, forever, and forever!” (Works, II, 361-362).

By itself, this last passage, as with others in the tale, could be considered fairly effective horror (especially in its concept of eternal sentience) even though overdone — if, that is, the repetitions and the comic lines “no one will know my sensations” and “what, O Baalzebub! — what an Eternity!” were removed. It should not be very difficult to see that the style of many of Poe's more famous Gothic tales derives from this kind of burlesque horror in “Loss of Breath” and that in those tales there may be at least two opposing possibilities for interpretation. In “Loss of Breath,” however, there is no ambiguity. The absurdly comic incidents, the exaggerated style, and the satiric references qualify any serious horror; immediately after the terrors of philosophical speculation during the night, for example, the hero sees the light of dawn and realizes that he is not dead (but instead in danger of being buried alive): “Then — and not till then — was I fully sensible of the fearful fate hanging over me. The phantasms of the night had faded with its shadows, and the actual terrors of the yawning tomb left me no heart for the bugbear speculations of Transcendentalism” (Works, II, 362). In both the early and the 1846 versions, Lackobreath is next placed in a tomb where he falls into a deep sleep. He awakes and searches about the sepulchre, complaining eventually of boredom. Finally, he feels his way among the numerous coffins, lifts them down “one by one, and breaking open their lids,” busies himself “in speculations about the mortality within” (Borzoi Poe, I, 112). Soon Lackobreath discovers two particularly interesting corpses to which he addresses soliloquies, holding one up by the nose. The bodies perhaps bear a vague resemblance to Coleridge and Wordsworth.(24) The familiar-looking, tall, gaunt “corpse,” however, turns out not only to be the criminal W—— but also to be Windenough, Lackobreath's wife's “friend.”(25) Lackobreath receives a “respiration” from him and together they shout until rescued by Scissors, the Whig editor, who, hearing them, has in the meanwhile published a treatise on “the nature and origin of subterranean noises” (followed by a vigorous “rejoinder” from the Democratic Gazette). The tale ends with fine symmetry by means of a paragraph on the merits of a proper “philosophy” to serve as a “sure and ready shield against those shafts of calamity which can neither be seen, felt, nor fully understood” (Borzoi Poe, I, 115), spun out windily with plentiful learned allusions to Hebrew wisdom, to a plague at Athens and Epimenides, and to Laertius. Such is Poe's blatantly comic treatment of the Gothic and the Transcendental.

III

The other story of the group is “Metzengerstein,” I ostensibly a tale of horror and the supernatural, in which two hereditary family enemies are wedded in mutual destruction. A. H. Quinn remarks of the tale that it stands out in contrast to the other Courier stories, “not only in its excellence but also in its general tone;” unlike the other four tales, it is “no mere burlesque but instead a “powerful story of evil passions in a young man's soul,” the allegorical “lesson” of which may be a warning that evil may become so powerful that one may lose the power to resist.(26) But it is hard to read “Metzengerstein” with such seriousness. It has too many absurd exaggerations of both content and style, exaggerations too clearly patterned, too symmetrically developed, for the tale to be a serious work of Gothic terror.

Poe scholars have occasionally suggested that “Metzengerstein” may contain elements of burlesque, but no detailed analysis of such elements has been undertaken. Interest in “Metzengerstein” has centered on noting “serious” art in Poe's early works, such as the creation of vivid scenes of terror and the adumbration of themes and techniques characteristic of his later work. So too the other Courier stories, especially the extravagancies of “A Decided Loss,” have been of interest primarily for their macabre elements. Edward H. Davidson mentions “Metzengerstein” only in connection with Poe's development from “fooling” to “masterly inquiry into the diseased and sin-ridden soul of man,” with the further comment that “only a slight shift of emphasis” would remold “Metzengerstein” into “The Fall of the House of Usher.”(27) But this comment, suggestive though it is, seems to be based on a general similarity of theme and atmosphere rather than on a detailed consideration of technique; and Davidson does not, in this instance, note the presence of like elements of “fooling” in “Usher” and other of Poe's “serious” works. William Bittner recently has also suggested the possibility of burlesque in “Metzengerstein” but then, in effect, dismissed the idea. He writes that “the narrative is ridiculous enough” — a horse in a tapestry becomes real when possessed by the spirit of Metzengerstein's enemy, Berlifitzing, and during a violent storm carries the [page 46:] fascinated Metzengerstein to his death in his own burning castle, the smoke from which takes the shape of a gigantic horse. But the story, he concludes (following the lead of Marie Bonaparte's psychoanalytic study), changed as Poe wrote: “Metzengerstein” became a working out of Poe's ambivalent feelings about John Allan, and the resulting “sincerity” makes the tale an effective study in horror!(28)

Indeed, the quality of near seriousness is the principal problem in reading “Metzengerstein” as a satire like the other four Courier stories, which are quite obvious in their comic touches even if the satiric point needs footnoting. A degree of seriousness, however, is essential for parody, since the original must be recognized for parody to have any point. If, on a casual reading, the serious elements overshadow the clues to parody, by reducing the blatancy of comic touches, of exaggerations, and of verbal and structural ironies, the work either may have failed in its ironic purpose or it may have achieved a subtler irony. If the work fails as parody, then both the casual and the perceptive reader can take the work as a serious, though “flawed,” effort. If, however, the clues are merely subtle, the work becomes a hoax; the circle of understanding readers is consciously limited, and the casual reader becomes part of the butt of the satire. It is this kind of satire that “Metzengerstein” presents.

When the tale is read carefully, the many seeming lapses in taste and precise control of point-of-view and style form a unified pattern of satiric irony. The apparent intent of writing a serious Gothic tale is cumulatively undercut by a ridiculous plot, exaggerated stereotypes of melodramatic Gothic scenes and characters, awkward and confused dialog, and a turgid and sometimes shockingly inappropriate manner of narration. Moreover, the literary satire suggested by these “flaws” is given clear reinforcement by an exaggerated series of ironies, by multiple innuendoes from the sounds and connotations of words, and by the motifs of meaningless utterance and perverse human behavior. The obvious “lapses” in style, the true subtleties of style, and the semi-comic motifs of meaninglessness and perversity interweave with the quality of near seriousness to present a parody a little better in some ways than its original, a burlesque of the Gothic tale that dupes the enthusiastic but unwary devotee of the genre.

This enthusiasm for the Gothic tale is the historical literary context that gives the undersurface of “Metzengergtein” its point, especially the enthusiasm in Poe's day for the kind of “German” horror tale imitated abundantly and badly in English and American periodicals.(29) Poe tried to make the context and thus the satiric point clearer by affixing to the 1836 republication of “Metzengerstein” in the Southern Literary Messenger the subtitle “A Tale in Imitation of the German.”(30) It is quite doubtful, however, that “Metzengerstein” reflects original German sources, as is often claimed; nor is the tale, so far as is known, a parody of a specific work. Rather, the tale burlesques the Gothic genre as a whole.(31) “German” Gothic is reflected primarily in the setting, the associated atmosphere of which immediately prepares the reader for a tale of the kind in which one accepts, and expects, the conventions of the medieval castle, the aristocratic hero, and a vague, generalized quality of the supernatural and the horrible, as well as such attendant motifs as prophecy, revenge, and dark fatality. But though the German names of the major characters are important for atmosphere, they are comically tongue-twisting; Baron Frederick von Metzengerstein and Count Wilhelm von Berlifitzing are hardly the most euphonious and convincing Poe might have chosen had he been serious.

Instead, it is the half-century of English and American Gothic romance that is the butt of most of the satiric innuendo. There are in “Metzengerstein” echoes of the Gothic trappings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1796), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and The Betrothed (1825), and the elder Richard Henry Dana's once popular poem “The Buccaneer” (1827). T. O. Mabbott has written that Dana's poem, in which the ghost of a slaughtered horse carries a pirate to a burning ship and back twice and finally destroys him, is “obviously” Poe's source.(32) Mabbott takes the tale seriously, but his view of its source is supported by the fact that Dana was an editor of the North American Review, a periodical Poe attacked vigorously in both his criticism and in his satiric fiction as part of a corrupt literary clique that puffed its own crowd and tomahawked all other writers; thus, a popular poem by one of its editors is an obvious candidate for one of the satiric butts of the tale.(33) In any case, yet another echo fairly proves that the suggestions of well-known Gothic works in the tale do not merely reveal the sources of a budding Gothicist but are instead the [page 47:] satiric butts of an accomplished satirist. There is a parallel in “Metzengerstein” of both the horse in the tapestry and the horse in the storm from Benjamin Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826-1827) — a novel that Poe burlesques in more than one tale, including as we have seen, versions of two of the other Courier satires, “A Bargain Lost” and “A Decided Loss.”(34) “Metzengerstein,” though differing in its near serious tone and in its dark “German” atmosphere, is of one piece with the other four Courier tales, displaying similar qualities of technique and the same burlesque intent. It is merely subtler — on a casual reading.

IV

Like the openings of the other Courier satires, the first paragraphs of “Metzengerstein” announce the ostensible situation and at the same time suggest a satiric point. Both humor and satire are less obvious than in the other stories primarily because effective scenes of terror and the dark atmosphere of the whole make the surface of the tale seem more serious than it actually is, and partly because the blatancy of the absurdities is masked by alternations of style. The con notations of the opening, however, are still quite clear once satiric possibility suggests itself. “Metzengerstein” is “prefaced” with two paragraphs on “horror,” superstition, and the probabilities of metempsychosis. The first sentences, given the possibility of satiric context, are quite pointed: “Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to the story I have to tell?”(35) The surface meaning of the first sentence is, of course, that horrible, fatal, and fated things have happened everywhere and at all times. But the abstractions horror and fatality, whether taken to mean certain kinds of human experience or cosmological forces, are twisted slightly from these frames of reference and given a faint comic touch by the use of “stalking abroad,” a phrase through which Poe personifies Horror and Fatality into a couple of demons stealthily ranging far and wide in search of prey. I do not want to claim too much for the passage, but surely the bare suggestion of such an image is discordant enough (at least on a second reading of the tale, after having been jarred by its absurd ending if by nothing else) to cause one to interpolate different contexts. “Abroad,” as well as “far and wide,” also suggests “foreign” and “current” (that is, “in circulation”). What is implied, especially when one is alerted by the later subtitle, is the currently popular “German” horror tale. With this much suggested, the obvious victim implied in the stalking of Horror and Fatality is the reader of such tales.

Admittedly, I am pushing the implications of the first sentence of the story rather vigorously — but such interpretation is supported by what immediately follows, by the over-all structure of the tale, by the publishing context, and by Poe's later work. The idea of reader as victim is not a point that Poe makes merely once, nor even a point that he makes indirectly. His clearest statement on his contemporaries' passion for the “Gothic” tale appears twelve years later at the conclusion of his semi-comic hoax “The Premature Burial.” In this tale, Poe hoaxes his readers (that is, makes victims of them through their credulity) for several pages before ending his tale with a ludicrous event and a comically blunt explanation; the hero finally loses his fears about being buried alive after the very absurdity of the final incident restores his sense of proportion, which he lost originally through reading Gothic works, or “bugaboo” tales — such as this” (Borzoi Poe, I, 542).

The function of the second sentence of “Metzengerstein” (“Why then give a date to the story I have to tell?”) is double. It not only emphasizes in an awkward way the artificial “literary” quality of the undated story to follow, it also interposes a narrator between the reader and the story. Since the story is essentially narrated from the third-person after the opening paragraphs, it may seem somewhat out of place for me so to emphasize the common device of a first-person narrator who never figures in the story himself and is perhaps holding forth before the fireplace in the manner of many tellers of supernatural tales. But the dual purpose of announcing the ostensible theme and at the same time suggesting an overriding irony with a satiric theme is focused in the unwitting persona of this narrator. The first paragraphs, as well as later ones, have their satiric point to make about him — and he is, after all, probably not sitting by the fireside but at the “Folio Club” table reading his manuscript to a group of “dunder heads.”

As the story develops, the ostensible themes of horror and fatality given in the first sentence are carried out through the agencies of a blood-feud and metempsychosis, [page 48:] both rooted in an ancient prophecy. The remarks of the narrator about metempsychosis are of special importance; they foreshadow what apparently takes place in the story (even to mentioning in French the shape of a horse as one of several common reincarnations); and these remarks suggest what the qualities of the narrator are. Our “erudite” author, though he says that “some points in the Hungarian superstition ... were fast verging to absurdity” (my italics), claims not to judge “of their falsity, or of their probability.” He immediately proceeds, however, to mention, primarily in a “learned” footnote, some eminent “authorities” to support “the doctrines of the Metempsychosis.”(36) Among these, the reference to Ethan Allen, the “Green Mountain Boy,” as a “serious Metempsychosist” is not the most felicitous allusion the narrator could have made, since Allen's reputation as an egotistical and belligerant [[belligerent]] Deist was still firmly planted in the minds of his countrymen. Indeed, the mere title of Allen's most famous work, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1789), militates against the supernaturalistic atmosphere the narrator is trying to suggest.(37) Moreover, the very sound of the phrase “serious Metempsychosist,” with its abundance of s's, is mildly comic and foreshadows the similarly sibilant names of von Berlifitzing and von Metzengerstein. Thus, the “erudition” of the narrator not only mocks such pretense in the tale of horror, it also underscores the obtuse character of the narrator.

Who of the Folio Club members is most likely to be the obtuse teller of a “German” tale of horror? The obvious candidate is Mr. Horribile Dictu, “with white eyelashes, who had graduated at Göttingen.” Dictu is a particularly suitable narrator for several reasons. The citing of Allen along with the European “authorities” is an appropriate gesture, and blunder, from a foreign narrator and thus further underscores the genre of the foreign horror tale; satiric intent is implied not only by the surface humor of its odd sound but also by its Latin connotations; it makes a double-edged comment on both the matter and the manner of the story — horrible to tell and horribly told. Thus, with its innuendoes about genre and about the narrator, the opening subtly suggests an overriding irony, the satiric thesis of which is that the Gothic tale is in both concept and style inherently absurd. But though the tale is sly in its opening, and though there is to follow an effective scene of terror, the absurdities and ironies of the story become increasingly obvious.

Beginning with plot, we may note, first, that the sequence of events has the kind of careful design associated with Poe's best work, here, as in many of Poe's tales, rigorously symmetrical, and unified by a constant image, stated and implied (of a horse). The story begins with 1] the narrator's suggesting possible forms of metempsychosis, including the form of a horse. Then the story turns to 2] a “history” of the enmity (originating in a vague prophecy) between old Berlifitzing and young Metzengerstein, wherein we learn that the old Count is obsessed with horses and that the young Baron is a typical Gothic villain, described with ludicrous-grotesque appropriateness as a “petty Caligula” (for, as Mabbott notes, the bloody Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul). Next the story shifts to 3] a “close-up” scene of the Baron staring at a horse in a tapestry during a fire at the Count's stables, followed by an extended “close-up” scene focused on the appearance of a gigantic flame-colored horse. The pattern tends to repeat itself in the second part of the tale. There follows 1] some dark and equivocal speculation on metempsychosis; then the narrative again shifts to 2] a “history,” wherein we learn not only of Metzengerstein's becoming obsessed with the horse (paralleling Berlifitzing's obsession in the first part) and of the vague enmity between horse and man, but also of an absurd curse by the Count's widow (which, like the prophecy earlier, strangely works out). This “history” is followed by 3] another “close-up” scene that brings the plot full circle into another fire as the horse carries the Baron to his death.

We may note, second, that the plot involves the careful working out of various ironies. Within the larger hoaxing irony is an irony shaping the plot in terms of the ostensible themes of horrible and fated enmity and revenge; and within this is a series of minor ironic twists that from their sheer number so exaggerate the symmetrical structure of the plot that it becomes comic beyond the absurdity of the bare events. The house of Metzengerstein, for example, is older than the house of Berlifitzing, but in the persons of the two protagonists the reverse is true; Metzengerstein is rather young and Berlifitzing is nearly senile. This situation is further twisted so that the feeble old Count becomes prodigiously powerful in his horse-form while the young Baron weakens, with the added irony that though Berlifitzing is supposedly captive to Metzengerstein, it is actually Metzengerstein who is [page 49:] captive by his “perverse” obsession with Berlifitzing. The comic is added to the ironic in the absurdity of Berlifitzing's metamorphosis, for, as mentioned, in life he is an ardent horse-lover so that he naturally is reincarnated, in young Metzengerstein's view, into a horse — with the letters W. V. B. branded on his forehead to insure recognition of him! And in his horse-form he becomes the sole companion and friend of his “mortal” enemy Metzengerstein. Moreover, though we are told at the beginning of the story that it is Berlifitzing who has the “more bitter animosity,” what is developed in the tale is the even more bitter enmity of Metzengerstein.

But what gives real unity to the plot — in terms of the apparent themes of fated enmity and supernatural revenge — is the irony involved in the working out of an “ancient prophecy” so ambiguously phrased that it seems merely “silly” to our narrator. And with this judgment, the narrator introduced, though unwittingly, the motif of meaninglessness, expressed throughout the tale first in the form of vague and confused utterances (the paradoxical prophecy, impotent ranting, bemused exclamations) and second in the intrusions of the narrator himself. The irony of the narrator's repeated interjections is multiple, for his occasional opinion as to the “silliness” of what the characters say does not merely comment on the absurdity of the characters in the story; the narrator's commentary suggests in a rather direct way the absurdity of the conventions and style of the German horror tale and in an indirect way the faulty control of Gothic writers, for, since the “silly” utterances turn out to be not so silly on a plot level, our narrator seems not to understand his tale very well. In addition, the motif of meaningless words (especially in connection with the plot-structuring prophecy) implies a comment on human behavior beyond what the dull-witted narrator sees, prefiguring Poe's concern in his later tales with order and disintegration and with the rational and the irrational. The ironic implication of the prophecy has to do with the consequences of absurdity and perversity, since the prophecy itself, because of what it merely seems to say, is the primary cause of its own fulfillment. The prophecy reads: “A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.”(38) To the house of Berlifitzing, the ominous utterance seems to imply, “if it implied anything” (I, 94), the eventual triumph of the already more powerful Metzengersteins and thus engenders a “more bitter animosity” in Berlifitzing. The paradox involved in mortality triumphing over im mortality is similar to that in the emblem of the Montresors in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), in which it is not clear who is the crushing heel and who the fanged serpent, a synecdoche of the story itself, in which it is not absolutely clear who is revenged and who is not. And, of course, the ambiguity of the prophecy adds to the ominous quality of its Gothic vagueness. Early in a first reading of the tale, however, except for the pompousness of the narrator, there is little reason to suspect the tone of being anything other than true Gothic, though the experienced reader of Gothic tales will certainly look forward to an unexpected twist of some kind.

And, indeed, the prediction works out literally and ironically in every detail. The lofty name fated to have a fearful fall is not Berlifitzing but Metzengerstein. The mere mortal Metzengerstein does triumph for a limited time over the immortal Berlifitzing when he rides the Count in his horse-form, an ironic literal occurrence of what in the prophecy is apparently only a metaphor: “as the rider over his horse.” But this triumph soon proves illusory, for the palace cracks and burns and the Count carries the last of the line of Metzengerstein into the flames, presumably to final death whereas Berlifitzing is metamorphosed once more, this time into a kind of vapor-horse rising triumphant above the ruins of the castle.

The reason the prophecy works, however, lies in the perverse and irrational human reaction to its vagueness. The meaninglessness of the prophecy and the absurdity of the enmity between the two families is emphasized quite pointedly at the beginning of the story. “Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly. The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy ... [though] the words themselves had little or no meaning. But more trivial causes have given rise — and that no long while ago — to consequences equally eventful.”(39) We learn next that what gives the prophecy its peculiar power to set the two houses at odds is the result of the two estates being “contiguous.” The two houses are thus “predisposed” to quarrel, not so much because of political and economic rivalry, but because “near neighbors are seldom friends.” This wry axiom given as a primary cause of the “enmity” between Berlifitzing [page 50:] and Metzengerstein, underscores early in the story the basic absurdity of the events to follow.

But the manner in which this comically blunt axiom concerning human relationships is presented epitomizes Poe's technique of maintaining an apparent seriousness; the bluntness, and the absurdity, of the comment is modified through paragraph organization, sentence rhythm, and diction so as to present a surface reasonableness that will keep up the hoax. The paragraph begins with the meaninglessness of the prophecy; next gives the fact of contiguity; then introduces the more reasonable ideas of rival political influence and Berlifitzing envy of Metzengerstein wealth, but phrased in lengthy clauses and sentences that tend to bury the twice emphasized axiom that enmity springs from contiguity. The tendency of the paragraph as a whole is to allay the absurdity of this analysis of the origins of human enmity and bring us with bland surface coherence, aided by diction abstract enough to suggest a little erudition, to the logical conclusion: “What wonder, then, that the words, however silly, of that prediction should succeed in setting and keeping at variance two families already predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy?” It is easy, if reading casually, to fail to note that what “every instigation” consists of is merely this: that near neighbors are seldom friends — a melancholy, comic view of perversity as well as of the absurd.

Such explanation for the feud fits well the personality of the narrator hinted at by the first two paragraphs. Although he recognizes the absurdity inherent in the vagueness of the prophecy, and although he has an inkling of the absurd element in human behavior, he is, under his surface reasonableness, also rather absurd. This is the first of his obvious intrusions on the story proper, but his personality as a typical teller of terrible tales is stamped on all the scenes and is implicit in the style of the whole.

The account of the plot-shaping prophecy provides one kind of exaggeration; absurd exaggeration of scene, character, and style soon follow. The section of the story concluding the history of Metzengerstein's feud with Berlifitzing maintains the motif of Gothic vagueness and meaninglessness in its characterization of the young Baron as a typical Gothic tyrant. His mother, the Lady Mary, died young, leaving him sole heir to the Metzengerstein estates. “The young Baron Frederick stood without a living relative beside the coffin of his dead mother. He placed his hand upon her placid forehead. No shudder came over his delicate frame, no sign from his flinty bosom. Heartless, self-willed, and impetuous from his childhood, he had reached the age of which I speak through a career of unfeeling, wanton, and reckless dissipation” (I, 94-95). The obvious exaggerations of this picture of “flinty” Metzengerstein are concentrated in the absurd picture of him with his hand placed on his dead mother's forehead. But the passage might be taken seriously, despite the grotesque image, because of its impressive sounding diction and sentence patterns, except that we learn next that the Baron's “career” of “dissipation’ since “childhood” has not been young manhood nor even a predatory adolescence. “Heartless” and “flinty” Metzengerstein still has most of his adolescence before him, being just “in his fifteenth year.” Aware, apparently, that fifteen years may be a rather young age for such flintiness, our narrator adds: “In a city fifteen years are no long period ... but in a wilderness — in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, fifteen years have a far deeper meaning” (I, 94). Not only is this comment a bit vague, it is a subtle twist on conventional ideas regarding the corrupting influence of city-life and the virtues of country-life; and it is brief enough and coherent enough on its surface, being consistent with a vaguely ominous Gothic tone, that one may easily miss the joke. Immediately after the horrendous suggestiveness of this passage, we discover that the fifteen-year-old Baron indulges in “shameful debaucheries — flagrant treacheries — unheard-of atrocities” (I, 95). The generality of these crimes is underscored by the abstract diction, the triptych order, and the dashes, producing not emphasis and climax but repeated vagueness so overstated as to be comic. Moreover, the narrator chooses to intrude a “comment” at this point, suggesting that Metzengerstein “out-heroded Herod” and adding wryly that he “fairly surpassed the expectations of his most enthusiastic admirers.”

Despite the Gothic vagueness of this history of Baron Metzengerstein's hideous career, at least one concrete crime is attached to his name, though there is no certainty that he committed the act; presumably, he is responsible for the fire in Berlifitzing's stables. But, again, the style points up the melodrama of the entire [page 51:] situation; the diction is overly general, inflated, illogically ordered, and redundant. “The incendiary” is added to the “already hideous list” of Metzengerstein's “misdemeanors” and “enormities.” But during the “tumult” which is (of all things) “occasioned by this occurrence,” the Baron sits in a “vast and desolate” apartment, buried in meditation, or at least “apparently” so — or maybe he wasn’t. At any rate, as he sits amid this Gothic splendor, his attention is engaged on a horse in a tapestry, and there suddenly arises on his “lip” a “fiendish expression” (I, 196). Despite these remarkable powers of “lip,” the Baron seems to have been struck with perverse idea (self-engendered from a guilty conscience?), for the tapestry horse seems to him, possibly, to have changed its position, a phenomenon which strikes “terror” into the heart of the “fiendish,” “reckless,” “dissipated,” “hideous,” “heartless,” “impetuous,” and “flinty” fifteen-year-old. He shudders to perceive that his shadow, thrown by a “flash of red light,” fills up the contour of the “relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.” Such a flinty villain, we might suppose, would rejoice in this omen of the fulfillment of the prophecy; instead, he rushes out “to lighten the depression of his spirits.” The characterization of the child Baron as a Gothic tyrant is, then, done with absurd exaggeration, jarring contrasts, comic twists.

But in the latter middle part of the tale — the scene in which the fiery horse appears, and the following history of Metzengerstein's obsession and ensuing solitude — exaggerations of manner are more important than those of incident and characterization. Poe exaggerates his narrator's use of four devices in this section to emphasize the satiric irony of the whole tale. First, the narrator continues the Gothic mode of vagueness; while the young Baron is “apparently” thinking this or doing that, both the aristocrats and the “multitude” are “attributing” and “suggesting” and “hinting” darkly of things of an “equivocal” nature (I, 97-98). Second, the narrator writes stilted dialog marked by mildly comic repetitions of exclamations like “Indeed!” and “Shocking!” Third, the narrator makes several interpretive intrusions into the story to underscore the motif of meaningless words, though he has only limited awareness of the larger implications of his judgments on the “silliness” of the characters' utterances. Fourth, the style is subtly exaggerated through plays on the sounds of words, reinforced through implied puns.

The last of these, the word-play, is probably most illuminating of the exaggerated devices to follow. The word-play exaggerates the style just enough to spoil for the wary reader the quality of near seriousness still likely to be dominant for the unwary reader. The horse in this section of the tale is repeatedly described as unnatural, untractable, intractable, intelligent, impressive, and impetuous. Other words are used in connection with the horse, but these half dozen are especially noticeable since they are similar in the approximate alliteration and assonance of the first syllables and in being polysyllables of nearly the same length and accent. Among the most emphasized sounds in the middle section of the tale are variants of un-, in-, and im-, repeated enough to keep the figure of the horse constantly in mind as a submerged image. Moreover, the most frequently repeated sounds, not only in the middle of the tale but also in the beginning section, are long and short e- sounds, at the beginnings of words. Since the e recurs frequently as equ- in the repetitions of equerry, equerries, equals, equally, equivocal, an implied pun on equus suggests itself, which along with the other sounds associated with the horse keeps the image literally echoing throughout the passage. I have earlier pointed out subtle symmetrical repetitions of the horse image in the beginning, middle, and end of the tale, as well as in the jesting reference to Caligula; the counterpoint of sound is further evidence of the care with which Poe wrote his tale.

Again, I am aware of the possibly strained quality that such an interpretation of minute details may have when claimed for the supposedly overwrought Romanticisms of “unsubtle” Poe. But the single most obvious characteristic of Poe's style in both his prose and his poetry is his manipulation of sound and rhythm. The point suggested by the repeated sounds is not merely that of reinforcing the unity of the story through the image of the horse. The repetitions call attention to the matter of style in a manner different from the exaggerations of order, rhythm, and diction discussed earlier. The repeated sounds provide another clue to the overriding irony, further alerting us to the possibility that there is a smiling, hoaxing author behind the dunder-headed narrator. Moreover, the repetitions of sound mesh with and underscore the motif of meaningless utterance. Metzengerstein inquires of his “three equerries” about the “estray” and learns of “evident marks on the “enormous” horse of an “escape” from fire. “Extremely singular!” Metzengerstein says “with a [page 52:] musing air ... apparently unconscious of the meaning of his words” (I, 96-97, my italics).

The triptych pattern shows up in these sound repetitions too, as when a page whispers “into his master's ear ... entering into particulars” with such a low voice that “nothing escaped to gratify The excited curiosity of the equerries” (I, 97). A different kind of sound repetition occurs next, the comic repetition of similar words in both presented dialog and narrative description, but introduced by the in-, im-, e- sounds. Learning that Berlifitzing has perished of his “exertions,” Metzengerstein seems “impressed” with an “exciting” idea that agitates his “emotions” so that he “ejaculated” the cry “I-n-d-e-e-d-!’ ” — an exclamation which is merely the most emphasized of seven repetitions of the word in two pages, being used three times in a stupid exchange with the equerries and four times in the accompanying narration of the scene, with the addition of the approximate rimes of “succeeded,” “exceed,” and the word “steed” thrice repeated.

Sometimes the repetition of sounds falls into obviously exaggerated patterns of alternation and multiple alliteration. We learn that “[[sic]]Metzengerstein becomes companionless “utterly ... unless, indeed, that unnatural, impetuous” horse may be called his friend; he refuses “invitations” of the Count's “imperious” friends, actions they consider “insults not to be endured.” “Equivocal” hints become current, as the Baron disappoints “every expectation” of (our narrator inserts) “many a manoeuvering mamma” (I, 98). Can there be any doubt that Poe was aware of the sound of his prose and intended the word-play as comic counterpoint?(40)

Finally, the widow is “even heard to express the hope that the Baron “... might be at home when he did not wish to be at home, since he disdained the company of his equals; and ride when he did not wish to ride, since he preferred the society of a horse” (I, 98). Here again, as with the prophecy, our narrator cannot refrain from interposing the comment that this utterance is merely “silly,” an “explosion of hereditary pique; and merely proved how unmeaning our sayings are apt to become when we desire to be unusually energetic” (I, 98). In addition to the meshing of the stylistic device of repeated sounds with the motif of meaningless words, the irony of the passage is multiple. The widow of the unfortunate Berlifitzing wishes to be energetic, but her speech is so vague that it sounds anticlimactic and her desires for Metzengerstein's discomfort so unhurtful that she sounds “silly.” Thus, the perversity of things operates on the widow — at least, according to our narrator. But “perversity” as a kind of cosmic irony also operates for her and beyond her since her “curse,” so absurd on the surface, like the prophecy, comes true with absurd precision. Metzengerstein “[[sic]]realizes that the horse must be Berlifitzing and forms what the narrator calls a “perverse attachment” to the animal, perverse to the narrator because unnatural and malicious, but also perverse for Metzengerstein because the attachment is ultimately against his own best interests: he rides when he does “not wish to ride” into the flames of his castle and thus is “at home” when he assuredly does not wish to be. Despite the prophetic quality of the widow's curse, however, she remains a comic caricature; the widow's curse is a parody of the first prophecy. Moreover, the narrator shows no awareness of the ironic working out of her curse; he notes only the surface bathos of her words and thus reveals himself further as a dunderhead who does not understand his story very well.(41)

The rest of the tale details Metzengerstein's perverse obsession, speculates ambiguously on the supernatural character of the horse (at least in Metzengerstein's mind), and concludes with a description of the climactic plunge into the flames. The manner of narration in one sense becomes more subtle and in another sense more obvious. The obvious intrusions of the narrator are reduced; instead, his style intrudes. Rather than commentary on the silliness of what is happening, an enthusiastic recounting of horrible events takes place — rather too enthusiastic, for in his enthusiasm the narrator from time to time loses control of his words, sacrificing meaning and connotation to stereotyped phrases that are only vaguely appropriate. In attempting to describe the intensity of the perverse attachment between Metzengerstein and the horse, for example, the narrator writes: “In the glare of noon — at the dead hour of night — in sickness or in health — in calm or in tempest — the young Metzengerstein seemed riveted to the saddle of that colossal horse ...” (I, 98-99). The use of the phrase “in sickness or in health” from the Prayer Book Marriage Ceremony (though it connotes the wedding together of the fates of the two enemies) is obviously incongruous;(42) but again the incongruous is buried in a triptych, punctuated melodramatically, so that although the passage is overwrought it also reduces [page 53:] somewhat the blatancy of the contrast between the several frames of reference. When noticed, however, the contrast calls further attention to the cliché-ridden style of the narrator, who here sacrifices meaning and tone to melodrama and trite rhythmic phrases — faults often attributed to Poe himself rather than to his implied narrators. This kind of incongruity of tone, as well as the different kind involved in inserting such judgments as “many a manoeuvering mamma,” turns the narrator's comments against himself. Not only because he does not see the implications of events and utterances in his own tale, but also because his manner is so often awkward and obtuse to connotation, his intrusion into the tale suggests a major satiric pattern.

When the reader recognizes this pattern, the egregious violation of tone and of taste at the beginning of the story — the notorious passage in praise of consumption, sometimes used by hostile critics to prove how obtuse Poe himself is as a narrator, or to prove how nearly psychotic he was — is clearly appropriate, for it roundly burlesques Gothic melodrama and senselessness.(43) Writing of the circumstances of young Metzengerstein's inheritance, the narrator tells us that both parents have died, and then introduced a paragraph of elegiac lament that ends with an affirmation. “The beautiful lady Mary! How could she die? — and of consumption! But it is a path that I have prayed to follow. I wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious — to depart in the heydey of the young blood — the heart of all passion — the imagination all fire — amid the remembrances of happier days — in the fall of the year — and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!” (I, 94-95). Illogical, florid, melodramatically punctuated, subtly unparallel, the passage has for a true subject obtuseness itself; it is an example of what Poe called six years later in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” the “tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional.” “The words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning. This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think.”(44) The grotesquerie of the consumptive passage is heightened by its surface associative progression; blood, passion, fire, and autumnal leaves are easily associated with the implied imagery of heat and color — whereas consumption connotes dampness, delirium from fever, and the coughing up of bloody sputum, each horribly implied by the obtuse “affirmations” of the narrator. And it is immediately after this incredible passage that young Metzengerstein stands beside her corpse with his delicate hand placed delicately upon his dead mother's forehead.

Thus, the “flaws” of “Metzengerstein” interweave to form a unified pattern of satire. The writer of the Gothic tale is not quite successful in his pretensions to erudition, not quite aware of the ironies of his own plot, not quite in control of his own style. The atmosphere and general technique of the Gothic tale are satirized by Poe's display of the obtuseness of his narrator (regarding tone, connotation, the incongruities of event and character), by the Gothic convention of the vague, by the counterpoint of the doubly ironic motif of meaningless words, and by subtler exaggerations of style through rhythm, puns, and repeated sounds. Gothic figures are satirized through the comic exaggerations of the character of Metzengerstein and through the “perversity” of subjective and superstitious human reactions to vague events and utterances. The plot of the Gothic tale is burlesqued through the exaggeration of events, through the very number and symmetry of ironic and mildly comic twists, and again through the faulty understanding of the narrator. In view of these exaggerations of content, structure, and style, it requires an effort to understand the views of careful readers who see “Metzengerstein” as radically different in tone and effect from the other Courier satires, or of readers who claim that “Metzengerstein” presents a powerful allegorical lesson, or a working out of Poe's inner conflicts.

V

Poe's ironic technique is close to the hoax, even in the more obviously satiric first version of “Metzengerstein,” for this burlesque imitation of the “German” horror story is so close that it can, on a casual reading, be mistaken for its original. It seems clear that the circumstances of the reception of “Metzengerstein” caused Poe eventually, in his revision of this tale and in writing subsequent tales, to narrow the circle of the perceptive audience. The devoted readers of Gothic tales are here hoaxed into believing a carefully flawed tale to be a genuine Gothic performance. The real flaws of the tale are different. The story seems merely clever rather than intrinsically interesting, despite its intricate ironies and sometimes subtle parody; and the satiric usage of the narrator is a little inconsistent [page 54:] since he is allowed to make wry comic observations on the characters and on human nature, and yet is part of the butt of the satire. The inconsistency here is not merely a matter of casual irony becoming straightforward from time to time; it is a matter of clearly defined point-of-view. We do not simply have Poe playfully imitating the Gothic tales; the character of the narrator is too strongly implied, and his intrusions form a pattern integral to the ironic structure. And because the narrator has two faces, so to speak, even in his role as narrator, several implications are left unclear.

Horribile Dictu (if I may be allowed this assumption) says that the prophecy and the widow's curse are both silly, but they both work out literally and ironically in every detail, including, ludicrously, the metaphors. Dictu then may be duped in some way, in which case the implication would seem to be the serious one that one should not be so hasty to judge mysterious and supernaturally charged events. Or Dictu may be employing foreshadowing dramatic irony to set his audience up for the twists to follow (including the supernatural occurrences); but he shows no other awareness of the ironies of his plot (indeed, seems obtuse about the matter) and his style and taste prevent one from responding with any serious delight to such “ominous” foreshadowing. On the other hand, one wonders if Dictu may himself be satiric; but he seems only to be faintly aware of the operation of “perversity” in his tale, and the range of his satire is limited on the surface to mild, “witty” sarcasm regarding the behavior of his characters. To expand the ironic framework so that he is satiric beyond the wryness of incidental comment tends to merge him with Poe the ironist too much — especially since in the overall “Folio Club” scheme the holder of the seventeen manuscripts plans to “expose” the dunderheads and their writings. It is only by noting that Dictu does not seem to understand his tale very well that his comments have real consistency with the overall parody, for then his self-assumed superiority (as announced by the opening paragraphs) is ridiculed in the working of his plot. But even granting this, the problem of consistent point-of-view in “Metzengerstein” is likely to prove annoying. The “Folio Club” scheme was left incomplete, and perhaps Poe had not clearly thought out the personalities of his narrators by the time “Metzengerstein” was published. At any rate, the inconsistency is fairly minor; and Poe, as he increasingly used participating rather than merely peripheral first-person narrators, did not have the same kind of problem later. That is, the problem of the separation and the intrusion of the narrator is not to be an operative or noticeable matter, for Poe makes fuller and clearer use of even the observing “I” in his subsequent tales. The first-person narrators of “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and “The Oval Portrait,” for example, are involved participants in the action; and their bizarre mental states are integral to the deceptively ironic, serio-comic, and satiric perspectives of the tales. “Metzengerstein” has sometimes been called a “false start” by critics who wish to consider only half of Poe's fiction and who insist that Poe is solely a Gothicist. But the tale is a false start only in the sense that its ironic point-of-view is somewhat blurred. In all other respects, however, this carefully flawed tale is a paradigm for Poe's subsequent Gothic hoaxes. Poe almost uniquely in American literature possessed the dark power to touch the unseen, unconscious life, to render forcefully certain private and prohibited psychological states, to suggest the demoniac in mankind and in nature — and yet at the same time to bring a cool rationality, an ironic skepticism, and a pervasive mockery to bear on all that he examines.

Poe began his career as a satirist, and he remained a satirist to the end of his career. The only real shift was his increased philosophical and artistic irony, which, not only informs all his satire but also came to overshadow the satiric impulse. The ironic mode and the ironic vision of the later tales, however, are implicit in the early satires. The history of Poe's career is the history of his simultaneous exploration of the fearful and the ridiculous. Poe exploited the terrors of the Absurd as an ironically detached artist, exploring perverse human psychology in a perverse, absurd universe. And Poe knew, consciously, from the first, what he was doing.

Washington State University

[page 54, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 Allen Tate, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” Collected Essays, (Denver, 1959), see pp. 457-465. [page 55:]

2 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, (N.Y., 1902; reprinted N.Y., 1965), VIII, 157. References to criticism and “Marginalia” are to this edition, cited as Works. References to Poe's tales, unless otherwise noted, are to The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. A. H. Quinn and Edward H. O'Neill, (N.Y., 1946), which prints earlier versions of several of Poe's stories, cited as “Borzoi Poe.”

3 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, (Cambridge, 1948; reprinted with supplement, N.Y., 1966), I, 53-54. References to Poe's letters in the text are to this edition; references to letters to Poe are to Harrison or to A. H. Quinn, Poe: A Critical Biography, (N.Y., 1941); Quinn (p. 200) gives a facsimile of the letter and the succeeding first paragraphs of Poe's neat copying out of “Epimanes.”

4 “Maelström” though published several years later in 1841 may be an early tale. But the evidence for this is suspect, being mainly the testimony of John Latrobe years later. Latrobe remembered that “Maelström” was one of the tales submitted to the Visiter prize contest, for which he served as judge, but Latrobe's other “recollections” of Poe seem to be somewhat inaccurate.

5 See Harrison's commentary on “Poe's Introduction for ‘The Tales of the Folio Club,’ ” Works, II, xxxv-xxxvi.

6 T. O. Mabbott in “On Poe's ‘Tales of the Folio Club,’ ” Sewanee Review, XXXVI, (1928), 171-176, focused critical attention on this Introduction and printed a newly found letter to the Philadelphia publisher Harrison Hall in which Poe further explains and expands his scheme. James Southall Wilson in “The Devil Was In It,” American Mercury, XXIV, (1931), 215-230, discusses the burlesque quality of several of Poe's earlier tales, identifies satiric echoes from other writers, and suggests probable “Folio Club” “authors” for several tales.

7 Letters, I, 103-104. Anyone reading through the whole of [[“]]The Rationale of Verse,” (1843), with its several clearly satiric passages and its vituperative conclusion, may well wonder if Poe did not incorporate some of the “Folio Club” criticism into it.

8 See Quinn, p. 250, for a description of the exchanges.

9 Kennedy to Poe, 9 February 1836, printed in Poe's Works, XVII, 28; Poe to Kennedy, 11 February 1836, Works, XVII, 30; and Letters, I, 84.

10 June, 1836; see Quinn, 250-251.

11 The details of Willis's affectations are from Daughrity, “Poe's Quiz on Willis,” American Literature, V, (1933), 55-62. Poe apparently had Willis in mind, along with others, again three years later when he published “Lionizing” in the Southern Literary Messenger of May, 1835. For commentary on the sources and meaning of “Lionizing,” see Richard P. Benton, “Poe's ‘Lionizing:’ A Quiz on Willis and Lady Blessington,” Studies in Short Fiction, V, (1968), 239-244; G. R. Thompson, “On the Nose — Further Speculation on the Sources and Meaning of Poe's ‘Lionizing,’ ” SSF, (1968), 94-96; and Benton's “Reply to Professor Thompson,” SSF, VI, (1968), 97. John Arnold, “Poe's ‘Lionizing’: The Wound and the Bawdry,” Literature and Psychology, XVIII, (1967), 52-54, expands on the frequently observed sexual innuendo in the tale (see note 16 below).

12 Borzoi Poe, I, 100-101L. The story appeared in the Courier on 3 March 1832. The Courier versions of the five tales are reprinted in J. G. Varner's Edgar Allan Poe and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, (Charlottesville, 1933), now out of print. Harrison in Works gives other variant readings of these early tales, but was unaware of their having been first published in the Courier.

13 David L. Carson in “Ortolans and Geese: The Origin of Poe's Duc de L'Omelette,” CLA Journal, objects to what he calls the “tenuous assumption” by William Bittner in Poe: A Biography, (Boston, 1962), that Willis “was the sort of dilettante who reclined on ottomans — while eating olives — and who was certain to have known all of the currently fashionable haberdashers” (P. 277). It is true that Poe uses ottomans in more than one story, but Carson is unaware of the detailed evidence in Daughrity's article, which Bittner merely summarizes. Carson goes on to make a much more “tenuous” conjecture that the tale is based on a practical joke Poe is supposed to have played while at West Point. Moreover, Carson also ignores the evidence of R. L. Hudson in “Poe and Disraeli,” American Literature, VIII, (1937), 402-416; Hudson suggests that Disraeli's The Young Duke is the butt of the satire. Her parallels are convincing, but she misconstrues the primary target; Poe uses the episode from Disraeli to satirize Willis, puncturing both at the same time. (The young Duke has a “pretty bird,” prays to “die eating ortolans,” owns an elegant apartment, and has trouble at écarté; Hudson also points out that a description of May Dacre in The Young Duke bears a resemblance to “Ligeia.”) David H. Hirsch in “Another Source for Poe's ‘The Duc de L'Omelette,” American Literature, XXXVIII (1967), 532-536, points to a review of The Young Duke in the Westminster Review for October, 1831, but, like Carson, he omits mention of Daughrity's findings.

14 A probable “Folio Club” author is Mr. Snap, an editor.

15 Borzoi Poe, I, 103. The story appeared in the Courier on 9 June 1832.

16 The Courier version was a little more blatantly satiric. To “Abel Shittem,” for example, Simeon declares “Let me no longer be called Simeon ... ‘he who listens’ — but rather Boanerges, ‘the son of thunder’ ” — that is, he-who-sounds, or the son-of-farts, supposedly a condition resulting from the eating of pork. Edward H. Davidson discusses indecent innuendo in Poe's early works in Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 145-148. The likely “Folio Club” author for the tale is Chronologos Chronology, who admired Horace Smith, and had a very big nose which had been in Asia Minor.

17 See Quinn, p. 194, for comments on the satiric butt of the story. Quinn suggests, however, that Poe makes some “parade” of his own, which is no doubt true but is to miss the point and fun of the parade. A possible “Folio Club” author for “Bon-Bon” is De Rerum Natura since he and the Devil in the tale both wear green spectacles (cf. Bittner, p. 290) and since the name is appropriate to the “philosophizing” of the tale.

18 Borzoi Poe, I, 106. The Courier publication was 10 November 1832.

19 September, 1835. The subtitle was amended in 1846 to “A Tale Neither In nor Out of Blackwood.” In the 1836 letter to Kennedy mentioned earlier, Poe specifies “Loss of Breath” as a satire aimed at the “extravagancies of Blackwood” (Letters, I, 84). The obvious “Folio Club” author is Mr. Blackwood Blackwood, who had written certain articles for foreign magazines.

20 See Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe's Grand Design: A Study of Theme and Unity in the Tales,” (Unpub. Ed.D. Diss., Univ. of Tennessee, 1962), pp. 116-117; and Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, is 1925), p. 11.

21 Borzoi Poe, I, 107-108, my italics. “Perversity” thus makes its appearance in the earliest of Poe's fiction. The human propensity to act against one's own best interests, an ultimate irony or grotesquerie, is a major theme in “Metzengerstein,” and became an increasingly major theme in Poe's work. “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845) is but a codification of the theme, rather than a new idea in Poe's thinking. “Perversity” is not a phrenological term, as some critics have thought, but is instead linked to the phrenological category of “combativeness” by Poe in “Imp.” Poe specifically says that the phrenologists are severely limited in their understanding of the human personality. The beginning of “Imp” is vigorously sarcastic about the “systems” that psychologists and phrenologists have tried to impose on the mysterious realms of personality and subconscious motivation, suggesting a certain presumptuousness in trying “to dictate” to God (Borzoi Poe, II, 637-638). Mabbott suggests that the anonymous writer of Ramblings and Reveries of An Art Student is clearly right in attributing the immediate source of “Imp of the Perverse” to the “perverse” behavior of Lady Georgianna in Ch. XXII of Fullerton's Ellen Middleton, a book that Poe reviewed six months prior to the publication of “Imp” (Works, XVI, 34, from the Democratic Review, December, 1844); but both the concept of perversity and the term “perverse” date from 1831 in Poe's works.

22 See M. S. Allen, “Poe's Debt to Voltaire,” University of Texas Studies in English, XV, (1935), 70

23 The later versions show reduction of obvious exaggeration and absurdity; two notable changes are emphasis on mock-learning and, what is more reasonable in a first-person story, keeping the hero alive. All the later versions are titled “Loss of Breath,” though there are variations in the subtitle. The quotations from the earlier version are taken from the Works.

24 The first corpse is fat and bloated, whose terrible lot it has been “not to walk but to waddle,” whose circumgyratory proceedings have been a “palpable failure,” for in “taking a step forward, it has been his misfortune to take two toward the right, and three toward the left.” Stephen Mooney suggests (pp. 116-117) that Poe's description recalls Hazlitt's description of Coleridge's method of walking in “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823); I find this rather strained. But W—— with his long nose does suggest Wordsworth when one considers the two corpses together, though Poe may have had almost anyone in mind, Emerson or Longfellow, for example, or possibly John Wilson.

25 Confirming the sly indecency of the “loss;” see Marie Bonaparte, Poe, A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, pp. 373-410, for a wild application of “impotence” to Poe himself.

26 Poe: A Critical Biography, pp. 192-193. “Metzengerstein” was the first of the five stories that the Courier published, January 14, 1832.

27 Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 138, 142. Davidson does, however, offer “Metzengerstein” as a “lampoon” in his anthology of Poe, Selected Writings, (Boston, 1956), but he gives only brief comment. [page 57:]

28 Poe: A Biography, pp. 85-87. Bittner agrees with Bonaparte that Poe began to see the young Baron Metzengerstein as himself and the old Count as John Allan! And it seems somehow significant that the two fascinated enemies go to mutual destruction.

29 See Davidson's chapter on “Death, Eros, and Horror” in his Poe, pp. 105-135, for comment on the Gothic fashion in the literature of the time. For detailed consideration of short American Gothic works, see the published dissertation of Sister Mary Mauritia Redden, The Gothic Fiction in the American Magazines (1765-1800), (Washington, D. C., 1939). For more general discussion, see Oral S. Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXIV, (1925), 72-93; Chapters X and XI of Edith Birkhead's The Tale of Terror, (London, 1921).

30 Published in January. Poe also italicizes the last word of the tale (“— a horse”), apparently to emphasize the absurdity of the concluding event. He later removed the subtitle, apparently because his readers continued to take the tale seriously.

31 Hoffmann's works are repeatedly cited as the source of Poe's Gothic works and especially of “Metzengerstein” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But similarities to Hoffmann in these two cases are very general: his “Das Majorat” makes use of a “dismal uninhabited castle tenanted by an eccentric hero, the last of his noble race;” Palmer Cobb in The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (published as the whole of Studies In Philology, III, at Chapel Hill, N.C., 1908), p. 9. Cobb argues for Poe's knowledge of German, but G. P. Smith writes that Poe had access to Hoffmann's works in translation in the Baltimore Public Library: “Poe's ‘Metzengerstein,’ ” Modern Language Notes, XLVIII (1933), 357-358. But it is even more likely that Poe got all the “German” decor he needed from Walter Scott's essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Foreign Quarterly Review, I, (July, 1827), 60-98, and current English Gothic novels.

32 See Mabbott's notes to the tale in his edition of the Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe, (N.Y., 1951), p. 414, the actual setting of “Metzengerstein” in Hungary, the land of black magic, as Mabbott points out.

33 Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, N.C., 1963), pp. 33, 73, 183n, 164, 167; Mabbott, p. 414; G. P. Smith, p. 357, points out the motif of the animated portrait. Another interesting possibility for Poe's source, especially for the idea of a satiric hoax, is a mildly clumsy Gothic poem called “The Spectral Horseman,” ostensibly by one Margaret Nicholson (Posthumous Fragments, Oxford, 1810, pp. 23-25) but actually by Shelley. Shelley and some friends intended the volume as a “practical joke,” a romantic hoax somewhat in the manner of Chatterton but with satiric overtones. Thus they invented a mad washerwoman, whose decayed mind not only led her to write poetry but also to attempt regicide. But N. I. White thinks that this mechanism was merely a cover for Shelley's serious attempt to publish a Gothic piece of the kind he had written as a boy; Shelley, (N.Y., 1940), I, 92-94. Similarly, Poe also probably had fun playing with the Gothic tale, writing a decent example of the genre at the same time he mocked it — a technique common in the fiction of the German “Romantic Ironists” of the time, such as Ludwig Tieck.

34 The rooms and their furnishings in “A Bargain Lost” are similar to a description of Vivian Grey's rooms. In a version of “Loss of Breath,” as we have seen the half-dead hero thinks of “falsities in the Pelham novels — beauties in ‘Vivian Grey! — more than beauties in ‘Vivian Grey’ — genius in ‘Vivian Grey’ — everything in ‘Vivian Grey.’ ” J. S. Wilson (p. 220), also notes the parody of Vivian Grey in Poe's “King Pest” (1835). See Hudson, “Poe and Disraeli.”

35 Borzoi Poe, I, 93. The text is that of the Courier.

36 Like the subtitle of the story, the footnote was added to later versions. Again, I suggest that Poe intended it as both a subtle clue to burlesque for the perceptive reader and as part of the hoax on the unwary reader. The thrust of the first paragraphs and their footnote is fairly clearly a subtle lampooning of the footnoting techniques and other scholarly pretenses of the Gothic tale, such as those in the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, who “scientifically” explains away apparently weird effects by citing authorities on various natural, though unusual, phenomena.

37 This, it seems to me, would be true whether Allen was a metempsychosist or not. There is, however, some relevance to the character of “Metzengerstein,” for Allen's reputation earned him the title of “the horned devil of Vermont” as well as that of “the Green Mountain Boy.” After the publication of the Oracle, clergy and laity both took up the fight to destroy “this antichrist of Vermont .... In countless tracts and sermons it was said that Ethan Allen was a profane, blasphemous, and wicked man who drank rum, caroused on the Sabbath, and denied God at all times .... Illiterate parsons ... shouted that this awful infidel should be put down by law, or [page 58:] by force regardless of law. Prayers went up to God for a great wind to blow this Allen into Turkey .... Jehovah was asked to smite him with a thunderbolt. The pious thought they smelled brimstone wherever the General walked or rode.” Stewart H. Holbrook, Ethan Allen, (N.Y., 1941), Chapter XIII, esp. pp. 231-233. Allen's Deist ideas do not seem to have included metempsychosis; perhaps the attribution of this unChristian belief was another gambit of the pious. Allen had also engaged in treasonable correspondence with the British; on the Vermont-New York dispute and Allen's “treason,” see Holbrook, pp. 181ff.

38 The tale can be seen as the working out of two paradoxes. One is the prophecy just quoted (I, 94); the other is the Latin motto to the story, which can be translated as: “Living, I was your plague — dying, I shall be your death” (from a letter of Martin Luther); see Mabbott, p. 414.

39 This passage may have a political or historical implication. Given the allusion to Ethan Allen in the footnote, the passage here suggests the Vermont-New York controversy in which Allen was involved and which was interpreted with further suspicion by the Congress. This hint is strengthened in a moment by the statement that Metzengerstein's boundaries have never been clearly settled. Nothing more, however, is made of this in the story.

40 Compare the repetitions here with the excessive repetition of x in Poe's comic exercise “X-ing a Paragrab” (1849), in which nearly every word of the last paragraphs begins with or contains an x (Borzoi Poe, II, 707-712). (The point of this short piece seems to be some satiric comment on editorial practices of American magazines and newspapers.)

41 It is possible, of course, that the narrator is merely setting up a conventional irony, but the working out of the widow's curse is not obvious on the level of plot to which the typical Gothic reader could be expected to be attuned. The working out of the curse is instead an ironic subtlety not only of plot but also of the satire, as I try to show here.

42 See W. M. Forrest, Biblical Allusions in Poe, (N.Y., 1928), p. 155.

43 Poe omits this passage in subsequent versions of the tale. Poe's revisions, as noted before, tend to reduce the obvious absurdities. Moreover, Poe's brother, William Henry, died of consumption just prior to the first publication of “Metzengerstein” in the January Courier, and Virginia suffered from the disease. These circumstances indicate Poe's sanity rather than the reverse.

44 Borzoi Poe, I, 237; first published as “Psyche Zenobia,” in the American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, November, 1838.