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Part IV: The Earmarks of Poe's Manner in the Short Story
Since, then, Poe diverged from the common critical path in his perception of a new and important place for the tale among literary forms and since he gave evidence of the sincerity of his point of view by formulating a clear statement of the principles which he believed to govern the newly identified genre, then the true measure of his originality may be found by an examination of his actual results. It is necessary, therefore, to answer definitely the question, — what are the recognizable marks of his handling.
The simplest and most obvious mark of his workmanship, perhaps, is his use of the first-person point of view in telling his stories. Of Poe's seventy-one stories — complete tales, fragments, sketches, and [page 524:] Pym — fifty-four are told in the first person, three others are introduced in the third person and transferred, by means of journal narration, to the first, three are colloquies that give the effect of first-person narration. Ten of the sixteen early stories are told in the first person. This method was, of course, not at all original with Poe nor peculiar to the tale of his time. It was thoroughly in keeping with the general subjectivity of Romantic poetry and was characteristic of many English novels and tales. Since emotions had come to count so strongly in literary creation, it was natural that no other point of view could be quite as effective, quite as convincing, as the story related in the words of an actual participant in the events described. This fact was quite generally recognized, I think, by Poe's contemporaries. For example, of the twenty-nine English novels and tales to which I have referred in the discussion of Poe's tales of horror, twenty-four are narrated in the first person. This method does not appear so predominant in the German and French tales which I have examined, but it occurs with frequency. Some of the most impressive of the stories to which I have alluded in the German and French are first-person [page 525:] narratives, however; for example, “Das Majorat,” “Der Geisterseher,” “Portrait du Diable,” and “La Morte Amoureuse.” The device of a journal, or manuscript, is also of frequent occurrence; another method which gives the effect of a first-person telling, that of one character relating a tale to another in the third person, is often used.
Since the use of the first-person for of narration was so obviously a device, Poe probably thought little about it; he simply relied upon it to assist him in achieving his effect. It was, however, a matter of discussion among the reviewers. A writer for Blackwood's in 1824 expressed himself so nearly in a fashion which Poe himself night have employed, if he had chosen to consider the question at length in a review, that his statement deserves attention. This reviewer associated the third-person point of view definitely with the novel of incident and the first-person with the novel of character; he believed that for the work “of more limited extent” and for the presentation particularly of one human mind, the autobiographical method was virtually the only good one. Of especial significance in connection with Poe's work is this reviewer's recognition of the [page 526:] value of the first person if the writer wishes to “bind the reader's attention and sympathy” on the peculiar problems of one human being. His discussion is worth quoting at some lengths:(55)
Although a great variety of long-winded discussions have been written about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of composing works of this class, in the first person, and in the third person, we venture to say that the truth of the matter lies not far from the surface, and may be expressed in three syllables. Whenever the novel writer places his reliance chiefly on the incidents themselves which he is to narrate, the historical third person is by far the better plan for him to adopt; whenever, on the other hand, his chief object is the development of character, the use of the first person furnishes him with infinitely superior facilities for the easy and full attainment of the purpose he has in view. Accordingly we find, that the skilful romance-writer, who does make use of the third person, never fails to throw himself out of that by the introduction of dialogue whenever the development of character happens to become for the moment his principal concern; and perhaps, in a long romance, where many different characters are to be equally, or nearly so, the objects of the reader's sympathy, this partial use of the first person may have many things to recommend it; as, for example, the greater variety, not only in the substance, but in the tone of the narrative — an advantage of high importance in a work of considerable bulk — and many other things of the same kind.
In works of more limited extent, and where the writer's purpose is to bind the reader's attention and sympathy on the progress of thought and feeling in one human mind, we conceive it to be quite clear, that the use of the first person is the best expedient. Provided we are called upon to sympathize solely or chiefly with one human being, perhaps this is the best expedient, even when the operation of external events, uncontrolled by him, [page 527:] upon that human being, for the principal fund on which the writer's imagination is to draw. But where the particular nature of the incidents in which the being is involved, is decidedly a point of small importance when compared with the nature and peculiarity of the mind on which these incidents are to exert their influences, then above all, it seems to us clear and manifest, that the uniform adoption of the autobiographical tone is not only the best expedient, but the only one. ... Whenever the depths of the heart and soul are to be laid bare, let us have the knife of the self-anatomist — nay, without saying anything about depths, since many human minds may be very shallow things, and yet highly amusing as well as instructive in their display, whenever the secret peculiarities of one man are the principa1 object, let that man tell his own story.
One could hardly formulate a better statement of the exact thing Poe strove to do in his stories than this Blackwood's review has made in describing one type of story. Especially in his serious tales, Poe attempted to focus attention on one individual and his reactions to events — to expose the nature and peculiarity of one human being. Whether he was influenced by what reviewers had to say upon the matter or by his observation of the practice of other fictionists, he learned by his own experience the usefulness of a first-person telling. It was a device peculiarly necessary to him in connection with his attempt to make “autorial comment” count as a “binding power.” He could naturally achieve this more satisfactorily by identifying the author with the narrator. [page 528:]
Thus it has come about that this very device, adopted by Poe because of its popularity and because it served best the purpose of creating a single impression upon the reader, has resulted in an autobiographical interpretation of many of Poe's tales. Professor J. A. Harrison, for instance, quoted at length in his biography of Poe from what he termed Poe's “fable-autobiographies,” “Eleonora” and “Berenice,” and commented, “Here is Poe drawing his own silhouette out of the cloudland of memory and self-analysis: the dreamer, the poet, the madman, the monomaniac, if you will, passionately addicted to reverie. ... ”(56) A later biographer groups “Berenice,” “Eleonora,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” as Poe's “‘waking dreams’ induced by laudanum,” and asserts that “it is almond certain that they were conceived in 1831” because in that year he saw his brother die of consumption and his thoughts were then set toward “untimely death!” She accounts for the “thrumming on the same string” by explaining that it was the result of an “automatism” developed by virtue of his use of drugs, and declares in “In all of these heroes we must recognize [page 529:] self-portraits.” Poe's descriptions of Oriental settings and characters become, according to this last biographer, an indication of his “subconscious recognition” of the Jewish ancestry suggested by his portraits.(57) Such interpretations have been in part the unfortunate result of Poe's particular method of telling his stories in the-first person, in part of his peculiar ability to suggest verisimilitude, but chiefly, I think, of the short-sightedness of his biographers in failing to take into account the fashions current in his time in both subject-matter and manner.
Poe's preoccupation with what Blackwood's reviewer termed self-anatomy, laying bear [[bare]] “the depths of the heart and soul” of one human being, may also have been responsible for autobiographical interpretations. Certainly it led him to develop another characteristic easily identifiable with his tales: the necessary limitation of the number of characters in the story. This has of course become a definite principle of the short story since Poe's day and is really an integral part of the whole theory of the [page 530:] tale. Poe learned it, however, through experience. Practically all of his tales are centered about from one to three characters; at least twenty-five of them exclude interest in all except one central figure; between fifteen and twenty others deal with only two main figures.
Most of Poe's stories which really create character and atmosphere are told with little or no conversation or with conversation of the monologue type. The comparatively small number of tales which actually make use of conversation to advance the plot are, for the most part, either third-person stories or tales of ratiocination. Poe must have felt the necessity of conversation in connection with a third-person story in the same way in which the Blackwood's reviewer quoted above explained it — as a means of throwing the point of view into the first person for the sake of character-creation. The conversation employed in Poe's analytical tales, such as ‘The Gold Bug” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is hardly conversation in the true sense of the term; it is of the monologue variety in which one character talks to another by way of explaining a point necessary to the advancement of the plot. The tales of ratiocination are plot, or incident, stories, and according [page 531:] to or reviewer, both the third-person method of narration and the use of conversation. Poe wrote them, however, with little conversation and in the first person.
Nothing is more characteristic of Poe's method than the circumscription of space and time in his stores. Though he frequently sketched antecedent events or the history of a character, he did this principally in the introductory paragraphs and limited actual events in the tale to a period, usually, of short duration. This, too, has virtually become a law of story technique since his time. With him, it was an inevitable concomitant of his theory of unity, as he himself recognized. In discussing locale in “The Philosophy of Composition,” he wrote, “... it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of spaced is absolutely necessary to the effect of the insulated incident: — it has the force of a frame to the picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.”
We associate with Poe's stories, of course, that impression, or mood as he called it in his poetry, in which he was primarily interested. It is not [page 532:] always easy to say exactly how he achieved it, for a mood, is after all, an intangible thing. Professor Wilson has very aptly compared Poe's art with that of the mesmerist and has pointed out that he sought “to create a defined psychological state upon the consciousness of his readers.”(58) Certainly his skill in beginning his stories had a very important bearing upon his creating the correct initial attitude for this state of mesmerism. His statement in connection with his review of Twice-Told Tales indicates his own emphasis upon the significance of the beginning: “If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he [the artist] has failed in his first step.” He elaborated this idea somewhat in one of his “Marginalia” notes:
How many good books suffer through the inefficiency of their beginnings! It is far better that we commence irregularly — immethodically — than that we fail to arrest attention; but the two points, method and pungency may always be combined. At all risks, let there be a few vivid sentences imorimis, by way of the electric bell to the telegraph.(59) [page 533:]
Poe spoke frequently in his reviews of “absolute conclusions.” Without doubt he himself did no one thing more effectively than the dramatic, and impressive conclusion. Even his early stories, as “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Visionary,” and even “Lionizing” and “The Bargain Lost,” show that he needed to take lessons from no one in creating the powerful final effect of his tales. The art which went into the “fillings in,” we can still explain in no better fashion than he himself put it — “no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not the one preëstablished design.” Certain stylistic traits, however, had bearing upon his success in creating his effects; exaggeration of details in his humorous tales, a certain beautiful and strange kind of diction in his serious ones, accumulation of phrases broken by dashes, exclamatory sentences, a sprinkling of foreign phrases, out-of-the-way literary allusions, and always attention to minute details. He had, too, a striking ability to minute make some one thing in each tale linger in the minds of his readers; the detail may differ as the individual readers differ, but usually the definite remembrance is there. His friend, P. P. Cooke, commented upon this characteristic in one of his letters to Poe: [page 534:]
I have always found some one remarkable thing in your stories to haunt me long after reading them. The teeth in Berenice — the changing eyes of Morella — that read and glaring crack in the House of Usher — the pores of the deck in the MS. found in a Bottle — the visible drops falling into the goblet in Ligeia, &.&. — there is always something of this sort to stick by the mind — by mine at least.(60)
The best illustration among Poe's tales of his skillful use of the first-person point of view, of his limitation of the number of characters, of his close circumscription of space and time in the narrative, of his impressively bell-like beginning and absolute conclusion, and of his successful use of conversation as a means of advancing the plot, is his brilliantly written “The Cask of Amontillado.” It illustrates, too, the perfect application of his theory of unity of effect and the finished artistry of his language and technical skill. Because, however, of its very perfection and its brilliant technique, it has less of heart, less of moving power, than some of Poe's earlier tales which were executed when he was still more the artist than the craftsman. In his “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe wrote of “The Raven” that “no one point in its composition is referrible [[referable]] [page 535:] either to accident or intuition — that the work proceed, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” He might, I think, have written similarly of “The Cask of Amontillado.” For this reason, coming as it did almost at the end of his career as a tale-writer, it offers an example of what happened to him in the course of his development as creator and critic. Great as are such stories as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” they are merely correct in design and intellectual in tone, as compared with the sheer rollicking fun of “Lionizing” and “The Devil in the Belfry,” or with the moving power of “Silence,” “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Eleonora,” — a power that grips and sweeps one line a burst of splendid music.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 526:]
55. “Remarks on the Novels of Matthew Weld,” XV (May, 1824), 568ff.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 528:]
56. Biography, volume I of Complete Works of Poe, 130-32.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 529:]
57. Una Pope-Hennessey, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography, 144ff.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 532:]
58. “The Philosophy of Composition,” loc. cit., 678.
59. Democratic Review, Nov., 1844. Works, XVI, 16.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 534:]
60. August 4, 1846. Letters, 264.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - RLH35, 1935] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story (Hudson)