The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Edgar Allan Poe · the tales as the body is read, some seventy pieces of prose fiction, not the poems · first printed in magazines, newspapers and annuals from “Metzengerstein” in January 1832 to the tales of 1849, and gathered in Poe’s lifetime only in part, in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales (1845) · scored on Poe’s English in the order of first publication, as printed in the Library of America Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick F. Quinn (1984), with Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s Tales and Sketches (1978) behind it; read from knowledge, with no text in hand, and only words that are certain are quoted
Mode
The tale of single effect: the confession, the arabesque of terror, the tale of ratiocination, the tale of science and the hoax, and the comic satire, in one body
Mythos
The house that is a mind and a family; the double who is conscience; the burial of the living; the plague as a masked guest; the vortex; the reasoning recluse who restores order to a city
Phase
Each tale its own brief time; the body itself written from 1832 to 1849, its great tales between 1838 and 1846
Presentation
Fiction; short tales, nearly all of the weighed ones told in the first person, many by the criminal or the damned man confessing, a few by the friend of the detective
Register
Dread, mounting toward one effect; the cold calm of analysis; a mannered, italicised, learned prose that at its best is exact in every sound, and in the comic tales a laboured joke at the reader’s expense
Scale
A single mind facing its own dissolution, and a city of crowds and crimes
Governing Proposition
Across some seventy tales printed over seventeen years, most of the great ones in a burst of about nine, Poe moved the tale of terror from the castle into the narrating mind, made the confession of the criminal and the damned man a form, invented the tale of ratiocination with its detective, its friend, its baffled police and its answer in plain sight, and gave the short story its first theory, that a tale is to be built toward a single effect. The wager of the body is that reasoning and derangement are one faculty seen from two sides: the mind that reads another by its traces and the mind that betrays itself by the method meant to hide it obey the same law, and the perverse impulse, to do a thing because we should not, is a primary motive of the soul.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The body has no single book. Poe printed his tales one by one, in magazines, newspapers and annuals, from “Metzengerstein” in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in January 1832 to “Hop-Frog”, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” and “Landor’s Cottage” in 1849, the year of his death. “MS. Found in a Bottle” won the prize of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833. In his lifetime the tales were gathered only in part: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard), two volumes dated 1840 and issued at the end of 1839, with twenty-five tales; and Tales (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), twelve tales chosen by Evert Duyckinck. A projected Phantasy-Pieces was never published. The body is assembled by editors, and the unit is the body as read.
That body is bounded on three sides. It is the prose fiction, not the poems. It leaves out the one completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), a book of its own, and the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman. It leaves out Eureka (1848), the criticism and the essays, which enter only where they bear on the tales. The comic tales, the satires and the hoaxes belong to it, and are weighed as they are, below the great tales. Most of the great tales came in a burst of about nine years, from 1838 to 1846: “Ligeia” in 1838; “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson” in 1839; “The Man of the Crowd” in 1840; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “A Descent into the Maelström” in 1841; “The Mask of the Red Death”, as it was first titled, and “The Pit and the Pendulum” in 1842; “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat” and “The Gold-Bug” in 1843; “The Purloined Letter” in the annual for 1845, issued in 1844; “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Valdemar” in 1845; “The Cask of Amontillado” in 1846.
The preface of 1840 states the turn of the whole body in one clause: “that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” The inheritance was the German tale of terror and the sensation tale of Blackwood’s, which Poe knew well enough to parody in “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, and he was charged with Germanism in his own time. The answer is in the tales. The terror leaves the castle and enters the narrating mind; of the thirteen tales weighed most here, all but “The Masque of the Red Death” are told in the first person, and the narrator becomes the instrument of the horror. Poe did this for the magazines, poor, on the shortest and least honoured form in the market, when the novel and the poem held the honour.
Movement II
In six of the thirteen tales weighed most, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “William Wilson”, “The Black Cat”, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Berenice”, the narrator is the criminal or the damned man confessing. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the form at its purest: one confession pressed to one sound. Its narrator asks “why will you say that I am mad?”, and argues his sanity in sentences that disprove it; the reader hears the method and watches it fail at once, and the beating heart that betrays him can be his own. The tale is built on repetition and the broken breath of the voice, so that the sound of the prose is the madness.
“The Black Cat” names the impulse: “the spirit of PERVERSENESS”. “The Imp of the Perverse” argues it as a primary motive of the soul, that we do a thing because we should not, and its murderer, like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, betrays himself out of the same impulse. In “William Wilson” the impulse takes a body. The double is the self’s conscience, a second self, killed only by suicide, and his last words name what has happened: “how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” These are meanings, and they hold. The tales stated them before the psychology that later named them had a vocabulary.
“The Cask of Amontillado” is the cold extreme. It opens on a sentence that states the whole plan: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Every line of the walk into the catacombs then spends itself on irony, Fortunato’s name, his motley, his cough, his joke about the trowel, until the last bricks are compelled. “For the love of God, Montresor!” is answered “Yes, for the love of God!”, then the bells, then silence. The tale is told fifty years after, by a man who has never been caught, and its last words, “In pace requiescat!”, close the tale and the grave together. Whether Montresor is confessing, and to whom, and why, the tale does not say.
Movement III
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1839) sets its sound in its first sentence, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year”, a run of slow stresses. The house is a mind and a family, and it falls when its last pair dies. The structure is doubled throughout: the house and the line, the poem inside the tale, and at the close the romance of the “Mad Trist” read aloud while its sounds come up through the house, as Madeline comes up from the vault. “We have put her living in the tomb!” Then the house splits along its fissure and closes over the tarn. Whether the narrator sees or dreams it is still argued.
The burial of the living, the plague, the dungeon and the sea give the other tales their frames. In “The Masque of the Red Death” the plague enters Prospero’s walled abbey as a masked guest, the black clock stops, and the last sentence is the tale’s whole height: “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” “The Pit and the Pendulum” opens “I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony” and moves by darkness, by the edge of a pit felt with the hand, by a blade lowering by fractions. In “A Descent into the Maelström” a fisherman goes down into the whirlpool and looks up the wall of water at the moon: the oldest kind of natural sublime, made exact.
The heights are frequent, and they are not even. Poe’s italics, exclamations and catalogues of horror often announce an elevation before the sentence makes it, and flatten what they insist on. Some of the arabesques, “Berenice”, “Morella” and parts of “Ligeia”, are padded with learning that is decor rather than need, and use one shape again and again; in the lesser tales sensation stands in for elevation. The learning is sometimes spurious and the foreign tags decorative. The great tales are made with exactness, and the body around them is uneven: the charges fall on The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law, and not on what the great tales built.
Movement IV
“The Man of the Crowd” (1840) follows an old man through the crowds of a city, and names him: “He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.” Its figure for him is the book that “does not permit itself to be read”, “er lässt sich nicht lesen”: what his crime is, the tale does not say. Here the anonymous modern city enters fiction as a mind that cannot be read, and Benjamin later read the tale in his work on Baudelaire and the city.
The next year, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham’s, April 1841), Poe made a new form. Dupin is the reasoning recluse who reads a mind by its traces and restores order to a city; beside him stand the friend who narrates him and the baffled prefect, and before him the locked room and, in “The Purloined Letter”, the answer hidden in plain sight. The form, the crime, the false lines of the police and the solution told back, is the form of its knowledge, that the mind can reconstruct the hidden. The pattern is load-bearing in all three tales of Dupin and in every detective since; Doyle took it for Holmes, and Borges called Poe the inventor of the detective story.
The detective and the murderer are the same mind seen from two sides. Poe insisted in “Rue Morgue” that the analytic and the imaginative mind were close kin, and the body bears him out: Dupin reads another mind by its method; the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” betrays himself by the method that was to hide him. One law governs the great tales, an intellect turned on itself, and the tales of science and the hoaxes, “Hans Pfaall”, “The Balloon-Hoax”, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, belong to it as calculations on the reader. The comic tales and the satires of literary fashion, “Loss of Breath”, “Bon-Bon”, “Lionizing”, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” and the rest, run on a cruder law, the joke at the reader’s expense, and there the seam shows.
Movement V
In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842) Poe gave the short story its first serious theory. The tale-writer conceives “a certain unique or single effect” and admits no word that does not serve it. The great tales are that doctrine made: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, with nothing that can go; “The Cask”, every line of it spent on one irony; “Usher”, where even the long reading of the romance is required. The theory gave a form with its own law to fiction’s shortest and least prestigious kind, and the practice proved it.
The reach was the widest of any body of short fiction of its century. Baudelaire spent much of seventeen years translating the tales, as Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (1857) and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865), wrote three essays on Poe, and carried him into the making of Symbolism; Mallarmé and Valéry followed. Dostoevsky, Stevenson and Verne, who wrote a sequel to Pym, took from him; Lovecraft and modern horror descend from him; Borges wrote detective tales after him, and Cortázar translated the complete prose. Some of the reach runs through genre in coarser forms, and some through those who carried it.
The return has been as long as the reach. Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study appeared in 1933. Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter” (1956, printed in the Écrits), Derrida’s reply, “Le facteur de la vérité” (1975), and the debate after it made one short tale a field for theory, and from the late twentieth century readers have taken up race and slavery in the tales. The texts survive whole, in their magazine printings and Poe’s revisions, and have been read without a break since the 1840s, in schools as in universities, in many languages, in film and illustration. The yield is concentrated in perhaps a dozen tales, and the rest of the body is read for its manner; the dozen have outlived the taste for sensation that printed them.
Act III · The Twelve
Poe made subtraction a doctrine: the tale-writer conceives “a certain unique or single effect” and admits no word that does not serve it, and the best tales obey. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one confession pressed to one sound, and nothing can go. “The Cask of Amontillado” spends every line of its walk into the catacombs on the irony of Fortunato’s name, his motley, his cough and the joke about the trowel, so that the last bricks are compelled. In “Usher” even the long reading of the “Mad Trist” is required. What holds the axis well below what those tales earn is the body: the comic tales and hoaxes could go with little loss, and some arabesques are padded with learning that is decor.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. First, perverseness: “The Black Cat” names “the spirit of PERVERSENESS”, and “The Imp of the Perverse” argues it as a primary motive, that we do a thing because we should not; the confessing murderers betray themselves out of the same impulse. Second, the mind that reasons perfectly in the service of its own ruin, the narrator who asks “why will you say that I am mad?” and proves his madness by his method. Third, the double, Wilson’s conscience as a second self, killed only by suicide. Fourth, the anonymous man of the city. These hold, stated before the psychology that later named them. Held where it is because much of the body discloses a mood, not a meaning, and the social world is barely seen.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is of terror, and it is frequent. The fisherman’s descent into the whirlpool, looking up the wall of water at the moon, is the old natural sublime made exact. “The Pit and the Pendulum” opens “I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony” and moves by darkness, the edge of a pit felt with the hand and a blade lowering by fractions. “Usher” ends with the house splitting along its fissure and closing over the tarn; “The Masque” with the black clock stopped and illimitable dominion. And the cold height of the catacombs, the cry for the love of God answered in the same words. Held below the top because Poe’s heights are often announced before they are made, and in the lesser tales sensation stands in for elevation.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Here the myth is built, and it lasted. Dupin is not an allusion to an old pattern but a new one: the reasoning recluse who reads a mind by its traces and restores order to a city, with the friend who narrates him, the baffled prefect, the locked room and the answer hidden in plain sight. The pattern is load-bearing in all three tales and in every detective since. The house that is a mind and a family, falling when its last pair dies, is built in “Usher” from title to tarn. The double, the burial of the living, the plague entering the walled festival as a masked guest, the vortex: each is the frame of a tale, not its ornament. Held a step below the top because the archetypes are many and short, each worked through a brief structure.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance was the German tale of terror and the sensation tale of Blackwood’s, which Poe knew well enough to parody in “How to Write a Blackwood Article”. The turn was inward: the terror moved from the castle to the narrating mind, and the narrator became the instrument of horror, unreliable by design. Beside it, three further departures: the tale of ratiocination in 1841; the first serious theory of the short story as a form with its own law; and the tale of science and the scientific hoax. The stake was real. Poe lived by the magazines, was poor, was charged with Germanism in his own time, and placed his art on the shortest and least honoured form in the market. Held under 9.0 because part of the turn was made inside popular forms, and much Gothic furniture is kept rather than broken.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The confession told in the first person by the criminal is the only form in which “The Tell-Tale Heart” can know what it knows: the reader hears the sanity argued and watches it fail in the same sentences, and the beating heart can be his own. “The Cask” is told fifty years after, by a man who has never been caught, and its last words, “In pace requiescat!”, close the tale and the grave together. The detective tale’s form, the crime, the false lines of the police, the solution told back, is the form of its knowledge, that the mind can reconstruct the hidden. In “Usher” the doubled structure, house and family, the poem inside the tale, the romance read aloud while the vault opens, is how the tale thinks. Held off the top because in the weaker tales the frame is a formula.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is long and unusual in range. Baudelaire spent much of seventeen years translating the tales and wrote three essays on Poe; Mallarmé and Valéry followed. Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study came in 1933; Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter” (1956, printed in the Écrits), Derrida’s reply, “Le facteur de la vérité” (1975), and the debate after it made one short tale a field for theory; Benjamin read “The Man of the Crowd” in his work on Baudelaire and the city; readings of race and slavery in the tales followed from the late twentieth century. The questions stay open: whether Usher’s narrator sees or dreams, whether Montresor is confessing, and to whom, and what the man of the crowd’s crime is. Held under 9.0 because the yield is concentrated in perhaps a dozen tales.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the prose fiction of the English language, and beyond it of Europe and the Americas, in the nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the tales reorganised what short fiction could do in three directions at once, making the detective story with its whole apparatus in one stroke, the tale of psychological terror told from inside the disordered mind, and the short story’s first theory and practice of unity, and they opened the tale of science. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the widest of any body of short fiction of its century. Through Baudelaire the tales entered the making of Symbolism; Doyle took Dupin’s pattern for Holmes, and the genre followed; Dostoevsky, Stevenson, Verne, Lovecraft and modern horror, Borges, who called Poe the inventor of the detective story, and Cortázar, who translated the complete prose. Held below the top only because some of the reach runs through genre in coarser forms and through intermediaries.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a hundred and eighty years. Form: the texts survive whole, in Poe’s printings and his revisions; nothing that made the work is lost, and nothing is charged. Presence: continuous since the 1840s and wider than almost any literary work of its century, in English and in translation, in schools as well as universities, and in film, illustration and popular culture without a break. Fabric: nothing to charge. The surface is fixed to a manner, the Gothic furniture of the 1830s and the magazine’s taste for sensation, and to an extent it dates; but the tales have long outlived that taste, and the presence is the proof. A survival of under two centuries is not scored with the millennia; the widest presence takes one tenth above the usual figure, and no more.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Poe’s English. At its best the making is load-bearing. The opening of “Usher”, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year”, sets the tale’s sound in a run of slow stresses. “The Cask” opens on a sentence that states the whole plan, and every later line is dramatic irony exactly placed. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is built on repetition and the broken breath of the voice, so that the sound of the prose is the madness. The charges are real. The prose is often florid and mannered, with italics and exclamation marks doing the work the sentence should; the learning is sometimes spurious and the foreign tags decorative; the comic tales are laboured; and the arabesques repeat their rhythm from tale to tale. A making this uneven does not stand with the highest figures.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the great tales: an intellect turned on itself, in which reasoning and derangement are the same faculty seen from two sides, and the whole of each tale is ordered toward one effect on the reader. Take the two most distant elements, Dupin’s cold analysis in “The Purloined Letter” and the narrator’s frenzy in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. They obey that law: both are minds of method, one reading another, the other betraying itself by the method that was to hide it, and Poe insisted in “Rue Morgue” that the analytic and the imaginative mind were close kin. Even the hoaxes belong, as calculations on the reader. What holds the axis is the wider body: the comic tales and satires of literary fashion run on a cruder law, the joke at the reader’s expense, and the seam between the two halves shows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged as a body of tales. Consciousness, deeply: the divided self, the perverse, the obsessed and the dying mind. Death and the body, in burial, plague, decomposition and mesmerism. Crime and the law, in the murderers’ confessions and in Dupin’s dealings with the police. The city, in “The Man of the Crowd” and in Dupin’s Paris. The natural order, in the vortex and the sea; science and its pretensions, in the hoaxes and “Valdemar”; art and its cost, in “The Oval Portrait”; power, in Prospero’s walled abbey and the king of “Hop-Frog”. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family appears only as a dying line or a dead wife; labour, history, the state, the sacred as faith and the wider social world are absent or glimpsed; no tale holds more than a few orders at once. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Imperishable at 9.2, and The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.9. A body that made the detective story with its whole apparatus, the tale of terror told from inside the disordered mind, and the short story’s first theory of unity, and whose reach ran from Baudelaire and Symbolism to Doyle, Borges and modern horror; texts whole and read without a break for about a hundred and eighty years, in many languages; myths built and still standing, Dupin, the house that is a mind, the double, the buried alive; and a turn of terror from the castle into the soul, made on the least honoured form in the market.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, death and the body, crime and the law, the city, the sea and science are held in one vision of the mind facing its dissolution, but the family appears only as a dying line, labour, history, the state and the wider social world are absent, and no tale holds more than a few orders at once. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.4 and The Made at 8.5: tales of a single effect in which nothing can go, set in a body whose comic tales, hoaxes and padded arabesques could be taken away, run on a cruder law and are made in a mannered and uneven prose.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the body is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 to 1849), the prose fiction from “Metzengerstein” (Philadelphia Saturday Courier, January 1832) to the tales of 1849, printed in order of first publication in the Library of America Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick F. Quinn (1984), with Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s Tales and Sketches (Harvard, 1978) as the scholarly text behind it. The unit scored is the body of tales as it is read, about seventy pieces depending on what is counted as a tale rather than a sketch; Poe made no single book of them, and his two collections, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales (1845), held twenty-five and twelve. The poems, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Journal of Julius Rodman, Eureka and the criticism are outside the unit; the review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and the preface of 1840 are named only where they bear on the tales. The comic tales, satires and hoaxes are part of the body and are weighed below the great tales. The tales weighed most are “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Purloined Letter”, “William Wilson”, “Ligeia”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Man of the Crowd”, “The Black Cat”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, “A Descent into the Maelström” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and after them “MS. Found in a Bottle”, “The Gold-Bug”, “Valdemar”, “Hop-Frog”, “Berenice”, “Morella” and “The Oval Portrait”; the comic tales are known by their manner and their targets more than by their sentences. Scored in Poe’s English; no translation stands between, and Baudelaire’s French versions are named as reception. Each tale is a short work and is weighed at its own scale. No text was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The tales are quoted only where their words are certain, and only in phrases that do not turn on Poe’s dashes; everything else is paraphrased, and passages are cited by tale. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of tales in Mabbott’s edition, the lengths of the tales in words, the marked copies of the 1845 Tales among Poe’s revisions, and an early printing of the tales in Russia.