Even though the concept of a literary canon has been in
tatters for decades, the fact of a literary canon still, for better or for
worse, remains. And one of the
names least likely to be dislodged from the de
facto canon of American literature in any foreseeable future is that of
Edgar Allan Poe. But why? One
answer is simple, or seems to be: that Poe was an inventor, an astonishing
inventor. Indeed, he was the Tesla
or Edison of literature, and from the laboratory of his genius came both
entirely new modes of writing and crucial refinements upon still-developing
genres. But as any infomercial
seen during insomnia-ridden night in a hotel with lousy cable options makes
abundantly clear, not all inventions matter. Many of Poe's did: they had staying power, influenced
important writers, and spoke to generations of readers. This, I think, had as
much to do with Poe's moment as with the man himself.
When Poe's short writing career began, there was
surprisingly little literary infrastructure in America. Literacy rates were climbing quickly,
and the days when an American writer had to send a manuscript off to England to
have it printed were long gone, but the landscape was utterly unlike what we
know today. Not only were there no
foundations, or grants, or MFA programs—there were very few places to publish,
and those tended to reach fairly ill-defined audiences: a century later writers
could send science fiction stories to science fiction magazines, adventure stories
to magazines sold specifically to boys who dreamed of jungle exploration,
stories with literary pretence to stalwart little literary journals, and so
forth. But Poe had to make his way
in the dark. When he came on the
scene the number of Americans who had made a living by the pen could be counted
on the fingers of one hand (Washington Irving is the only name still
recognized) and what the public wanted, what they were willing to pay to read,
remained a mystery (Irving tried all kinds of things: pop history,
observational letters, hopped-up folktales, you name it). So Poe tried everything: his story
"The Balloon-Hoax" was initially published in a newspaper and passed
off as fact; and his proliferation of inventions was in large measure a
sounding-out of the public, a matter of throwing all kinds of words at the wall
of fame and fortune and hoping something would stick. His was a time of the open literary frontier, of risky
ventures in an unknown landscape with the hope of vast rewards.
When we think of Poe's limited success in his short lifetime,
and his posthumous canonical ubiquity, we might remember Gertrude Stein's
thoughts about posterity in her essay "Composition as Explanation":
No one is ahead of his time, it is
only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his
contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. The things refused are only important
if unexpectedly somebody happens to need them.
Poe's inventions didn't quite take before his death at the
age of 40, but they've proved important to a great many readers and writers
later—somebody did happen to need
them. In fact, many people did,
and for many different reasons: his wild inventiveness, which was a response to
the unformed literary landscape of his time, meant that he came, posthumously,
to appeal to multiple constituencies—a factor as important to a writers'
posterity as it is to a politician's electoral prospects.
One way to think about Poe's different constituencies is to
associate them with the important writers who have drawn from one or another
side of the Poe legacy. Four or
five such writers (and their four different views of Poe) come to mind:
Ray Bradbury's Poe. Ray Bradbury's aunt gave him an
illustrated edition of Poe's stories when he was a child and he never looked
back. "I am the ghost of Poe
resurrected" he once told an interviewer (he also said he was the new
Melville, but that he was Poe "above all"). Among the treasures most valued by Bradbury collectors are
the letters he sent out with Edgar Allan Poe commemorative stamps, under which
Bradbury invariably wrote "My Papa." But which Poe is his father? The story "Usher II," included in the American but
not the British editions of The Martian
Chronicles, explicitly draws on "The Fall of the House of Usher,"
but the gothic Poe is of secondary importance at best to Bradbury. His Poe is the early pioneer of science
fiction, the technology-obsessed writer of "The Balloon Hoax." But Bradbury's Poe is also the
adventure writer, the minute-by-minute chronicler of struggle and daring: a
story like Bradbury's "The Long Rain" from The Illustrated Man may be set on Venus, but it is every bit as
much the man-vs.-nature tale as Poe's "Into the Maelstrom," where
inventive problem solving and stoic endurance are the primary virtues. Bradbury's Poe is the grandfather of
many pulp magazine writers of the twentieth century, the progenitor of Amazing Stories and Argosy.
H.P. Lovecraft's Poe. Many people see Poe's influence on
Lovecraft's career as confined to his early, pre-Cthulhu period, and there is
something to this. Certainly the
Poe who dabbled in the gothic, the Poe of "The Fall of the House of
Usher" was a direct influence on the early Lovecraft—and it's true to say
that Lovecraft's development of an elaborate fictional mythos has no real
precedent in Poe, owing more to Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna
than any other source. But it
isn't the trappings of gothic horror that really matter in the Poe-Lovecraft
connection. Indeed, Poe himself
wasn't the inventor of the long-established machinery of gothic horror, he was
the refiner of that tradition. His
greatest refinement is the application of what he called, in his essay
"The Philosophy of Composition," the literary work's "unity of
effect"—the conscious co-ordination of all parts of the story to a single
affective end, to produce a single emotion in the reader. This kind of deliberate orchestration
is what early gothic writers like Sheridan Le Fanu or Horace Walpole lack—Poe
introduces calculated order into the wild garden of the gothic imagination, and
the effect is (and is precisely intended to be) spine chilling. The way a story like "The Pit and
the Pendulum" strives, inch by inch, to creep you the fuck out is Poe's
greatest legacy to Lovecraft—who applied the lesson throughout his career—and
to the black-garbed, eyeliner wearing multitudes who followed in Lovecraft's
baleful wake.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
Poe. Poe is not the inventor
of the detective tale, which, like the word "detective" itself, has
its origins in France. There's a strong case for Voltaire's Zadig as the ultimate progenitor of the
genre, and examples appeared sparsely here and there throughout European
literature in the decades that followed, notably in the work of E.T.A.
Hoffmann. Poe once worked for a
man named William Evans Burton, who wrote "The Secret Cell," a story
of police following procedures to solve crime—but it is what Poe does with the
genre that is original. While
Burton's story is all about following rational procedures, Poe's three
"tales of ratiocination" insist that one needs not only the tools of
the scientist, but of the poet, to see into the heart of things. Indeed, it is the character he invents,
the fallen French aristocrat and bohemian outsider C. Auguste Dupin who
represents his real innovation: the detective not only as rational man, but as
aloof outsider, as a virtuoso of insight, as the master of inferring a world
from a small tic, the way a great poker player reads his opponents by their
giveaway 'tells.' This is the
character who inspired Sherlock Holmes, as Arthur Conan Doyle is quick to
acknowledge: he even has Watson compare Holmes to Dupin (as well he might: the
first Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" is a scandal indeed, in
that much of it is a virtual plagiarism of "The Purloined Letter"). The Byronic detective is Poe's
invention, and from Dupin to Holmes it's just a short drive to the vast and
shadowy lands of noir.
Jorge Luis Borges'
Poe. Borges mentions Poe up in well over 100 different
essays and scores of interviews, and posed for a photograph at Poe's
grave. So deep was his love of Poe
that he carries not one, but two versions of Poe close to his heart. The first is much like Arthur Conan
Doyle's Poe, the Poe of Dupin and analytic detection. Indeed, Borges wrote stories in response to Poe, stories
best read in tandem with the Dupin stories. But Borges' other Poe is my favorite Poe. The Poe of the Dupin stories is the
master of the explicable universe—Dupin sees through surface confusion and
grasps the thread connecting and making sense of all things. But there's another Poe who matters to
Borges—the Poe of stories like "MS Found in a Bottle," the Poe
devoted to mystery, to meanings always on the verge of coming clear. I often think of "MS Found in a
Bottle" as the antithesis of "Into the Maelstrom"—each story
deals with an enormous whirlpool drawing the protagonist in, but where
"Into the Maelstrom" deals in physics and rational calculations for
survival, "MS Found in a Bottle" offers nothing of the kind. Instead, we encounter mysteries that
can't be solved, unless, perhaps, the moment of revelation comes when we exit
the known world and allow ourselves to be taken over the border into something
mysterious—perhaps death—at the sublime heart of the whirlpool. This sense of a great revelation
concealed but hovering on the verge of revelation is at the heart of many of
Borges' best-known writings: we see it in "The Garden of Forking
Paths," for example, and we watch scholars search for it in "The
Library of Babel." "The
Lottery of Babylon" hints that there may, just may, be a secret order to
the world, but we hover on the brink of knowing, just as Poe's protagonist does
in "MS Found in a Bottle." This Poe is the modernist and
postmodernist's Poe, a Poe not for the mass market pulp magazines but for the
literary quarterlies and the seminar room.
To these four we might consider adding another, Charles Baudelaire's Poe. Baudelaire's translations of Poe were
crucial to establishing Poe's international reputation, but I find it difficult
to think of Poe as an influence on Baudelaire so much as a spirit-companion, a
courage-giver for a kindred spirit.
Poe's writing mattered to Baudelaire, to be sure, but as Baudelaire's
biographer Alex De Jonge put it, "Perhaps more importantly, Baudelaire
identified with the man. Poe was
the first modern writer: a desperate loser, haunted by his guignon [his bad luck or fated failure], a man who lived a life of
misery and drink, and died in suspect and ignoble circumstances." This Poe matters too, of course, but
less as a writer than as a type, the poète maudit.
Many of the writers who drew from Poe exceeded him in one or
another form of excellence. But it
is hard to think of any modern figure who equals him in inventiveness. We might turn to the evolution of the
literary market for explanations: the lack of defined genres, Roberto Bolaño
once remarked, is a sign of literary underdevelopment: in advanced economies we
find whole arrays of literary niches and sub-niches: hard-boiled detective,
young adult fiction, swords and sorcery, historiographic metafiction, you name
it. Specialization is the norm—but
this wasn't an option for Poe, who worked in a relative vacuum, and tried in a
thousand ways to connect with a readership.
How, then, to be a classic? Invent, try new things, take a lot of potshots, and—this is
the hard part—happen to hit bulls-eyes with all of them.
