IN the popular mind Poe stands as the supreme artist in stories of the dark and terrible side of life. The element of horror was never handled by any one else with quite the same oppressive and convincing realism. Other writers have strained after Poe's effects, but in their straining they have missed the result.
It has long been a question, what value there is in picturing this dark and gloomy side of life, the degeneracy, criminality, and madness which so fascinated Poe. That the world is full of this, no one can doubt. Our newspapers tell us of murders, of suicides, and of cases of criminal revenge daily. Few of us but feel at times the oppression of gloomy despair. It has been the policy of a certain literary school to ignore all this, and to try to uplift by holding before the mind only the bright, cheerful, and (incidentally) the commonplace. An opposite school, that of the popular French writers, has gone to the other extreme, and given us a plethora of vileness.
Poe's mind undoubtedly had a bias toward the dark side of all human existence. It is one of his idiosyncrasies. But it would be far from truth to say that Poe shows any sign of morbidity. He never lapses into the wavering weakness of the degenerate mind. Though he pictures degeneracy, there is no suspicion of degeneracy in his literary handling of the subjects he chooses. He displays the facts in these stories with no less acute analysis than in his tales of ratiocination; and it is interesting to observe that when we have read one of these tales we are led to reflect, not on the amount of misery and wickedness actually existing in the world (as we do after reading Zola), but on certain strange freaks of our own dispositions.
By many critics "William Wilson" is regarded as one of Poe's best stories, if not indeed his very best. The opening portion is reminiscent of his school days in England. This tale and that of "The Black Cat" and "The Man of the Crowd" are certainly extremely effective studies in psychology, and they lack (especially the last mentioned) the revolting horror of Poe's two tales of out-and-out insanity, "Berenice" and "The Tell-tale Heart." It is possible that Poe wrote these two latter stories to see how far he could go in picturing the horrid, and perhaps he would have done better to omit them from his works. But since he chose to retain them, we cannot exclude compositions of such manifest power. The three tales of revenge, "Hop-Frog," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Pit and the Pendulum" are drawn from history, and that fact seems quite to justify the terror they inspire; for certainly no lover of Poe would wish to miss these stories.
Akin to these tales of the gruesome, though a genus of its own, are Poe's tales of mesmerism, the most powerful of which is "The Case of M. Valdemar." This was, in fact, one of Poe's incursions into the realm of imaginative science, what might be called "a journey beyond the grave." By reason of its realistic treatment, it is said to have been taken for fact by a certain British scientific journal. Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) referring to it in a letter to Horne says, "There is a tale of his which is going the rounds of the newspapers about Mesmerism, throwing us all into most admired disorder or dreadful doubts as to whether it can be true, as the children say of ghost stories. The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer and the faculty he has of making improbabilities seem near and familiar." The one objectionable feature of the story is the somewhat nauseating conclusion.
Visit: The Edgar Allan Poe Portfolio illustrations Bernie Wrightson (1976)
The Fall of the House of Usher animated with subtitles Edgar Allan Poe Read by Christopher Lee (Free Full movie on youtube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkXzGDcT46g
Extraordinary Tales - The Masque of the Red Death Edgar Allan Poe (Free Full movie on youtube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURFvYmKvoc
"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, presented as a spreadsheet.
https://twitter.com/katherineluck/status/1192507048786845697/photo/1
13 odd facts about Edgar Allan Poe
Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919)
No comments:
Post a Comment