The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics)

by Edgar Allan Poe

  8. (p. 132) act all things… from the perception of the angels: An elaborate revision of: ‘pervade at pleasure the weird dominions of the infinite’. These were originally the sleep-waker’s last words; his tutorial on the relativity of pain was added later.

  9. (p. 134) His brow was of the coldness of ice… after long pressure from Azrael’s hand: (Hebrew, ‘help of God’), Angel of Death in both Judaic and Muslim lore, who severed the body from the soul. The final three sentences too were added for the 1845 edition.

  Select Bibliography

  SIDNEY E. LIND, ‘Poe and Mesmerism’, Publications of the Modern Language Association vol. 62 (1947), pp. 1077–94

  DORIS V. FALK, ‘Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism’, Publications of the Modern Language Association vol. 84 (1969), pp. 536–46

  THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE

  First published

  Godey’s Lady’s Book (February 1845)

  Reprinted

  Broadway Journal (25 October 1845)

  Translated

  Léon de Wailly, ‘La 1002° Nuit’, L’Illustration (1856)

  The wonders of encyclopaedic lore defy the Arabian Nights. The real modern world beats Gulliver’s Travels hollow. This young ‘gullible’ from Bagdad does not voyage east to the land of the Houyhnhnms but west to that of the ‘Cock-neighs’.

  Sinbad’s last voyage around the world in a British armoured cruiser turns into a catalogue of western fantasy: dirigible balloons, steamboats, railways, printing-presses, daguerreotypes, electrotype and telegraph. The satiric theme is not so much the credibility gap between modern science and theology, as between the acceptance of scientific criteria and theological dogma. To the Caliph the Koranic ‘sky-blue cow’ alone is credible.

  In ‘The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign’ (April 1839), Poe’s champion for progress and the machine age had been the Indian fighter and universally popular hero, Brevet Brigadier-General John A.B.C. Smith (alias General Winfield Scott):

  ‘There is nothing at all like it,’ he would say; ‘we are a wonderful people, and live in a wonderful age. Parachutes and rail-roads – man-traps and spring-guns! Our steam-boats are upon every sea, and the Nassau balloon packet is about to run regular trips (fare either way only twenty pounds sterling) between London and Timbuctoo. And who shall calculate the immense influence upon social life – upon arts – upon commerce – upon literature – which will be the immediate result of the great principles of electromagnetics! Nor, is this all, let me assure you! There is really no end to the march of invention.’

  But it is precisely this utilitarian spokesman, this hero, this darling of democracy, who is the ‘man that was used up’: a mass of prosthetic surgery, a mere assemblage of parts (it turns out), a mechanical illusion of artificial limbs – false teeth, false palate, false arm, padded shoulders, cork leg, glass eyes, a wig – himself the mindless product of the times he celebrates, himself an automaton for a machine age!

  1. (p. 135) like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides: The Cabbalistic commentary on the Pentateuch, attributed to Simon ben Yohai (of the Second Century A.D.).

  2. (p. 135) It will be remembered that, in the usual version: cf.

  Montgomery, in his lectures on Literature (!), has the following – ‘Who does not turn with absolute contempt from the signs, and gems, and filters, and caves, and genii of Eastern Tales as from the trinkets of a toy shop, and the trumpery of a raree show?’ What man of genius but must answer ‘Not I’?

  Pinakidia

  3. (p. 138) in my old age… I became once more possessed with a desire of visiting foreign countries: Like Dante’s Ulysses, whom neither son, father nor wife:

  vincer poter dentro da me l’ardore

  ch’i ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto,

  e degli vizii umani e del valore…

  Inferno, xxvi, lines 97–9

  could conquer the ardent desire that I had

  to gain the world’s experience and attain

  knowledge of human vices and of worth…

  4. (p. 139) a black speck, which rapidly increased in size: Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western steamed into New York harbour on 23 April 1838, just after Poe had settled in New York.

  5. (p. 141) I now bitterly repented my folly in quitting a comfortable home: But this Sinbad-Ulysses soon reverts to Poe’s favourite boyhood hero, Robinson Crusoe.

  6. (p. 146) vegetables… that moved from place to place: These exotics apparently include teasel (scabiosa) and the Rhone water lily (vallisneria). The whole paragraph – Orchideae, Parasites, Algae, subterranean fungi and all – yet again derives from Hugh Murray, Encyclopaedia of Geography, revised edition (Philadelphia, 1839).

  7. (p. 149) The Eccaleobion: (Greek, ‘I invoke life’), an egg-hatching apparatus or incubator.

  8. (p. 150) Maelzel’s Automaton Chess-player: Invented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769, but exhibited throughout the United States by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the Bavarian mechanic who was himself the inventor of musical machines like the Orchestrion and the Panharmonicon. Poe, nine years earlier, had taken a leading part in exposing the hoax. (See ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’, page 425, note 12.) On Maelzel’s death in 1838, the Chess-Player had been bought by Dr John K. Mitchell and stood in the Chinese Museum at Philadelphia, until destroyed by fire in 1854.

  9. (p. 150) Babbage’s Calculating Machine: Forerunner of the modern computer:

  But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man?

  ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’, Southern Literary Messenger (April 1836)

  10. (p. 150) Chabert, and since him, a hundred others: Interposing another stunt-man – not with a Turkish automaton this time but a Turkish pipe – among the engineers and scientists.

  11. (p. 151) two loud sounds… two brilliant lights: The wizardry with ‘red rays’ derives from Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1832), pp. 182–3.

  SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY

  First published

  American Whig Review (April 1845)

  Reprinted

  Broadway Journal (1 November 1845)

  Translated

  Baudelaire, ‘Petite Discussion avec une Momie’, Le Pays (December 1854)

  It is ‘all a mistake o’! The very hieroglyphs drive home the spoof, even though this is not a palpable hoax. What opens with a threat of indigestion ends with a nightmare farce of the whole indigestible modern world – its industries, its faith in ‘Progress’, its democratic hordes.

  Joseph Priestley, author of The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), who had emigrated to America in 1794, wrote:

  Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some may suppose these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by the true theory of human nature, and to arise from the natural course of human affairs. But, for the present, I waive this subject, the contemplation of which always make me happy.

  ‘An Essay on the First Principles of Government’ (1771)

  The Benthamite or Utilitarian creed, of the happiness of the majority, too was first enunciated there: ‘the great standard by which everything relating to’ social life ‘must finally be determined’.

  Poe whole-heartedly disagreed. His contempt for the Transcendentalists’ view of progress he makes abundantly clear. As he wrote in his long letter to James Russell Lowell:

  I live continually in a reverie of the future.
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary – and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the forgone man has lived in vain – that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future – that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves – nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass. – I have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a mere word. No one has really a conception of spirit. We cannot imagine what is not…

  New York: 2 July 1844

  1. (p. 155) a tomb near Eleithias, in the Lybian Mountains: All this Egyptian detail – the Theban sepulchres with their frescoes and bas-reliefs, the extraction of the brain before embalming, the pasteboard coffin, hieroglyphic inscription, bead collar, ‘reddish’ flesh and gilded nails – derives, almost verbatim as Lucille King demonstrated, from two articles in the Encyclopaedia Americana: on ‘Mummies’ (vol. 9, pp. 89–90) and on ‘Embalming’ (vol. 4, p. 487).

  2. (p. 156) By good luck, Mr Gliddon formed one of our party: George Robins Gliddon (1809–57), the British Egyptologist and acting American consul in Cairo during the 1830s, became a popular lecturer on the American circuit from Boston to New York to Philadelphia in the 1840s. His Ancient Egypt (1843), Burton R. Pollin argues, may be the source of Allamistakeo’s unruffled air of superiority:

  Men of knowledge and arts must return to Egypt to learn the origin of language and writing – of the calendar and solar motion – of the art of cutting granite with a copper chisel and of giving elasticity to a copper sword – of making glass with the variegated hues of the rainbow – of moving single blocks of polished syenite, 900 tons in weight, for any distance, by land and water…

  P. 34

  3. (p. 157) The application of electricity to a Mummy… was an idea… still sufficiently original: Though a ‘mention of the galvanic battery’ one year earlier had recalled to ‘memory a well-known and very extraordinary case in point, where its actions proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days’. Apparently dead of typhus fever, the body was unearthed for a post mortem examination and a battery applied to one of the pectoral muscles :

  A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient with a hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible; but the words were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell heavily to the floor.

  For some moments all were paralysed with awe – but the urgency of the case soon restored them to their presence of mind. It was seen that Mr Stapleton was alive, although in a swoon. Upon exhibition of ether he revived and was rapidly restored to health, and to the society of his friends – from whom, however, all knowledge of his resuscitation was withheld, until a relapse was no longer to be apprehended. Their wonder – their rapturous astonishment – may be conceived.

  The most thrilling peculiarity of this incident, nevertheless, is involved in what Mr S. himself asserts. He declares that at no period was he altogether insensible – that, dully and confusedly he was aware of everything which happened to him, from the moment in which he was pronounced dead by his physicians, to that in which he fell swooning to the floor of the hospital. ‘I am alive,’ where the uncomprehended words which, upon recognizing the locality of the dissecting-room, he had endeavoured in his extremity to utter.

  ‘The Premature Burial’ (July 1844)

  Robert Lee Rhea found just such an account of galvanic batteries used for reviving a corpse in The Medical Repository (January 1820). The experiment is worth quoting in full :

  On the 4th of November last, various galvanic experiments were made on the body of the murderer Clydsdale, by Dr Ure, with a voltaic battery of 270 pair of four-inch plates. The results were truly appalling. On moving the rod from the hip to the heel, the knee being previously bent, the leg was thrown out with such violence as nearly to overturn one of the assistants, who in vain attempted to prevent its extension! In the second experiment the rod was applied to the phrenic nerve in the neck, when laborious breathing instantly commenced, the chest heaved and fell; the belly was protruded and collapsed, with the relaxing and retiring diaphragm; and it is thought, that but from the complete evacuation of the blood, pulsation might have occurred!! In the third experiment, the supraorbital nerve was touched, when every muscle in the murderer’s face ‘was thrown into fearful action’. The scene was hideous – several of the spectators left the room, and one gentleman actually fainted, from terror or sickness!! In the fourth experiment the transmitting of the electrical power from the spinal marrow to the ulnar nerve, at the elbow, the fingers were instantly put in motion, and the agitation of the arm was so great that the corpse seemed to point at the different spectators, some of whom thought it had come to life! Dr Ure appears to be of opinion, that had not incisions been made in the blood vessels of the neck, and the spinal marrow been lacerated, the criminal might have been restored to life.

  Even the idea of applying electricity to a Mummy was not necessarily original. Poe’s possible source, discovered by Lucille King, may be the tale ‘Letter from a Revived Mummy’ (New York Evening Mirror, 21 January 1832). There an English soldier, stunned on the battle-field, is preserved for a hundred years in a Brussels museum. The corpse is removed to New York. An attempt at resuscitation is made. When at last a galvanic battery is applied, the mummy starts to its feet, shouting ‘hurrah for merry England! and darted forward as in the act of charging’.

  One book certainly known to Poe was The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) by Jane Webb, centring on the resurrection of the Mummy of Cheops. In league with a Roman Catholic priest, it secures the election of a Queen of England. But the real hero is the scientist, Dr Entwerfen :

  the fortunate inventor of the immortalizing snuff, one single pinch of which cures all diseases by the smell; the discoverer of the capability of caoutchouc being applied to aerial purposes; and the maker of the most compendious and powerful galvanic battery ever yet beheld by mortal.

  Part 2, p. 221

  A play possibly seen by Poe was The Mummy; or, The Liquor of Life! by William Bayle Bernard, a London farce that remained a hit on the American stage throughout the 1830s and 1840s.

  4. (p. 158) Mr Silk Buckingham… upon all fours, under the table: James Silk Buckingham – tireless traveller from Asia to Canada, journalist, lecturer, teetotaller – was elsewhere scornfully pilloried by Poe. Burton R. Pollin suggests that The Slave States of America (1842) may have been his undoing. The vendetta long continued (see ‘Mellonta Tauta’, p. 311).

  5. (p. 158) the exterior os sesamoideum pollicis pedis: One of the small bones of the big toe.

  6. (p. 159) as does Mr Barnes in the pantomime: Comedian at the Park Theatre, father of the far more celebrated actress and playwright, Charlotte Barnes.

  7. (p. 162) in my time we employed… the Bichloride of Mercury: cf. Encyclopaedia Americana: ‘The impregnation is performed by the injection of a strong solution, consisting of about four ounces of bichloride of mercury to a pint of alcohol, into the blood vessels’ (vol. IV, p. 487).

  What the article does not mention, however, is that, far from being Egyptian practice, this was a French discovery of the late eighteenth century.

  8. (p. 166) the very word Adam, (or Red Earth): Gliddon printed Hebrew characters for Adam (Adme), as ‘Red Earth or clay’ (Ancient Egypt, p. 29).

  9. (p. 166) prototypes of Gall and Spurzheim… the manœuvres of Mesmer: Invoking the contemporary Trinity of pseudo-science. The German Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and his disciple Johan Caspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), who died in Boston, collaborated as physicians in Vienna. On the supposition that separate attri
butes of the mind must be localized in separate organs of the brain, they correlated twenty-six faculties with bumps on different parts of the skull.

  Yet Poe himself had given an enthusiastic reception to Mrs L. Miles’ Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology:

  Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at. It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of a science, and, as a science ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings…

  Southern Literary Messenger (March 1836)

  His own ‘Literati’ sketches (1846) were to be marked by phrenological pretention.

  10. (p. 167) I had better consult Ptolemy, (whoever Ptolemy is): Elsewhere Poe alludes to the Almagest, Arab version of the Syntaxis, the famous astronomical work by the Alexandrian, Claudius Ptolemy.

  11. (p. 167) one Plutarch de facie lunæ: ‘The Face in the Moon’, literally De facie [quae] in orbe lunae [apparet] (Moralia 920A–945E). Kepler had written a Latin translation and commentary.

  12. (p. 167) a peep at Diodorus Siculus: ‘Oenopides likewise passed some time with the priests and astrologers’ of Egypt ‘and learned among other things about the orbit of the sun, that it has an oblique course and moves in a direction opposite to that of the stars’ (Diodorus Siculus, Book 1, 98.3).

  Oenopides of Chios, astronomer of the fifth century B.C., is credited with the discovery of the obliquity of the ecliptic.

  13. (p. 167) Look… at the Bowling-Green Fountain in New York! : The Green at the foot of Broadway ‘now ornamented with a fountain supplied by the Water Works of the city. The jets are made to fall upon an uncouth mass of rocks which, in the opinion of some, gives to the same a “wild and picturesque appearance”.’ (E. Porter Belden, New York: Past, Present, and Future, 1851) The water rose some seventy feet, to above the level of surrounding trees.