The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics)

by Edgar Allan Poe

  2. (p. 195) resembling those of John Randolph: John Randolph of Roanoke, a fellow Virginian, died in 1833, twelve years earlier. In his old age he had become increasingly eccentric, occasionally suffering from bouts of madness. His political stance must have appealed to Poe. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ he declared. ‘I love liberty; I hate equality.’

  3. (p. 196) The osseous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossible: Even a modern X-ray might not expose Valdemar’s internal ailments with quite such accuracy. Poe, Sidney E. Lind suggests, may have combined a number of post mortem reports for this living autopsy.

  4. (p. 203) As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes: As early as 1855 the anonymous author of Rambles and Reveries of an Art Student in Europe pointed to the last page of Justinus Kerner, The Seeress of Prevorst (translated from German into English, 1845) as the source for Poe’s gruesome finale:

  Once, when she appeared dead, some one having uttered my name, she started into life again, and seemed unable to die – the magnetic relation between us not yet broken. She was, indeed, susceptible to magnetic influences to the last; for, when she was already cold, and her jaws stiff, her mother having made three passes over her face, she lifted her eyelids and moved her lips. At ten o’clock her sister saw a tall bright form enter the chamber, and, at the same instant, the dying woman uttered a loud cry of joy; her spirit seemed then to be set free. After a short interval, her soul also departed, leaving behind it a totally irrecognizable husk – not a single trace of her former features remaining.

  5. (p. 203) of loathsome – of detestable putridity: ‘putridity’ is Poe’s final manuscript correction in his own copy of the the Broadway Journal in place of ‘putrescence’.

  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), p. 536–46

  EUREKA

  First published

  ‘Eureka: A Prose Poem’ (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, June 1848)

  Translated

  Baudelaire, ‘Eureka, poëme en prose, ou essai sur l’Univers matériel et spirituel’, in four instalments, Revue internationale mensuelle, Geneva (October 1859 to 1860). The translation was not finally completed until 1863 (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1864)

  What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly – but I say it.

  To George W. Eveleth : 29 February 1848

  It is no use to reason with me now; I must die. I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka’. I could accomplish nothing more.

  To Maria Clemm : 7 July 1849

  On 3 February 1848, Edgar Allan Poe read a two-hour lecture ‘On the Cosmogony of the Universe’ at the Society Library, New York. It was delivered with all the aplomb of an Edwin Booth:

  He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully. He wore his coat tightly buttoned across his slender chest; his eyes seemed to glow like those of his own raven…*

  Eureka, ‘A Prose Poem’, was the extension and culmination of that lecture. His wife, Virginia, had died the previous year. Maria Clemm, his aunt (and mother-in-law), was now his sole support – sole audience of his ‘Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe’, his De Rerum Natura and Novum Organum, or ‘Book of Truths’. She later recalled:

  He never liked to be alone, and I used to sit up with him, often until four o’clock in the morning, he at his desk, writing, and I dozing in my chair. When he was composing ‘Eureka’, we used to walk up and down the garden, his arm around me, mine around him, until I was so tired I could not walk. He would stop every few minutes and explain his ideas to me, and ask if I understood him…†

  No doubt, Mrs Clemm – all motherliness – declared she did. For Poe insisted on an edition of 50,000, exclaiming: ‘I have solved the secret of the universe.’ George Putnam accepted the ‘pamphlet’; he advanced a payment of fourteen dollars, extracting a receipt and signed promise ‘not to ask or apply for any other loans or advance from said Putnam in any way’. For Poe it was a humiliating bargain.‡ Yet the printing of a mere 500 copies published sold very slowly.

  Not that the reception of the lecture had been unfavourable. To the contrary, the Weekly Universe was enthusiastic. The Evening Post and the Express commented intelligently.

  The work has all the completeness and oneness of plot required in a poem, with all the detail and accuracy required in a scientific lecture.

  Express (4 February 1848)

  His remarks on the subject were characterized by the strong analytical powers and intense capacity of imagination which distinguish him.

  Tribune (4 February 1848)

  … a nobler effort than any other Mr Poe has yet given to the world.

  Courier and Enquirer (11 February 1848)

  The book reviews, however, were distinctly cooler. Perhaps that extraordinary mixture of grotesque and arabesque alone was enough to put off the ‘Student of Theology’ (in the Literary World) who so incensed Poe.* And little has changed. American and British readers have never been able to take this swan-song very seriously. They simply skip it. Until recently only the French have listened intently enough to hear in its vortices premonitions of our future. Yet the imaginative sweep, the intellectual coherence, the scientific and spiritual implications – to all who stay the course – remain stupendous.

  Poe’s scientific premises were threefold :

  1 Keplerian physics on the elliptical orbit of planets.

  2 Newtonian laws of gravity and motion.

  3 Laplace’s wave-theory of light and nebular hypothesis.

  That is, he inherited the divinely controlled, mechanistic universe of Newton and Locke in which God, its aboriginal cause, is also the continuing source of its energy or thrust; and man, a privileged ‘member of the cosmical family of Intelligences’, for whose perfection the universe was created. What in Newtonian terms, however, was seen as a static ‘fixed design’ is now construed as a continually evolving and devolving process. Poe celebrates the organic cycles of a finite ‘Universe of Stars’, whose nuclear Spirit is immanent and identical with the creative fission itself.

  The word ‘scientist’ had been coined only eight years earlier.† Poe, like Newton, still thought of himself as a ‘natural philosopher’ whose ultimate affiliations were less with research than with ‘natural theology’. He wrote disdainfully :

  One thing is certain that the objections of merely scientific men – men, I mean, who cultivate the physical sciences to the exclusion, in a greater or less degree, of the mathematics, of metaphysics and of logic – are generally invalid except in respect to scientific details. Of all persons in the world, they are at the same time the most bigoted and the least capable of using, generalizing, or deciding upon the facts which they bring to light in the course of their experiments. And these are the men who chiefly write the criticisms against all efforts at generalization – denouncing these efforts as ‘speculative’ and ‘theoretical’.‡

  Philosophers not merely recognized God’s wisdom and rationality displayed in the divine design since the creation, but revealed the key to those cryptic laws governing the operations of God. Poe’s Eureka, as much as Emerson’s Nature (1836), was (in Aristotle’s phrase) ‘the product of wonder’. Both were cryptographers studiously deciphering the workings of nature. Both still functioned in a post-Newtonian universe.

  In Newton’s picture the material world basically comprised so many fixed kinds of ‘solid, hard, massy Particles’, whose shape, size, and number had been determined by God at the creation.* These particles were not wholly independent in their behaviour. Instead, they interacted by forces of attraction and repulsion, depending on the distances separating them; while, in addition, there were certain other ‘immaterial’ agencies (e.g. light, magnetism, elec
tricity) which had something in common with the ‘electric and elastic Spirit’ associated with perception and volition in the human nervous system, and which were transmitted between the particles through the intermediary of a weightless ‘Aether’. Of these, however, he refused to say anything on the ground that experimental knowledge was inadequate. In the very last paragraph of the Principia Mathematica (1687), he calls attention to a whole list of his omissions:

  I should have liked to say something of the highly subtle spirit which pervades crass bodies and lurks in them, by whose force the particles of bodies attract each other to within minute distances and cohere in this contiguity; electrical bodies act at greater distances, repelling others as well as attracting them; light is emitted, is reflected, is refracted, is inflected, and warms bodies; and sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals are moved at will, by vibrations of this spirit propagated through the solid nerve-filaments from the external sense-organs to the brain and from the brain to the muscles. But these matters cannot be expounded in a few words; nor is there a sufficiency of the experiments by which the laws of this spirit’s action would have to be accurately determined and demonstrated.

  Scientific developments – even in Poe’s lifetime, but strikingly after his death – seemed to confirm Newton’s premisses. John Dalton’s concept of ‘chemical atoms’ (formulated in the first volume of A New System of Chemical Philosophy, 1808) had been applied to a table of atomic weights as early as 1803. By 1870 the physical idea of ‘molecules’ had been employed simultaneously by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell as the foundation for their dynamical theory of heat and gases. Together Dalton’s ‘atoms’ and Maxwell’s ‘molecules’ seemed to provide a sure identification for Newton’s ‘particles’. Meanwhile Maxwell was demonstrating that light, magnetism and electricity, far from being an assorted trio of separate mysteries, were really alternative manifestations of a single class of mystery (transverse waves) that conformed to a single set of mathematical equations. Maxwell’s theory of electro-magnetism seemed brilliantly to cap the Newtonian system. At last Newton’s mystical talk of elastic Spirits, immaterial agencies and weightless Aether had secured its authoritative, theoretical base.

  But Newton had his blind spots. He could be uncritical. In the Scholium, appended to his definitions, he distinguished absolute time (which ‘in itself and without relation to anything external flows at a uniform rate’) from relative time (‘measured by movement’), absolute space (‘everywhere uniform and immobile’) from relative space, absolute motion from relative motion – never asking why relative time, relative space, relative motion alone might not suffice for his brand of ‘experimental philosophy’. He could be illogical. In the Scholium Generale (or general appendix) having demolished the Cartesian theory of vortices, he concludes that this in itself proves that space, far from being full of the subtlest matter, must be a vacuum. He could be sweeping. Having admitted his ignorance in laboratory terms of electric repulsion, electric attraction, light, physical sensation, will-power, he ascribes the whole rag-bag of these mysteries to a single phenomenon ‘X’, a spiritus subtilissimus, a force of which he can say nothing since it has totally evaded his mathematics. But were the phenomena of light consistent with his doctrine of empty space? Was the admission of an electric attraction consistent with his doctrine that mass is simply quantity of matter? A further complication arose with the acceptance of John Dalton’s theory of ‘chemical atoms’. These atoms varied from one another in mass. If the ultimate ‘particles’ were not uniform, but varied according to a scale of atomic weights, what became of the corpuscular theory of matter? What else was that theoretical atom – Newton’s primordial ‘particle’ – but a unit of mass? How could physical quantity of itself be the key to a specific chemical reaction? An essential bridge between physics and chemistry was missing.

  That was Poe’s quandary. He inherited the Newtonian system with all its strengths and weaknesses. A critical example is his treatment of ‘ether’. Of course he was not equipped with Clausius’ second law of thermodynamics nor Maxwell’s work on the laws of the electromagnetic field. Yet he is no mere victim of Newton’s studied vagueness on the subject of that spiritus subtilissimus; he stands up for his master’s vacuum against the proponents of ethereal matter, proving himself as percipient in his way as Newton in his, even though the maestro at this point sadly lets him down.

  For a primal energy, an ‘ether’, was believed to permeate all space, hung even between the minutest particles of observable matter. Sometimes called ‘luminiferous ether’, this was the medium through which light was transmitted from the sun, atoms were confined in their physically perceived forms, even sense data transferred from mind to mind. Once conceived as a fifth element, a quintessence, a purer form of air or fire, it was usually described by post-Newtonian physicists as a unique kind of matter : not divided into particles, uniform, homogeneous. Its function was to propagate wave-like disturbances caused by the movement of the particles. Itself stationary, all movements were movements through it. Though all-pervasive, it offered no resistance to these movements, being at once elastic and perfectly rigid.

  It is surely to Poe’s credit that he rejected attempts either to ascribe a corpuscular structure to this ether – that is, to conceive it as a highly rarefied gas – or to conceive light as a stream of moving particles. (Though he skirts close, mingling ‘light-particles’ with ‘light-impressions’, as if the two concepts were casually interchangeable.) For both attempts failed the experimental test. Poe echoed his master:

  To electricity – so, for the present, continuing to call it – we may not be wrong in referring the various physical appearances of light, heat and magnetism; but far less shall we be liable to err in attributing to this strictly spiritual principle the more important phaenomena of vitality, consciousness and Thought.

  Or again:

  It will be remembered that I have myself assumed what we may term an ether. I have spoken of a subtle influence which we know to be ever in attendance on matter, although becoming manifest only through matter’s heterogeneity. To this influence – without daring to touch it at all in any effort at explaining its awful nature – I have referred the various phaenomena of electricity, heat, light, magnetism; and more – of vitality, consciousness, and thought – in a word, of spirituality. It will be seen, at once, then, that the ether thus conceived is radically distinct from the ether of the astronomers; inasmuch as theirs is matter and mine not.

  This need for a vacuum – checked by the counter-need for some elastic, immaterial ether – confounded Newton to the very end. And there the master left his disciple in the lurch.

  Despite obvious scientific quirks, moreover, Poe scored some surprisingly clear-headed hits. He questioned the Euclidean assumption that the axioms of geometry are self-evident truths at the very time when the Russian Lobachevsky and Hungarian Bolyai were laying the foundations of a non-Euclidean geometry, based not on axioms but ‘space definitions’, which might be ‘inconceivable’ but were never ‘inconsistent’. He recognized in light years ‘the phantoms of processes completed long in the Past’. He correctly quoted the great German astronomer F. W. Bessel on his discovery of the parallax of the fixed star 61 Cygni. He correctly rejected ‘the hypothesis of Mädler – that there exists, in the centre of the Galaxy, a stupendous globe about which all the systems of the cluster revolve’. He correctly dismissed ‘the idea of a retarding ether’ with reference to Lagrange’s work on ‘the configurations of the spheroids’.

  But even more remarkable are his adaptations and revisions of the Newtonian system. Long before Einstein he insisted on a finite Universe of Stars :

  No astronomical fallacy is more untenable, and none has been more pertinaciously adhered to, than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars.

  And as space is finite, he argued, so is time:

  the considerations through which, in this Essay, we have proceeded step
by step, enable us clearly and immediately to perceive that Space and Duration are one.

  For the Universe of Stars is an evolutionary Universe; and the explosion of energy which at once began time and began, in time, to generate space, may even now – as R. H. Fowler first demonstrated – be in a progressive state of collapse.*

  If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the ‘state of progressive collapse’ is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering All Things; and, with due humility, let me here confess that, for my part, I am at a loss to conceive how any other understanding of the existing condition of affairs, could ever have made its way into the human brain. ‘The tendency to collapse’ and ‘the attraction of gravitation’ are convertible phrases.

  For all matter is resolved to energy – that is, to Attraction and Repulsion :

  So rigorously is this the case – so thoroughly demonstrable is it that Attraction and Repulsion are the sole properties through which we perceive the Universe – in other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind – that, for all merely argumentative purposes, we are fully justified in assuming that Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion – that Attraction and Repulsion are matter : – there being no conceivable case in which we may not employ the term ‘Matter’ and the terms ‘Attraction’ and ‘Repulsion’, taken together, as equivalent, and therefore convertible, expressions in Logic.

  As modern research has shown, there is now no matter; there is only electrical energy. The inertia of the various parts of the atom – the negative ‘electrons’, positive ‘protons’ and neutral ‘neutrons’ – is exclusively electromagnetic in origin.

  The fundamental law in Poe’s Universe is ‘the complete mutuality’, ‘that absolute reciprocity of adaptation which is the idiosyncrasy of the Divine Art…’ For each law of nature depends at all points on all the other laws. This reciprocal dependence extends even to causality. As causality is seen as symmetrical, cause and effect can indistinguishably change their roles: