The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
Page 42
WILLIAM H. GRAVELY, JR, ‘A Note on the Composition of Poe’s Hans Pfaal’, Poe Newsletter vol. 3 (1970), pp. 2–5
DAVID KETTERER, ‘Poe’s Use of the Hoax and the Unity of “Hans Pfaall” ’, Criticism vol. 13 (1971), pp. 377–85
THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION
First Published
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1839)
Reprinted
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Vol. 2
Saturday Museum (1 April 1843), as ‘The Destruction of the World’
Tales (1845)
Translated
Isabelle Meunier, ‘Fragments d’Eiros et Charmion’, La Démocratie pacifique (July 1847)
Baudelaire, ‘Entretien d’Eiros avec Charmion’, Le Pays (July 1854)
The style is that of a Platonic dialogue, but instead of logical thrust and counter-thrust, all is speculation, pedantry, melodrama: apocalypse rationalized by equating biblical prophecy with recent advances in physics and chemistry.
1. (p.65) Eiros and Charmion: The names of Cleopatra’s two attendants in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. But Poe’s source seems to be Dryden rather than Shakespeare. For in all Shakespearean texts the spelling is ‘Charmian’ and ‘Iras’. Dryden, in All for Love, like Plutarch, used the correct form ‘Charmion’. But why Eiros? that is the question. ‘Why do you call me Eiros?’
Poe had quoted from Dryden’s prologue in the introductory letter to his Poems (1831). He had already used the same names in recounting Cleopatra’s death in his verse drama, Politian:
Thus endeth the history – and her maids
Lean over her and weep – two gentle maids
With gentle names – Eiros and Charmion!
Scene iv, lines 24–26
2. (p. 65) I will bring fire to thee: The epigraph – from Euripides, Andromache, 257 – was added in 1845. cf. Poe’s self-conscious mockery of Greek quotations seven years earlier:
In a Blackwood article nothing makes so fine a show as your Greek. The very letters have an air of profundity about them. Only observe, madam, the astute look of that Epsilon! That Phi ought certainly to be a bishop! Was ever there a smarter fellow than that Omicron? Just twig that Tau! In short, there is nothing like Greek for a genuine sensation-paper.
‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, American Museum (December 1838)
3. (p. 65) Why do you call me Eiros? : Or should it be ‘Eiron’, in the Greek sense of ‘dissimulation’? Is this Poe, the witty hoaxer, lurking at an ironic distance, manipulating his Platonic context, elaborating his Platonic myth with the bantering είρωνεία of a Socrates disguised as a disembodied, angelic intelligence?
4. (p. 65) that mad, rushing, horrible sound, like the ‘voice of many waters’ : of St John the Divine’s apocalyptic vision:
His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire;
And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.
And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.
And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last…
Revelation i, 14–17
5. (p. 66) all of pain… which you will suffer in Aidenn : Arabic Adn (‘Aden’, or ‘Eden’), the realm of disembodied spirits. Here it is the interstellar, etherial region, literally a ‘place of ether’, which is also to be the setting for ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’.
6. (p. 67) wonders and wild fancies… strangely rife among mankind : The predictions of Father Miller of the end of the world roused great excitement in the 1830s and 1840s. From 1831 on this Deist-turned-Baptist prophesied that the Second Coming would occur in 1843. Many prepared for Doomsday. Then the date was shifted to 1844.
At least 120 camp meetings were held during the summer months of 1842–4 with an estimated attendance of half a million. Signs in the heavens were reported: a meteoric shower, strange rings around the sun, crosses in the sky, a great comet at high noon that for days hung ominously overhead. Expectation became fixed on 22 October 1844. Second Adventists climbed on to their roofs and haystacks in order to be nearer heaven or assembled in cemeteries to be closer to the resurrected dead.
In 1845 Miller founded the Adventist Church. He himself outlived Poe by a dozen years.
7. (p. 67) the announcement by astronomers of a new comet: Poe, in all probability, saw Halley’s Comet in August 1835. The Edinburgh Review had published a 47-page article on ‘The Approaching Comet’; the Quarterly Review, a 39-page preview, ‘Astronomy – the Comet’.
But he may well have been thinking of Biela’s comet (discovered in 1826), of which Sir John Herschel wrote:
It is a small insignificant comet, without a tail, or any appearance of a solid nucleus whatever. Its orbit, by a remarkable coincidence, very nearly intersects that of the earth; and had the latter, at the time of its passage in 1832, been a month in advance of its actual place, it would have passed through the comet – a singular rencontre, perhaps not unattended with danger.
A Treatise on Astronomy (1834), pp. 291–2
8. (p. 69) the character of a gigantic mantle of rare flame: In the early morning of 13 November 1833, a rain of meteors had been visible in Baltimore. ‘The intense light… gave the sky the appearance of sunrise…’ (Col. J. Thomas Scharf, The Chronicles of Baltimore, 1874, pp. 465–6).
9. (p. 70) in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen: These figures are broadly correct for the troposphere – the atmospheric layer closest to the earth.
But this whole passage on ‘the principle of combustion’ derives almost verbatim from The Christian Philosopher (1826) by Dr Thomas Dick. ‘Dr Dick… describes an experiment whereby combustion is seen to follow the total extraction of nitrogen from the air, saying that in all probability that was the method prophesied by the Scriptures for the fiery destruction of our world. Dr Dick suggests that by the aid of chemical apparatus, we can perform experiments “on a small scale, similar in kind, though infinitely inferior in degree, to the awful event under consideration” ’. (Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe’s Critical Theory, 1925, ch. 5, pp. 140–41).
10. (p. 70) fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations… of the Holy Book: cf.
should the Creator issue forth his Almighty fiat – ‘Let the nitrogen of the atmosphere be completely separated from the oxygen, and let the oxygen exert its native energies without control, wherever it extends’; – from what we know of its nature, we are warranted to conclude, that instantly a universal conflagration would commence throughout all the kingdoms of nature…’
Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher, p. 135
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM
First published
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1841)
Reprinted
Tales (1845)
Boston Museum (26 May 1849)
Translated
Isabelle Meunier, ‘Une Descente au Maelstrom’, La Démocratie pacifique (September 1847)
Baudelaire, ‘Une Descente dans le Maelstrom’, Le Pays (February 1855)
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain…
‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845)
This is a tale within a tale: the ‘Maelström’ is framed. The actual descent, that is, was made by a Norwegian fisherman; turned Ancient Mariner, he tells his tale to the narrator while poised on a great cliff above the Moskoe-ström. Like the Wedding-Guest, the narrator might cry:*
‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-s
and.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.’ –
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down.
For the vertigo of the one is juxtaposed by the descent of the other; the lure of the abyss, by the fisherman’s loss of fear, his ‘almost serene contemplation of the impassive Law which brought that fear about.†
Such is ‘the well of Democritus’, as the epigraph from Glanvill suggests. Or, put more simply, as Poe had surely read in Rees’s Cyclopaedia :
This mode of acquiring certain knowledge he confessed to be very difficult, and, therefore, he used to say that truth lay in a deep well, from which it is the office of reason to draw it up.
1. (p. 72) ‘The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence…’: From Joseph Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (1676), p. 15. The original reads
The ways of God in Nature (as in Providence) are not as ours are: Nor are the Models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness and profundity of his Works; which have a Depth in them greater than the Well of Democritus.
2. (p. 73) The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy: So too the narrator of ‘Le Maelstrom’, an anonymous story in Le Magasin Universel (April 1836), after the final plunge finds himself on the rocky shore of Mount Helseggen.
This French story (discovered by Arlin Turner) proved to be a free adaptation of a British text: ‘The Maelstrom: a Fragment’ in Fraser’s Magazine (September 1834). It is this ‘Fragment’ (discovered by W. T. Bandy) that seems to have thrown out a challenge to Poe: how to contrive a convincing first-person narrative from such a mysterious ‘escape’. It was the kind of enigma Poe could never resist.
3. (P. 73) the Nubian geographer’s account of the Mare Tenebrarum : The Arab Idrisi, author of the Kitab Rujjar, or ‘Book of Roger’. cf. ‘They who dream by day… penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable” and again, like the adventurers of the Nubian geographer, “agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, qui in eo esset exploraturi”.’ (‘Eleonora’, 1842).
4. (p. 74) I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound: Poe may also have read a sea captain’s account of the Drontheim (or Trondheim) whirlpool in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (10 October 1838).
5. (p. 75) That of Jonas Ramus… is perhaps the most circumstantial of any: Poe’s actual working source, open on his desk, was the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Third Edition, Edinburgh, 1797), as briefly acknowledged on p. 77. There, among other things, he found the quotation from Jonas Ramus. But what Poe did not realize was that the whole article (quotations and all) was lifted bodily from an English translation of an original Danish source: Bishop Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway (1752). It is Pontoppidan who quotes Jonas Ramus. It is Pontoppidan who raises the hypothesis of ‘flux and reflux’ (p. 77).
6. (p. 87) See Archimedes, ‘De Incidentibus in Fluido’. – lib. 2.: This footnote was inserted in the 1845 edition of Tales by Edgar A. Poe. Killis Campbell has pointed out that the work contains nothing directly on the principle proposed (‘Marginalia on Longfellow, Lowell, and Poe’, Modern Language Notes vol. 42, December 1927, p. 520).
The article on ‘Whirlpools’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions cylindrical objects – specifically a cask – but suggests they be thrown overboard as a kind of decoy or plug to still the whirlpool. Far from being drawn less rapidly into the vortex, Orkney Islanders apparently argue, barrels are sucked immediately into the abyss.
Select Bibliography
ARLIN TURNER, ‘Sources of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology vol. 46 (1947), pp. 298–301
W. T. BANDY, ‘New Light on a Source of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” ’, American Literature vol. 24 (1953), pp. 534–7
MARGARET J. YONCE, ‘The Spiritual Descent into the Maelström: A Debt to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ’, Poe Newsletter vol. 2 (1969), pp. 26–9
GERARD M. SWEENEY, ‘Beauty and Truth: Poe’s “Descent into the Maelström” ’, Poe Studies vol. 6 (1973), pp. 22–5
THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA
First Published
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (August 1841)
Reprinted
Tales (1845)
Translated
Baudelaire, ‘Colloque entre Monos et Una’, Le Pays (January 1855)
At long intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each advance in practical science as a retro-gradation in the true utility.
Monos, ‘death-purged’, is now Poe’s alter ego. For this is Poe’s flight from the modern world: that destructive trauma (as he sees it) of the split personality, that Cartesian Jekyll and Hyde of mind and spirit, where the intellect cancerously usurps the emotions till ‘taste’ – the mediating faculty that alone could lead ‘us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life’ – withers and dies. Even the ‘universal equality’ of the Jacksonian era is part of the same perversion, the same infection with ‘system’, with ‘abstraction’, with ‘generalities’:
in the face of analogy and of God – in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven – wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made.
Poe’s education, his loyalties were wholly identified with the Southern gentry. He ‘was reared not in the tradition of democratic liberalism sanctified under the names of Jefferson and Jackson, but under a powerful conservative or Whig reaction. Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism were vulgar and frontier; the conservatism of Tidewater Virginia, especially dignified by John Marshall, was polite, urbane, and strongly anti-democratic and anti-reform.’* Below that Southern urbanity, however, what gnawing resentment! What despair!
but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be ‘born again’.
It is a strangely paradoxical vision – anti-utilitarian, anti-industrial, anti-egalitarian – yet, for all its mystical fervour, aspiring to a material regeneration: an ecological Paradise Regained, purged of ‘rectangular obscenities’, ‘rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man’.
For individual death, too, is not a matter of moral sensibility, moral judgement, or moral regeneration: ‘of moral pain or pleasure none at all’. It is a swoon rather from perception to heightened perception – a sensual progress through synaesthesia to the dissolution of identity or ‘sense of being’. A sixth sense, ‘a mental pendulous pulsation’, leads to pure spiritual transcendence without thought, without sentience, without matter, without soul, reduced to eternal and primal ‘nothingness’ in space and time. Such is the passage of human consciousness from life through the veil of death to life-beyond-death: a centripetal reversion to that focus (the pulse divine) from which time itself and all matter originally sprang in centrifugal, fractured dispersal.
1. (p. 89) Monos and Una: Poe’s macaronic title (conflating a Greek masculine and Latin feminine) may well be a further twist to Bulwer-Lytton’s punning ‘Monos and Daimonos : A Legend’. cf.:
We have long learned to reverence the fine intellect of Bulwer… We feel sure of rising from the perusal a wiser if not a better man. In no instance are we deceived. From the brief tale – from the ‘Monos and Daimonos’ of the author – to his most ponderous and laboured novels – all is richly and glowingly intellectual – all is energetic, or astute, or brilliant, or profound.
Marginalia, p. 174
2. (p. 89) These things are in the future: Sophocles, Antigone, 1334. Poe repeats the Greek phrase in Eureka (p. 275), continuing: ‘I am but pausing, for a moment, on the awful threshold of the Future.’ It became the title of one of his final stories, ‘Mellonta Tauta’ (1849).
3. (p. 89) the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal: Balzac too, Poe’s contemporary,
lost himself in speculations upon the nature of death. cf. Séraphita (1834–5), whose central character is an exalted, winged, androgynous being who appears to two young lovers. Risen above the flesh, on the point of becoming an angel, Séraphita is female to the young man, but masculine, as Séraphitus to the young woman.
Séraphita–Séraphitus, too, points the mystic way ahead, rising from sensual to heavenly love :
The seraph lightly spread his wings to take his flight and did not look back to them – he had nothing now in common with the earth. He sprang upwards; the vast span of his dazzling pinions covered the two watchers like a beneficent shade, allowing them to raise their eyes and see him borne away in his glory, escorted by the rejoicing archangel.
Séraphita, ch. 7
4. (p. 90) each advance in practical science as a retro-gradation in the true utility: cf. Poe’s sonnet ‘To Science’ :
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
(1829)
5. (p. 92) ‘tout notre raisonnement se réduit à céder au sentiment’: Pascal, Les Pensées, 274. Pascal continues:
Mars la fantaisie est semblable et contraire au sentiment, de sorte qu’on ne peut distinguer entre ces contraires. L’un dit que mon sentiment est fantaisie, l’autre que sa fantaisie est sentiment…
All our reasoning in the end gives way to feeling. But fantasy is both like and unlike feeling, so that it is impossible to disentangle their contradiction. One man says that my feeling is a matter of fantasy; another that his fantasy is a matter of feeling.
6. (p. 92) I could anticipate no regeneration save in death: cf. Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Monos and Daimonos’, where the fugitive vainly searches for solitude in the wilderness only to learn that he cannot shake off his demon.