Edgar Allan Poe (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

216 Pages·2006·1.35 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Edgar Allan Poe,Updated Edition
©2006 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2006 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edgar Allan Poe / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom
p. cm — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-8567-8
1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series
S2638.E32 2006
818’.309—dc 2005027445
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth
on the Nature of Poetic Language 13
Barbara Johnson
Poe’s Art of Transformation:
“The Cask of Amontillado” in Its Cultural Context 27
David S. Reynolds
A Platonic Dialogue; Eurekaas Detective Story;
Marked with a Letter; The Tetractys and the
Line of Beauty; Letter as Nodal Point;
A Shared Structure; Thematizing the Acts of Reading 45
John T. Irwin
Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis,
and the Analytic Sublime 65
Shawn Rosenheim
Black and White and Re(a)d All Over:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 89
Scott Peeples
vi Contents
“Reading Encrypted But Persistent”:
The Gothic of Reading and Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” 111
Harriet Hustis
Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation:
Reading Racism in the Tales 129
Leland S. Person
Ligeia: “Her Large and Luminous Orbs” 149
Dorothea E. von Mücke
House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” 169
John H. Timmerman
Chronology 183
Contributors 187
Bibliography 189
Acknowledgments 193
Index 195
Editor’s Note
My “Introduction” concedes that Edgar Allan Poe is inescapable, if only
because he dreamed universal nightmares. Still, I argue, he wrote bad prose
and worse poetry, best read in translation, preferably French.
Barbara Johnson, a superb rhetorical critic, juxtaposes Wordsworth and
Poe, showing that the great English Romantic sought to save natural passion
from the tyranny of style, while Poe gave himself to a passion for repetition.
Our leading historicist of the American Renaissance, David S.
Reynolds, places the famous tale, “The Cask of Amontillado” in the contexts
of Poe’s literary feuds and of contemporary popular literature.
John T. Irwin, whose critical mastery ranges from Faulkner and Hart
Crane to detective fiction, analyzes Poe’s Platonic fantasy, Eureka, as a
Pythagorean “mystery,” that blends sleuthing and esoteric theology.
Poe’s analytic detective stories also are handled by Shawn Rosenheim,
for whom Dupin is a narrative therapist who entangles the reader, in a mode
prophetic of Sigmund Freud’s.
Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe’s sole novel, concludes with a menacing white
figure who can mean nearly anything, or just the abyss of nothingness. In
Scott Peeples’ witty reading, all quest for meaning here blinds us, and
exposes our desperate reductiveness.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is adroitly interpreted by Harriet
Hustis as an instance of “the Gothic Reading,” which exposes us to endless
uncertainties.
Poe’s indubitable racism is traced in the tales by Leland S. Person, who
somewhat ironically finds that the author’s sublimely perverse imagination
yields us also a reversal of racist values.
The ghastly “Ligeia,” extreme even for Poe, is studied by Dorothea E.
vii
viii Editor’s Note
von Mücke as a mythology of “the medial woman,” no longer alive but still
undead.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” returns in this volume’s final essay,
where John. H. Timmerman surprisingly judges the story to be a critique
both of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Critics, even good ones, admire Poe’s stories for some of the oddest of
reasons. Poe, a true Southerner, abominated Emerson, plainly perceiving
that Emerson (like Whitman, like Lincoln) was not a Christian, not a
royalist, not a classicist. Self-reliance, the Emersonian answer to Original
Sin, does not exist in the Poe cosmos, where you necessarily start out
damned, doomed, and dismal. But I think Poe detested Emerson for some of
the same reasons Hawthorne and Melville more subtly resented him, reasons
that persist in the distinguished American writer, Robert Penn Warren, and
in many current academic literary critics in our country. If you dislike
Emerson, you probably will like Poe. Emerson fathered pragmatism; Poe
fathered precisely nothing, which is the way he would have wanted it. Yvor
Winters accused Poe of obscurantism, but that truthful indictment no more
damages Poe than does tastelessness and tone deafness. Emerson, for better
and for worse, was and is the mind of America, but Poe was and is our
hysteria, our uncanny unanimity in our repressions. I certainly do not intend
to mean by this that Poe was deeper than Emerson in any way whatsoever.
Emerson cheerfully and consciously threw out the past. Critics tend to share
Poe’s easy historicism; perhaps without knowing it, they are gratified that
every Poe story is, in too clear a sense, over even as it begins. We don’t have
to wait for Madeline Usher and the house to fall in upon poor Roderick; they
have fallen in upon him already, before the narrator comes upon the place.
Emerson exalted freedom, which he and Thoreau usefully called “wildness.”
No one in Poe is or can be free or wild, and some academic admirers of Poe
truly like everything and everyone to be in bondage to a universal past. To
begin is to be free, godlike and Emersonian-Adamic, or Jeffersonian. But for
a writer to be free is bewildering and even maddening. What American
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