Edgar Allan Poe

=== proiect in engleza ===

MOTTO:

“Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself, it soon begins to fear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self.”

Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China

INTRODUCTION

Edgar Allan Poe is an enormous subject because he is mostly interested in the endless reality around him, but not the inferential reality of the universe of stars and apace, but the reality of that more proximate interior universe of feeling. He imputes to all creation the universe of conflict between the life-wish and the will to self-destruction; between the ego, asserting, exercising, reveling in its powers, and the Imp of the Perverse, ever be trying the assertive self with the instinct that lies most deeply secreted within it.

Poe finds in man’s mind and soul his never-ending source of writing. There are no limits and he trees different experiences just to see his characters’ reactions. He manipulates the world of his stories and he doesn’t allow anyone to live or to end happily, because he knows that only in death one could find the light by incorporating oneself into the primordial unity.

Nothing in Poe has been done at random. Baudelaire, that greatly admired Poe, considered him the most skilful writer of the time, the writer that presents the absurd under an intelligent form, governed by a dreadful logic. To this world, he gives a logical order, but still irreducible to the reasonable logic. Reason is Poe’s basis; no matter what, he tries to save it, the use it up to the end, to even surpass it. He associates it with intuition, with the direct introspection and with that intimate effort just to realize an immediate knowledge of things. He doesn’t agree with the most writers that prefer to “compose by a species of fine frenzy”1. He analyses the tone of consonants and vowels because he wants to create an effect. Poe even begins with “the consideration of an effect”2, and then he dresses it adequately. The clothes he dresses the effect in are made of terror and horror, but not the terror of the Germanic influence as many critics have said, but the terror of the soul itself.

The Fall of the House of Usher, which is considered Poe’s probable best short story, is an example for almost all his principles and themes: it deals with a gloomy atmosphere, with death and decay, with premature burial, with the loss of a dear person, with fear and horror, and with the other, which is Poe’s well-known Imp of the Perverse. This is what I tried to present in this work. It is Poe’s way of thinking and of working that impressed me so much. Although the reader is not aware of the writer’s interference in his stories, his presence and the influence of his personality are evidently felt. Moreover, Poe described many of his characters as if they were himself. Roderick Usher’s physical constitution resembles a lot of Poe’s:

A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassing by beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew-model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking in its want of prominence, of a want of more energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity3.

The first chapter is a kind of introduction into the world of Roderick Usher. It deals with the presentation of the morbid and decayed, present all over the manor. House and family — which Poe names the House of Usher — live under the sign of destruction or self-annihilation. Roderick Usher knows very well his condition, but he doesn’t try to face it. He knows he is doomed, and he happily waits for the end. He lives in terror and he fears its consequences. He represents the mind of a whole, while the body belongs to Madeline. Madeline is just a pawn in Poe’s realizing an effect and exposing some principles. She is the one that returns from her tomb in order to take her twin brother, with her. She knows that, being a part of a whole, she cannot leave this world without her other half.

But the destruction is still not complete, as long as the mansion remains up. The black tarn has its role and its significance: it swallows the house and its inhabitants and buries them into nothingness. Only now the annihilation is complete. Water in Poe has many symbols and this is what the second part of the first chapter deals with: it helps to join the double; it forms the mirage that corrects the real; it confuses; it makes the atmosphere even heavier, and, although it is not obvious, it is personified and it remains in time as the witness of the Ushers.

Poe’s greatest obsession and its analyze I largely presented in the second chapter. The dissolution of matter and mind are of great importance and interest for Poe. They are plentifully used in The Fall of House of Usher. They wear out Roderick Usher’s physical constitution and his soul, they wear out the dwelling and Madeline’s body, the atmosphere around the manor and eventually they wear out even the narrator’s mind. Anxiety and fear lead step by step to destruction. Here I exposed Freud’s principles and analyses about what means to feel anxiety becomes fear or the other way round, and I analyzed Roderick Usher’s behavior according to Freud’s theories.

Further on I exposed Roderick’s other and its significance, Roderick’s will of self-destruction and Roderick’s setting free of his Imp of the Perverse. Perversity is frequent in Poe’s short-stories and most of the times leads to death. But next to perversity and other act time and space, as the enclosures of Usher’s mind and matter, and as Poe’s pillars in his creating of effect.

As for to stress the odd atmosphere that floats over the story, Poe makes the reader consider more deeply about the “real” the narrator tells. This is what the third chapter deals with. Poe makes the reader wonder if it is not the narrator himself that is mentally deranged, or it everything told in the story is a mere fabrication of this one, and not the pure truth.

How Poe realized to confuse the reader about who is the mad one in the story and how he created that effect on the reader and that lurid atmosphere I explained in the fourth chapter. I tried to incorporate The Fall of the House of Usher in a genre and a mode according to Tzvetan Todorov’s theories. I found the pure uncanny realized by symbolism, chromic composition, stories within story and point of view. Poe’s calculation’s about how much to use allegory never fails. He knows what shapes to give to his forms and what shades to give to his atmosphere. Everything Poe does is for the effect’s sake that is why he stresses and synchronizes different actions. The stories within the story are not mere tales, but tools in creating Poe’s denouement.

Briefly, what I tried to expose in my work are the different forms in which dissolution and decay acted on the House of Usher, and the different forms in which Poe created this dissolution and its consequences. It is well-known that the disintegration is dreadful, but Poe made it even more dreadful just to make the reader and the characters understand and wish for the end, for the death that leads to the happy Union.

NOTES:

1G.A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, Anthology of American Literature, vol.1, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1980, p. 984.

2Idem, p. 983.

3Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 80.

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD OF USHER

• Matter and Mind

• Water and Its Imagination from G. Bachelard’s Point of View*

MOTTO:

There were things around us and about of witch I can render no distinct account — things material and spiritual — heaviness in the atmosphere — a sense of suffocation — anxiety — and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the sense are keen, living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us.

E. A. Poe, Shadow: A Parable

Matter and Mind

The Fall of the House of Usher is a detailed, symbolic account, of the derangement and dissipation of an individual’s personality. It is a mosaic of incidents, psychological attitudes, and symbols, all combined following a well-balanced structure, according to the rules of a fine and major art. Here, Poe combines natural and supernatural, taking into account hidden but rational laws that lead the action. In The Fall of the House of Usher, tragedy, far from being unreasonable or a mere problem of a whimsical will, has the House of Usher — family and castle — follow the foredoomed way of destruction.

The story illustrates the Poe’s critical doctrine that unity of effect depends on unity of tone. Every detail, from the opening description of the dank tarn and the dark rooms of the house to the unearthly storm, which accompanies Madeline’s return from the tomb, helps to convey the terror that overwhelms and finally destroys the fragile mind of Roderick Usher.

Terror, even this extreme which results in madness and death, is meaningless, unless it is able to somehow illustrate a principle of human nature. One approach to understanding the true significance of this story lies in the many connections that Poe establishes for the reader. Roderick and Madeline are not just brother and sister, but twins who share sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature1, which connect his mental disintegration to her physical decline. As Madeline’s mysterious illness approaches physical paralysis, Roderick’s mental agitation takes the form of a morbid acuteness of the senses2 that separates his body from the physical world making all normal sensations painful:

[…] the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.3

Besides the fact that Roderick and Madeline are not just twins but represent the mental and physical components of a single being or soul, there is also a connection between the family mansion and the remaining members who live within. Poe uses the phrase House of Ushers to both the decaying physical structure and the last of the all time — honored Usher race. Roderick has developed a theory that the stones of the house have consciousness, and that they embody the fate of the Usher family. He was enchained b certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence for many years, he has never ventured forth4. The crack in the Usher mansion which is at first barely discernible by the narrator, symbolically suggests a flaw or fundamental split in the foretells the final ruin of both family and mansion.

In The Fall of the House of Usher Poe explores the inner workings of the human imagination, but at the same time, caution the reader about the destructive dangers within. When fantasy suppressed reality and the physical self, as in Roderick’s case, what results is madness and mental death. Madeline’s return and actual death reunites the twin natures or their single being, claiming Roderick as a victim to the terrors that he had anticipated.

Of great importance is also the narrator’s reaction and understanding of these strange evens. Even to look into the dark imagination where fantasy becomes reality is to evoke madness. That is why Roderick twice refers to the narrator as Madman in the final scene. The narrator has made a journey into the underworld of the mind and he is nearly destroyed by it; however he manages to escape and turns to watch as the House of Usher crumbles into the deep and dank tarn.

Roderick Usher yearns to free himself from his dreadful condition. Every aspect or his gloomy existence transpires in his house from which he never ventures forth. The house encloses him as if it were a burial vault in which he has been laid to rest prematurely. The decayed condition of the house corresponds to the decline of a once flourishing family.

Some critics have succumbed to the temptation of ascribing cosmic significance to The Fall of the House of Usher, contending that the story is a symbol representation or the theories, which Poe penned in Eureka. The collapse of a universe or of a psyche points to the same primal impulse. Perversity, the force that Poe attributed to his characters destruction, is the universal tendency, of contraction or collapse as it applies to the mind of man. While contraction of the universe involves the Mind of God, perversity constitutes God’s imprint upon the contracting human mind; thus, Poe’s character Roderick reflects God — consciousness as it collapses into oneness. After all, the house itself was reflected in the dark tarn where all houses, all minds, all universes must eventually lose their individuation.

All of the details — the fissure in the house, the oppressive décor, Roderick’s wild guitar improvisations, and the violent storm of the last night —contribute to the general effect of the story and to its final calamity. Appropriately, Roderick Usher is himself an artist: he paints, he plays guitar, he writes poems. But all of this art — in fact, Roderick’s entire existence — produces only one effect upon the narrator of the story — pervasive gloom. Roderick is found strangely in touch with his fate. He performs on the guitar a song, his poem The Haunted Palace. It describes Usher first in his glory, then in his decline and ruin. The symbolism of the interpolated stanzas rests upon the analogy between the façade of a palace and the face of a man, between the house and the brain. In Poe’s phraseology, Roderick’s mind is influenced by the physique of his dwelling. Its vacant eye-like windows, which strikes the approaching observer, foreshades the mental condition of its occupant. The final collapse of its ruin into the tarn, while the retreating narrator looks back through the moonlit storm at the desolated landscape, projects an apocalypse of the mind.

The narrator, a childhood friend of Roderick’s, finds his comrade in deep trouble, afflicted by his own collapsing cosmos. His senses have already become morbidly acute. From the narrator we learn that Roderick resides in a shadowy realm, eerily aware of his misery. His twin sister Madeline, the only other surviving Usher, is ill, and will soon die. While she lives, Roderick must remain in his mortal shell, for Madeline represents not so much a character in the story as a symbol of the last vestige of electrical, repulsive energy which keeps the body and of soul of Roderick and palace in a differential state.

Roderick knows that when she dies, he can unburden himself of his body, rejoining a more primitive state, nearer to the unity for which he rages. Finally, he performs a premature burial of his twin sister, oddly aware that she might not be “entirely” dead. She had long suffered from catalepsy, and, Roderick is destined to battle what he had previously called the grism phantasm, FEAR*. Roderick, in a creepy empathy heightened by his close kinship with Madeline, and frenzied by a rampaging storm, listens to Madeline’s escape from the vault and footfall upon the stairs. As the narrator reads a tale of Ethelred’s conquest of a dragon, his twin sister returns to take Roderick with her to the darkest space of his mind. Madeline’s return from the tomb coupled with his attendant depiction of the storm, his pacing of Roderick’s descent into the maelstrom of his own fear, may be Poe’s finest moment of horror.

The narrator escapes the house so that he may later recount his experience. Most electrifying is his description:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and bloodred moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened — there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind — the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight — my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder — there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters — and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher”.5

Water and its Imagination

from G. Bachelard’s Point of View

There is a unity of the means of expression in Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Psychology found its secret center and the literary critique found its original language.

The language of a great writer like Poe is undoubtedly rich, but it involves a certain hierarchy. Under numerous forms, imagination hides some substances that prevail, substances that determine the unity and the hierarchy of expression. One of the substances that prevail in Poe is water, but his water is a special one, a heavy, deeper and a more dead water than the entire deep waters that nature provides. Water, in Poe’s imagination is a superlative, a kind of substance of substance, a mother substance. This poetical chemistry studies the images, fixing for each of it its intimate matter.

In Poe, a clear and transparent water increasingly or suddenly turns black and in the end it swallows the sufferance around it. The same way happens in The Fall of the House of Usher. The black and lurid tarn seems to feel the approaching of the end or it foretells it. The entire landscape and atmosphere around the Usher mansion fall asleep, they are all silent and they seem to have a rest; an entire valley deepens and darkens, it becomes a chasm where the entire human unhappiness is to be buried.

But here the tarn does not represent only a grave of a family. Poe didn’t want this tarn to be only a pawn in the scenery, a lake near the House of Usher, a mirror of it. This silent tarn also possesses the so-called absolute of reflection. Poe sometimes thought about the reflection of the images in water. He wondered which of the two was the reality. The man who watches himself into the mirror of a water may not be the real one; he may be in fact the image of the man who watches from the other part of that mirror. So Poe thought that reality may be behind the frontier of a water, that the image seen in it may be the reality whose image is this world we live in.

Water helps Poe to create the double. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the image in the tarn seems to be more frightening than reality, or it seems to stress the feeling of strangeness and still luridness. The image in the water seems to be more real than reality. The eye-like windows and their vacancy hide behind them an entire life, a life with its deficiencies, disintegrations, sins and fears. Only a short glance into these eyes foretells an odd and peculiar close future:

[…] and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down — but with a shudder even more thrilling than before — upon the remodeled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.6

This dim water contains a universe, that of this Ushers’. The dim water, the decayed trees and the bleak walls form a scenery perfectly suitable for the story that is to be told.

Poe sometimes saw water as the mirage that corrects the real and that eliminates the useless elements. Water gives to the world a personal character. The image reflected in a water was considered by Poe as his vision. But it is this vision that Poe wanted to create. He is the author of what it is possible to be seen only by himself or through himself, he is the author of what he sees from his own point of view. His interest is more in the image reflected than in the object, sometimes the two are so similar that they are confused.

What it is very important to be mentioned is that in many of Poe’s clear waters the bottom of that water could be seen and misunderstood as the sky or other objects reflected in it. This transparency is tinged with optimism and positive landscapes and it allows to the mind to wander in whatever places it wants. But, in The Fall of the House of Usher, the dark surroundings and especially the dark water do not allow to imagine but the worst of the situation that is to come. This tarn does not reflect a happy universe, does not allow to the soul to transcend; it limits the possibilities and darkens the future. Here water is the matter through which nature, by touching reflections, prepairs the destiny of the Ushers.

Another theory that Poe launched was the theory of the shadow. In The Fall of the House of Usher the fact that the mansion was finally swallowed is the natural consequence of the simple existence of the tarn. In Poe’s reverie, one of the vegetal’s and object’s functions is that to produce shadow as the octopus produces ink. In each minute of its life, an object or a tree has to help the night to darken the world. Every day, this object or tree produces and leaves a shadow. Each shadow, as the sun goes down, has to leave the trunk that gave life to it and eventually it is absorbed by a river, a lake or a swamp, or by whatever is water around, while other shadows rise each moment from the same tree or object, taking the place of the old and dead ones. As long as the shadows are linked to their creator, they are still alive; they die when they completely leave it, they are leaving it while they are dying, burying themselves in the water like in a deeper and blacker death.

To daily give a shadow up — this shadow — being a part of the creator — means to live together with Death, to share the moments of life with it, it means to give to life the bitter taste of Death. Thus, Death is a long and painful story, it is not the mere tragedy of a fatal hour, but a melancholic loss. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the death of the mansion with everything that belongs to it is natural, it is even more natural than it is supposed and expected to be. The image reflected in the tarn and the swallowing of the shadow the minute it was born — because it had no time to develop as the tarn was near it — straightly and logically lead to the unfortunate, but expected end. The narrator never mentioned in the course of the story about the tragic end, but it was expected because of Poe’s reveries and principles.

Different from other Poe’s stories, The Fall of the House of Usher presents more clearly the idea of expected tragic end. Not only that the tarn drinks the shadow of the mansion, but it also swallows it. The end is irrevocable and for good. This time, water does not express the nothingness of the world, meaning the fact that no matter what everything fades away step by step, this time water is the end, and it is shown directly and brutally. The House of Usher, meaning both the family and the mansion, suddenly disappears into the dark waters of the tarn, leaving behind it only memory and the witness which is the tarn itself. But although the unavoidable has happened, a feeling of relief is foreseen.

So, water in Poe is not just a mirror to form the double, a witness of what happens, a drinker of shadows, but it is also an evildoer. It is obvious that water got personificated. It has the ability to act like a human being. She swallows the mansion and its shadow, as if they were a black linctus. This is not an exceptional image. It could be easily found among the visions of the thirst. It could be a real force in the poetical expression, proving its profound and unconscious character. That is why Paul Claudel exclaimed once: Oh, God! Have mercy for the waters inside me that are so thirsty! 7

There is a foretelling death sign that renders to Poe’s waters a strange and unforgettable character: their silence. But in Poe’s work, water in not from the beginning silent; it eventually becomes silent. Although it is not explicit, in The Fall of the House of Usher, the black tarn was not from the beginning silent. Poe presents this water only in the moment it is transformed by and according to the circumstances. This is easy to be proved because one of the narrator’s memory which refers to Roderick Usher’s childhood, where the two were close friends. The narrator is very surprised now when he sees Roderick in such an estate. He even mentions once that his friend hasn’t been always like that:

Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher!

And as water fully participates in Poe’s work, and as it is a real character (if not the protagonist), Poe particularly takes care of it and moulds it according to the personages. Roderick Usher’s changing body, his mental behaviour becoming insecure, Madeline Usher’s being ill, all these are evil and they break the beautifully arranged human nature. As human beings turned into bad, Poe turned the water silent and now, the water in front of the mansion is dark and lurid. Poe cursed the water to be silent; he wants his revenge for a bad thing to be a curse thrown on the water. But Poe doesn’t do it without reasoning: as reality mirrors into the water, the image reflected may be confused with the real object, and he, the poet, wants to punish everything that groans inside or outside us; so he curses the tarn to be silent, but as reality and the image reflected are confused, the reality is cursed, too, and reduced to silence by the final act when the House of Usher (both the mansion and the family) is swallowed. And thus, Poe’s principle that the immobile waters evoke the dead because the dead waters are stagnant waters is demonstrated.

The Fall of the House of Usher is the short-story that presented water in many forms and by different symbols. Poe imagined it human; he personificated it because it acted like a human being: it could be dead, silent, it could be an witness and an evildoer. Poe endowed it with the power of doubling by reflecting the reality and Poe finally made it a grave for the House of Usher.

Water is a material element that receives death in its intimacy, like an essence, like a muffled life, like so a total memory that can live unconsciously, without ever surpassing the power of dreams.

The world of usher is tremendously difficult. Roderick Usher has to accept the conditions Poe created for him and he has to live up to the end without struggling to go out of his limited world and without fighting his creator. Roderick has to live in madness and in the dissolution of everything that is matter and mind around. He knows his end will come and he knows that, if he dies, the race of Usher will perish forever, too. Poe gave to Roderick Usher a world impossible to live in: the tarn is dark and confusing, the house is old and fissured, the landscape is clouded by a heavy and sombre atmosphere, and his mind is profoundly deranged. This is the world Usher lives in, and this is the world that he and everything that means Usher leave in order to join the mighty Oneness.

NOTES:

*Gaston Bachelard, Apa și visele. Eseu despre imaginația materiei, Ed. Univers, București, 1995.

1Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, Penguin Popular Classics, England, p. 89.

2idem, p. 81.

3ibidem.

4idem, p. 82.

5idem, p. 95.

6idem, p. 77.

7Paul Surer, Teatrul Francez Contemporan, Editura pentru literatură universală, București 1968, p. 166.

CHAPTER II

THE CONFUSION OF THE SOUL

• The Uncanny

• When Anxiety becomes Fear from Freud’s Perspectives.

• The Other in the Double

• Enclosures: Space and Time.

• A Portrait of Perversity.

• Death and its Metamorphosis.

All of Poe’s most memorable characters withdraw from life in its conventional aspects, into heavily draped rooms with artificial lighting (as in his own description of the ideal room in The Philosophy of Furniture), and there they cultivate a life of their own, so distinct and cut apart from the world that they lose all touch with reality. In this condition, they can develop an acuteness of the senses and an almost mystical perception in keeping with Poe’s own aesthetic principle. When Hawthorne’s characters step out of life, they often develop a kind of clairvoyance and they dabble in witchcraft, but they pay for their vision the Faustian price: they lose their souls. Poe’s outsiders lose their sanity and often their lives as a result of expandes consciousness. The Masque of the Read Death forms an interesting corollary to the more complex Fall of the House of Usher, where Roderick has actually approached that acute sensitivity in which beauty can be perceived in its ideal forms, but the concomitant of this mystical transcendence is madness, as well as the inability to bear the conventional ingredients of reality.

In his Madness and Civilisation, Foucault relates that madness, which finds its first possibility in the phenomenon of passion, radiates both toward the body and toward the soul, and it is at the same time suspension of passion breach of causality, dissolution of the elements of this unity. Madness participates both in the necessity of passion and in the anarchy of what, released by this very passion, transcends it and ultimately contests all it implies. Madness ends by being a movement of the nerves and muscles so violent that nothing in the course of images, ideas, or wills seems to correspond to it: this is the case of mania when it is suddenly intensified into convulsions, or when it degenerates into continuous frenzy. Conversely, madness can, in the body’s repose or inertia, generate and then maintain an agitation of the soul, without pause or pacification, as is the case in melancholy, where external objects do not produce the same impression on the sufferer’s mind as on that of a healthy man; his impressions are weak and he rarely absorbed by the vivacity of certain ideas.

Only the second part of Foucault’s principle can be applied to The Fall of the House of Usher. Roderick Usher maintain an agitation of the soul, without pause or pacification. The reality around has not the same impact on him as on his friend, the narrator (at least for the beginning of the story).

Jung psychoanalyse many similar situations in his works of the so-called helping literature. He divided the psychic energy into dia-bolic and sym-bolic. The dia-bolic image, as a part of a whole, is lived through a relatively large range of labyrinths: the infinite labyrinth, without possibility of escaping and the labyrinth where, appropriately guided, one arrives to fight the shadow and to recover, to become a newer stronger and a healed person. One arrives to the blind alley in his depressive regression when he loses the sense of direction, of control and when he loses the image of the center. The circular movement around a vicious circle, or the pendulation from an opposed solution to another, mutually insoluble, are a few of the illustrations, for the loss of direction. The maximum point of bewilderment is the return to the centre, but a centre regarded through the eyes of fear, like a meeting with the Devil, with Death. His hyposthasis of the centre is the archetype of God’s shadow and it acts like a point of maximum dissolution, a living of death as tragedy.1

It is the same case for Roderick Usher and his confusion and bewilderment. He tries to run away from depression and from the experience of death by different actions: he postulates ideas, plays instruments, reads etc. He does all these as if he were a maniac.

An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous luster over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why — from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words […]. If ever mortal painted an idea, than mortal was Roderick Usher.2

Freud, Jung and others have already shown the multitude forms of the dissolution of mind. This chapter tries to present the different forms Roderick Usher’s confusion of the soul manifests, and how Poe gave shape to it.

The Uncanny

The uncanny is a term which has been used philosophically as well as in psychoanalytic writing, to indicate a disturbing, vacuous area. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the world as meaning not quite safe to trust to is in 1773. But by 1785, it means dangerous, unsafe. It is a term recurring time especially throughout nineteenth century fantasy.

In his seminal essay on the uncanny, Freud begins with a fairly wide definition: The uncanny is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror […] it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.3

What is that excites fear in general in The Fall of the House of Usher? Everything leads to fear. Even the theme of the short-story is that Roderick Usher is the victim of his consequences. He is afraid of the fear itself and of his consequences. He knows that fear leads to insanity and loss of control. Although he doesn’t know for sure, Roderick forefeels the return from the tomb of his sister, Madeline, and he is afraid of it. He also has certain superstitious impressions about the dwelling he lives in, because of the atmosphere around him and around it, and because of the fact that he has never left the house because he is stock still there by everything that is his environment. And death is also an exciting of fear. Roderick fears it, although he wants it in order to get rid off the intolerable life he bears.

But everything enumerated here is Roderick’s fear, or everything he is afraid of. Considering from the reader’s or the narrator’s point of view, there are barely a few things that do not produce fear: the atmosphere is tormenting, the air is heavy, the tarn is black, the house is black, the storm is demented and Madeline’s return, monstruous. All these make the soul tremble and the heart bit fast.

But Freud doesn’t stop here, he furthers into analyzing. He proceeds to a more particular theory, reading the uncanny as the effect of projecting unconscious desires and fears into the environment and on to other people. Roderick Usher’s fears step by step overwhelms the narrator who does not want to admit them and he tries to suppress them, but in vain. Roderick calls him in the end Madman.

It was no wonders that his condition terrified — that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the might of the seventh or lights day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings.4

As Freud points out, there are two levels of meaning to the Germanic term for the uncanny, das Unheimlich. Both levels are vital for an understanding of his theory in relation to fantasy. Das Heimlich, the un-negated version, is ambivalent. On the first level of meaning, it signifies that which is homely, familiar, friendly, cheerful, comfortable, intimate. It gives a sense of “being at home”. Roderick Usher feels “at home” because he knows everything around him, he knows each thing’s value and power, he is familiar to the things that form his milieu. The negation of Heimlich summons up the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange, alien. It produces a feeling of estrangement, of “being not at home”. This is again true in the case of Roderick Usher. Although he is familiar on he is aware of the importance and use of the things around him, he is not able to take them as they are. He doesn’t feel at home anymore in the world he has created because he is no longer compatible with his own things and this is caused by his morbid acuteness of the senses:

The most insipid food was alone endurable: he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a joint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.5

A second level of meaning begins to explain the uncanny’s disturbing powers. Das Heimlich also means that which is concealed from others: all that is hidden, secreted, obscured. In The Fall of the House of Usher everything is concealed; nobody knows what the near future brings. Madeline’s and Roderick’s illnesses are obscure, and they are even obscured by themselves. The tarn hides in its silence its secret. The story Mad Trist develops in its own terms the real reality, meaning Madeline’s return from the tomb. Everything is confused and confusing. The negation, das Unheimlich functions to discover, reveal, to expose areas normally kept out of sight. What happens next in The Fall of the House of Usher is revealed the moment it happens. The reader has, indeed, the feeling that something bad is to happen, but nothing is for sure. He doesn’t really know what is going to happen. This is one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects: to leave the reader in uncertainty.

The uncanny combines the two semantic levels: its signification lies precisely in this dualism. It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar.

There in one more question to be answered: what is the essential condition for the uncanny to be possible and have such effects? In Freud’s opinion, the writer has the license to select his world of representation so that it either coincides to the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particular he pleases. In fairy tales, for instances, the world of reality is left behind from the very start and the animistic system of believes is frankly adopted. Wish fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories cannot exert uncanny influence here, for the feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflicts of judgement as to whether things which have been “surmounted” and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated because of the world of fairy tales.

The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case, he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and, everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality, has it in his story. Now, he can even increase his effect and he can multiply it for beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact.

Under close scrutiny, The Fall of the House of Usher managed to prove its uncanny effects, but is this short-story a real story or is a mere fabrication of the narrator?

When Anxiety Becomes Fear from Freud’s Perspectives

Anxiety has an unmistakable relationship with waiting; it is fear of something. It is proper to it an indeterminate and lacked of object character; the correct usage of language changes its name, too: if it has an object, its name is turned into fear.

Fear is a basic element of human emotion that is caused by the expectation or realization of danger. The existence of fear is essential for establishing our belief and the actions we take throughout our lives.

In The Fall of the House of Usher Roderick Usher is dominated both by fear and by anxiety. But when it is the first and when it is the last? The dominant feeling in the short-story is fear because, as it is mentioned before, fear occurs when it is no concrete abject to fear. And Roderick is the victim of his own fear. Rosemary Jackson in her Fantasy, the Literature of Subversion said that the object of fear can have no adequate representation and is, therefore, all the more threatening.6 Roderick Usher himself says that he must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.7 He admits to himself and to his friend, the narrator, that he dreads the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results.7 So, it is the consequence of the events that scarries Roderick Usher, not the events themselves. The object of fear misses, it is only fear that destroys him.

Besides its relationship with danger, Freud goes on, anxiety has another relationship with neurosis. He divides anxieties into normal or real and neurotic. The real danger is a known danger, and the real anxiety is the one in front of such a danger. So, the neurotic danger has to be, first of all, searched for. It is an emotional one. If the unknown danger is shown to the self, the difference between real and neurotic anxiety is erased and the last is treated like the first. But there are cases when the characteristics of the two –real and neurotic anxieties — mix. The danger is disproportionately big, bigger than it should be. In this “bigger” the neurotic element is met. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick Usher’s neurotic anxiety is obvious, too. It is normal for Usher to be afraid of the death he forefeels, of Madeline’s return from the tomb, or even of the strange feelings he has regarding the dwelling he lives in, but to be afraid of fear itself, it has already become neurosis. The certain textures he wears, the insipid food he eats, the oppressing odours of all flowers, the faint lights that torture him, all this amplify once more that “bigger” than the normal anxiety. His senses are not as they should be.

Roderick is overwhelmed by the fear he is experiencing and it affects every aspect of his life. It is the constant presence of fear that he caused his illness. Roderick doesn’t know how, or his unwilling to try to overcome his fears. The narrator tries to help him, but in the end fears comes to dominate him, too: His condition terrified me.

After Madeline is placed into the vault, Roderick’s fears increase and his insanity becomes more evident:

[…] an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. He is ordinary manner has vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unusual and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue— but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance.9

The narrator closely studied Roderick and tried to understand his fears, while he was ignoring the inception of his own fears. He does not recognize that his feelings are derived from the fear within him.

When Madeline returns from her supposed death both characters becomes paralysed by fear. Roderick is ultimately destroyed by his biggest fear, that is fear itself. He brings about his own illness and death by refusing to face and conquer it.

E. A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher revolves around this realm of fear and reveals the importance of facing and overcoming our fears. Their denial can lead to madness and insanity. This message is especially clear as the deterioration the short-story’s characters is followed.

Freud’s deeply and accurately done analysis makes Poe’s intentions and effects much more understood at their real value. Thus, Roderick Usher became the reader’s pacient to analyse in point of fear and anxiety.

The Other in the Double

The Fall of the House of Usher built its structure on this idea of doubleness or otherness. But double in this short-story has to be regarded from two points of view: one is the double in Roderick Usher — formed by the conscient Roderick, and the other, the unconscient that fears — and the other is the double that forms one unity, one human being, which has a body and a mind. Here, the body is Madeline Usher, while the mind belongs to Roderick Usher. The first analysis is to be made on the double in Roderick Usher, the conscient and the unconscient one.

The theme of the double has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank10. He has gone into the connections, which the double has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death, but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the double was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an energetic denial of the power of death and probably the immortal soul was the first double of the body. Such ideas have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism, which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. The double has become the thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion the gods turned into demons.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, fantasies structured around dualism, revealing the internal origin of the other. The demonic is not supernatural, but is an aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire. Mary Shelley’s Frankestein is the first of many fantasies re-deploying a Faustian tale on a fully human level. From then onwards, fantastic narratives are clearly secularized: the other is no longer designated as supernatural, but is an externalization of part of the self. The text is structured around a dialogue or an inner struggle between self and as other.

By the time of Heine’s version of Faust, the supernatural reading of the demonic is made uneasy: Faust is mocked by demons whispering: we always appear in the shape of your most secret thoughts. Roderick Usher is conscient of his situation, he knows very well his morbid acuteness of the senses, and he is aware that fear of fear is the one that harms him. Roderick Usher’s demon is fear itself. Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, rebukes, fights, his demon, he tries not to let himself to be dominated by the evil inside him:

[…] it is I, I myself, speaking, not you…. Never for one minute have I taken you for reality…. You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom… you are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself… it is really I myself who appears in different forms.11

Differently from Ivan Karamazov, Roderick Usher does not fight his demon, which is fear, although he is conscious of it and of its consequences. He is aware of the Roderick Usher who is aware of other Roderick Usher overwhelmed and eventually killed by his demon. In fact, they are one, they are halves of a whole.

Tzvetan Todorov12 identified only two groups of fantastic themes, those dealing with the I and those dealing with the not-I, or the other. Therefore, in his opinion there are two kinds of myths in the modern fantastic. In he first, the source of otherness, of threat is in the self. Danger is seen to originate from the subject, through excessive knowledge, or rationality, or the miss-application of the human will. The pattern will be exemplified by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Too extreme an application of human will or thoughts creates a destructive situation, creates dangers, fears, terrors, creates a monster which harms the people around and which can be countered only by correcting the original sin or mistake. This Frankenstein type of myth could be represented diagrammatically as:

when the circle of the self generates its own power for destruction and metamorphosis.

In the second kind of myth, fear originates in a source external to the subject: the self suffers an attack of some sort which makes it part of the other. This type can be found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and tales of vampirism: it is a sequence of invasion, metamorphosis an fusion, in which an external force inters the subject, changes it irreversibly and usually gives to it the power to initiate similar transformations. This could be seen as:

with external forces entering the subject, effecting metamorphosis and moving out again into the world. Dracula type of myth is not confined to the individual subject; it involves a whole network of other beings and frequently has to draw upon a mechanical reproduction of religious beliefs or magical devices to contain the threat.

But there is a third group, another kind of myth of which Todorov has nothing mentioned: the Roderick Usher myth: the danger originates in the subject, like in the Frankenstein myth , through a morbid acuteness of the senses, and is misapplicated, this time, not to the world around, but to the self itself. Diagrammatically it is reproduced as:

Fear originates inside Roderick and harms him, terrifies him, makes his life miserable and eventually kills him.

In the Frankenstein type of myth, self becomes other through the subject alienation from himself and trough consequent splitting or multiplying of identities. In the Dracula type of myth, otherness is established through a fusion of self with something outside, producing an other reality, and it centralizes the problem of power: Dracula collects victims to prove the power of possession, to establish a self-supporting system. In the Roderick Usher type of myth, self becomes other through the process of anxiety and fear, which step by step destroys both the body and the mind, generating – differently from the Dracula type of myth – a desire of dying, death being seen as the freedom of soul.

All the three kinds of myths push towards a state of undifferentiation of self from other.

From the second point of view, double, in The Fall of House of Usher, is represented by the two brothers, Madeline and Roderick, the body and the soul of a whole, which is the House of Usher. Roderick and Madeline are not just brother and sister, but twins who share sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature, which connect his mental disintegration to her physical decline. As Madeline’s mysterious illness approaches physical paralysis, Roderick’s mental agitation takes the form of a morbid acuteness of the senses that separates his body from the physical world making all normal sensations painful. The two represent the mental and physical components of a single being.

The Fall of House of Usher presents once more, but in another form, Poe’s principle of Unity, amazingly asserted in Eureka; Poe recognized that in a differentiated universe, gravity has its counterpart. Poe called it electricity. In the original one there could have been no electricity because electricity is noticeable only when two or more differing particles are brought into proximity. Though the original particle contained no differing particles, the cosmos, which has irradiated from that original unity does depend upon the repulsive impulses of electricity. Gravity represents the force of attraction. Poe asserted that attraction is the body, repulsion, the soul; the on is the material; the other, the spiritual principle of the universe. No other principles exist. All phaenomena are referable to one, or to the other, or to both combined. Attraction and repulsion are the sole properties through which the universe is perceived. In other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind, assuming that matter exists only as attraction and repulsion, that attraction and repulsion are matter. In order for cosmos to exist, attraction and repulsion must be present, for without repulsion (electricity), all matter would collapse in an instant. Without attraction (gravity) all of the atoms comprising the world, as it is known, would fly apart in all directions. Attraction and Repulsion – the Material and the spiritual – accompany the Body and the Soul walk hand in hand. Nature relies upon these dual forces for its very existence.

Enclosures: Space and Time

The classical unities of space and time are threatened with dissolution in the fantastic texts, too. Parameters of the field of vision tend towards indeterminacy. The nature of space inserted into it an additional dimension, where a transformation can be effected. The additional space is frequently narrowed down into a place, or enclosure, where the fantastic has become the norm. Enclosures are central to modern fantasy. They are a space of maximum transformation and terror.

Poe’s hero travels all over the world: England, France, Russia, North and South Poles, Turkey, America, Africa, etc. The horizontal space is strangely wide. But the intention of his width is not to prove the distance or the movement, but to suggest the monstrous multiplication of the same threatening spatial configuration.

As it is very evident in Poe’s works, the place where an action takes place is not important. That is why in The Fall of House of Usher Poe does not mention not even once where the house of Usher is situated. What is very important, like in Nerval’s works, is the interior space of a conscience that projects its desires into a threatening whirl of forms, colors and sensations. Like Roderick Usher: he has never ventured forth of his dwelling. That house is for him everything he supposes he needs. Differently from Melville’s Ishmael who wanders the oceans in search for space, Poe’s Roderick seems to suffer of a seclusion complex that makes him discover another great space dimension: verticality.

In The Fall of House of Usher, Roderick and Madeline live in a mansion that they haven’t left for years; the mansion is surrounded by a tarn, the tarn itself is bounded by the Ushers’ domain, over which it flows its own atmosphere, a strange one, different from that of the sky. The repeated circumscriptions give the illusion of a bold space and of a more profound enclosure.

Maurice Merleau – Ponty in his Phénoménology de la Perception13 declares that what guarantees a man’s health against hallucination or delirium is the structure of his space. In The Fall of House of Usher it is Roderick’s structure of space that deepens his mental condition. Roderick Usher does not want to leave his mansion and to search sunny and green places. He lets himself surrounded and dominated by this atmosphere, from which he is the part that forms the whole.

Poe motivates the narrowing of his space first of all by formal criteria, because, in his narrative theory, he considers that circumscribed space is absolutely necessary to increase the effect of an isolated happening. Then, his second reason is thematic: the physical isolation of the hero means, in fact, the triumph of the irrational, of that monster that has been shackled into the mighty reason. This escape from the reason represents the way that sooner or later leads to delirium or madness. And madness led Roderick Usher to death.

As far as the space is concerned, form is also very important because Poe has different preferences according to the effect he wants. So, for him, the walls of the Universe14 are very important. But however, the circular forms and sometimes their obscurity prevail.

There is a symbolism of their geometrical forms, symbolism of which Poe was aware. He considers the rightangled form obscene, and he prefers the round one. In the grammar of the imaginary, the circle is associated with the secret intimacies. The obscurity of the circle means confusion, oscillation of the mind, it means fall into the abyss, which is madness. The corners of Roderick Usher’s room disappear into a deep black shadow, that signifies Roderick’s mind loss into the blackness and eventually into death.

This enclosure of the House of Usher is a space for Roderick to discover, with fear and horror, in a lucid madness, the hidden demon: the Conquerer Worm from The Haunted Palace – symbol of human life’s ephemerity.

above time

(the master of time)

behind time before time

(memories and (prophecy and

nostalgia) vanguard)

under time(life deeply lived)

Victor Gioscia in his diagramma of representation of time in literature15, on the horizontal axis, he divided time into behind time, which is the time of memories and nostalgia — a past time, and into before time— the literature of prophecy and vanguard.

The vertical axis has at one pole above time, which is to be free of temporality, to be out of time or even the master of time. Its symbols, in Gaston Bachelard’s opinion, are the wing, the arrow, purity and light16. The other pole of the vertical axis is occupied by under time, the kind of time that Poe and his The Fall of House of Usher represent. Gioscia’s under time means to intensely live the temporal flow, to feel the bitter taste of dissolution and decay. Roderick Usher lives his life even more deeply because of his morbid acuteness of the senses.

Time, in The Fall of House of Usher is felt only in the development of action. Time’s flowing is obvious as Roderick’s madness is more evident and deeper, and as the narrator’s mind is increasingly dominated by terror. The reader does not know for sure how much time has passed since the narrator’s arrival to the Ushers up to his escape from death. The only concrete time mentioning is the seventh or eighth day after the placing of lady Madeline within the donjon.

The moment when time flowing is the most intensely lived is the night when Madeline returns from her tomb and the narrator reads to Roderick the story of Ethelred. Both actions happen simultaneously. Their effect on the reader is the eagerness with which he waits for the end to come, but not because he is frightened, but because he is curious.

Poe does not mention the year, the month or the day the action happens. Time and space in their concrete manifestation do not interest Poe. The interior space and the obscurity of time flowing help Poe to create atmosphere, domain and isolation, and to make the reader really feel the dissolution and decay of mind and matter.

A Portrait of Perversity

Poe’s best writings describe his own psychic tendencies toward dissolution. These tendencies will be subsequently spoken of as Perversity. The counterpart to Perversity is Creativity. Material man, like all other matter in the universe, is subject to both: birth and death, creativity and perversity. The imprint of the universe is upon us. Just as Poe was entranced with death, he was also intrigued by perversity, the psychic tendency of the spirit to do itself harm.

Madeline and Roderick Usher were both created by God that waits for them to return to him. Between creativity and perversity or death, Poe chooses not to postulate the positive creativity, but to demonstrate the different ways of the perversity that leads to death. Rather than write about the flourishing house and psyche of Usher, Poe chooses to examine the disintegration and final dissolution of Usher. Rather than, like Whitman, sing the joys of selfhood, Poe anticipates the loss of selfhood and the reunion of the soul with the Godhead.

In Poe wrong is wrong because it is perverse, not because the Bible told him so wrong is wrong because it is damaging to the personality who initiates the action. When Roderick in The Fall of House of Usher speaks of a constitutional evil many assume that he has committed some monstruous act which is so morally hideous that he cannot recover, missing entirely Poe’s archetypal of perversity, which with certain minds, under certain conditions, becomes absolutely irresistible…radical…primitive.17

The constitutional evil Roderick talks about is his conscience. When Roderick commits the evil act, meaning he buries Madeline alive, he hasn’t violated God, but he has violated his own spirit. In violating his own spirit, he has acted from impulses that he couldn’t control, since his very being, as all cosmic material, has been implanted with the seed of its own annihilation. What Roderick does is a wrong for the wrong’s sake, it is an unreasonable reason. He acts for the reason that he should not act and, afterwards, he regrets. But he does not regret the act he done, but its consequences.

Very often, regret in Poe is spoken by the conscience, perhaps the author’s least understood disquisition. Conscience speaks in the conclusion of The Imp of the Perverse, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, William Wilson and The Tell-Tale Heart and it is hidden under the mask of fear in The Fall of House of Usher. It is the betrayal of the self in deepest consequence Poe’s most powerful agent of the perverse. Roderick is defeated by his own fear that has him make harm to himself. Differently form the other short-stories, Roderick harms first of all his body, which is Madeline, and after that, consequently, his mind is destroyed and eventually everything that is called Usher is annihilated. If William Wilson and the narrator from The Black Cat confess their murders pushed by their guilty conscience of perversity, which is fear. The difference between him and the others is that Roderick has never hidden his constitutional evil, on the contrary, he exposed it, confessed it, but never fought it and he eventually was killed by it. He expected his end; it was supposed to happen. The more expected death is, the more perverse Roderick’s perversity is.

In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym18, Poe declares that if there is no friendly arm to check a victim on the brink of a precipice, or if that victim fails in a sudden effort to prostrate himself backward from the abyss, he plunges and he is destroyed. The narrator in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is saved from a fall from a steep cliff by Peter’s arms, but Roderick Usher refuses his friend’s help and he refuses his own help and unfortunately he plunges together with his sister and his mansion and he is destroyed. Help has been all the time next to him, but Roderick failed in taking advantage of it.

This imp of perversity, which psycho-analysis would identify without hesitation with the elementary masochism (which next to Nirvana principle constitutes an element of the death instinct), is that inner and kill the House of Usher; it is an instinct fights the ego, hurrying its disintegration and disappearance.

Death and Its Metamorphosis

Poe’s finest works of fiction, in great part, are perhaps not entirely fictional, but rather poetic representations of the grand consistency of the universe. In this collapsing universe, every particle hungers for its undifferentiated reunion, for its loss of individuation. In order to understand Poe, it is necessary to have together with him an intuitive leap into the nature of death. It is important to realize that in Poe’s scheme, death is the return of spirit to unity and that this return to unity mirrors a grand universal consistency which can not be altered by the feeble efforts of the human will.

The human body and psyche, thus, follow the same pattern manifested in the birth and death of a flower, a star, a galaxy, or a universe. Although Poe recognized that the motions of the universe are double, he himself seemed obsessed with the return to unity rather than the springing force from Unity; in a world, Poe was absorbed by the thought of death. He creates in his fiction a kind of triangle: the awkward life which surely and eventually leads to death, which, in its turn, is an essential part Unity.

Life Death

Unity

Roderick Usher lives a mentally and physically disintegrated life which impedingly will lead to death. This mental and physical life refers, on the one hand, to Roderick and Madeline as a body which has a physical part and a mental one, and, on the other hand, to the mansion itself.

• Forebodings of Death

In The Fall of House of Usher, Poe uses the concept of death and Roderick’s deteriorating mental condition in order to give a sense of foreboding and mystery to the story. It is this premonition of something dreadful to come, which surrounds the characters of Roderick and Madeline Usher as the story progresses.

The narrator of the story, an old friend of Roderick Usher, is shocked by the ghastly appearance and odd behaviour of his long time acquaintance and it is from this impression and several odd occurrences that he becomes increasingly uneasy. For example, upon seeing Roderick, the narrator remarks the cadaverous of complexion an eye large, liquid and luminous beyond comparison; lips… pallid,… hair of… web-like softness. Although Roderick is very much alive, his appearance would indicate death and his behaviour shows signs of deteriorating sanity. The fissure in the house seen earlier by the narrator symbolizes Roderick’s deteriorating mental condition as well. Upon the narrator’s entrance into the room, Roderick remarks on the solace he expected (the narrator) to afford him. Throughout the story, Roderick and the narrator also keep themselves occupied by reading and playing music; however, Roderick previously remarks that he dreads the events of the future and must reason together in his struggles with some fatal demon of fear. Perhaps Roderick knows of some evil to come and he occupies his time with reading, music, and the company of his old friend so that he will not go crazy. In addition to the previous observations by the narrator, he also notes that Roderick is enchained by certain superstitions impressions in regard to the dwelling, which he tenants. This indicates that perhaps Roderick is aware of some supernatural element belonging to the house.

In addition to Roderick’s appearance and behaviour, the narrator is shocked to see the similarity in Madeline and Roderick’s appearance. The fact that the two remaining members of the House of Usher appear so deathly, may be a sign of the final end to the House of Usher. Later, upon putting Madeline’s supposedly dead body in a crypt, the narrator notices her complexion as having the mockery of a faint blush. Although the narrator notices the unusually healthy complexion of the deceased Madeline, he tries to rationalize what he sees by concluding that it must have been caused by her particular illness. The fact that the colour in her face is even mentioned, may be a sign that perhaps she is not really dead and that Madeline may appear in the story later. The narrator remarks that there were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with an oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.18 The narrator also comments on how Roderick seems to stare at nothing and appears to be listening to some imaginary sound. Again, this may be another hint of some evil occurrence yet to happen and Roderick does in fact lose his sanity as well as his life when Madeline reappears before Roderick and the narrator at the end of the story.

Poe’s use of imagery and describing Roderick’s appearance as well as his mental condition are instrumental in giving a sense of dread and foreboding to the story. The explanations for Madeline’s return from the grave may be anything from her being a vampire to her merely having been in a coma, yet Edgar Allan Poe’s conclusion to The Fall of House of Usher is no doubt an exciting and terrifying end to a suspenseful story.

• Freedom in Death

The Fall of House of Usher and many of Poe’s other works have many similar distinguishing characteristics. In all of Poe’s works, there are always aspects of evil, supernatural happenings, death etc.— anything that concerns itself with the dark side of the spectrum. In The Fall of House of Usher, there is an increase of negativity in the atmosphere of the passage.

When the reading starts, one senses a morbid and cold atmosphere. Reading on, the reader reaches an atmosphere of sorrow, which turns to one of great evil, which eventually leads to death — the death of Roderick Usher. It is this atmosphere that creates a living nightmare for Usher. It is a nightmare that Roderick wants to escape, but can not — that is he can not escape the nightmare alive. Therefore, in The Fall of House of Usher, death is not viewed as a bad occurrence, especially for Usher who uses death as his only means of escape — his only way to freedom.

When the story opens, it can be seen that the atmosphere plays an important role in the reading. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day… within view of a melancholic House of Usher.19 This is the very first sentence in the story. Here, one can feel the morbidity and coldness about the passage. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.20 Both exerts were taken when the narrator first comes in contact with the house of Usher — the first time he sees and enters the Usher House. With these two quotes, the narrator seems to sense some kind of unexplainable evil presence surrounding the house. In these descriptions of the house, the narrator tries to tell the reader that something is wrong — the house is different from the way it used to be in his youth. The narrator somehow thinks that nothing good is going to come out of his visit.

After being with Usher for a while, the narrator gives this description: To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave.21 The narrator calls him a slave because Roderick is a prisoner in his own house. He is not just any slave, but a bounden slave — somehow obliged to take on role of a prisoner of this nightmarish prison of a house. What is he obliged for? It is not yet known to the narrator or the reader.

The narrator gave the previous description after he is told by Usher: I shall perish. I must perish in this deplorable folly…. I feel that I must abandon life and reason together in my struggles with some fatal demon of fears.22 With this quote, the narrator gives the slave description of Usher. Also, Usher is telling what he is going through — what is the thinking. Usher is saying that he is a prisoner in his own house, imprisoned by a demon of fear. Usher lives in constant fear every day and he is to the point when he would rather die than live in fear.

Finally, it is this demon of fear — lady Madeline of Usher — that comes after Roderick. She wants her revenge and the revenge is death. What lady Madeline does not know is that it is this revenge of death that is welcomed by death. Usher prefers death than the hellish prison his life was becoming. It is in the death, in the fall of Usher, Usher finally has peace —he finally has freedom.

• Metamorphosis into Unity

As it stated before, Roderick Usher is not afraid of death, he even desires it because he considers it his freedom. Poe’s principle of what is after life, of that Unity, is shared by Sade23, too. Sade proposes a universal prostitution of all beings, providing unity with nature in a state of perpetual motion. Death, he suggests, ceases to signify: it is merely a translation of forms, a kind of metamorphosis. This transition from life to death then ceases to terrify, or to give to life any dignity or supremacy over death. Sade refuses to give to the first a positive and to the second a negative categorization. He considers dissolution a very great state of motion.24 Nothingness or death is no less present than live matter.

The difference between Poe and Sade is that Poe gave to death a somber air just to succeed in giving the right effect. The somber of death is increased by people’s opinions about it, it is increased by their fear of it. The reader is penetrated by these looks and he fails to see Poe’s intention to present Unity as behind death, to present death as a metamorphosis into Unity. Roderick Usher understands this unity and desires it. Somehow he is Poe’s spokesman of his principles.

The Fall of House of Usher describes Usher’s ideal as the kingdom of inorganization Poe’s Eureka develops this ideal of natural unity. Here everything is swallowed up, Space and Duration are one, there is no Past and there is no Future because all being is Now.

That is why Roderick Usher wishes death, which is not a simple desire to cease to be. This is a longing for Nirvana, where all tensions are reduced. This is what Roderick looks for and he knows that he can free himself from his fear only in death.

Many people and critics saw in Poe’s wish of developing his stories around the realm of death a direct influence of his own experience: when he was young, his mother died, his step mother died later, and his young wife Virginia died of consumption. The frequent gloom, the confused soul and the physical decay are, indeed, Poe’s most interesting preoccupations in his stories. But he doesn’t see them as negative or pessimistic, he only looks for effect and therefore his methods are strange. Death is seen as return to the primordial Unity and everything up to there are only ways of reaching the final unique state. One of the ways that Poe chooses to best illustrate his principle is to have his characters insane, so they long for the perfect and happy end. Insanity in Poe is best presented in The Fall of House of Usher. To Roderick’s madness Poe gave different and multiple forms. He exposed these forms of dissolution in a strategically worked short-story whose structure was very much influenced by Kierkegaard, Hoffmann and other Germanic philosophers and whose psychoanalytical principles found their echo in Freud and Jung.

This chapter tried to prove the not at all easy philosophy and principles of Poe’s dissolution. It turned Roderick Usher’s soul on all its sides, so to be able to deeply and accurately understand the different approaches of a tormented soul.

NOTES:

1Mihaela Minulescu, Introducere în analiza jungiană, Editura Trei, București, 2001.

2Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 83-84.

3The Uncanny, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. James Strachey, London, The Hogarts Press, 1953, vol. 17, p. 217.

4Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 89.

5idem, p. 81.

6Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, London and New York, 1988, 1991.

7Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 82.

8ibidem.

9ibidem, p. 89.

10Otto Rank, Dublul: Don Juan, Institutul European, Iași, 1997.

11cit. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, London and New York, 1988, 1991, p. 55-56.

12Tzvetan Todorov, Introducere în literatura fantastică, Univers, București, 1973.

13Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 385-397.

14Edgar Allan Poe, Ms. Found in a Bottle, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994.

15Victor Gioscia, On Social Time, in The Future of Time, edited by Henry Yaker, Humphry Osmond and Frances Cheek, London The Hogarth Press, 1972, p. 85-93.

16Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les Songes, Paris, Corti, 1942.

17Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994.

18Edgar Allan Poe, Aventurile lui Gordon Pym, ed. Dacia, 1970.

19Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 89.

20idem, p. 76.

21idem, p. 80.

22idem, p. 82.

23ibidem.

24Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Eugenie de Franval and Other Writings, New York, 1965, p. 86-87.

25ibidem.

CHAPTER III

FABRICATION OR REALITY?

Poe’s condition to Gothic is enormous and varied and it was in terms not of themes, but of structure and tone, in the evolution of a variety of symbolist terror in which he has never been surpassed, but which seems in most ways more European than American. Although Poe did not invent the Gothic short-story, he invented something within it, a kind of story which does not move by simple narrative, but by spiraling intensification. This technique is at its most perfect in The Fall of the House of Usher.

Besides the spiraling intensification, what makes the short-story unique is the confusion that it throws on the reader, on thinking if the story the narrator relates is real or is just his fabrication. If it mere fabrication, many things change.

The Fall of the House of Usher — published in England, incidently, by Ainsworth — cannot be summarized in terms of plot. Thompson describes it as a structure if interpenetrating structures1. But he does also mention the most important thing about it when he comments that, by the end of the story, the reader does not know that anything the narrator has told is real, the whole tale and its structures may be the fabrication of the completely deranged mind of the narrator. Nothing at all may have happened in a conventional sense in the outside world — only in the inner world of the narrator’s mind. The problem is that this could be said in one sense about any work of fiction: it is specifically important in The Fall of the House of Usher because of the degree of sensitivity with which Poe leads us to doubt the narrator’s veracity and competence. Confronted with a fiction, which may well be written by an insane pseudo-author, criticism tends to come full circle.

Beginning with a crude statement, The Fall of the House of Usher is a mounting spiral of terror in which the narrator, visiting his dying old friend Roderick Usher, perhaps witnesses certain supernatural events in his company; or becomes involved in his private but powerful fantasies; or, conceivably, himself visits the products of his dubious imagination on Roderick. At all events, it appears that Roderick’s sister dies, and then returns to life. Subsequently the house itself, which Roderick has been blaming for exercising a malign influence over the lives of himself and his family, sinks into the surrounding lake.

One way of investigating the complexity of the prism through which these events are viewed, is by looking at the opening and closing passage of the story. At the beginning, the narrator arrives at the house and, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit2. Already, everything is doubtful. Poe is deliberately dissociating the scene from any connotations of sublimity, raising the question of whether this is a movement towards or away from reality. The after-dream of opium is no more real than the revelry itself, and the narrator may already be suffering from a causeless melancholy. He appears given to extremes—insufferable, utter, bitter, hideous — and the victim of incomprehensible feelings: it was a mistery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered3. But if he cannot grasp his own condition, what chance does he stand of perceiving aright roots of Roderick’s sickness unto death?

He goes on to speculate on possibility that in some way the arrangement of the features of the house might be producing this effect, but this only adds to the difficulty, because when Roderick comes round to suggesting something similar it is impossible to know whether the narrator has put it into his mind. What is especially frightening about the development of the relationship between the narrator and Roderick is that Roderick knows he is neurasthenic, whereas the narrator makes confessions of his own susceptibility while he looks down into the tarn, his first impression of the house deepens:

There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition — for why should I not to term it? — served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.4

He thus acknowledges his own tendency to inflate situations of fear, which is also an ironic comment on the writer’s self — defeating ability to vest the most mundane of circumstances in a shroud of terror. For a psychological reading of the tale, there is already a problem, about whose psychological constitution is to be probed: Roderick’s or the narrator’s?

At the end of the story the narrator, to pass away this terrible night together, reads to Roderick one of his favorite romances, the imaginary Mad Trist. It is a story hardly calculated to allay Roderick’s fears: during it, various sounds occur in the sub-text which becomes real in terms of the actual story, being transmuted into the sounds of the perhaps prematurely buried sister rising from her tomb, until Roderick, crazed with terror at her imminent appearance, bursts out:

“Oh! Whither shall a fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbrade me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!” — here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“ Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”5

Here is the crux of the story in a single word: Madman. In a sense the whole action of the tale has been a movement towards the production of this one word, with its multiple interpretations. Roderick, at least, has seen the madness in his companion; or, Roderick has finally seen his own insanity in its full colours; or the narrator is giving vicarious vent to his psychological triumph over the dying Roderick; or the writer is celebrating his victory over the now disorganized perceptions of his readers. Madman is the hidden word on which the story has throughout hinged. Once it is admitted and uttered, once disorientation is no longer displaced, the lady appears; she and Roderick go down to death together; the house sinks; and the narrator flees aghast from the site of the destruction in which he has participated, perhaps as murderer, perhaps as agent of a kind of terrible catharsis. His pseudo-rational discourse and the neurotic discourse of Roderick are buried under the ruins when this unitary and paradoxically unifying primal scream breaks up the webs of reason and superstition which, in their interlocking, have sustained the apparent coherence of the house; consciousness and unconscious fuse under the pressure of the released energy, and house and tarn, pattern and depth, cancel each other out.

NOTES:

1David Punter , The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Longman, London and New York, 1980, p. 203.

2Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 76.

3ibidem.

4idem, p. 84.

5idem, p. 95.

CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

• The Fall of the House of Usher — a Fantastic Pure Uncanny Tale

• The Rationale of Creativity

• The point of View

• The Fall of the House of Usher—a Pure

Fantastic Tale

As Poe accurately proved in his Philosophy of Composition, Poe wrote his works under close observation, according to some rules, works proceeded step by step… withthe precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem1. His works are not the consequence of a fine frenzy2, but of an elaborate labour.

This chapter is not to expose the steps Poe followed, but their result and their techniques. The first part deals with the incorporation of The Fall of the House of Usher in a genre, according to Tzvetan Todorov’s Introducere în literatura fantastică.

Critics have traditionally defined fantasy in terms of its relation to the real, and in literary terms this meant that the fantastic tended to be understood through its relation to realism. Todorov’s study was the first to question this classification ant to offer a systematic formulation of the poetics of fantasy. Rather than turning too far to philosophical and psychological explanations, Todorov relies upon an analysis of the text in its own terms, so arriving at a theoretical rather than a historical definition of the genre of fantasy.

The fantastic is to do with some kind of existential anxiety and unease, both having a close relation to the real. Tales, which are too incredible to be introduced as real, break the convention. When there is nonsense, the limits of possibility are broken. The tale, which introduces strange events, permits no internal explanation of the strangeness — the protagonist cannot understand what is going on — and this confusion spreads outwards to affect the reader in similar ways. According to Todorov, the purely fantastic text establishes absolute hesitation in protagonist and reader. Roderick Usher or the narrator and the reader of The Fall of the House of Usher are very confused, anxious and amazed of the things going on. They can neither come to terms with the unfamiliar events described, nor dismiss them as supernatural phenomena. Anxiety, then, is not merely a thematic feature, but is incorporated into the structure of the work to become its defining element. Aren’t fear and anxiety the realms of the House of Usher?

Todorov considers that the fantastic requires three conditions. First, the reader is obliged to consider the world of the characters the real one and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Because of Poe’s formulas and art of writing the reader of The Fall of the House of Usher does not think a moment that the world the story took him in is not a real one and he hesitates indeed when thinking about the natural or supernatural explanation of the happening. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character. And it is, indeed, by the narrator and by Roderick Usher himself. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude regarding the text: he has to reject allegorical and poetic interpretations. It is impossible for the reader to make an allegorical interpretation to The Fall of the House of Usher because Poe’s principles about Unity and its approaches do not allow it, it would be a paradox in Poe’s conceptions.

But Todorov does not stop here. He explains and represents the different kinds of fantasy diagrammatically.

Here, too, The Fall of the House of Usher has to be incorporated, taking into account its relations to the other modes.

For Todorov, the area of the pure marvellous indicates narratives such as fairy tales, romance, much science fiction, while the area of fantastic marvellous presents inexplicable effects which are eventually given supernatural causes. The fantastic uncanny includes strange events seen as having some subjective origin. Todorov places Poe’s tales, and implicitly The Fall of the House of Usher, in the pure uncanny, where the fantastic occupies a duration of uncertainty, where the reacher is left in doubt over the origins of “ghosts” as supernatural or natural presences. In The Fall of the House of Usher neither Roderick, nor the narrator knows the truth about what happens there. Sometimes the events have the air of the natural course of things, but sometimes they seem to be supernatural.

“Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam to unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the Jull, setting, and bloodred moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure.”

This frontier between the marvelous and the mimetic (which is the imitation of an external reality) is very well represented by the fantastic. Fantastic narratives confound elements of both the marvelous and the mimetic. The Fall of the House of Usher asserts that what it is telling is real — lying upon all the conventions of realistic fiction to do so — and then it proceeds to break that assumption of realism by introducing what — within those terms — is manifestly unreal. The Fall of the House of Usher pulls the reader from the apparent familiarity and security of the known and every day world into sometime more strange, into a world whose improbabilities are closer to the realm normally associated with the marvellous. The narrator is not less confused than Roderick Usher of what is going on; the status of what is being seen and recorded as real is constantly in question. The Fall of the House of Usher is not the only Poe’s short-story that circles around equivocation. The opening of The Black Cat is Poe’s clear testimony of the confusion that rules in fantastic tales.

For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.

The Fall of the House of Usher, between the marvellous and the mimetic, borrowing the extravagance of one and the ordinariness of the other, belongs to neither and it can excite without their assumptions of confidence or presentation of authoritative truths. It is a fantastic short-story where natural and supernatural interweave in order to create a confusion of the soul that makes it exquisitly alluring.

• The Rationale of Creativity

Everybody knows that Poe’s works are extremely calculated, well-structured and rigurously elaborated even Poe mentions it in The Philosophy of Composition. He considers that there is a radical error […] in the usual mode of constructing a story.6 He doesn’t agree to choose a commonplace incident of the day and then Jill in with descriptions, dialogues or actions. He prefers comencing with the consideration of an effect keeping originality always in view.7And the effect depends very much of the dinouement of the story presented. It is only with the dinouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intentin.8

So happens with The Fall of the House of Usher which is a tale of effect. Poe chose to make the reader live the story, to make him shudder and to amaze and displease him with the sudden end. Although this end was expected because Poe chose to deal with death — the only way that leads to the primal unity — deny to turn the page when he finishes the story because he expects more. He is so much attracted by the course of the story that he reads it out of breath, and then he stops suddenly because there is no more. Only afterwards he realizes that that was all, that that was the end Poe wishes and that that was his effect he wanted on the reader. If Poe could have watched inside the reader while he was reading the story, he would have laughed because of the reader’s reaction. This is what Poe intended to create: the effect of vivid gloom.

The same as his endings, how much is artistry or how much is intuition in his works remains an open question. Still, the symbolism in the Gothic Stories constitutes ten leader key in Poe’s literary art. The fact that he doesn’t use it constantly is a success. Poe uses the symbol only when it has a clear role and he carefully handles it so than it doesn’t become confusing. Symbolism in Poe usually takes the form in which an object replaces an abstraction or a personal character. In The Masque of the Red Death, the pendulum and its each low beatings foretell the coming of the end. But sometimes Poe’s analogies turn against him; the story becomes heavy because of a true list of objects. It is the case of Ligeia where Poe finds too many analogies for Ligeia’s eyes: they are butterflies, stars, music, leaves of vine, running water and so on.

In his best works, Poe’s symbolism is at its best, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, probably Poe’s best short-story. Here, symbols find their way in a strong texture of causes and effects. The Usher family and the Usher castle are identical: they both have the print of time on them, they are worn out, ruining inside and waiting for their fall. Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline, twin brothers, are the body and the soul of one unity, but they also can be considered soul of the body, which is the house. All the three fall together, and the disappearance of one means the disappearance of the other two, too.

A few days after Madeline’s burial, she comes back alive and her return in her brother’s office is strilfully orchestrated. The narrator reads to Roderick aloud a legendary story, whose subject exactly describes the sound she produces on her way back. The door largely opens, Madeline falls on her brother and then they both fall dead on the floor. The narrator escapes in time and watching back he sees how the House of Usher disintegrates and is swallowed by the black waters of the tarn. The fissure in the house stands for the fissure between the body and the soul, meaning Madeline and Roderick, while the swallowing by the tarn may seen to be a regression wombward , or a reunion with Godhead. What Poe wants to illustrate is that everything eventually turns back to Nothingness.

In order to perfectly create the effect of vivid gloom, Poe needed a gloomy tone and gloomy colours. The chromatic composition is not rich in The Fall of the House of Usher, but it has the necessary shades. As the prevailing feeling is that of deception, dissolution and decay, consequently the predominant colours are white, black and their combination: grey. In Poe, white is the sign of terror9, and although it is not obvious in the short-story, its presence is felt and it is made evident by Poe when the narrator saw a small painting of Roderick Usher, painted by Fuseli, that presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with law walls, smooth, white and without interruption or device.10 As stated before, white is the sign of terror, and here white is the colour of a tunnel and this tunnel is the way that leads to death because there is the light Roderick needs, meaning the freedom in death, in that primordial unity. So, while is the colour of terror that leads to death.

By logical extension, black is the colour of horror, black is everything that is rejected but impossible to be removed, black is like a shadow that never leaves the body to which it belongs, except the moment when this body dies. The body in The Fall of the House of Usher is Roderick and his shadow is the evil around him, is that energy that falls into the by his psychic. Thus, the energy that falls into the shadow is always at variance with the body. The danger of this rejected shadow consists in the rejection itself; the misunderstanding of the shadow will react like an unknown force that poisons the life of the body and its way of seeing and understanding things. Roderick shouldn’t fear his fear, but he should face it and consider it.

The body and its shadow — live into the white and black and Poe takes advantage of them and creates a grey world so he can produce the effect he has been looking for.

But Poe doesn’t stop here in his trying to create an effect. In The Fall of the House of Usher there is a section of the story where different forms of art — painting, poem and other various novels — are introduced to the reader. All these arts fell a story — a story within the story. These stories, that the different pieces of art tell, are somehow parallel to the story of The Fall of the House of Usher. They are to be read to Usher so his mind would be off to what was going on around him. But they seem to do more harm good.

The painting that is introduced is a painting done by Henry Fuseli, noted foe his interest in the supernatural. But the interpretation of the while walls and of the rectangular tunnel has already been explained and they don’t need further development.

Another story within the story is presented by Roderick Usher’s own composition: The Haunted Palace — the poem that makes the narrator aware of the fact that Roderick knows very well the condition in which he is. The Haunted Palace makes a connection between the house and its inhabitants. There are similarities between the story and the poem. The Haunted Palace parallels the plot of The Fall of the House of Usher. The fair and stately palace that reared its head11 is the past of the Usher House. It was once a stately manor. As time went by, the House deteriorated along with the emotions of the people occupying it. But present came in both the story as in the poem: But evil things in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate.12

This is what is happening with the House of Usher now: the house and its two inhabitants are full of sorrow. All that the painting and the poem do is to stress once more the morbidity and coldness already existing in the house. Most people have art or create art in their homes for cheering up their souls or their place. But these stories within story do not serve this purpose.

The other stories present here are those read by the narrator to Roderick. They have similar themes and they also resemble in happenings with The Fall of the House of Usher. The similar theme among the stories is that there is always some sort of evil presence around, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm.13

Besides The Hounded Palace that parallels The Fall of the House of Usher, there is another story, Sir Lancelot Canning’s Mad Trist that more than paralleling, develops simultaneously with Poe’s story. The sounds that Ethelred makes coincides with the sounds that Madeline makes when she comes back from her tomb. What Poe tries to realize by adding these other stories into the story is to make the reader understand Usher’s bad situation. Differently from Poe, the narrator tries indeed to make Usher feel better by reading him these stories, but his actions only reinforce the situation Usher was trying to remind Usher of his past, present and his possible future. He knows deep inside him that there is no escape from the House of Usher but in death.

Poe’s taste for dissolution and gloomy air is justified in his Litters14. He thinks that, considering the magazine’s history, it is obvious that writers have reached their celebrity because of works that, by their nature, resemble Berenice. And their nature is rendered by the absurd amplified up to grotesque, by the terror element turned into horrible and by the uncanny or unusual turned into strange and mystic. Poe knows that in order to be appreciated the writer has to be read, and the elements above mentioned are greedily searched by the reader. Poe consider that the grotesque is an estranged world, it is our world but under another form. Arabesque — used to mean a geometrical design, but for Poe this notion means the free play of fantasy. For example, Roderick Usher’s art is arabesque: it paints ideas in the form of pure abstractions.15 So grotesque and arabesque are the rhetorical figures to express man’s alienation and the intrusion of demonic and absurd into the world.

• The Point of View

Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is not interesting only from the points of view of ways of creating the gloom. The short-story has an unexpected variety regarding the point of view itself.

The notion of point of view is interested in the way of enunciation. It refers to questions like: Who is the one that sees?, From what perspective?, In an immediate relation with reality or taking into account a certain distance?

J.W. Beach’s Henry James Method and The Twenty Century Novel. Studies in Techniques, and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction established a clear distinction between a traditional epic representation and the modern one, the last being considered more appropriate for the psychological truth.

The Fall of the House of Usher should be analysed from the both perspectives. In terms of method of writing, Poe’s short-story may be considered traditional, but as this technique cannot be complete without the study of semantics, The Fall of the House of Usher should be considered modern, as it shows a deeper end more profound psychological truth.

Although very different in style, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe have the common characteristics of the modern representation, meaning they (as Lubbock and Beach do, too) choose the direct scene, the showing instead of the traditional representation where the telling and the discursive panorama are at their best.

Superficially considered, The Fall of the House of Usher is traditional. It has a narrator that tells a story. There is a telling and a panorama of the action of the story. But the action in fact develops itself. The novelist does not interfere. The future is not clear. The action is like a movie: it relates itself, it is its own nourishment. For Lubbock, the art of novel really begins when the novelist accomplishes this condition, which in Beach’s opinion constitutes the specifical difference between novel and history, philosophy or sience.

In order for The Fall of the House of Usher to be analyzed from the point of view of the point of view, it is necessary to partialize knowledge and appreciation. This is especially dued to the possibility of seeing and comprehensing the limits of the object. For example, Roderick Usher may be considered one of the narrators, the narrator of his internal issues or of a part of his external actions. But some times the real narrator, too, the I of the story, tells Roderick Usher’s actions. Another problem rises when one thinks that the narrator is the hand, the mind, briefly, the doll in the author’s hands; that is like a machine that accomplishes without reasoning the desires of its master.

If the absence of the author is taken into consideration, it is clear that a restraint to punctual and explicit takes place. The point of view of the author in the short-story results from the confrontation between the narrator’s discourse and that of the actors . It represents a convergence of effects a synthesis of points of view, more precisely, a synthetical point of view, deductible from the ensemble of the text, and sometimes from its implicit, not reductible to the verbal manifestation of the narrator. But analyzing Lintvelt’s 16 and Bernard’s17 theories about the point of view, it results that in this short-story the point of view belongs to the narrator. From now on, only Lintvelt’s and Bernard’s terminology and theories are to be used.

They established a narrative typology based on the functional opposition between narrator and actor. They dissociate between the two, and this dichotomy leads then to two fundamental narrative forms: the heterodiegetic narration and the homodiegetic narration. As the heterodiegetic narration implies the fact that the narrator is not present in history as an actor, meaning he does not participate at the action of the story, it is not of use in the present demonstration. But the homodiegetic narration, on the contrary, has a double-function character: as a narrator, he narrates the story, and as an actor, he plays a role in history. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator Roderick Usher’s friend, is also a participant in the story. And it is this friend whose point of view is present in the short-story.

Here again a problem rises. The narrator, as Lintvelt says, has many degrees, these being considered after his importance in the history, meaning the action of the story. He may be a protagonist or a simple character, playing the role of a witness. In The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator represents an actor, as Roderick Usher does, as Madeline Usher does, as the tarn does, and as even the mansion does.

But Lintvelt’s theory about the narrator — actor relationship does not entirely suit the case of this short-story. In Lintvelt’s point of view the narrator identifies himself with the actor, in order to mentally relive his past. And consequently, the reader shares the same narrative perspective. The narrator distances himself from the actor in order to clearly render the past experiences. In The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator is simultaneously the actor. There is no temporal or spatial distance between them. The narrator-character tells and the actor-character lives. This situation marks the moment of the most complete identification between the reader, the narrator and the actor.

But sometimes the narrator lets the reader catch a glimpse of the difference between the mental health when he tells the story — as the narrator, and the crises of anxiety — as the actor:

At the termination of this sentence I started and, for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited Jancy had deceived me) — it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincident alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have in — terested or disturbed me.

As the moment of living and the moment of telling are simultaneous, the narrator-actor has not enough time to multilaterally analyze the experiences he lives. That is why the external and internal perceptions are somehow limited. As the three — narrator, actor, reader —identify themselves simultaneously, the same and one perception seems to prevail. The reader becomes the narrator — character who feels and profoundly lives the history because he is the actor-character.

The narrator-character hides behind the actor-character. In fact, the narrator disappears in favour of the actor, which seems to express the spontaneous course of his thoughts, without having any ad-interim instance. The past tense used does not seem to express a real past; it provokes the illusion of a narration simultaneous with the present, because the reader identifies himself with the actor in front of which the scene of the world of the short-story develops.

As the narrator-actor is the point of reference, this temporal experience must be considered, too. His flash-backs are possible because he lives the present that has a past, because he can evoke memories, but the anticipation is excluded, as the narrator-character does not know how the future is to be.

Generally speaking, the point of view refers to the questions mentioned in the beginning. Following the course of the short-story, the questions are anwered:

Who is the one that sees? — The narrator.

From what perspective? — From the perspective of the actor.

In an immediate relation with reality or taking into account a certain distance? In an immediate relation with reality.

Poe adapted the world around him and its conceptions so he could create his own world and his own conceptions. The search for an effect and the sticking on it is unique at Poe and is greatly successful. All his methods and their results are pure art. Poe created his own style, but not by listening to his heart and putting down on paper his feelings, but by analyzing, searching, structuring and calculating. He analysed the character of the word19, he kept with the intended tone20, and he respected Beauty, Truth and Passion as rules of Art.21 His dark in life is just a reason to create the light in death. The return to Nothingness is just a normal order towards the primordial Unity. Poe followed his aim and reached it by hard working and by originality.

NOTES:

1E.A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1, Macmilan Publishing Co., Inc., New-York, 1974, 1980, p. 984.

2ibidem.

3Tzvetan Todorov, Introducere în literatura fantastică, Univers, București, 1973.

4E.A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 95.

5E.A. Poe, The Black Cat, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 311.

6E.A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1, Publishing Co., Inc., New-York, 1970, 1980, p. 983.

7ibidem.

8ibidem.

9Liviu Cotrău, Prefață la E.A. Poe, Prăbușirea Casei Usher. Schițe. Nuvele. Povestiri, Univers, București, 1985.

10E.A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 84.

11ibidem, p. 85.

12ibidem, p. 86.

13ibidem, p. 87.

14V. Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe, Editura pentru literatură Universală, București, 1966, p. 191.

15Harry Lenin, The Power of Blackness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976, p. 134.

16JaapLintvelt, Punctul de vedere. Încercare de tipologie narativă, Univers, București, 1994.

17Bernard Valette, Romanul. Introducere în metodele și tehnicile moderne de analiză literară, Cartea Românească, 1997.

18 E.A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Penguin Popular Classics, England, 1994, p. 42.

19E.A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1, Publishing Co., Inc., New-York, 1970, 1980, p. 985.

20ibidem.

21ibidem.

CONCLUSION

Walt Whitman felt for a long time a profound repulsion for Poe’s works. The Poet of Democracy considers that a work has to offer the clear shining sun, the breeze of the fresh air and the power of health, not the delirium, the air of death and the smell of decay as Poe’s writings do. One night, Whitman dreamt of a boat fighting a storm. It was not a perfect and well-equipped ship, but it was a small yacht floating at random on the water’s with his canvas torn out and its masts broken. On the deck, a feeble figure, a beautiful and dark creature was enjoying the dreadful burst of nature and, ironically, the victim of nature was the figure itself. Whitman considered a lot his dream and named that figure Edgar Allan Poe. Only much later Whitman understood Poe and saw in him flu real man and the real writer.*

Whitman’s feelings after reading Poe are largely shared by everybody. But Poe is more profound that he lets us perceive. And this is what I tried to expose in my paper. I chose The Fall of the House of Usher to be my example it seemed to me the short-story the most adequate for presenting Poe’s principles and approaches in realizing his effect.

Superficially read, Poe is pessimistic and everything in his works eventually turns bad. But Poe’s intentions are not to relate a tale, but to create an effect and to symbolically expose some of his theories and principles.

Dissolution and decay are not states of facts but vias towards the primordial Unity. The mental and physical decline of the House of Usher is one of the leading ways to death. Poe was very much interested in the way mind works and in the way of the unconscient to unawares manipulated the conscient. The other is also of great importance because it takes the form of the unconscient, sometimes shaped into passion, sometimes shaped into revenge, but most of the times shaped into the Imp of the Perverse and into Fear of Terror, as is the case of The Fall of the House of Usher. Step by step, Fear mentally and physically destroyed Roderick Usher. The annihilation of the self called by Poe the Imp of the Perverse is the most secreted inside someone, but Poe reveals it neither directly, nor step by step, but symbolically or through intuition.

Roderick Usher suffered all the faces and transformations of fear and anxiety. Poe put Roderick under close observation. He placed him into a certain space and a certain time, he created him not the condition Roderick wanted, but the condition Poe wanted and then he set him free into the world of madness and dissolution. Being very much limited and powerless, Roderick couldn’t recover, and he chose to deal with his only possibility of escaping: death. Poe watched very deeply inside Roderick, and from time to time he showed him the way to self annihilation.

Disintegration has many forms and Poe plentifully used it in The Fall of the House of Usher. He didn’t choose only to work with a dissolution and his dinouement created a profound feeling of bitterness. In fact this is what Poe began his short-story with: with the consideration of an effect. He wanted his reader not only to finally understand Roderick’s decay, but also to deeply feel it. And the reader feels it, indeed, as if he lived it.

Psychoanalysis and deep introspections helped Poe to create a dark world whose aim is to bring the light from the end of the tunnel. Psychoanalysis and deep introspections helped me to understand Poe and his creation, and to expose his main principles and semantic features considered from the point of view of The Fall of the House of Usher.

NOTE:

*Walt Whitman, Opere Alese, Univers, București,1992

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