Re-evaluating Poe

Posted 4 September, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Flannery O'Connor |

Maud Newton has an interesting post on her site concerning Edmund Wilson’s feelings about Edgar Allan Poe, specifically the question of why Poe had not been embraced by his own country. Writing in the early part of the 20th century (the essay Maud points to is collected in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and ’30s, the first of an upcoming two-volume retrospective of Wilson’s criticism to be published by the Library of America), Wilson complains that Poe’s writing “so completely failed to impress itself upon the literature of Poe’s own country that it is still possible for Americans to talk about him as if his principal claim to distinction were his title to be described as the ‘father of the short story.’”

This might arguably have been true in the early part of the 20th century, when no one had heard of Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates; it would be difficult to make the same assertion today. Poe’s motifs, approach (the “singular effect” that Wilson points to), Gothic sensibility, and relationship with the subconscious have all found resonance in postwar American fiction. As Philip Van Doren Stern asserts in his introduction to The Portable Edgar Allan Poe,* Poe “tapped the rich reservoir of the subconscious mind to set free the strange and terrible images which had seldom been allowed to stalk the printed page until he introduced them into his work,” but which have seldom been far from the American fictional psyche since.

Is it possible, for instance, to read King’s The Dark Half or his novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” without thinking about the ultimately fatal struggle between the narrator and his Doppelgänger in Poe’s “William Wilson”? And Oates’s Gothic stories, especially those in Haunted and The Collector of Hearts, are enormously Poe-influenced. (One story in Haunted, “The White Cat,” is a fairly explicit reworking of one of Poe’s most notorious stories, although Oates coyly changes the colour of the titular feline.)

This is to say nothing of Poe’s influence on works by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park), and, perhaps surprisingly, Flannery O’Connor. In Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, one of the best works of O’Connor scholarship I’ve come across, Frederick Asals engages in a lengthy examination of Poe’s influence on the novel Wise Blood, commenting in part:

The parallels are at times so close that it becomes difficult to believe Flannery O’Connor was unaware of them. Such specific echoes as walling up cats (”The Black Cat”) and the story of the body in the chimney (”The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) would seem open (if tongue-in-cheek) allusions. Other, less overt borrowings, however, have greater significance. Hazel Motes’s recurrent fear of being “not dead but only buried” … has of course a number of possible sources in Poe’s tales, but the action toward the end of the first chapter of Wise Blood parallels remarkably that of “The Premature Burial.” … [W]hile Poe’s narrator claims that his experience has broken his obsession with death, Hazel Motes will suffer this defining terror again and again in the course of the novel.

American filmmakers have been similarly enamoured with Poe’s themes and stories. Roger Corman (The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher) and Stuart Gordon (The Pit and the Pendulum) both filmed Poe’s material, and Quentin Tarantino has evinced a recent fascination with Poe’s own horror of being buried alive (both Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and Grave Danger, Tarantino’s two-part CSI episode, feature characters who are buried alive).

When it comes to Poe’s influence on American letters, perhaps the last word should go to Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote in the Afterword to Haunted: “Poe’s influence upon the literature of the grotesque — and the mystery-detective genre — has been so universal as to be incalculable. Who has not been influenced by Poe? — however obliquely, indirectly; however the influence, absorbed in adolescence or even in childhood, would seem to be far behind us.”

*Van Doren Stern, pace Wilson, also locates Poe’s influence in 19th century American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Bierce, and, in the early 20th century, Faulkner.

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