2. Expression and Theatricality, or Medium Poe

In a Jack Cole comic from November 1949 Plastic Man nearly meets his match.¹ The villain, hangdog-faced escaped criminal Phil Sanders, has gone straight and avoided the law for the past two years. Everything changes when he tries out for a theatrical role, rather minimally specified: the part of a sad character whose “facial expression must break hearts of audience.” The director finds that Sanders suits the part and coaches his expression slightly, until they both realize that his face can bring everyone around him to tears (fig. 2). Plastic Man’s sidekick, who happens to be at the same audition, starts the train rolling: “Here are my last two bucks . . . er . . . Sadly-Sadly! It’s the only name I can think of for you!” And so the newly renamed Sadly-Sadly returns to his life of crime with his new unbeatable weapon, a face that causes people to want to make him feel better by handing over their cash and jewels. Bounding away from the audition with an armful of money, he thinks, “All I have to do is remember what Camden [the director] taught me about the tone of my voice and the expression on my face! I’ll be able to pull anything and maybe even win Plastic Man’s sympathy!” (fig. 3). For the duration of the comic this face renders its diegetic viewers helplessly sad while giving many of us outside the frame of the comic great pleasure, a pleasure taken not only in Sadly-Sadly’s face and its exorbitant effects on his viewers or victims but more generally in the great assortment of exaggerated faces and warped and twisted bodies. In Cole’s extraordinarily vital, manic style, Plastic Man’s slapstick abilities to stretch, bend, expand, and compress are exaggerations of the distortions of every body in every frame; as the subtitle of Art Spiegelman’s Plastic Man edition puts it, “Forms Stretched to Their Limits!”

Figure 2. “A little sadder . . . more pathetic.” Plastic ManTM, DC Comics. Used with permission.

In one sense Cole’s version of the sad man who provokes sympathy in his onlookers takes to the ridiculous limit that manipulative role played by distressed straight masculinity, especially in U.S. political performance.² Not that there’s explicit satire here, but the queer energy of Cole’s drawing and the refreshing absence of any self-pity in this comic contrast with, say, a contemporary Frank Sinatra singing “Willow Weep for Me.” Sadly-Sadly is much more up front about his new power: “What an angle! I should work when I’ve got this new gift for getting easy dough?” Less satire than burlesque, this comic offers an over-the-top treatment of the idea of sympathy itself, both the pity that one feels for another’s pain and distress and the more general sense of sympathy, in Adam Smith’s understanding, as the mechanism by which anyone can feel what another person is feeling. Famously, for Smith, “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”³ In Smith’s model, emotional contagion takes place only through an act of wholesale imaginative identification with another person, a sympathetic identification that operates in the mode of the hypothetical. Cole’s story glosses sympathy very differently: when viewers see Sadly-Sadly’s extreme expression, they experience an analogously extreme distress with nothing hypothetical about it; no need for a viewer to imagine himself or herself in Sadly-Sadly’s shoes, as distress is somehow communicated more directly, and to overwhelming effect.

Figure 3. Sympathy in Cole’s burlesque. Plastic ManTM, DC Comics. Used with permission.

Cole’s gloss on sympathy as a kind of instant contagion of affect closely resembles a theory that Smith briefly entertains only to reject: “Upon some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person. The passions, upon some occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person principally concerned. Grief and joy, for example, strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion” (11). For Smith’s interest in developing theories of social order, equilibrium, and propriety, this is a dangerous theory. For one thing it leaves open the possibility of a quick spread of passion through a crowd; for another, and relatedly, it bypasses the discriminating abilities that eighteenth-century psychology located in the faculties of imagination and judgment (as indexes of class) in favor of a sensationalist account of emotional communication that depends on the sense of sight. Smith offers a counterexample to dismiss this account—“the furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies” (11)—but this example offers yet another instance of the transfusion model he wishes to reject. While we may not be angry with the same thing as the angry man, we are, as Smith points out, “exasperate[d]” or, like him, ourselves angry. Smith would like sympathy to depend on judgments or evaluations of the propriety of emotion (the propriety, that is, of the relation between emotion and object) but cannot avoid those more physiological aspects of emotional experience that take place before or to one side of propriety and judgment. Cole’s comic foregrounds these less evaluative aspects. Sadly-Sadly’s viewers have no idea what the object of his sadness might be; indeed they are prevented from making any judgments at all about the propriety of his feeling. What counts here is expressive intensity rather than emotional authenticity.

Cole’s burlesque fits well with Silvan Tomkins’s theorization of the affect system as I have been making use of it in this book: its primary location on the face (and in the voice), its freedom with respect to object, the lability, volatility, and mobility of affect across physiologies, and its status as generally autonomic, involuntary, or, in the terms of information theory, redundant to a large degree. For example, in a discussion of the redundancy of affects Tomkins explores what he calls their “syndrome characteristic” (AIC 1: 146), the innervation of all parts at once in affective response (as when we break into a full-body sweat in sudden fear or literally leap for joy), and goes on to suggest that as a consequence of this redundancy, affect tends to rearouse itself, resulting in the phenomenon of contagion.⁴ In this context consider a quick thought experiment: could some facial expression other than sadness fit Cole’s story? Joy might work for this criminal plot as an expression that can inspire money-giving acts of gratitude, though a certain animated Stimpy’s “Happy-happy Joy-joy” tends to have an opposite effect on his cranky partner, Ren. Fear or anger might not so easily fit the bill here—or could they? My sense is that it is the coached, pitch-perfect intensity of Sadly-Sadly’s facial expression that creates the redundancy and syndrome effects in Cole’s depictions, a swamping and rearousal of affect that renders viewers incapable of thought. If the villain in this comic were a woman, something called sex appeal would likely replace sadness as the physiologically overdetermining, hypnotic quality in an artifact of mid-twentieth-century U.S. popular media, as in film noir’s femme fatale. “GRAWK! What have we done? What came over us?” “How could we do it? We weren’t ourselves . . . couldn’t even think rationally!” In Cole’s comic, the communication of exorbitant affect as it overwhelms reason and makes one’s self unrecognizable takes effect as a kind of mesmeric power, a power often thought to have its source in sexuality and which here appears on the face of things.

I use the term mesmeric to evoke the historical coincidence of Adam Smith’s writing and Franz Anton Mesmer’s life and work. Sympathy theory and mesmerism are flip sides of the same coin, both mid- to late eighteenth-century attempts to understand what we now associate with the phenomena of affective communication that set the terms for later investigations into both individual psychology and group behavior. Mesmerism (a model for the labile movement of emotion across physiological boundaries) and sympathy (a model for feelings that, although they may be for others, are only ever authentically our own) come in deconstructive tandem, something that can be seen clearly in Freud’s work. As several historians have pointed out, only after his early attempts to use hypnosis failed did Freud develop techniques of free association and dream analysis to treat his patients. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has convincingly argued that the disciplinary identity of psychoanalysis has depended on the repression or disavowal of hypnosis as a technique, even while related phenomena of suggestion and emotional contagion continue to surface in the realm of the transference.⁵ If I begin with Cole’s comic and the mesmeric, material underside of the coin of affective communication, it is in order to develop a theory of expression that can describe exorbitant affect dynamics without resorting to depth models of psychic causality. Cole’s comic, along with Tomkins’s affect theory, model affective communication in terms of intensity and quality rather than interiority and authenticity as these are supposed mutually to guarantee one another within depth models; the mesmeric model offered by Cole’s comic offers overt and excessive expression that, in a sense, obviates (for the moment) epistemological questions of authenticity or true feeling.

Much twentieth-century criticism, informed by modernist antisentimentalism, had difficulty treating such highly expressive aesthetic forms as comics. I approach this aesthetic terrain by turning to a similar maximization of affect in Edgar Allan Poe’s prose romances and poetics. Poe’s writing both forcefully communicates specific feelings and claims to know something about what it does. In theorizing his practice Poe elaborated over the course of his career a well-known poetics of effect that makes explicit an intention to produce “Passions” in his readers. According to these poetics, all writing (whether poetry or prose, science or romance) aims for pleasures or satisfactions of varying kinds: “A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.”⁶ This three-way generic distinction from “Letter to B—” (between poetry, scientific prose, and prose romance) reappears in “The Philosophy of Composition” (published ten years later): “Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul.”⁷

This reference to “homeliness” would tend to invite critics to route Poe’s poetics of passion through Freud’s thematics of the uncanny and the depth dynamics of repression and the unconscious. I turn instead to Tomkins’s reinterpretation of these thematics by way of a set of conflicts between what he calls the General Images, or goals of the affect system. I argue that Poe’s most effective stories are roughly equivalent to Cole’s comic book depictions in that both serve as overtly expressive masks that stage relations between the four Images of the affect system: maximize positive affect, minimize negative affect, minimize affect inhibition, and maximize power. These Images or goals generate a set of conflicts with one another and, in conjunction with what Tomkins terms the taboos on looking, work to regulate or control the expression and communication of affect. This chapter maps the prominent facial dynamics of Poe’s tales in terms of Tomkins’s affect theory and reads Poe’s narrators’ fascinations with their loved objects as enactments of his poetics or proposals to his desired readers. I have two main goals here: first, to offer a revised notion of expression that criticism appears to be seeking, one that can describe affect dynamics without falling back into an idealized, self-authenticating interiority; and second, to read out of Poe’s peculiarly shameless narration (in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) a specific affect strategy, what Tomkins describes as a masochistic strategy of “reduction through magnification” of negative affect. This strategy helps to explain the considerable appeal of Poe’s writing more generally, especially in the terms that I began to discuss in the introduction of the theatricalization of writing. At the same time, this strategy offers an alternative description of the phenomena we have come to associate with the return of the repressed.

Consider, first, the frequent descriptions of faces in Poe’s tales, less in the service of elucidating character than in a series of attempts to frame relationships with readers. A Poe narrator will often offer a minutely detailed depiction of the face of some beloved or compelling person within the tale’s first few paragraphs, directly after confessing to the difficulties he has remembering origins. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia”; “I cannot just now remember when or where I first made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.”⁸ These self-consciously nervous, melancholy narrators tend to follow such gestures with extensive, obsessive, idealized physical descriptions, as if to correct the impressions they have just given of their memory loss and to sketch a picture of, say, Ligeia’s ivory skin, raven hair, Hebrew nose, sweet mouth, brilliant teeth, Greek chin, and extraordinarily large eyes, or of the general’s jet-black hair and whiskers, brilliant teeth (again), clear voice, and (yet again) “exceedingly large” eyes. But these long, mostly visual descriptions are bizarre, somehow never quite adding up, for what Poe’s narrators seem to want to make perfectly clear is less a picture of a person than a problem with expression.

This problem, or set of problems, clusters around the various meanings of expression that the narrator of “The Man That Was Used Up” makes explicit. The first is a problem with verbal capacity, an inadequacy of linguistic expression or a failure of words fully to capture the narrator’s meaning: “There was something, as it were, remarkable—yes, remarkable, although this is but a feeble term to express my full meaning—about the entire individuality of the personage in question” (378). The second, related problem is with the location of the identity expressed by the beloved or fascinating individual, a problem that the narrator has in locating essence or substance: “I could not bring myself to believe that the remarkable something to which I alluded just now . . . lay altogether, or indeed at all, in the supreme excellence of his bodily endowments” (380). These two problems of locating and communicating meaning, his difficulties grasping an idealized identity and speaking about it intelligibly, are brought together when the narrator stares into his beloved’s eyes and attempts to describe the facial expression that he sees: “there was perceptible about them [his eyes], ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression” (379). The narrator of “Ligeia” moves through a similar set of problems with even more emphasis on the eyes of his beloved: “The ‘strangeness,’ however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual” (313).

Expression, for Poe’s narrators, names a host of basic problems: how can they possibly tell “spiritual” feeling given the “mere” material features of sounds, words, and faces? That is, how can they tell how their beloved feels, or how they feel about their beloved—and how can they possibly tell these feelings in turn to a reader, who is often directly, desperately addressed? The narrators of these tales all seem to believe that their problems of expression are specific to their beloved, and it is true that, in these tales, their objects are unusual: something about Ligeia’s volition or force of will is so immense that it permits her to return from the grave to possess her husband’s second wife, and the title character of “The Man That Was Used Up” turns out to be entirely made up of artificial parts and prostheses. In another story, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” the narrator begins by offering us a detailed, blazon-like description of Augustus Bedloe’s face, a man of whom he can get no information concerning his family or history. By the end of the tale it seems Bedloe is the reincarnation of a man named Oldeb, who died in a colonial rebellion more than thirty years before. These depictions of faces and the accompanying problems of expression tend to take place at the start of tales about bodies that threaten to belong to no one or to someone else, or to take over someone else; these are tales about persons who are never properly singular or individual in their bodies.

Insofar as we are born from bodies not our own, of course, none of us is properly singular. These Poe tales investigate the connection between the nonsingular nature of bodies or persons and a variety of problems of expression. Perhaps these narrators are struggling to remember some lost image of a parent, engaged in the process that Poe calls “mournful and never-ending remembrance” (the title of Kenneth Silverman’s psychobiography and a citation from “The Philosophy of Composition”).⁹ This would help to make sense of several aspects of these scenes: the narrator’s difficulty remembering origins (just when, again, do we meet our parents for the first time?), his infant-like proximity to facial features or other body parts that do not quite cohere as an identity, the fact that these beloved persons have a tendency to return unexpectedly from the past. My intention in bringing forward this psychoanalytic observation is not at all to begin a psychological investigation into the narrators themselves, their particular characters or psyches; indeed the persons in Poe’s prose romances tend to have nothing readers skilled by realist writing would recognize as three-dimensional or well-rounded characters, as Poe’s writing is not interested in delineating idiosyncratic surface features to index buried or ingrained character traits.¹⁰ Part of the peculiar power of Poe’s writing is its ability to step away from privileging the depth side of the opposition between surface and depth, especially in its prescient understanding of analysis: “The Purloined Letter” and the other detective stories define analysis in terms of an attention to what is right under our nose yet remains hidden or unreadable. Both Poe’s detective stories and his tales of terror are centrally concerned with the legibility of expression and pose fundamental questions about the communication of affect between individuals as well as within individuals who, precisely in experiencing multiple and contradictory feelings, may not experience themselves as singular or individual.

At the same time, Poe’s tales are centrally concerned with affective communication between text and reader. In this way the problems of expression, like the dynamics of analysis, occupy the terrain that psychoanalytic theory describes by way of the notion of transference. Poe’s tales have been uniquely available to psychoanalytically informed and especially deconstructive theory because they continually and hyperreflexively stage the basic enabling condition and problem for analysis, that of the transference. Transferential relations have been explored at length in largely linguistic terms in the Lacan-Derrida-Johnson debate, those theoretical approaches canonized in the 1980s that avoided the epistemological oppositions surface/depth and interior/exterior by pursuing the more complex topographies that come to be associated with writing (signifier, signified, the circuit of the letter).¹¹ One major motive for bringing affect theory such as Tomkins’s to literary study has been to think the interimplications of writing and affect without beginning from or ending with theories of exclusively linguistic signification. If I focus on the set of problems associated in Poe’s writing with expression rather than analysis, it is because the basic critical thematic of the purloined letter applies equally to facial affect as to linguistic signification. A survey of the detective stories shows that Poe defines analysis precisely in terms of a transferential identification that takes place through facial affect. For example, the prefatory remarks in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” adduce examples from games such as draughts (checkers) and whist in order to describe the successful analyst’s proper object of observation, “the countenance”: “he notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering up a fund of thought from the difference in expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin” (530), keeps track of the “manner” and “air” of the players so that he can play his cards “as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own” (530). Similarly “The Purloined Letter” insists on the play of facial identification in the schoolboy’s game of even and odd.¹²

I have already discussed Melanie Klein’s understanding of transference and unconscious phantasy. Here I want to suggest that object-relations theory offers an approach to expression (whether by way of words, gestures, or other means) as enactments of phantasy in the here and now of the analytic situation. Recast in these terms, expression becomes a play of enacted relations or reenactments of conscious and unconscious relations to objects of phantasy. In those of Poe’s tales that begin from attempts to depict a beloved’s face, expression names both the possibility and the problem of successfully enacting phantasy relations, not to Poe’s narrators’ parents but to the texts’ primary objects, its readers. Consider how we readers are positioned in these tales both with the narrator, by way of the first-person perspective, and with the beloveds who are described as specifically “remarkable”: they bear a graphic nature that pertains both to writing and to a vivid, unusually violent or literalizing death or death-in-life scene. For Poe, these meanings of graphic are densely intertwined. For example, Bedloe’s name is almost exactly the inverse of the name of the man whom he reincarnates (Oldeb), and both die similar deaths when an arrow or leech penetrates their skull; Ligeia’s force of will is exemplified both by her passionate text-based learning and by her zombie revival; and the General John A. B. C. Smith, as his name attests, is both a bodily and “textual precipitate.”¹³ Poe’s beloveds tend to allegorize the readers he seeks to please, manipulate, and control, especially in their iterated, serial, or mass aspect, and the relations between narrators and beloveds can be read as mapping the phantasy relations his writing attempts to enact with readers.¹⁴ In this context the detailed depiction of faces that do not quite come together or cohere can be thought of as ways to reach out and touch a reader, or at least try to touch us.

It follows that Poe’s strategies for depicting faces differ from many of his contemporaries’ more typical uses of physiognomy to idealize expression as transparent, legible, or indicative of inner moral qualities.¹⁵ “The Man of the Crowd” thematizes this difference most explicitly. The tale begins with physiognomy’s highly conventional association between reading print and reading faces: the male narrator, a sensitive convalescent, sits at a large window in a London coffeehouse alternately “poring over advertisements . . . observing the promiscuous company in the room . . . [and] peering through the smoky panes into the street” (507). Emphasizing the hazy graphic continuity between the newspaper and the populated city spaces, the tale repeats the word press, which, along with throng and crowd, name the primary object of study. After pages of the narrator’s detailed descriptions of the “dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” (507) of the myriad types and classes he sees through the window, his taxonomic approach is suddenly interrupted by a man whom he is entirely unable to classify: “Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before” (511). The narrator can only list the set of ideas that “arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair” (511). He is unable to make this overwhelming list of feelings cohere or attach to an existing social type and leaves the coffee shop to stalk the man through the streets of London. A full twenty-four hours later he finally stops the man and looks him full in the face but receives no acknowledgment; the narrator returns to the taxonomizing impulse and concludes that he is “the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd” (515).

But who is it, after all, who cannot be alone? Certainly both men in the story answer to this description of “the man of the crowd.” Once again Poe offers us the failure of a first-person narrator to read or tell the physiognomy of a fascinating figure, although here the illegibility is specifically a crime as well as a problem for the narrator. Critics have observed how this tale gives us the flaneur as a prototype for the detective who reads the urban space and its inhabitants in the service of a new form of social control that requires exhaustive typologizing; unreadability becomes a crime in this specific sociocultural context.¹⁶ Another, perhaps related reading returns to the point that Poe’s beloveds tend to allegorize the readers that Poe wants, and their unreadable faces give us these phantasy relations: the man of the crowd who cannot be alone becomes a reader stalked by Poe’s compulsive writing style, who, after all, must stay with the text’s narration at least for the duration of the reading experience. In a strange (at once estranging and too intimate) manner, Poe’s writing acknowledges our unreadability: the tale ends by echoing its physiognomic beginning and comparing the man to a book that “does not permit itself to be read” (506). We are quite literally unknown to Poe or future to his act of writing, criminal in the sense of being beyond his control or that of the proto-detective. In this context the tale’s epigraph from La Bruyère, “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul” (This great unhappiness, not to be able to be alone), hints that the story be read as a sly, slightly sadistic punishment, both for being beyond the writer’s control and for the unhappy crime of reading, which in this story names the inability or unwillingness to be alone with whatever crowd of thoughts or feelings we might want some distraction from.

Like other Poe tales, in “The Man of the Crowd” man is a crowd, never only singular or individual, nor even only double, but multiple, dynamic, self-contradictory, and perverse. This man’s face, like the other Poe faces I have described, is unreadable not in being blank but rather in being overly legible or too intensely expressive of too many things at the same time, an intensity that overwhelms the narrator, who can only create an impressive list of disparate feelings. (The “pregnancy” of expression in “The Man That Was Used Up” also implies this kind of multiple or nonsingular aspect of feeling-states.) In order to unfold those aspects of Poe’s poetics that turn on intensity, multiplicity, and especially the excessive expression of negative affect, I turn now to Tomkins’s affect theory, both to his understanding of the faciality of affect and to his theory of what he calls the General Images.

In the introduction I described how, for Tomkins, “affect is primarily facial behavior” (AIC 1: 205–6) and how facial expressions are not consequent to inner, prior feeling-states but lead the rest of the body in the enactment of affect. Tomkins’s approach to affect’s faciality permits physiognomic reading to look rather different from usual: rather than revealing inner, ideal, or essential feeling-states or moral traits, faces index layered histories of complex affective experience, or, to use Tomkins’s terms, faces index the scripts or theories that serve to organize and navigate our motivational realities, scripts that are both stable and open to revision. One name for the history of such scripts as they appear on the face might be “character.”

I would like to approach Tomkins’s understanding of such scripts and theories by way of his important distinction between affect and image: affects as the primary motives in humans (and some other animals), images as specific purposes or goals. This distinction hinges on Tomkins’s way of taking up first-order cybernetic theory, in which an intention, aim, or purpose should itself be understood as an emergent property of some complex system.¹⁷ Tomkins called such emergent aims that direct the human feedback system “images,” a term that may strike a reader as idiosyncratic but serves to illustrate a basic aspect of cybernetic approaches to purposive behavior: cybernetics understands such behavior not by reference to the notion of an originating will or consciousness but by reference to the observation of a sensorimotor apparatus of sufficient complexity capable of mistake or trial and error. For example, the image of room temperature (say, 68 degrees Fahrenheit) becomes the target and guide for a thermostat and heating and cooling system; an image of social justice or a more equitable economic system becomes the target and guide for activist politics (such as the Occupy movement). An image, as Tomkins puts it, is “a blueprint for the feedback mechanism: as such it is purposive and directive” (1: 120); by contrast, affects are motives, “by which we mean immediately rewarding or punishing experience mediated by receptors activated by the individual’s own responses” (1: 120). The excitement that I may experience reading Poe and the shame that I experience thinking about why I am interested in his work (more on this shortly) are affective motives that have something to do with my choice to make it a subject of my writing. But these affective experiences are distinct from my stated purpose of demonstrating the usefulness of affect theory for criticism. This latter purpose is what Tomkins would call an image, in this case a conscious one, and there will always be less conscious images or purposes at work as well.

Because of the inherently self-rewarding and self-punishing aspects of the affects, Tomkins suggests, there is an extremely high probability that any human will generate four “General Images” that guide or give purpose to the (somewhat independent or autonomous) affect system: maximize positive affect, minimize negative affect, minimize affect inhibition, and maximize power to the other three images. These General Images can and do interfere with one another, and the varieties of interference and the different ways of weighting their importance, as well as distinct strategies for their attainment—our scripts—offer satisfyingly complex descriptions of behavior and motivation. Whether conscious or not, these Images guide an affect system that is primarily located on the face. I suggest, then, that we think about the overtly expressive faces in Poe’s tales as they offer a staging ground both for the multiple affects and the conflicting images and scripts that guide them; indeed Poe’s depictions of these faces should tell us something about the affect strategies of his writing, or, to put this another way, the terms of his poetics as phantasy, wish, image, or purpose.

At first glance it would seem that Poe’s poetics of “Passion” or pleasure are guided by the first General Image of maximizing positive affect, and this may be true in the broad sense in which all verbal behaviors, including writing, count as “modes of communion.”¹⁸ For Tomkins, the enjoyment of communion with others is the major motive for speech and other verbal behavior; his discussions of oral gratification, claustral pleasures, mutual staring and visual intimacy, and other preverbal modes of communion, all set up a powerfully simple analysis: “The major motive to speech is, paradoxically, the intensely rewarding claustral and pre-verbal social affect. Speech is in the first instance a continuation of that kind of communion in which the distinction between subject and object is attenuated. It is only because the infant feels so close to the other, we think, that he wishes to mimic the sounds he hears from the other” (1: 428). Affective and verbal communication need not be in competition with one another (although they may also be) because for Tomkins speech is in the first instance a medium for affective communication. Poe’s poetics certainly participate in this way of thinking about verbal behavior. Whatever else is going on, Poe’s writing aims to please.

It may strike readers of Poe as perverse to foreground something as pleasant or nice as the enjoyment of communion as central to his poetics. Yet this first General Image of the affect system turns out to be a capacious category that happily includes a number of perverse possibilities, among which Tomkins lists “controlling others as a mode of communion,” “the enjoyment of the expression of negative affects as a mode of communion,” and even “the attenuation of communion as a mode of communion” (1: 454–63). Particularly the second of these helps us to understand Poe’s writing as it characteristically communicates a host of mostly negative and intense feelings of confused terror, humiliated disgust, self-abasement and contempt, or any combination of these and others with a high-wire pitch of excitement or thrill and a push to the edge of sanity or figuration. This first Image gives purpose to a host of contradictory feelings, and matters become even more complex when considering the conflicts between Tomkins’s second General Image, minimizing negative affect, and the third one, minimizing affect inhibition. When the fourth Image powers both of these at the same time, the stage is set for some of Poe’s most sublime scenarios, those involving the binding of fear-terror by shame-humiliation, and vice versa.

Before turning to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as it offers this kind of conflict between these two General Images (along with a strategy of affect magnification for dealing with this conflict), I want briefly to explore an important aspect of Tomkins’s discussion of the third general goal of the affect system. Unusually in his treatment of this goal Tomkins makes use of what appears to be a psychoanalytic mechanism of repression, something he usually does without; for example, he writes, “The inhibition of the overt expression of any affect will ordinarily produce a residual form of the affect which is at once heightened, distorted and chronic and which is severely punitive” (1: 330). He goes on to describe the possibility of any affect being suppressed and the resulting pain of this chronic suppression. But what becomes clear over the course of this discussion, as well as other discussions throughout the volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness, is that he proposes no single mechanism of suppression. Rather affects themselves occupy the pivotal role of controllers or inhibitors. For example, “an individual may be distressed much of his life, but never overly complain or exhibit his suffering because of shame” (1: 330–31), or “he may be incapable of expressing his excitement, sexual or otherwise, because he is afraid or ashamed to express these positive feelings” (1: 331). Especially fear-terror and shame-humiliation can act to control or inhibit the expression of other affects, positive and negative, and participate in what he calls affect theories and scripts. Suppression becomes less a single mechanism or multiple instances of one thing than a set of constraints on behaviors and feelings that may be described in terms of the contradictory motives and goals emerging from a dynamic and complex affect system interacting with its various environments.¹⁹

The notion that inhibition itself may be an emergent phenomenon of the affect system brings us closer to the de-idealized notion of expression that I am trying to elaborate by way of Poe’s tales. As illustration, consider one of Cole’s throwaway frames from early in the comic, which depicts Plastic Man’s sidekick hurtling into a line of auditioning men, one of whom is squeezed up and partly out of the crowd (fig. 4).

This image offers a way of linking the first two dictionary definitions of the verb express, “to press or squeeze out” and “to portray, represent.” Expression becomes quite literally a matter of physical emergence, with its representational qualities following upon changes in force and configuration such that the composition of the line changes as these other variables change. The meaning of express here does not rely on a movement from interior to exterior; in fact the initial force is directed from the outside. The six or seven individuals in Cole’s ragtag line can, in this context, be considered metaphorically as a configuration of affects in dynamic interaction. For if, in Tomkins’s theory, affects can bind each other for the purposes of inhibition, they can also bond in order to amplify one another: shame may serve to suppress fear, or it can amplify excitement, or both; fear may serve to suppress enjoyment or to amplify contempt, or both. The effects of expression will depend on the scripts or strategies that guide the dynamics of the specific affects in question. Curiously, in both Cole’s comic and Poe’s writing, overt expressiveness accompanies an intense crowdedness or multiplicity: Cole’s comic depicts a long scene in which Sadly-Sadly induces a sympathetic mob to beat Plastic Man to death. Expression, for these artists, involves the forceful squeezing or crowding out of persons, states, or feelings, a crowding out that need not imply some container that can hold only so much. Crucially, of course, crowding out can mean in at least two ways, as expression and as something more like suppression. In this latter sense we are finally approaching a way of describing the graphically destructive aspect of expression in Poe’s tales, one that does not require a depth model of psychic causality and that may begin to compass the puzzle around exorbitant expression that Poe’s tales offer.

Figure 4. Expression as crowding out. Plastic ManTM, DC Comics. Used with permission.

To unfold these dynamics of the affect system a little further, I turn now to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I find it a little embarrassing to be writing about this story, which is strange given how much I have already written about Poe’s tales without encountering the particular feeling that I am betraying my preadolescent tastes or a distinctly uncritical attraction to this most out-there of Poe’s tales. Then again it is precisely this tale’s exemplariness—exemplary of Poe’s poetics generally and of what I will argue is a very particular affect strategy—that makes any attention to it a matter of some shame. This tale practices what Tomkins calls a masochistic strategy of amplifying negative affect for the purposes of making it disappear; in this story fear-terror is especially amplified, and shame-humiliation is made to vanish from the tale (perhaps to be communicated to a reader). The shamelessness of Poe’s writing gives us an affect strategy that comprises a particularly theatricalizing aesthetic form. Poe’s usefulness to a number of twentieth-century traditions (especially to American underground or B-movie aesthetic practices such as Roger Corman’s) that have adapted his work into film, audio, and comics lies precisely in the skill with which his writing makes this masochistic affect strategy available or communicable to its readers. At the same time, this affect strategy covers terrain very similar to what critics have tended to understand in terms of repression: the attraction that Poe’s writing has held for psychoanalytically informed criticism is, I would suggest, not distinct in kind from the attraction that it holds for dramatic adaptors. It is something about the writing’s shameless theatricality that has drawn so many different readers, and this something is what I will try to specify or describe.

As we can gather from its title, “The Tell-Tale Heart” takes affective communication as its subject, and more specifically the inevitability or uncontrollability of affective communication. It also offers the most efficient or condensed version of the problem of expression with which I began: we are given, once again and very quickly, a nervous narrator (“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous” [792]), his beloved object (“I loved the old man” [792]), and a difficulty remembering origins (“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain” [792]). Once again we have the beloved’s face, or simply the old man’s eye; the entire problem of expression in writing appears to get boiled down to the narrator’s conviction, “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!” (792). And finally, we have a marked incoherence of facial features as well as a fragmentation of body parts (the eye, the heart, the old man’s eventually dismembered body). All of the indications of the problem of expression appear in this tale, here enlisted in a particularly overt, destructive goal: the narrator’s desire “to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (792). And just as “The Man of the Crowd” invites us to pose the question, Why is the man’s illegible face a crime?, this tale invites the question, What’s so bad about the old man’s eye?²⁰

More generally, what’s so evil about the evil eye? Tomkins approaches the evil eye in its enormous variety of transcultural and transhistorical manifestations as instancing what he calls the taboos on looking.²¹ These taboos—on looking, on being looked at, and on mutual looking or interocular interaction—follow from his theory of facial affect, arguing as it does for “the unique capacity of the look-look with respect to the expression, communication, contagion, escalation, and control of affects” (AIC 2: 158). The affect of shame-humiliation plays a privileged role in Tomkins’s discussion of the taboos on looking because of its innate activator, “the incomplete reduction of interest or joy” (2: 123): when curious or interested staring (or communion) is partially inhibited by these taboos, shame can become implicated in “the whole spectrum of affect expression” (2: 182). Think, for example, of a shy child looking through her fingers at a stranger as the child’s attempt to negotiate the shame of transgressing these taboos. Or think of the basic situation of attending live theater, one situation in which we are permitted the experience of uninhibited staring at the face of a stranger. But think too of the potential for acute embarrassment if your stare, as an audience member, is suddenly returned by the performer on stage and you are picked out for some interaction. This may be one reason why live theater or performance is considered risky in a way that film never is. The risk is specifically one of humiliation, and not only for the performer who may make a mistake and the audience member who may experience the vicarious shame of this mistake. More basic, I think, is the shame that can at any time take place upon the reinstallation of the taboos on looking: the risk of the humiliating acknowledgment of the structural, affective conditions of live theater.²²

Remarkably Poe’s tale manages to communicate something like this theatrical risk in writing. It does this in part by taking the evil eye or the taboos on looking as subject: the tale offers a meditation on the murderous aim of getting rid of the evil eye, getting rid, therefore, of the shame-humiliation that accompanies the taboos on looking. The possibility of shame in this tale is located in the interrupted relations between the narrator and the old man’s “pale blue eye, with a film over it” (792), an eye that is apparently covered and that may or may not be able to meet the narrator’s look. Every night for a week the narrator attempts to stare at the eye without the old man’s knowledge and casts a ray of lantern light while he sleeps, “so that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye” (793). While the eye remains closed he cannot “do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (793). To put this another way, until the taboos on looking are activated, the shame-humiliation of the look-look does not occur and there is no motive to get rid of it. Once the eye opens—that is, once the eye takes center stage, lit by the narrator’s spotlight in this tale’s bizarrely condensed, literalized version of theatricality—all hell breaks loose: “It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness—all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot” (795).

All the strained staring or gazing in this tale still fails to make any facial expression cohere; quite the opposite. This lack of coherence of facial figures, emphasized here but present also in other of Poe’s tales, manifests a particular defense against the humiliation of the taboos on looking. As Tomkins explains, at the same time that the taboos on looking constrain intimacy and expression of affect generally, they keep shame in intolerable focus by way of a double bind: “One may not defend oneself against looking into another’s eyes by looking away or by hiding one’s face. The expression of shame or shyness is quite as shameful as shameless looking” (AIC 2: 170). The narrator’s fury stems from an encounter with this double defense against both looking and not looking, a double defense that magnifies not only the basic shame of the taboo but other negative affects as well. The narrator’s shiver is one of terror, rage, and humiliation, all triggered by his inability to determine whether or not the old man’s veiled eye can return his look. Generally in Poe’s tales humiliation may be readable not through any explicit depictions of the facial expressions of shame (a blush or the head or eyes turned down or away) but precisely in the failure of visual coherence or of figuration, the failure of facial features to come together and offer any single, legible expression. What Poe offers instead is a shameless self-exposure (rhetorically a confession) that yet fails to offer what we would recognize as a coherence of self, a self that we would expect to be, as Tomkins suggests, “located phenomenologically on the face and in the eyes” (2: 180).

This lack of coherence of self is accompanied in this tale by a very distinctive coherence of sound and a peculiar maximization of terror communicated through sound. Consider this list: the lantern’s creaky hinges, the old man’s groan, the beating heart, a yell and a shriek that alert the police, a bell that tells the hour (4 a.m.), a knock on the door, a ringing in the ears, and again, most dramatically, the beating heart and final yelled confession: “it is the beating of his hideous heart!” (797). Sound tells this tale to offer not a spatialized facial coherence but a temporalized coherence of narrative movement, and the specific sound that repeats, metrically, thematically, analogically—from the “death watches in the wall” (794), to “the low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (795), to “the hellish tattoo . . . which grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant” (795)—is the beating heart-watch. The heart, of course, has been traditionally cast as a seat of feeling. Like the eye, it is an organ that serves as a medium for the expression and communication of affect, but it is a kinesthetic and aural medium that usually communicates within a single physiology or organism. It is the narrator’s excessive aural sensitivity that constitutes his “madness”: “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell” (792). We are invited to experience this madness when Poe gives us the sound of a beating heart throughout the entire tale, by way of poetic meter and other technical devices: the repeating trochees and anapests at the high-pitched start, the adverbial repetitions throughout the tale (“slowly—very, very slowly”; “steadily, steadily” [793]), the several moments of emphatic direct address. The tale’s signal rhythm, stillness or extremes of slow motion followed by sudden violent movements, echoes the sound of the beating heart, and (like the signature soundtrack music from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws) aims to create overwhelming suspense and terror, its particular version of madness.

But while madness may be one name for what Poe is giving us to experience, sympathy may be another. To return to Adam Smith, consider that one intertext for the particular analogy between the ticking of a watch and the beating of a heart is Smith’s writing on “keeping time” with another’s emotions, and especially the difficulty of doing so. Smith suggests that the major obstacle to shared feeling between spectators and a person expressing suffering is “the thought of [the spectators’] own safety, the thought that they themselves are not really the sufferers,” and that this creates a wish in the sufferer: “He longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own. To see the emotions of their hearts, in every respect, beat time to his own, in the violent and disagreeable passions, constitutes his sole consolation.”²³ This wish, redescribed, is Tomkins’s goal of minimizing affect inhibition, here negative affect. But Smith does not condone this wish (not outside of the theater, anyway);²⁴ instead he advises the sufferer to minimize negative affect, to “flatten . . . the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him” (22). He tracks the importance for this harmony of the spectatorial relation to oneself. Sympathy, in permitting the self’s imaginary identification with an other that produces the “somewhat analogous” feeling that is less intense, also permits the self to imagine the other’s imaginative identification. This “reflected passion,” weaker than the original one, “abates the violence of what he felt before he came into their presence” (22). This will eventually unfold in Smith’s writing as the “impartial spectator” within our breast that regulates our feelings to keep time with others, the impartial spectator that keeps a watch on our hearts.²⁵

Not only does Poe literalize and exceed this pun (it’s a death-watch), but he also gives us a dangerously partial spectator who longs for sympathetic concord with the beloved, that is to say, with the old man and also with the reader. The narrator’s explicitly spectatorial relation to the old man becomes one of identification when, on the night of the murder, the man wakes up and groans in “mortal terror” (794): “I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom” (794). This identification of an experience of self and other returns at the conclusion of the tale, when the narrator once again hears the beating of what he presumes to be the old man’s heart but that we may presume to be his own, misrecognized or projected outward. To wonder whose heart you’re hearing is to wonder whose feelings you’re having. We could say that the narrator has some boundary issues, or we could say that the tale is determined to communicate feeling in writing. If by the end it remains undecideable whether the beating heart is the old man’s beneath the floorboard or the narrator’s own, whether the tale is supernatural or explained supernatural, this is because Poe is aiming to make the narrator’s boundary issues ours. If the tale succeeds in communicating “Passion,” then the old man’s or the narrator’s beating heart may well have become the reader’s.²⁶

Unlike Smith’s writing, Poe’s does not prefer to minimize negative affect (to put it mildly). In this tale we encounter a maximization of especially fear-terror and a version of what Tomkins would call a masochistic affect strategy of “reduction through magnification” of negative affect. This strategy can play out whenever the general goal of minimizing negative affect comes into conflict with that of minimizing affect inhibition. Tomkins lists several instances of this strategy, including drunken avowals of humiliation or self-contempt, but think of any sought-out experience of distress, rage, or fear, such as going to movies to “have a good cry” or to be safely horrified or to experience righteous anger, triumph, and revenge.²⁷ He describes it this way:

The human being will strive to minimize the experience of negative affect at the same time that he longs to express overtly the affect which grows stronger just because of his effort to suppress and minimize it. There will be much suppression and avoidance of affect which will be successful, and under these conditions the second general strategy will provide a clear directive. There will also be failures of suppression which will grow to intolerability until they are released and reduced by overt expression. The self which is so overwhelmed is necessarily a divided self, siding both with and against the affect within, which was his own but which has become alien.

It is the discovery of this basic ambivalence which constitutes Freud’s most significant contribution to our understanding of human nature. He mistakenly identified this conflict as one between the drives and the threat of castration which produces anxiety, rather than between the affects themselves. (AIC 2: 269)

Note that, for Tomkins, suppression of negative affect can be successful, so that the strategy of magnifying negative affect takes place only when suppression does not work, in other words, when the second General Image of minimizing negative affect does not succeed in directing the show. What appears to be a magnified return of the repressed takes place only when the third General Image or goal directs the human feedback system. In such cases, when negative affect can neither be simply suppressed nor expressed, this affect may become intolerable and the masochistic strategy of negative affect magnification comes into play.

In Poe’s story shame is double-bound by the peculiarities of the taboos on looking and can neither be suppressed nor simply expressed. These conflicting goals of minimizing shame and, at the same time, of minimizing the inhibition of shame create the conditions for the binding of shame by terror and “a quest for maximizing rather than minimizing negative affect” (AIC 2: 268). That is, Poe’s tale seeks to “express” (to squeeze or crowd out) the shame-humiliation associated with the evil eye and the taboos on looking; it must, somehow, be gotten rid of or expressed by way of being projected outward, as it were, on the back of terror, an intensive magnification of terror that swamps or presses all other feelings to the vanishing point. The sublime exhilaration that may be experienced in reading this story comes from the binding of shame by fear in this particular affect strategy, as it is used both for and against a reader. The evil eye, as it connotes the shame associated with the taboos on looking, also connotes the shame of any encounter with an other. The narrator’s desire to destroy the evil eye, then, is also a desire to destroy any other, that is, to destroy any reader. Poe’s power as a writer is largely composed of this remarkable ability to please us by showing how much his writing wants to, or needs to, destroy us.

Figure 5. Reduction through magnification of negative affect. Copyright 1996 by Charles Burns. Published by Fantagraphic Books. Used with permission.

I will conclude by returning to comic books and a specific image by a contemporary American visual artist, Charles Burns. Burns has adapted the outsized eyes and breasts of Japanese anime style (specifically, hentai, or perverse drawing) to offer what I think of as an emblematic depiction of the strategy of reduction through magnification of negative affect (fig. 5).²⁸

Try the experiment of isolating the girl’s various facial features by blocking off parts of the image. Doing this, you can see an iconic depiction of each of the negative affects: her eyebrows depict anger; she is wide-eyed with fear and surprise (the startle lines); she cries with distress; her nose is crinkled with contempt; her skin entirely blushes with shame. If you see the snake as a tongue, then she expresses disgust as well. Here are all of Tomkins’s negative affects iconically depicted, and in this context her prominent breasts and nipples connote total expressiveness. These affects practically cancel each other out. It is the other face in this picture, the snake’s bucktoothed, sweaty, nervous excitement, that registers the perverse success of this strategy of amplifying all the negative affects at once, a strategy that aims at splitting and annulment, suspension, or making something disappear.

“It must be nice to disappear / To have a vanishing act”: Lou Reed’s strange Poe tribute album The Raven includes at least four songs that treat “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Of these, “Vanishing Act” best understands this affect strategy and its murderous, paradoxically self-conscious shamelessness. This shamelessness, so characteristic of Poe’s writing as it responds to the excruciating double binds of the taboos on looking, forms part of the basis for his appeal, especially to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers powerfully drawn both to the play of language as such and to composition in mediums that make use of audiovisual materials. The sheer number of Poe adaptations into film and audio indicates that something about this writing works well as a medium, specifically as a medium for communicating and disinhibiting negative affect.²⁹ Poe’s writing shares with mask work, minstrelsy, many comic books, and other excessively iconic, highly stylized facial representations opportunities to power the goal of minimizing affect inhibition. In other words, Poe’s writing knows how to touch a reader, and in this chapter I have been unfolding what this affective knowledge consists of.

When we think of Charles Burns’s and Jack Cole’s comics, Poe’s tales, exploitation and psychotronic films, or other gonzo-manipulative aesthetic forms, we are likely thinking of work that offers a kind of gamble to readers, an opportunity to maximize expressions of negative affect that is shameless in the sense that shame does not work to inhibit this expression. Literary and cultural criticism has often devalued aesthetic compositions that work this way, offering the generic terms sentimentalist or sensationalist to describe them, though especially within feminist and queer critical uptakes of the past twenty-five years these valuations have been reversed, complicated, or theorized. Poe is especially interesting as a test case because his work belongs to complementary genealogies, at once central to a modernist trajectory (Baudelaire, French Symbolism, high modernism) and to several mass-cultural genres.³⁰ In bringing Tomkins’s work on the Images to Poe, I have been aiming in part to find approaches to this terrain of modernism and mass culture or entertainment using fresh terms for phenomenological description; by locating and theorizing a variety of shamelessness in Poe’s writing I want to avoid opposing these various trajectories. The method of transferential poetics offers a way to begin mapping a field of aesthetic compositional strategies using the vocabulary of affect, without, I hope, getting bogged down by distinctions between literary cultures and their others.

Not only does the vocabulary of affect hold promise for a nonhierarchized approach to poetics that is to one side of the evaluations of modernist antisentimentality. It also departs from too great a modernist investment in analyses of the specificities of medium, analyzing instead a variety of expressive goals or affect strategies. I do not reject approaches to medium; generally I find it valuable to attend to the differences between experiences of print, film, and television, for example. Nonetheless I want (and I think that contemporary criticism is seeking) a vocabulary that permits me to move in and out of a greater variety of aesthetic experience. The notion of theatricality that I offer in this book foregrounds the vocabulary of affect for this purpose. Poe’s writing in particular has led me to identify what is at once a writerly technique for the communication of affect and the basis for theatrical expression. Its shattering shamelessness offers one (if not the) affective engine for theater. In this way experiences of writing and theater share something significant: both let us suspend or transgress the taboos on looking. If it is possible for expression to mean in a manner that is not entirely bound by notions of idealized interiority and self-presence, I expect these meanings will have to address the continuities and discontinuities between writing and theater, both of which involve the affect dynamics that Poe, Cole, and others permit us to read.