Sean Moreland
Poe’s Fall of the House of Burke, Ussher, and Kant
Baudelaire once observed that each of Poe’s “opening paragraphs draws the reader in without violence—like a whirlpool,”[1] describing what can be termed the sublimity of Poe’s greatest tales, their power to affect, to absorb, even to enrapture generations of readers. The simile itself is apt, as it reflects an image that is ubiquitous throughout Poe’s fictions,[2] that of a figure perched precariously on the lip of a precipice, drawn irrevocably into the terrific involutions of an abyssal vortex. Psychoanalytic critic Marie Bonaparte argued for the centrality of this figure to any understanding of Poe’s writings, as many of his tales feature a male narrator/character who is “drawn into a vast whirlpool—which, for all its terror, fatally attracts him.” Following Freudian reason to its ineluctable conclusion, Bonaparte tirelessly insisted that this figure “expresses a version of the return-to-the-womb phantasy.”[3] I would like to resituate this observation in terms of the historical discourse on the sublime, by suggesting that the image of the vortex[4] throughout Poe’s fictions can be read as emblematic of Poe’s conception of sublimity, an affective state thought to combine wondrous attraction with overwhelming terror, and one that was also thought to result in an absorption of the mind of the reader into that of the author, via the medium of the sublime text.
If Poe’s tales trace the return to the womb, as Bonaparte insisted, it is finally a textual matrix, a Poetic vortext, to which they return and to which they invite their readers to return. This involution, and the attendant dissolution of the distinction between reading subject, writing subject, and text, was considered, from Peri Hypsous on, to be the sine non qua of literary sublimity. While Poe’s engagement with the discourse on the sublime is “omniprevalent” throughout his writings,[5] this essay focuses specifically on “The Fall of the House of Usher,” since, as critics including Kent Ljungquist and Jack G. Voller have observed, it is this tale which offers Poe’s most sustained fictional engagement with and simultaneous disengagement from the discourse on the sublime.
In effect, the tale performs a dramatic negation of the architecture of sublime theorizations Poe inherited from European intellectuals, including Edmund Burke, James Ussher, and Immanuel Kant, each of whom produced definitive contributions to the discourse on the sublime, in part by their conceptual circumscription of the affect of terror. Such circumscription lent itself to the formation of a moral teleology and a literary hierarchy in popular aesthetics, both of which Poe was determined to overturn. While Poe ultimately rejected the theories of Burke, Ussher, and Kant,[6] “Usher” testifies to the degree to which he refigured, rather than entirely abandoning, their concepts. The tale’s negative sublimity also evidences the degree to which Poe’s investment in the discourse on the sublime led to his critical revision of a number of contemporaneously prevalent philosophical and aesthetic binaries, including Burke’s distinction between beauty and sublimity, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and the imagination, and Anne Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror. These interconnected aesthetic hierarchies are figured by Usher’s overdetermined house, with its generic Gothic ancestry and unstable architecture, and their radical revision by Poe is finally figured by the revelatory collapse of the house itself.
While generally concurring with Voller, who argues that with “Usher” Poe is “writing a tale directed against established theories of sublimity,”[7] I would like to refine and add to some of his arguments, especially by considering the potential relevance of James Ussher’s 1767 treatise Clio to the tale. Clio has been notably absent from prior discussions of the tale’s pre-texts; this absence is understandable insofar as there appear to be no direct references to Clio in Poe’s letters or critical writings. Nevertheless, Clio’s influence on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British discourse on the sublime[8], and Poe’s keen interest in this discourse, make it likely that Poe would have had at least a passing familiarity with Ussher and the basic thrust of Clio’s arguments. Moreover, the degree to which many of Clio’s central themes, and even its specific phrases, are echoed throughout Poe’s tale reinforces the probability that James Ussher’s name is a partial source for the tale’s patronym.
There are two things about Ussher’s conception of the sublime in Clio that particularly illuminate Poe’s revision of the sublime with “Usher.” Clio expounds a conception of the sublime that first, drawing heavily on Burke’s Enquiry, is far more piously theistic, and which carefully circumscribes the role that terror plays in the experience of the sublime. This is a circumscription that Poe’s “Usher” goes to great lengths to explode. Second, Clio’s conception of the role of the object in the psychology of the sublime contradicts Burke’s theory in a way that Poe’s critical writings echo, and this contradiction is dramatized by the narrative of “Usher.” As Ashfield and de Bolla observe, Ussher’s account opposes Burke’s delineation of the specific qualities of sublime objects, emphasizing instead that “the object of the sublime is vacant,”[9] much like the “eye-like” windows of the tale’s central architectural image. In this respect, “Usher,” like Ussher, breaks from Burke’s object-based theory.
Before returning to these issues, some of the structural, symbolic, and phrasal continuities between Clio and “Usher” bear explication. Clio’s narrator attributes his pontifications on the sublime to an “old friend,” “a genius” who, like Roderick, dwells in an isolated locale, surrounded by wilderness: “He had withdrawn himself from the trifling bustle of the little world, to converse with his own heart, and end a stormy life in obscure quiet.”[10] This mediated narrative structure, itself owing something to Johnson’s Rasselas, anticipates the structure of Poe’s tale. Clio, described as “an enthusiastic gentleman’s” (132) rhapsody on taste, sets up an opposition to the skepticism of Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville, arguing that the power to recognize beauty and sublimity inheres in a “universal spirit,” an idea proximate to Kant’s later notion of a sensus communis. Ussher claims that “the sublime, by an authority which the soul is utterly unable to resist, takes possession of our attention, and of all of our faculties, and absorbs them in astonishment. The passion it inspires us with is evidently a mixture of terror, curiosity, and exultation: but they are stamped with a majesty that bestows on them a different air and character from those passions on any other occasion” (102). Ussher goes to great lengths to contain the terror that Burke had more openly identified as the “common stock of everything which is sublime,” a containment that will also characterize Kant’s revision of the sublime encounter in the Critique of Judgment’s “Analytic of the Sublime” (1790), a text that Poe was less likely to have read.[11] Ussher claims that:
the combination of passions in the sublime, renders the idea of it obscure. No doubt the sensation of fear is very distinct in it; but it is equally obvious, that there is something in the sublime more than this abject passion. In all other terrors, the soul loses its dignity, and as it were shrinks below its usual size: but at the presence of the sublime, although it be always awful, the soul of man seems to be raised out of a trance; it assumes an unknown grandeur (103).
Ussher restates this central point later, writing that “we must carefully distinguish between common accidental fear, and this noble sensation that elevates while it overawes” (117). The distinction Ussher makes here between abject terror and elevated terror is one that is echoed by Anne Radcliffe’s later differentiation of the sublime affect of terror from the repulsive affect of horror. In a dramatic dialogical essay titled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” first penned in 1798 and later republished as part of her late novel Gaston de Blondeville, Radcliffe placed a distinction in the mouth of one of her characters between terror and horror, which “are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” whereas “the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”[12]
As Radcliffe’s readers would have immediately recognized, this description of terror paralleled Burke’s account of the sublime affect in the Enquiry closely. While Burke had made no clear distinction between “terror” and “horror” in the Enquiry, Radcliffe’s amanuensis viewed this as a terminological oversight; “while I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, . . . they all agree that terror is a very high one.”[13] This distinction, while to some degree founded on the etymology of each word, was also clearly designed to serve Radcliffe’s aesthetic-political agenda. First penned shortly after she read Matthew Lewis’s scandalous Gothic novel The Monk (1796), which he openly admitted had been inspired by her own Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), it gave her an opportunity to create a distinction between Lewis’s frenetic, transgressive novel and her own more restrained and rationalistic fiction. Thus, like Ussher, Radcliffe hierarchizes both affect and literary style, elevating terror above horror by associating the former, but never the latter, with the grandeur of divinity.
In Clio, Ussher goes on to claim that “the Greeks, the fathers of thought and sublime knowledge, always nicely observed the difference between the native powers of the mind over its stock of sensible ideas, and the sublime influence to which it was passive” (122).
Ussher’s account identifies precisely that element of the sublime that made Enlightenment thinkers so uncomfortable. Sublimity was thought to possess the power to, in Burke’s formulation, “anticipate our reasonings” and “hurry us onward” even in opposition to them. As Hume’s skepticism had already postulated, reason, understood as merely “a calm determination of the passions,” could not be an adequate goad to moral behavior in the face of more extreme determinations of the passions, such as those experienced during a moment of sublime ekstasis.
The power of the sublime to inspire action independent of rational consideration was something that would be wrestled with both by the later Burke and by Kant. As Voller has shown, however, “The Fall of the House of Usher” implicitly rejects the resolutions presented by both theories. The tale’s engagement with and transformation of the Burkean sublime is signaled in its vortex-like opening paragraphs by its reference to and refusal of “that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.”[14] This negative invocation of that “pleasurable, because poetic sentiment” implies the narrator’s familiarity with the discourse on the sublime, and also highlights his vain expectation of experiencing such poetic affects. He is, in this regard, a literary confrere of both the travelogue-addicted Arthur Gordon Pym and Jane Austen’s quixotic Catherine Morland, whose experience of reality is mediated by her enthusiasm for Radcliffean Gothic fictions.
To the narrator’s apparent disappointment, neither the rapturous transports of Radcliffe’s novels nor the tortuous arguments and definitive distinctions of Burke’s and Kant’s theories seem to apply to his experience. As Paul de Man explains, “The initial effect of the sublime, of a sudden encounter with colossal natural entities such as cataracts, abysses, and towering mountains, is one of shock, or says Kant, astonishment that borders upon terror. . . . By a play, a trick of the imagination, this terror is transformed into a feeling of tranquil superiority.”[15] This second movement of the Kantian sublime’s cognitive symphony is notably absent here. As Voller puts it, “The mind’s ability to resist the power of sublime objects, to regard them as ‘without any dominion over us and our personality’ is shown by Poe to be an illusion. . . . ‘Usher’ flatly rejects Kant’s easy confidence in the mind’s superiority over nature.”[16] Instead of the delightful terror of the sublime, the narrator experiences “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.” (TS 397).
This allusive and sibilant phrasing signals both the tale’s rejection of prior theories of the sublime, and following Dennis Pahl, Poe’s adaptation of “Burke’s notion of sublime ‘effects’ to his own materialist aesthetics, an aesthetics that emphasizes, among other things, the sensory-emotional effects of language and sounds on human subjectivity.”[17] With its emphasis on the feeling of “sinking,” the narrator’s phrase both foreshadows the tale’s conclusion and invokes Pope’s Peri Bathos, or On the Art of Sinking in Literature, itself a satiric stab at the profusion of imitative literature produced in the eighteenth century in response to the popularity of Longinus’s treatise. The narrator’s description also effectively revises both Burke’s physiological account of the sublime experience and Radcliffe’s strategic distinction between terror and horror. The sensations of iciness, sinking, and sickening were sensations Radcliffe claimed were produced by the affect of horror, rather than terror, which by her formulation is alone associated with both Burke’s sublime, and less explicitly, her own Gothic productions.
The narrator questions his own affective response to the house as he draws closer, asking, “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered” (TS 397–98). The word fancy, more or less synonymous with imagination throughout the eighteenth century, became semantically demoted by Coleridge’s influential distinction in Biographia Literaria between mere fancy and revered imagination. Poe notably rejected Coleridge’s distinction in one of his reviews:
‘Fancy,’ says the author of ‘Aids to Reflection,’ (who aided Reflection to much better purpose in his ‘Genevieve’)—‘Fancy combines—Imagination creates.’ This was intended and has been received, as a distinction, but it is a distinction without a difference—without even a difference of degree. The Fancy as nearly creates as the imagination, and neither at all. Novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which does not exist.[18]
Alexander Schlutz has persuasively shown that, for all Poe’s debts to Coleridge, he is “far from completing the philosophical structure that Coleridge had attempted to build, and if he inhabits it, he does so not as a headstone in its supporting arch, but rather as a threat to its desired foundations.”[19]
Poe’s rejection of Coleridge’s distinction also notably represents a return to Burke’s sensationist psychology, as it echoes Burke’s claim that:
[the] mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination. . . . But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing any thing absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.[20]
Further dramatizing this rejection of Coleridge in “Usher,” Poe repeatedly deploys not only the term fancy (it appears eight times in the tale) but also a number of its etymological siblings, phantasmagoric, fantasias, fantastic, and phantasm, chiefly in describing the artistic productions of Roderick, and the affective states they embody.
Each of these usages suggests the tremendous power Usher’s “unusual combinations” can have on those who experience them, further undermining Coleridge’s distinction. Similarly, the delusions fostered by the affective power of Usher’s art, and the consequences these delusions have for both the unfortunate narrator and the Usher siblings, must be recognized as a direct challenge to the theories of both Kant and Ussher. For both these thinkers, as for most eighteenth-century commentators on the sublime, what saved the concept from a dangerous, enthusiastic amorality was the anchoring of its power in some transcendent moral order. Where Kant employs the notion of moral reason in this place, Ussher emphasizes the concept of divine authority. In Clio he states, “I know no reason for our perception of absolute eternal beauty in the virtues I have mentioned, but by supposing, that the Father of being, who is eternal truth and goodness, and the original standard of grandeur and beauty, has stamped on our minds a sense of those absolute and eternal perfections” (12). Further, Ussher emphasizes that the sublime had its source in the divine well before Longinus wrote his tract, since the Greeks “traced the [sublime] through its various appearances, and never failed to attribute it to divine power; sometimes to the Muses, sometimes to Apollo, to the Furies, to Pan, to the Sylvan deities, and to the genius of the place” (152).
This sacred anchorage is notably absent[21] from the phrasing of Poe’s “Usher.” But Ussher’s attribution of an irresistible sublime influence to “the genius of the place” is important to “Usher,” since the entirety of the tale depends upon a recognition of the coextensive nature of the pathological “genius” of Roderick Usher and the “genius” of the house and its environs, a genius which (like that described by the narrator of Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”) inexorably affects all in its presence, drawing them into its vortex. Clio valorizes the aristocratic aesthete as the agent of the sublime, as Ussher instructs his reader to “observe the few of a higher station, who by their fortunes are disengaged from wretchedness and poverty, who vegetate freely, and take the bias of the unfettered human genius. You see their taste soon distinguish them from the crowd, they assume a more elevated character” (40). Once again, Roderick Usher, with his theory of “the sentience of all vegetable things” provides a dark reflection of James Ussher’s expression. Roderick, the quintessential Romantic genius, can be readily recognized as an embodiment of Ussher’s ideal, but also as its ultimate subversion, as his elevation is merely the prelude to his, and his lineage’s, final collapse. Thus Poe’s “Usher” both echoes James Ussher’s conception of genius and subverts it by anticipating Max Nordau’s later linkage of genius with degeneracy and madness. For Ussher, nothing could be further from the sublime than madness. He writes that:
of all the objects of discord and confusion, no other is so shocking as the human soul in madness. When we see the principle of thought and beauty disordered, the horror is too high, like that of a massacre committed before our eyes, to suffer the mind to make any reflex act on the god-like traces of pity that distinguish our species; and we feel no sensations but those of dismay and terror (174).
Poe’s tale, on the contrary, presents a movement from sublimity to madness, through Roderick’s genius and art, and from pity to madness, through the narrator’s unnatural affinities for Usher. The narrative’s presentation of Roderick’s elevation (genius) and descent (madness) is also one of its many ludic allusions to the etymology of the word sublime, as it emphasizes the fact that, in the two-dimensional world of the text, depth is always illusory, and height and depth are ultimately relative characteristics; thus, in contradiction to Ussher’s sublime, an elevated character is ultimately indistinguishable from a fallen character.
The detailed description of the house’s exterior reinforces its critical figuration of Burke/Ussher/Kant’s sublime, as “there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (TS 400). While these theories of the sublime seem potent when taken as totalities, “Usher” implies that each, when its elements are scrutinized closely, presents only a “specious totality,” riven by “a barely perceptible fissure.” This fissure, whose expansion is coterminous with the tale’s progression, is inclusive of Burke’s artificial isolation of beauty from sublimity, Ussher’s understatement of the role of terror in the sublime, and both Ussher’s and Kant’s containment of terror within a moral teleology.
The tale’s critical perspective on this subordination of terror to an abstract moral system is particularly important when considering the role played by Roderick Usher’s art. As Philip Shaw explains, “In the ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Kant links the beautiful with the bounded. A beautiful object has clear outlines and distinct form, whereas the sublime is found in formlessness,”[22] and it is just this formlessness that the narrator claims gives Usher’s art its terrible potency. Usher’s paintings, like his features and those of the house, force the narrator to “the unsatisfactory conclusion” that their “power lies among considerations beyond our depth” (TS 398), mirroring Ussher’s claim that art often has its most powerful effect on those who do not comprehend how it achieves this effect, as “a fine picture charms and transports a spectator who has no idea of painting” (3). As the narrator finally confesses, his attempts to interpret these seeming ciphers are in vain, as are his attempts to interpret Roderick’s physiognomy: “I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity” (TS 402).
It was his recognition of the sustained opposition established throughout Poe’s writings between the ornate involutions of the arabesque and the “idea of simple humanity” that led Baudelaire to write of Poe’s title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque that it is “remarkable and deliberately chosen,” “for the grotesque and arabesque ornaments thrust aside the human figure.”[23] This recognition in turn informs David Ketterer’s argument that “the arabesque designs are active symbols of Poe’s efforts to melt away the rigid pattern that is imposed by man’s reason.”[24] Following this logic, it can be recognized that Usher’s “arabesque expression” is meant to “melt” such “rigid patterns,” including these influential rationalizations of the sublime.
Poe’s emphasis on the link between Roderick’s unreadable features and his indefinite works of art also mirrors Clio, in which Ussher observes that “if grace has any fixed throne, it is in the face, the residence of the soul” (52) and that “the countenance is the very palace in which it takes up its residence” (54).This statement may well underlie Poe’s framed poem, “The Haunted Palace,” which the narrator includes because, he claims, it reveals “a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne” (TS 406). No mere parergon, “The Haunted Palace” is another example of Usher’s art’s indefinite ability to escape the limitations of any imposed frame, spreading, like the crack in the house’s foundations, throughout the entire tale. The poem expands the equivocal use of the word expression on which much of the story’s effect depends, revealing Roderick’s own facial expressions in both his musical expressions and in the expression of his ancestral estate, and it grotesquely literalizes James Ussher’s claim that we “look as well as speak our minds” (75). Similarly, the narrator’s inability to read this relationship reflects Ussher’s insistence that “we can no more account for the relation between the passions of the mind and a set of features, than we can account for the relation between the sounds of music and the passions” (76).
It must also be noted that Poe’s use of the term arabesque in describing Usher’s expression was almost certainly influenced by one of the chief champions of the arabesque in painting, Friedrich Schlegel,[25] who was also an important influence on Coleridge. Winfried Meninghaus explains that “for Friedrich Schlegel the arabesque was ‘the original form of painting’ and also ‘the genuine mother, the embryo of all of modern painting.’ . . . But Schlegel went further than this. He declared the arabesque to be indeed ‘the oldest and original form of human fantasy.’”[26] Schlegel’s conception informs the dark whorls of Usher’s paintings, which even at their most representational, partake of a “formlessness” and “abstraction” that signals their negative sublimity, their “thrilling vaguenesses.” The narrator’s account links the influence of these abstract spectacles to the roles of both Usher and the narrator in Madeline’s premature interment (a prefiguration of which appears to be the subject of one of these paintings), exploding both Ussher’s and Kant’s insistence on the necessary connection between the apprehension of the aesthetic sublime and the influence of, respectively, divine authority or moral reason.
It is perhaps no coincidence that both Ussher’s Clio and Poe’s “Usher” finally situate themselves with the staging of an act of reading by their respective narrators. Ussher’s amanuensis produces his most telling comments on the sublime following a “reading [of] Homer on our way to the sea-side. When we sat down, our conversation turned on the strange power of the sublime” (106). This is mirrored in Poe’s tale when the narrator reads Roderick “The Mad Trist,” a poem full of clangorous rhetorical effects that deliberately parodies the poetic devices Longinus iterated as productive of sublimity in Peri Hypsous. The poem’s title provides a wry comment on the conflation of the narrator’s identity with that of Usher, as they are joined together throughout the tale in a kind of textual-affective conjugation. This perversely reflects Longinus’s claim that “the mind is naturally elevated by the true sublime, and so sensibly affected with its lively strokes, that it swells in transport and an inward pride, as if what was only heard had been the product of its own invention.”[27] In other words, the mind that apprehends the literary sublime seems to lose itself in the mind that created the sublime text, and ultimately, author, reader, and text become indistinguishable, inter-involved, and utterly confused.
Burke’s Enquiry disseminated a similar notion, arguing that in the apprehension of the sublime, the mind is “always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates.”[28] This absorption parallels the vertigo that Baudelaire experienced upon his discovery of Poe’s tales, and it also influenced Poe’s own conception of authorial propriety in a manner most pertinent to his inconsistent attitude concerning plagiarism. Echoing Longinus and Burke (unconsciously or otherwise), Poe claimed that the poetic sentiment “implies a peculiarly, perhaps an abnormally keen appreciation of the beautiful, with a longing for its assimilation, or absorption, into the poetic identity. What the poet intensely admires, becomes thus, in very fact, although only partially, a portion of his own intellect.”[29] As Meredith McGill has pointed out, “What is perhaps most striking about this defense of plagiarism is the utter passivity of the offending poet. He is not only fully possessed by another’s thought in the act of reading, he is subject to a kind of hair-trigger reproduction of his thought.”[30] This passivity reflects the Longinian/Burkean conception of the reader’s response to a work of the sublime.
Thus, while I agree with Voller’s argument that, through “Usher,” Poe reveals the degree to which earlier theorizations of the sublime fail to competently explain or account for the importance and vitality of terror, I do not agree that this constitutes Poe’s wholesale rejection of the discourse on the sublime, as the tale’s depiction of an intersubjective contagion experienced during the act of reading is heavily influenced by many of these earlier writers on the sublime, as, apparently, is Poe’s “own” theory of authorship and inspiration. As Dennis Pahl has recently argued, despite Poe’s apparent rejections of Burke’s Enquiry,[31] Poe’s writing continued to adapt, if in an altered form, Burke’s theory of language, and “Usher” offers much to support this interpretation.[32]
In addition, the sublimity of Roderick and his art presents a problem for the more allegorical dimensions of Voller’s approach to the tale, as Voller claims that “the lure of the imaginative, the nonrational, is embodied (not surprisingly for Poe) in the story’s only female character.”[33] Voller’s allegorization of Madeline is largely founded on a desire to see Kant’s theory of the sublime dramatized in the tale, and as far as that goes, it is productive. Despite the likelihood of Poe’s not having read the Critique of Judgment, Madeline’s parallels with the imagination—which, in Kant’s conception, is sacrificially lain at the altar of moral reason—remain striking. Yet this allegorical generalization is unsatisfactory insofar as it excludes the relationship that obviously exists between Usher, the archetypical mad genius, and Poe’s conception of the imagination; and it also fails to account for the other conceptual binaries that the House of Usher’s collapse effectively overturns through Madeline, who can as readily be read as personifying Burke’s attempt to subordinate the feminized beautiful to the masculinized sublime, and Coleridge’s attempt to subordinate the feminized fancy to the masculinized imagination. The tale suggests that, like Madeline, Burke’s denatured conception of beauty, separated from the vitality of terror, and Coleridge’s conception of fancy, denying the power of creativity, have been prematurely buried, and thus must be made to return to life.
However, keeping in mind Poe’s suspicion of allegory and his monomaniacal penchant for literary one-upmanship, it is clear that a degree of both caution and humor is called for in such interpretations of “Usher,” whose symbolic fluidity and occultation of causal relations are among its greatest strengths. It may be more apt to read this dramatization as a kind of elaborate parodic play, meant to trap readers who are, in Poe’s phrase, “theory mad beyond redemption.”[34] This is especially true since, for all its sophisticated critical engagements with the discourse on sublimity, the story’s status as a work of and not merely on the sublime is ultimately dependent on the inadequacy of theoretical interpretations that seek to define or restrict its meanings.
In praising the sublimity of Milton’s evocation of Death, Burke wrote that “in this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree,”[35] emphasizing that uncertainty is an exigent ingredient of effective sublimity. Considering the power of music, Poe echoed this sentiment in terms redolent of both Burke’s and Ussher’s, arguing that “indefiniteness” is the key to evoking “sensations which bewilder while they enthral—and which would not so enthral if they did not so bewilder.”[36] This commingled bewilderment and enthralment, characteristic of sublimity, is what underlies the image of the vortex, the “whirlwind,” with its “rushing sound as of a thousand waters” (TS 417), with which “The Fall of the House of Usher,” like many of Poe’s tales, closes. It is a testament to the unity of the tale’s sublime effect that it continues to bewilder while it enthrals, reinforcing its status as a work both on and of the sublime.
Charles Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 90.
Examples include “MS Found in a Bottle,” “Metzengerstein,” “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” to name a few.
Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Imago, 1949), 353.
Poe’s numerous references to vortices synthesize a variety of potential meanings. One of the most important for understanding the vortex as the emblem of Poe’s aesthetic practice is the Cartesian theory, which posited that vortices accounted for the origins and behavior of the material universe—an idea that had been largely discredited by Poe’s time. For example, in his 1833 Table Talk, Coleridge stated that “Descartes’ vortices were not a hypothesis: they rested on no facts at all.” Poe was clearly aware of this, as he recommended the book in his “Notice of Coleridge’s Table Talk” for the Baltimore American, July 22, 1835, yet he would revisit, and revise, the Cartesian vortical theory in his own way in Eureka (1848).
Poe’s extensive interest in the sublime is readily evidenced by J. Lasley Dameron’s identification of thirty-eight usages of the term sublime in Poe’s critical writings alone. Citing Dameron, Kent Ljungquist suggests that Poe’s familiarity with the sublime may have arisen largely from his familiarity with Burke’s Enquiry, to which there are “several references” in Poe’s works. See Kent Ljungquist, The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac, MA: Scripta Humanistica, 1984), 48.
Readers interested in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse on the sublime should consult James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005); Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Jack G. Voller, “The Power of Terror: Burke and Kant in the House of Usher,” Poe Studies 21, no. 2 (1988): 27–35. Voller places his arguments in a wider context in his book The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994).
See, for example, Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, “Irish Perspectives,” in The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, 131–157.
Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 128.
James Ussher, Clio: Or, a Discourse on Taste. Addressed to a Young Lady, The Fourth Edition, with Large Additions (London, 1778), 105–6. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Accessed October 13, 2012. Accessed September 5, 2012. http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/.
For more on Poe’s (lack of) knowledge of Kant and other German writers, see Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R. Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Literary References in His Works (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995).
Anne Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” qtd. in E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 166.
Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 167.
Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, Volume I: 1831–1842, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 397. Hereafter cited in text as TS.
Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and Its Differences, ed. Hugh Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 102.
Voller, “Burke and Kant in the House of Usher,” 29.
Dennis Pahl, “Sounding the Sublime: Poe, Burke, and the (Non)sense of Language,” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 42 (2009): 41–60, 44.
Edgar Allan Poe, “American Prose Writers, No. 2: N. P. Willis” (Text-02), Broadway Journal 1, no. 3 (January 18, 1845): 37–38. Accessed September 5, 2012. http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45wn01.htm.
Alexander Schlutz, “‘Purloined Voices’: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 195.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1967), 17.
The story clearly does employ biblical phraseology and rhetoric, but I would argue that, in keeping with the tale’s Schlegelian irony, this only serves to reinforce its displacement of the power of the sublime from a theistic moral center. On this point I concur with Voller’s statement that Poe’s “greatest value is in the sense of horror that accrues from the realization that the romance . . . can uncover the emptiness not only in reality but in our schemes to rise above reality.” Voller, The Supernatural Sublime, 225.
Philip Shaw, The Sublime, 117.
Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 78.
David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 36.
Readers interested in Schlegel’s importance for Poe should consult G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (New York: Madison, 1973).
Winfried Meninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, trans. Henry Pickford (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 85.
Ashfield and de Bolla, “Introduction,” The Sublime, 23.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 51.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Plagiarisim—Imitation—Postscript,” from the Broadway Journal, April 5, 1845. Accessed September 5, 2012. http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh07.htm.
Meredith McGill, “Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 297. Of course, as it is situated in the epistolary-editorial feud known as “The Longfellow War,” this conception serves Poe as a defense against accusations of plagiarism made in the wake of his own accusations against Longfellow. For more on this subject, see also Stephen Rachman, “Es Lässt Sich Nicht Schreiben: Plagiarism and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” 49–91, in the same volume.
For example, in his “Notice of Coleridge’s Table Talk,” from the Baltimore American, July 22, 1835, Poe cites approvingly Coleridge’s statement that “Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate.”
Pahl, “Sounding the Sublime.” 41.
Voller, “Burke and Kant in the House of Usher,” 29.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” Critical Theory: The Major Documents, ed. Stuart and Susan F. Levine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 186.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 115.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginalia [part XIII],” Southern Literary Messenger (April 1849): 218. Accessed September 5, 2012. http://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar0449.htm.