Daniel Fineman
The first sentence of “The Man of the Crowd” seems almost self-reflexive: “It was well said of a certain German book that “er lässt sich nicht lesen”—it does not permit itself to be read.”[1] Such a sentiment might be the motto too of much of Poe’s own work that presents motives, causes, and purposes that remain inscrutable even after the tale’s final period. But the quotation also offers a hint at—if not a solution to—the philosophical ambiance from which this tale and its obscurity might have come: the German idealism of Schlegel, Schiller, Tieck, Novalis, and Hegel. Behind them, one finds the echoes of their shared philosophical heritage reaching back, first to Spinoza and, further yet, to Lucretius.
In De rerum natura, we find the potential origin of a darker tradition than that of science, of straight rational explanation. This is a philosophy not based primarily on Platonic form or Aristotelian order. In part, Lucretius takes exception to the predominant concepts of reason, explanation, and linear causality. Famously, we find in his work the concept of the clinamen, nature’s unjustified “swerve” of becoming from the line of unerring sameness. This difference comes not from exterior cause but through an autonomic variation, a spontaneous deviation.
For Poe, this insistent turn is not just a physical theory, though it appears as a governing material principle in Eureka, but also the underlying force for his compositional technique. His is a narrative practice that deconstructs its initially ordered material to leave a consequent supernal “effect” in its stead. This too is the secret ingredient that makes understandable the apparent inconsistency between his compositional formality and his persistent practice of decomposing the subjects and objects that formed his settings and characters.
As his story “The Imp of the Perverse” makes clear, he views the human swerve from the rational course not as a purely aleatory exception or an inexplicable madness but as one of the “prima mobilia of the human soul.”[2] Thus his tendency toward obscurity, humor, puzzle, prank, and the grotesque are not reverse proofs, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, of order out its comic or tragic inversion. Instead, his works are celebrations of a necessary, natural, and desirable deviation toward a paradoxically constructive dissolution and cosmic reconstitution. This celebration of free change explains evil and the death instinct as the epiphenomena of a cosmic tendency to undo every particular entity, the endless tumult of “a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.”[3]
To theorize this swerving perversity, this chapter will at moments employ vocabularies and insights reminiscent of twentieth-century French theory. However, these thinkers of difference are not impositions but the latest manifestation of the darker metaphysical tradition that began with the philosophical father of Lucretius, Epicurus. In these Greeks, one finds the same trajectory from which Poe derives his disposition. Indeed, the accusations of Germanic influence that Poe mentioned in the preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was not one of literature alone. As Poe’s essays make clear time after time, his concept of literature was formulated against the debates engendered out of the philosophical milieu of Kant, Hegel, and the less well remembered figures of the Enlightenment and its enemies. Behind these, especially at the start of the nineteenth century, we find that instigator who so valued Lucretius and who excited early American romanticism, Baruch Spinoza.
The crux most at issue here is stated famously in Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe:
When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. . . . Thus nature would never have created anything. (1219)
For Lucretius, as for Poe, deviation is the precondition of creation without which nothing is conceivable: invariant sameness is sterile and disallows both creation and creativity. In both the world and in writing, deviation in becoming is what makes becoming possible. Difference or differencing is not a stable quality internal to ontology but its determining aspect, its constitutive internal agitation that forms the underlying motivation of his fictional plots and even the narrative poems, most famously “The Raven.”
While Lucretius was content in his radical materialism to understand difference as genetic, Hegel wanted to put difference to work for progress through contradiction and sublation. This version of undoing seems nearer to Poe’s time and his practice. For Hegel, each entity found itself fulfilled in its other, a kind of figure/ground complementarity. For Hegel, every definition of an entity itself was found necessarily outside itself, a kind of apophatic realization. In this Hegel was affirming a Christian version of knowledge through negation, the via negativa of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Indeed, even earlier Erigena could write in his Periphyseon: “The creative nature permits nothing outside itself because outside of it nothing can be.”[4] In short, the individual is an emanation of the divine whose individuation is illusory and whose real existence is wholly in the corpus of God. Thus the perversity of mortification is the sensible exchange of the hubris of selfhood for the reincorporation in the body of divinity. This is the philosophical and religious context of Poe’s perverse, a seeming perversity only from the perspective of the scientifically secular and not of the dark supernal.
For Poe, as he makes clearest at the conclusion of Eureka, man has two identities and so two frames of reference for thought, and these diverge. The normal or rational supplies the usual criterion for evaluation and deviation, but that is because it judges by its own lower standard. Still, men are of two minds and therefore are double thinking, “conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak.”[5] Individual identity is always already for Poe a swerving away from the totality that cannot be identified. That holism cannot fall under a name or representation since it forms the productive heterogenesis that is the whole cosmic ontology. This is the arena that Poe would have us reach—not as rational comprehension, since that would be oxymoronic, but in the disorientation of the centered subject, the protagonist, and in the sublime elevation of the reader.
His mastery of ratiocination—demonstrated through his detective, Dupin—and of taxonomy as in The Conchologist’s First Book—was but just the ground for deviation, for swerving. Order is then not his highest end but the presentation of a structure created for cancellation, for a nonprogressive cancellation into the nonparticular. This is not Hegelian sublation, for it postulates an eternal return, a universal cyclicality that always antagonizes the particulars it overcomes. But how is this inversion to be accomplished with language, a structure given to sameness and identity?
His aesthetics supplies a path. In “The Philosophy of Composition” he states his method: “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.”[6] Art, for Poe, is neither an end in itself nor a didactic opportunity; he sought to neither please nor instruct, as both traditional functions pandered to the self he wished to ablate. He wanted not an Apollonian but a Dionysian art, whose consciousness was nonsense to the logical and rational. This becoming different he could represent in transitional states that qualified the concept of discrete personhood: drunkenness, drugged intoxication, illness, and love. But how could verbal art perform these functions, those not found in theories of language as speech act: absent in Austin, Searle, or even Butler? These theories of verbal performance all depend—more or less—on models of analytic self-possession that Plotinus saw kept one from divine unification. For Plotinus, as for Poe, the dissolution of individual identity is a positive activity, since the fragmentation that is the self alone is ecologically dead: “We cannot break life into parts: if the total was Life, the fragment is not.”[7] However, the Enneads imply that the best path to reunification is contemplative wisdom, while Poe’s way swerves to cancellation and dissolution—a violent undoing that finds its image in death. How is literature to accomplish this cancelling deviation from its own normative character and yet remain intelligible?
The tale for Poe is a transitional process, the object of which is to undo the very elements that make it manifest and in this very disassembly to instill an apprehension in spite of its nominal constituents. Like a rocket that burns itself to nothing in its attainment of height, his tales dissolve their own materials. Poe states in “The Poetic Principle:” “Through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience at once the true poetic effect but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth that merely served to render the harmony manifest.”[8] Harmony for Poe is the musical analogy of a destructive sublation that de-individuates artistic elements for their swerving apotheosis.
Edmund Burke, perhaps, offers a model of an aesthetic based on the apprehension of destruction. In his Inquiry (1757), he produces an affective theory of art that suggests a function for art that is similar to Poe’s abiding concern with reader response. For Burke, the greatest art astonishes so that the participant is transported in an ecstasy that exceeds rational capacity. This irrational sublimity was—for Kant—one of the central concerns of the third Critique (1790), but for Burke it suggests an affective functionality antagonistic to the demands of the understanding. What the perverse writer wants is the opposite of the purgative catharsis of Aristotle’s Poetics. Instead, literary clinamen is a cathexis to affect. Here, unlike classical tragedy, unwarranted events are not cancelled as proof of the inevitable return of order. Rather, order’s particular manifestation is revealed as contingent and temporary. Only out of the perverse threat to the order of identity can art accomplish feelings of the highest rank. Burke states that the sublime is “that state of the soul, in which all of its notions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”[9]
Unlike Poe in Eureka, Burke could not explain why threats to the “body” should raise “the mind.”[10] However, he could offer a reason why an apparently uncongenial medium like language—which has superficially only a medial relation to sensation—should be affecting, since “by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise.”[11] Words—like harmony in music—allow us to mix entities in a swerving from their quotidian identities as separate and integral selves. Literature then is an excellent medium for the oxymoron of affect, a constructive deconstruction of the constituents of composition. Here we can now trace this operation of destructive sublation in the “Imp of the Perverse.”
This very short story follows a pattern familiar in Poe’s tales but exaggerated here. The narrator’s initial discourse appears in a form appositional to the last: a path from academic distance to personal threat. Indeed, the first presentments are those of a scholastic essay by a disinterested third party and not a biographic confession of murder. The story begins:
In the consideration of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have overlooked it. [Poe’s emphasis, 1219]
The text has already begun to set up the swerve it will constitute or enact.
The language dissembles its own apparent order to undertake a narrative deviation and sublation not only of its nominal fields—science and morality, the alpha and omega of knowledge—but of its own medium. The repetition of “overlook” in the quotation echoes the map trick in “The Purloined Letter,” the sense that it is the ubiquitous that is invisible: the universality of difference is hidden in the open. While the slight joke—“make room” on the skull—already hints at the autoimmune disorder that is to be the destruction of this first posture; it is the passage’s style that forms the straight man from which the grotesque of perversity will depart.
The sentences are wrought with an almost ironic allegiance to pedantry. The syntactic constructions are long, complex, compound, periodic, and involuted. The lexicon is Latinate, polysyllabic, effete, self-satisfied, and ostentatious. The net effect then seemingly capitulates discursively with the very structures under criticism by a person, we are later to learn, whose experience and current position are antithetical to the mode and the implied institutions of logical regulation. Perhaps this is parodic, an extended trope in which the work is a double or—like William Wilson—a Doppelgänger of its ostensible identity. Such a possibility, always inherent in parody, suggests a connotative deviation without difference, a constitutive swerve, or as Schlegel said, a “permanent parabasis.” Still, the small but central mark of the coming destructive sublation is found in the first pronominal usage.
The text at first favors “we.” This seems calculated to give some normative impression of sensible collectivity later to be undone. The first person plural hints here at a community of centered subjects that share a common concept of science and morality even as the text brings these into question. “We” is a collection of individuals who share rationality, convictions of causality, and sufficient reason. We are not perverse.
In this frame, the reader receives the ensuing discussion of perversity. The disembodied narrative voice defines perversity as “a mobile without a motive. . . . Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms; we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable” (1220). The previous implicit assurances of the “we” now threaten, for they catch the implied audience in a universal move of difference, in an ontology of deviation without norm. The pronoun no longer identifies a collection of rational beings but the opposite, where we are caught up in a maelstrom of uncontrollable impulse.
The text changes from a rational discussion of irrationality contained within institutional rhetoric to a lived instance of expressive insanity. The sentences become short and active, and our inclusion is now an irresistible participation in a narrated flow of compulsion. “We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. . . . We struggle in vain” (1222). Procrastination is but a mild but pervasive perversity that substantiates the universality of its contradiction of rational behavior. The principle of the perverse is not speculative or objective, a scientific symptom for calm study, but our own self-annihilating tendency, our unstoppable swerve that overcomes the order of reason with emotion: “We perpetrate [perversity] . . . because we feel we should not” (1223). Short, terse, emotive, the text can again change registers, from the collective to the personal, from the abstract to the active, from the discussion of morality to the commitment of immorality.
Again, the undoing is marked by a pronominal shift: “I have said this much, that in some measure I may answer your question—that I may explain to you why I am here . . . wearing these fetters, for my tenanting this cell of the condemned” (1223–1224). This has been then a narrative bait and switch: rather than a community of scientific moralists, the reader finds herself or himself as the intimate friend of a murderer and thief. We are the confidants of the irrational, engaged in a tête-à-tête that we asked for. Quickly we learn the facts: our dialectical other committed the perfect crime by poisoning an inveterate night reader’s candle, another undone—like us—by thinking language only supplied light. He has remained uncaught, and he is safe until he thinks: “If I be not fool enough to make open confession!” (1225).
Immediately, he is assailed by perversity against his own rational interest. He is in the fit and cannot resist: “I became blind, and deaf, and giddy. . . . The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul. They say I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell” (1226). Again, the progress of perversity is marked with a pronominal variation. He is now an “I” only in the eyes and the ears of others. At that moment he can only recall himself in the narrative of others. He is decentered and finds his distal image himself only in the crowd’s disoriented and disassociated retrospect. “They say” marks now not a community to which the narrator belongs since they are still part of the delusion of the rational “we.” “They” are now his opposite from which he only appears to himself as the object of their narration. His speech was not that of his own rational subjectivity but that of another self that did not share his narrow instinct for preservation. Thus his most critical moment was not the quintessence of his personal identity but its opposite, an impersonal difference.
Finally, the tale ends not with the abstraction and distance that since Aristotle has signaled the summing up, the resolution of loose ends, but with the immediate, the personal, and the empirical. But the swerve of the perverse has done its work, and all these sense certainties are undone. “But why shall I say more? To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless!—but where?” (1226). What were answers or even givens—the taken-for-granted elements of rational discourse—are now more than problems. The pronominal shifters—we, I, they—now become completely destabilized in space-time, the here and now. These indexical and referential terms are deconstructed not just for the narrator but also for the reader, whose hubris and sense of identity also swerve away from previous certainty. We enter instead the sublimity of perversity, the swerve to a differencing unregulated by the metrics of the rational.
Edgar A. Poe, The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978), 2:506.
Mabbott, Collected Works, 3:1219. Further references to Poe’s texts are from this edition and are noted parenthetically in the text.
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1976), 66.
John Scotus Erigena, Periphyseon: Division of Nature, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and John J. O’Meara (New York: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 675.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1358.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 13.
Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (New York: Kessinger, 2004), 632.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, 93.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 158.