Tales of Mystery and Imagination

By Edgar Allan Poe and John S. Whitley

With an Introduction by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex.

This collection of Poe's best stories contains all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories as 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart', all of Poe's Auguste Dupin stories are included.

These are the first modern detective stories and include 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' and 'The Purloined Letter'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848704046

Edgar Allan Poe

Born on January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe has become synonymous with writing described as mysterious and macabre. Also credited with originating the detective-fiction genre, Poe is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. A very celebrated poet, short story writer, and Gothic novelist, Poe died in 1849.

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TALES OF MYSTERY

AND IMAGINATION

Edgar Allan Poe

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Introduction and Notes by

John S. Whitley

University of Sussex

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Tales of Mystery and Imagination first published by

Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1993

Published as an ePublication 2011

ISBN 978 1 84870 404 6

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ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

with love from your wife, the publisher

Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

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Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

KEITH CARABINE

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

It has never been easy to give details of Poe’s life because he frequently fantasised (lied) about dates and places and he suffered from possibly the worst literary executor in history, Rufus Griswold, who sought every opportunity to blacken Poe’s name. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to actor parents who very soon died, whereupon the infant was taken in by John Allan, a merchant in Richmond, Virginia. He lived with the Allans, including a lengthy spell in England, until he was seventeen, thus acquiring a lifelong conception of himself as a Southern gentleman. A brief period as a student at the University of Virginia was followed by the publication, in 1827, of Tamerlane and Other Poems, a two-year spell in the army and the publication of Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in 1829. After less than a year at West Point (1830–1) he was expelled. A third volume of Poems appeared in 1831. The years in Baltimore, 1831–5, were characterised by poverty, marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, the friendship of the writer John Pendleton Kennedy and the commencement, with ‘Metzengerstein’ in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, in 1832, of the publication of his tales. In 1833 he won fifty dollars from the Baltimore Saturday Visitor for ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’.

He worked as an assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835–7, and published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1838, though, because he pretended only to be its editor, a typical Gothic trick, he earned no money from it. This was hard, for he and his family were extremely poor by this time. In 1839 he found a job as co-editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, where he continued his reputation as a brilliant but acerbic reviewer and literary theorist, and published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which was not a success. Fired from Burton’s because he would not stop drinking, he became a co-editor of Graham’s Magazine and his powers as a writer were at their height. During the next few years he published work steadily, including a collection of a dozen of his stories and The Raven and Other Poems, all in 1845. He also became sole owner of the Broadway Journal, a move which, like so many in his benighted life, turned out to be a failure. His drinking and ill-health increased in 1847, following the death of his wife, who had been a semi-invalid for a number of years. He managed to publish ‘Ulalume’ in 1847 and his remarkable work Eureka the following year. Amid a number of entanglements with women and following a brief adherence to the Temperance Movement, he died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore on 7 October 1849.

It should be said at this point that despite Poe’s ultimately considerable literary reputation, something he always felt he should have, he was a racist (witness Arthur Gordon Pym), a supporter of slavery, a snob (his detestation of mobs seems at times to edge over into a dislike of people), a user of drugs, an alcoholic, a paranoiac (while some of his feuds had substance, others did not) and a hysteric. None of this alters his literary stature one jot, but it does give strength to D. H. Lawrence’s dictum: ‘An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day.’ [1]

Poe’s major claim to fame is as the father of the short story. In November 1838 he published, in the American Museum, a piece entitled ‘The Psyche Zenobia’, which was later changed to ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’. This is a slight, rather wearying satire on the contemporary taste for ‘sensation’ stories, wherein the central character is found in a terrible predicament involving incarceration, torture or the threat of an awful death, his or her sensations as they happen being minutely described. The article shows that Poe had read much in British and American magazine fiction [2] because he uses the actual titles of fictions published in such magazines as Blackwood’s, Fraser’s and The London Magazine. He also satirises his own practices-to-be, for ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ are classic examples of the ‘sensation tale’. In America, Washington Irving had gained great prominence with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20, which seemed to indicate differences between a ‘sketch’ (brief, lacking in plot, the product of a sauntering observer, a forerunner of a story) and longer pieces, such as ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, where Irving becomes more interested in a historical approach, character delineation, mythic and cultural reference and a catching of some aspects of the national spirit. Irving begins ‘Rip Van Winkle’ by alluding to ‘the following tale’ and this is the most often used term for short fiction in the nineteenth century. Apart from the volume to which this is an introduction, Irving also published Tales of a Traveller (1824), Hawthorne, who was also very fond of the ‘sketch’, enjoyed considerable fame with his Twice-Told Tales (1837, enlarged in 1842) and Melville achieved some of his finest writing in The Piazza Tales (1856). Into the twentieth century Henry James, whose short fictions were often surprisingly long, and Sherwood Anderson continued to use the term, but from the middle of the nineteenth century the use of ‘story’ was gathering force, as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Marjorie Daw and Other Stories (1873) and Fitz James O’Brien’s The Diamond Lens with Other Stories (1885).

In 1884, Brander Matthews, a critic and story-writer, coined the term, ‘short-story’ [3] and Bret Harte, writing in The Cornhill Magazine in 1899, pointed out that the rise of the ‘new’ form had much to do with the development of American humorous ‘tall tales’ and the demand for ‘local colour’ stories, especially after the Civil War; stories that described the customs and speech of one part of the United States to the other parts, especially readers on the Eastern seaboard. Harte also remarks that the popularity of short fiction in the United States might lie in the limited amount of time available for perusing fiction among busy American readers: ‘perhaps the proverbial haste of American life was some inducement to its brevity’. [4] In 1930, John Cournos repeated this point: ‘the American temperament, evolved out of a preoccupation with concrete, practical matters, and a tendency to rush and hurry, demands its literature terse and to the point’; [5] and, much more recently, an American scholar has echoed this sentiment more colloquially: ‘The short story is better suited to our habits. Like the hamburger, it satisfies the appetites of those who eat and read on the run.’ [6]

The tale/short story can, indeed, be considered an almost indigenous American literary form. Consider how much the long fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner owes to their short fiction, sometimes rearranged for inclusion in their novels, and compare the respective outputs of comparable European prose fiction writers. In the nineteenth century, especially, major novelists such as Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës, Trollope and Thackeray show little accomplishment in short fiction. Hardy shows some, but one has to wait for Joseph Conrad before a major novelist is also a major writer of tales. The reasons for this state of affairs are rather more complicated than Harte and Cournos suggest. Short fiction flourished in the United States from an early point in the nineteenth century because that country had far more outlets for short fiction – in terms of magazines, journals, gift annuals, etc. – than existed in European countries, a situation which is still true to the present day. A look at the original publication details of Poe’s tales will help to illustrate this. He published stories and sketches in approximately thirty different outlets, including such stalwarts as Godey’s Lady’s Book, the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, the Democratic Review and the Broadway Journal.

The American novel was slow to develop in the first half of the nineteenth century because of the lack of an international copyright agreement (something not achieved until the 1890s) which meant that European novels could be swiftly reproduced without paying the authors any royalties. Scott was probably the worst sufferer and Dickens spoke publicly about this inequity during his 1842 visit to the United States. American novelists did have a national copyright agreement and so were much more expensive to publish, therefore it was somewhat harder for them to acquire a foothold. To be sure, American magazines clamoured for the creation of a truly national literature which would free American writers from the artistic shackles of the Old World. Since it was so difficult for this national voice to be transmitted through novels, the tale developed rapidly because American writers had few models to imitate and so were almost forced to experiment with shorter forms.

Since the Old World and its authority was firmly linked with the past, it is perhaps not surprising that the short story tends often to discard historical preambles, character background and social context. Brander Matthews suggests that the short story owes much to the notion of the three unities in drama: those of time, space and action. A play adhering to these unities would occupy approximately the same dramatic time as the real time of the audience, or, at least, no more than one day. The same set would be used throughout and there would be no sub-plots or deviations from the main narrative thrust. A good recent example would be Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother (1983). Matthews insists that the short story must have a ‘unity of impression’, obtained through ‘ingenuity, originality, and compression’. He asserts that the form must have a ‘subject’, a story to tell, a ‘plan’ if not a ‘plot’; because, while a sketch may be ‘still-life,’ in a short story ‘something always happens’. The short story, he says, ‘is one of the few sharply defined forms’, whereas the novel is often a ‘hybrid’. [7] These are all excellent points, but it has to be said that they were not, when Matthews made them, original points, for Poe had insisted on them forty years earlier.

Poe’s claim to be the father of the short story, especially in America, rests partly on the fact that he was its first theorist. Thus, at the same time as he was developing his artistry in short fiction and paving the way for others to follow, he was also mapping out the territory, fixing boundaries, naming routes, setting up a terminology for the exploration of short fiction. In a review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, first published in Graham’s Magazine in May 1842, [8] Poe praised Hawthorne’s originality, scorned contemporary critics for failing to evaluate his contribution to the bougeoning greatness of American literature, and analysed his success as a writer. Hawthorne’s greatest weakness, for Poe as for Henry James, was his strong penchant for allegory. Poe’s view is that allegory can only work at all if it constitutes a ‘very profound undercurrent’ which never distorts the surface of the narrative, never seeks to divert from or confuse the ‘unity of effect’ so essential to short fiction. In order to achieve this, the tale must be such as can be read in one sitting. Worldly interests intervene while a novel is being read, its rhythm is often dictated by the fact that it was originally published serially, in weekly or even monthly parts. It is too easy for the author to wander into sub-plots and digressions, as Sterne saw only too well. In reviewing Bulwer Lytton’s novel Night and Morning (1841), Poe expressed dismay at its ‘continual and vexatious shifting of scene’. [9]

Poe feels that during the perusal of a piece of short fiction, which he estimates at about an hour, the soul of the reader is in the writer’s control: nothing intervenes or distracts. Events and incidents move towards the ‘preconceived effect’ and every word written must work towards one conclusion. As he says of Hawthorne’s ‘The Hollow of the Three Hills’: ‘Every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell.’

While the highest idea of a poem is the idea of the Beautiful, Poe argues that the aim of the tale is Truth, and he points out that some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination, of formal reasoning power. Of course, he wrote several of these himself, but perhaps by ‘Truth’ he really meant the working of every part of the story – rhythm, plot, character, language, references – towards a denouement which ends the story logically, consistently and satisfactorily. Certainly, this definition cannot apply to his long story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but, in general, his best stories serve his precepts with wonderful fidelity.

An admirable example of Poe practising what he preaches can be seen in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, first published in Godey’s in November 1846. It comes, therefore, at a point late in Poe’s career and so can draw strength from aspects of intertextuality. As in several of his other stories, such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’, the opening seems to take us into a conversation between the narrator and someone whom he addresses as ‘you’. The narrator is unburdening himself. The listener who knows so well the narrator’s soul may be a priest or a doctor or a friend, but, principally, s/he is the reader, who is made privy to the protagonist’s innermost fears and desires, as in sensation tales. Poe, however, goes beyond the lurid details of these hack stories to carefully stated suggestions of abnormal psychology. The description of the proper requirements for revenge in the opening paragraph intimate a psychopathology as intense as the obsession in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ or the hallucinatory experience in ‘Ligeia’. Indeed, it could be argued that the figure represented by ‘you’ is being invited to watch a performance, to collaborate with the central protagonist in the extended ‘joke’ being played on Fortunato. The second paragraph of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ creates a link between the narrator and Fortunato – their connoisseurship in wine. Our finding out, a page or so later, that they have similar names, Fortunato and Montresor, reminds the reader of Poe’s use of doubles in ‘William Wilson’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Purloined Letter’ and ‘Ligeia’. Fortunato seems to have a higher social status which Montresor might have had, or used to have (‘you are happy, as once I was’) and Fortunato is walled up in the deepest, darkest and smallest part of the Montresor vaults. As in the Gothic imagination, Poe’s vaults are images of the subconscious/unconscious where aspects of the protagonist’s life lie, or refuse to lie, buried: thus Madeline in the Usher vault, the old man beneath the floorboards, the murdered wife in the cellar, the inhabitant of the oblong box. In reality, or in conscience, or in memory, the dead will not lie still. Fortunato is a drunk and the story has a good deal of reference to alcohol and its muddling of the wits. Is Montresor the cold, rational part expelling that which causes chaos in his brain? To the end, the two protagonists are inextricably linked:

A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated – I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-echoed – I aided – I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.

Once again, Poe has narrowed the action, physically and mentally, to the smallest compass. Montresor has difficulty ridding himself of the hated ‘other’ and even for a moment believes that, somehow, that other self has managed to evade destruction. He shouts it down desperately, just as the narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ finally leaps on his victim ‘With a loud yell’. The final, terrible joke, ‘Let us be gone’, thus has considerable reverberation at the end of the story. Since it seems that Montresor has been haunted by his crime for fifty years, neither can be said to have rested in peace.

It is carnival season, when Misrule rules and mirth and conviviality are triumphant on the surface. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, discussing the emergence of the dialogic novel, in which various points of view are presented without any unificatory strategies, uses the term ‘carnival’ to posit a literary world in which authoritarian structures which presuppose the existence of hierarchy and unity are thoroughly subverted. [10] Carnival here could be said to mean just the opposite. Here drink creates a fool and the only mirth is ‘a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head’. Alcohol causes misrule, that is a failure to rule oneself, and hence has to be shut up forever. Just as the two central characters move remorselessly towards the point of doom, so laughter becomes increasingly hollow, attenuated, deranged, until it tails off to nothing. Montresor is in complete control and so there is no subversion of authority, only its enhancement. Poe was always concerned with the acquiring of unity, however painfully, and here all features point the same way. The puns are way stations: ‘Medoc’, ‘De Grave’, ‘mason’; irony piles on irony: the vaults are encrusted with nitre which might, under different circumstances, be made to have a medicinal effect; nemo me impune lacessit [11] is, most emphatically, not a motto anyone should forget, and it is Montresor whose heart grows sick, though it is Fortunato who coughs. In the space of five and a half pages, Poe succeeds both in anticipating the modern views of the fragmentation of personality and demonstrating the value of his own views of fiction. The reader may also, through perusal of this kind of story, see the great value of sensational fiction to writers who were, as yet, bereft of models for dealing with social fiction at a time when America lacked a society of sufficient density to make such writing more than barely feasible.

Since the 1950s, Edgar Allan Poe has, like so many classic American writers, become an academic industry. A visit to a university library will reveal volumes examining French criticism of Poe; Poe in Russia; the image of Poe in American poetry; Poe and the British magazine tradition; the Scandinavian response to Poe; Poe, Lacan and Derrida; and one ‘simply’ called Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (presumably because the author, like his subject, believed in the powers of incantation). Yet for most people it surely remains the case that Poe has two great claims to fame. The first is that, in his three Dupin stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’; ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’; and ‘The Purloined Letter’, as well as the cipher tale, ‘The Gold Bug’, and the least-likely-suspect story, ‘Thou Art The Man’, he laid the foundations for the subsequent development of the detective story. Poe can be credited with the creation or very early refinements of the locked-room convention; the Olympian detective; the less-than-brilliant associate and chronicler; the linguistic and visual puzzle; the easily dismissed police force; the murder as disruption of a small town; and the solving of crime as an intellectual exercise.

The second claim to fame is that he is one of the greatest of all writers of horror stories; not merely because he made more sophisticated the elements he took from the European Gothic tradition, such as subterranean dangers, the ‘femme fatale’ (literally so in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’), burial alive, ghosts, excessive curiosity, the curse from the past and exotic locales; but because he fashioned those elements into a remarkable investigation of abnormal psychological states and obsessional behaviour (what he chose to call ‘the imp of the perverse’). In his Preface to the original edition of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) he asserted that ‘terror is not of Germany, but of the soul’, thus immediately distancing himself from what he saw as outdated Gothic paraphernalia. The Gothic novel served as a major model for the early development of fiction in America. In Cournos’s interesting 1930 collection, [12] I find that the first two stories, ‘Peter Rugg, The Missing Man’ by William Austin (1824) and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ by Washington Irving (1819), both use the old Gothic notion of the man who defies a higher power and loses his place in the normal flow of time and in each case misses the change from colony to new nation; an excellent example of the way in which a popular literary formula was used to air the stresses and nostalgias of contemporary life. One of the earliest published American novelists, Charles Brockden Brown, was a fully-fledged Gothic novelist, whose works substituted Indians for the demons of European Gothic; where humble two-storey wooden edifices, far from crumbling ruins, still hold terrors from the European past, and where the chaos of the plot mirrors the chaos of the first decades after the War of Revolution, when there seemed to be little tradition and few recognised moral and political codes to work with. Similarly, one does not have to read far into the tales and novels of a much greater American nineteenth-century writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to see how heavy was the influence of the European Gothic on his writing. [13] The curse from the past, a staple of Gothic fiction, is underlined relentlessly by the predicaments of Poe’s protagonists. So many of them are haunted and destroyed by spectres from their past lives and one can see here how the early American writers’ reliance on Gothic models underlined both the thinness of their contemporary culture and their fears that the war of revolution had not eradicated old evils, but only found ways of domesticating them.

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is an excellent example of Gothic elements narrowed down to the smallest possible compass in order to emphasise the narrator’s horrifying descent into madness. The castle becomes two small rooms, the subterranean caverns become the small space under a few floorboards, the cast of characters is limited to two (of whom one could, just possibly, be a figment of the other’s imagination) and the past is discounted as any explanation of the narrator’s obsession: ‘It is impossible to say how the idea entered my brain, but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.’ Even when he seems to be more obviously indebted to European models, as in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the Gothic drama is soon internalised, since the allegorical links between Gothic architecture and the structure of the human consciousness, always lurking less or more plainly in earlier narratives, are here made manifest, both by the description of the house itself and the rather intrusive poem ‘The Haunted Palace’, as well as the small cast of three; allowing for a reading which sees Roderick as the human intellect torn between rationality (the narrator) and ideality (Madeline) [14] – a struggle which is far from equal. Poe can also leave the reader poised between psychological and ‘Gothic’ readings, as in ‘Ligeia’, where it is likely that the narrator has created a milieu where it is possible for him to hallucinate the presence of his first wife, even by killing his second, but where it is equally possible that Ligeia, through the sheer force of her will, returns from the dead to take over Rowena’s body. It is the ‘Gothic’ readings, of course, which so appealed to the American film director, Roger Corman, in a series of movies based on Poe’s stories which were released between 1960 and 1965.

It has often been asserted that there are, therefore, two Poes; the writer of tales of imagination, where the irrational reigns supreme, and the writer of mystery tales whose cardinal emphasis is on the operation of the reasoning faculties. This seems to me to be the same kind of simplification as saying that there are two John Donnes, the writer of love poems and the composer of religious poetry. Just as Donne takes an attitude of jokey adoration toward his beloved(s), so his devotion to God is frequently couched in the passion, wit and startling wordplay of his more material relationships. There is only one John Donne and all his work shares in his struggles towards what he conceives as an ideal state; so it is with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to start with Poe’s least accessible work, Eureka, a Romantic prose-poem-cum-philosophical-and-mathematical treatise on the nature of the universe, first published in 1848. This long work is impossible to summarise in the brief space of this introduction: suffice it to say that Poe’s view of the universe is at once highly sophisticated and profoundly simple. The reason for this is that Poe is dissatisfied with recent theories of cosmogony, including the basic regularity of the Newtonian universe, and, therefore, he anticipates Einstein in discussing the finiteness of space and time. But his insistence on the original unity of the universe is really the final gesture of the Romantic imagination. Just as Wordsworth could talk about that which we half-perceive and half-create and Coleridge could argue that the outside world only becomes alive through the shaping spirit of the poet’s imagination, so Poe felt that the prime impulse of the artist must be towards restoring an original unity to the chaos which seems to surround the poetic spirit. Thus, at the very beginning of Eureka, he likens the artistic impulse to a person spinning round on his heel at the top of Mount Etna so as to obtain a dizzy blending of the formally disparate elements of the scene into a vertiginous whole. He repeatedly insists on the need for a leap of imagination or ‘faith’ to understand the operations of the universe and this is demonstrated in the texture of his prose:

Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms point to a common parentage? Does not a sympathy so omniprevalent, so ineradicable, and so thoroughly irrespective, suggest a common paternity as its source? Does not one extreme impel the reason to the other? Does not the infinitude of division refer to the utterness of individuality? Does not the entireness of the complex hint at the perfection of the simple? It is not that the atoms, as we see them, are divided or that they are complex in their relations – but that they are inconceivably divided and unutterably complex: it is the extremeness of the conditions to which I now allude, rather than to the conditions themselves. In a word, not because the atoms were, at some remote epoch of time even more than together – is it not because originally, and therefore normally, they were One – that now, in all circumstances – at all points – in all directions – by all modes of approach – in all relations and through all conditions – they struggle back to this absolutely, this irrelatively, this unconditionally One? [15]

Note how the reader is lulled here by the familial references, by the balance of words, ‘entireness. . . . perfection’, but, most of all, by the insistence, in both the thought and language of this passage, of the extremeness of Poe’s imaginative creations (an orang-utan; whirlpools; plagues; wind machines which make the curtains move; journeys into strange and irregular lands; premature burials). There is, then, an extreme oneness involved in the stories: the vampiric-seeming Madeline Usher literally falls on top of her brother Roderick, and they both expire at the same moment (followed immediately by the house crumbling into its inverted image in the tarn); the magical conditions of a pentagonal chamber create a situation where the ‘hyacinthine’-haired Ligeia merges with the fair-haired Lady Rowena; the coat of arms of the Montresors – ‘a huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel’ – supports enticingly the idea of the double that I have already outlined as crucial to an understanding of that story. [16] And, finally, premature burial approaches as close to a oneness with death as is humanly possible (without dying). Thus Poe, like Shelley, recorded the ‘desire of the moth for a star’, the effort of the Romantic artist to create the journey towards, and sometimes the arrival at, a supernal realm of the imagination; but, for Poe, the search is very dangerous and the result might well be horrific. Keats longed for death, but Poe was less sure. The end of the search might be the Domain of Arnheim:

There is a gush of entrancing melody; . . . there is a dreamlike intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees, bosky shrubberies, flocks of golden and crimson birds, lily-fringed lakes, meadows of violets, tulips, poppies . . . [17]

but is more likely to be a plunge into an abyss; a drop into a pit containing who knows what horrors; incarceration in some dreadful darkness; or even, in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, merely ‘detestable putrescence’.

The oneness is as applicable to the detective stories as to the horror tales. In Eureka, Poe, despite a good deal of scorn aimed at the philosophers who deal only in facts (‘a more intolerable set of bigots and tyrants never existed on the face of the earth’), [18] seeks to combine scientific observation with poetic leaps of the imagination. Similarly, Dupin, Poe’s great detective, makes such a leap with no difficulty. In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ he remembers the great French thief-taker/detective, Vidocq, and his limitations:

He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing, he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole.

This could also be said of the French police in ‘The Purloined Letter’, who search the apartment with absolute thoroughness but fail to see the letter in the letter-rack because they have not obtained any conception of the room. They are easily outdone by Dupin, who finds the letter because he has a notion of the room as a whole, he sees the oneness of the room. One is reminded here of Mark Twain’s view of Sherlock Holmes’s success rate:

Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can’t detect a crime except where he plans it all out beforehand and arranges the clues and hires some fellow to commit it according to instructions. [19]

There is a real sense, then, in these stories that the world goes according to Dupin’s view of how it should go.

Oneness, in Poe’s stories, comes often from a rapacious curiosity. In this, Poe adapted a borrowing from the European Gothic tradition, wherein curiosity is both the motor force of the plot and the Achilles’ heel of the central protagonist. In The Monk (1796), such a desire to know hands the hero into the clutches of the Devil and a grisly end; in Caleb Williams (1794), the hero’s quest for the truth about his employer, Falkland, is compared to Pandora’s opening of the dreaded box; and Vathek’s quest for knowledge, in William Beckford’s novella of that name (1786), leads to damnation because

Such shall be the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge . . . [20]

For Poe, curiosity fits much less easily into any pattern of transgression and punishment. No condemnation of the narrator of ‘Ligeia’ occurs, despite the possibility that he has murdered his wife; the narrator of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, despite his semi-conscious desire to merge with whatever horrors exist at the bottom of the pit, is given a last-minute, tongue-in-cheek rescue by deus ex machina; the narrator of most of ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ emerges from the abyss with his hair changed from ‘raven-black’ to ‘white’ but with a strong ability to tell his tale. To know can lead to horror, just like the desire for oneness (at its limit, this merging can only come through death), but it can also lead to an escape from this humdrum world of facts.

I have already mentioned that Poe is revered as a great American writer, but that estimate raises obvious problems, for how far can Poe be seen as American? His stories are usually set in some imaginary or at least unnamed land. Where is the House of Usher? Perhaps it is best to say that most of his tales and poems occur in a place he locates, in ‘Dream-land’, ‘Out of SPACE – out of TIME’. When he wishes to use an actual place for the location of memory, he uses the ‘Old World’ of England (‘William Wilson’); when he wants to create a city detective he invents a Frenchman and places him in Paris, even making mistakes when he transposes the events of a real American murder case to France in ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’; and on the rare occasion when he wants to use a story to illuminate a growing problem of anomie and identity in the growing cityscape, he chooses London (‘The Man of the Crowd’). In the present volume, the only stories which set foot in the United States are ‘The Gold Bug’, which almost immediately leaves Charleston for an island off the coast of South Carolina, and ‘The Oblong Box’, which very soon sets sail for the open sea. Mention might be made, however, of the last tale in this volume, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, which turns out to be an arch and half-hearted satiric allegory of Poe’s view of American politics. The subject-matter of the last-named tale thus makes it very unusual among Poe’s works; for the reader scans his writings almost in vain for references to American history or biography or politics or, indeed, American literature. We are reminded of Poe’s wranglings with the East Coast literati [21] and the fact that Walt Whitman was the only American writer to attend his funeral – and he refused to say anything.

Yet perhaps the very fact of Poe’s isolation from American society and culture may be most important. The period in which he wrote, the 1830s and 1840s, was a disputatious, bustling period, probably like many other periods in American history, and the artist seems to have needed persistently to justify his/her existence. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson had firmly enunciated the authority of the poet:

The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart. [22]

For Emerson, the natural world of the American landscape was not merely fit and proper matter for the artist, but a glorious field for the accomplishments of a national literature. The Oversoul flows through nature and man alike, so that literature can be a natural expression of an essential harmony. The ‘integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects’ is clarified by the poet, ‘whose eye can integrate all the parts’. [23] For Poe, this was a mistaken notion. In ‘The Landscape Garden’ (1842), later expanded into the much more famous ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ (1847), he insisted on the essential alienness of nature:

In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess – many excesses and defects. While the component parts may exceed, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of the parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence, in what is technically termed the composition of a natural landscape. [24]

In other words, Poe believes in the Olympian position of the artist, not as a namer of beauty, but as a creator of order from crude, chaotic materials.

But in the ‘Custom-House’ introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne (only partly as a joke) fears the reaction of his Puritan forebears to his literary calling:

A writer of storybooks! What kind of a business in life, – what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, – may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! [25]

It was hard to be a writer in America. In a time of a rapidly expanding economy, individualism might too often mean opportunism and greed; scientific achievements and the expansion of American society across the continent bolstered a progressive and aggressive epoch. The public, political voice of America was, therefore, one of boundless optimism. A piece in the Democratic Review in 1839 believed that, since the War of Revolution, the United States had achieved ‘progress in all the substantial elements of national grandeur which is believed to have had scarce a parallel in the annals of mankind’. [26] Writers, as they are wont to do, tended to show the darker side of this optimism. James Fenimore Cooper remarked, in Home As Found (1838): ‘ . . . the mass has become so consolidated that it no longer has any integral parts, . . . the individual is fast losing his individuality in a common identity’. [27] Emerson found, in ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), that: ‘The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man;’ [28] and Thoreau, in Walden(1954), felt that: ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ [29]

Poe, like many of his contemporaries, desired a national literature which ‘sustains our own men of letters, upholds our own dignity, and depends upon our own resources’, but he took issue with the notion that American literature should confine itself to the treatment of American themes, for ‘the world at large is the only legitimate stage for the autorial histrio’. [30] Following the view of the European Romantics that the artist is a privileged genius, Poe created his own world, of enclosed spaces, otherworldly terrains, abnormal psychology, drug-induced hallucinations, the drift towards madness and death. Like Charles Brockden Brown before him, though with much greater skill, he indicated that the sins and guilts of the Old World could, like men, goods and ideals, cross the ocean. He showed an alternative to the optimism, complacency and materialism of his age, a dream of beauty and primal unity which always contained the probability of terror and darkness. Few people at the time heeded him, but since his death, and particularly in the twentieth century, his voice has been widely heard and recognised, like those meaningful shapes from the past so beloved of Gothic writers.

John S. Whitley

School of English and American Studies

University of Sussex

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Garden City, New York 1951, p.12

2 See Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, New York 1969.

3 Brander Matthews, ‘The Philosophy of the Short-story’ reprinted in Hollis Summers (ed.), Discussions of the Short Story, Boston 1963, pp.10–14

4 Bret Harte, ‘The Rise of the Short Story ’, reprinted in Summers, pp.5–9

5 John Cournos (ed.), American Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century, London 1930, p.v

6 Max Putzel, Genius of Place: William Faulkner’s Triumphant Beginnings, Baton Rouge 1985, p.xiii

7 Summers, pp.10–14

8 Poe’s comments on Hawthorne, from which these points are taken, can be found, for convenience, in Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Poems and Selected Essays (ed. Richard Gray), Everyman, London 1993 pp.240–52.

9 in Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 10 (ed. James A. Harrison), New York 1965 (originally published in 1902), p.123

10 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. R.W Rotsel), Ann Arbor, Michigan 1973.

Reviews for Tales of Mystery and Imagination

[Cazadoradelibros · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The extraordinary narratives of the most universal writer of North American literature are a paradigm of originality and mastery in storytelling in the 19th century. Poe explores madness, death, pain, cruelty, the killing instinct, physical and moral disintegration, loneliness, isolation, and the duplicity of human nature. In a display of mastery in creating atmospheres, the writer outlines the psychology of characters anguished by nightmares, fantasies, and fears that undoubtedly foreshadow the contradictions of contemporary humanity.

What will you find in this collection of stories? Some of his tales, such as "The Black Cat," represent the raw states of dementia and despair in humans. A more detective-like profile is preserved in stories like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Murder of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter." The common denominator of most of his stories is the creation of atmospheres charged with madness, suspense, terror, and death—the aspect that I loved the most about them.

So far, my favorite story is "The Black Cat." I never tire of reading it due to its enveloping atmosphere and the protagonist's stark madness. I can undoubtedly say that reading Poe is a marvel (especially in English), as his prose is very rich, and the passages he narrates are so vivid that you will feel transported to each environment.

Another aspect I loved was the way he manages to convey the anguish or feelings of the characters without unnecessary fluff; the descriptions didn’t feel heavy to me, and some, despite their brevity, achieve their goal: to put you in the shoes of those who experience them.

I consider this pillar of literature an essential and highly recommended read because of his significant influence on other authors like Borges, H.P. Lovecraft, and Conan Doyle, as well as his mastery in depicting those dark aspects of existence. (Translated from Spanish)

[JavooA · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

mystery and dark romanticism 10/10 (Translated from Spanish)

[Mane MH · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poe's writing style, considering he was an author from the early 19th century, is more than remarkable. The edition I read starts with a prologue briefly summarizing the writer's biography, and after having read all the stories, it highlights his experiences in each of them. The vocabulary is exquisite, and the book is of great cultural and literary interest. The story I liked the most is "The Gold Bug." A masterpiece that should not be missing from any respectable library. I emphasize that for greater enjoyment of the stories, it’s better not to read them all in a row, as it can become "saturating." (Translated from Spanish)

[Taurus83 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A classic that is indispensable in every library. (Translated from Spanish)

[Merln · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was the first book by Poe that I read, and I was fascinated. His style is unique. My favorite story from his collection is "The Cask of Amontillado" or "A Descent into the Maelström." A tormented genius. (Translated from Spanish)

[TatianaHerondale · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was a bit disappointing since I had heard a lot about this author, but sometimes I found it difficult to understand the stories; the type of writing isn't my style, and I'm sorry, but this has been the only book that I've almost fallen asleep with every time I tried to get through it. What I must say is that his stories, for the most part, if not all, are quite original. (Translated from Spanish)

[Aurinka · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I finished this small collection days ago, and sadly, I was quite disappointed.
I had never read Poe, and seeing how popular he is around here, I decided to give it a try.
Out of the 5 stories it contains, at least in my edition, the ones I somewhat enjoyed are "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The rest were little to nothing.
Without a doubt, Poe's descriptions are extraordinary, but in some stories, I feel he has overdone it, resulting at times in being very heavy.
Maybe I’ll give it another chance later on. (Translated from Spanish)

[AndreaLosLibrosdeAndreaCanaldeYouTube · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of short stories that evoke different emotions, the reader is able, so to speak, to "live" what they read! Excellent. (Translated from Spanish)

[CondeD · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poe is quite an artist when it comes to expressing not so much the fear of death (or at least that's how I've seen it) but the fear of madness, the fear of losing oneself; he states it in "The Premature Burial": "For, in truth, the genuine pain, the peak of suffering is individual, not collective." Moreover, surely the only story where madness does not equate to terror but to genius is "The Gold Bug," but in any case, the anguish would be suffered by those who do not understand the degree of genius of William Legrand.

Then there are very enigmatic stories in their meaning, such as "The Sphinx." Considering the explanation given about democracy in this tale, the vision of the Sphinx butterfly would serve as a symbol to demonstrate that opinions and points of view vary not only depending on the person but also on the time, something that seems more than obvious were it not for Poe using the element of fear, in this case, towards the sphinx; the vision of the monster seems to me a metaphor for discussing the difference in perceptions because if the protagonist's guest in the story is not frightened by seeing the Sphinx, it is simply because their perception is different.

Of course, there are stories where he criticizes society for its indifference towards the misfortunes of others, as in "MS. Found in a Bottle" (in fact, I wonder if Poe identified at some point with that occupant of the ship that the rest of the sailors seemed not to see). But if I have to choose one story, it is undoubtedly "The System of Doctor Brean and Professor Plum." Rarely have terror and comedy combined so well in a tale. (Translated from Spanish)

[Marypb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good book, however, the way some chapters are written can be confusing for some people, but after all, everyone understands in their own way and sees the book from another perspective, perhaps of horror or mystery. But overall, it is one of my favorite books. The only bad thing is that the author writes good books but had a tragic life like many other writers and is not always recognized. Anyway, thank you for allowing me to read this story again, regards. (Translated from Spanish)

[Chachán · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting collection of stories that recounts many horrors and traumas. I was very captivated by "The Tell-Tale Heart" as it illustrates very well what madness and despair are. (Translated from Spanish)

[Monika · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A must-have if you like Poe. Short, macabre stories from the era. (Translated from Spanish)

[Jose Mariano H · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A phenomenal work, it consists of eight stories by Edgar Allan Poe, unsettling tales with very good illustrations, and includes a brief overview of the life and work of the American writer. (Translated from Spanish)

[Littlecrow17 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simply beautiful, from start to finish; without a doubt, the exquisite narration by Poe combined with the captivating illustrations by Benjamín Lacombe is one of the best combinations that will set your imagination flying and make you feel like you have a treasure in your hands. It also includes notes and reviews that will be very useful for those who are not familiar with the literature that Edgar consumed in his time and to which he makes various references in his short stories and novels. It also gives us a glimpse into his life, as well as that of Julio Cortázar who brought us his literature in our language, Charles Baudelaire who was one of the first to value, admire, and compile his works as well as write about his life without diminishing him as many did, and the artist who brings these Macabre Tales to life with a unique style that will be etched in my memory. Without a doubt, this book is a unique experience that readers of Poe, horror, suspense, and mystery cannot miss. (Translated from Spanish)

[Antoine Lennox · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A unique terror that may be difficult to react to today, but reflects the fears of the time. (Translated from Spanish)

[dayanapalencia · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent collection. Comprehensive and easy to read, with beautiful illustrations. (Translated from Spanish)

[jcadenah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A gem of horror and mystery stories, suspense is present throughout the book. A pleasant and entertaining read. (Translated from Spanish)

[AnaOlS · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How great is Edgar Allan Poe.
I highly recommend this illustrated edition because Benjamin Lacombe is an excellent illustrator. (Translated from Spanish)

[mapau0509 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is an extraordinary compilation, leaving you pondering contingencies when you close the book. As always, with an incredible narration that keeps you attentive to every detail the characters present, thanks to the precise description used.

As always, Poe is the best. (Translated from Spanish)

[angelitobook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's a book that I found excellent; I loved this author and his way of writing. It consists entirely of stories in the gothic or horror/suspense style. It compiles the stories written by this author. That's why it's a very enjoyable and pleasant read. Also, if you don't have much time or are reading other things, this book is very convenient because it contains 14 stories, so you can read the one that catches your attention the most and then put the book down and pick it up again whenever you like. I really liked that it has a variety of stories, as some are very short and others a bit longer, some are more suspenseful, and others more in the horror style. There are also some that are detective stories, investigative in nature. So it’s a book that can appeal to different literary tastes. It's one of the best I've read so far, and I really recommend it. (Translated from Spanish)

[GabG · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An extraordinary book, Poe has the ability to captivate the reader from beginning to end, his writing style and that characteristic "dark romanticism." Among the readings I had, the ones I liked the most were: The Raven, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, and The Black Cat. (Translated from Spanish)

[Roger L. Chico · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Master. (Translated from Spanish)

[olicantarella03 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, after about two months I finished this hefty book. Edgar Allan Poe shows us that he is the king of suspense and descriptions. I give it three stars because sometimes I had to use my last brain cell at full speed to understand what I was reading, but it was worth it by the end of the story because each one leaves you with a bad taste due to the murky nature of each ending and a surprise from the plot twists. As for the poems, there was no point; I read them just to read them, but I'm not one to enjoy poems, so maybe you will like them. (Translated from Spanish)

[Tina Glez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The macabre, the dark, the inexplicable... all at once, explained by the marvelous pen of Poe. (Translated from Spanish)

[BookFanMx · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Starting with a beautiful edition ?
I didn't know several of the stories in this edition, but my favorite part was learning more about the life of Edgar Poe and the history of his works. (Translated from Spanish)

[Caritoflor89 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extraordinary Narratives by Edgar Allan Poe
I recommend it to readers as it will give them a slight chill and a light shiver...typical of the writer who, in my opinion, was a genius of psychological horror...
Closed and claustrophobic spaces, more mysterious tombs, eerie hallucinations, and psychological pressure are some of the tools the author uses to inspire different feelings in each reader, while we enjoy his works...

The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Raven are my favorite stories... but I love all of his tales.

It is a chilling book, ideal for reading in small doses... I advise purchasing the ? from the BookTrade publisher; it is one of the best editions and its illustrations are fantastic.... (Translated from Spanish)

[AngelaRTeran · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As if you didn't know me by now, I want to start the review by talking about the book's edition. In a large format with hardcover and pages in white, black, or gray, this collection of eight stories by the renowned horror writer E. A. Poe is presented to us. Additionally, it is an illustrated book by Benjamín Lacombe, who, for those of you who have seen his work, you will know is always beautiful and a bit disturbing too! The stories found in this volume are:
- Berenice
- The Black Cat
- The Fairy's Island
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- The Oval Portrait
- Morella
- Ligeria
I will not review each story here. I have already done that separately for each story in case you want to check it out. In addition to the stories, at the end, there is a biography of the author, illustrations of Lacombe's creation process, and more content. (Translated from Spanish)

[SuperPerrete · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading sometimes felt a bit dense to me; I already have a concept of Poe. The best stories, in my opinion, are at the end of the book. (Translated from Spanish)

[amorporloslibrosok · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extraordinary Narratives

I love it. Their narrative makes me experience spine-chilling, terrifying, and mysterious moments, and sometimes mixed with adventures and love.

I feel like I can't say anything more about my feelings and experiences regarding these readings. Without a doubt, it gives me goosebumps and I suffer through the stories as if I were inside them.

Without a doubt, Poe is a master. (Translated from Spanish)

[Laurivas.mislibros · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the different stories a lot, of terror, suspense, horror; this genius writer surprises in most of his stories with his creativity and ingenuity... In many cases, he plays with madness and reality, generating in the reader a feeling of uncertainty and spatial disorientation. Have you read any of his stories? Don't miss them! (Translated from Spanish)