Allan Poe’s Practice on Single Effect in Short Stories
Binshi WANG Dianchi College, Yunnan University
hen the reader reads Poe’s tale, terror intrudes into his inmost heart in a subtle W way. The reader unconsciously follows Poe into the dreamlike psychological process of the protagonist and experiences some “heaviness”, “heaviness in the atmos- phere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant[1]”. This deep involvement of the reader is not achieved fortuitously. Instead, it’s the natural result of Poe’s deliberate planning of the theme, plot, and characters and the intentional use of linguistic tech- niques and other writing techniques. All elements in his story are so arranged only for one purpose—to involve the reader into appreciation of the work and create a united effect on the reader, that is, terror of the soul. 1. Poe’s Theory on Single Effect For Poe, an effect or an impression should be decided before the author begins to write. “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect”, says Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition”. This “impression, or effect” should be “universally ap- preciable [2]” A work should give the reader the “pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure”. Poe thinks this pleasure can be ex- perienced from reading a melancholy and terrifying story. After deciding what an effect a story will exert on the reader, the author has to coldly and deliberately plan his story “as an architect plans a building [3]”. In “Review on Hawthorne’s Twice- Told Tales”, Poe relates:
A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.
About the author: Binshi WANG, Female, Feb. 1983, Han, Yingjiang, Yunnan Associ- ate Professor Master English Teaching, British and American Literature.
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Poe believes that a well-digested general purpose has to be established first and then everything else should work for the effect including the theme, the setting, the character, the plot and every linguistic skill. “It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable wither to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid con- sequence of a mathematical problem”. Thus relates Poe his idea on the deliberate planning of the story in “The Philosophy of Composition”. A good story should have a preconceived effect and “no word should be then written which does not tend or form a part of a sentence which tends . . . to the strengthening of the effect[4]”. Only “with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction[5]”.
More than any other principle, Poe emphasized Single Effect that one should strive for in any work of art. In Poe’s critical writings occur and re-occur some words and phrases such as “to affect”, “the totality of impression”, “the unity of effect”, “the novelty of the effect alone” and “the unity of effect”, and so on. This exhibits the value of this principle for Poe. However, other three principles, Originality, Brev- ity and Totality, are closely related to the principle of Single Effect. First, Originality and Single Effect are closely related. Poe stresses the novelty of an effect. In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe says that he usually chooses “a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect” and considers all means that “best aid me in the construction of the effect.” The feeling of fear is the effect of most Poe’s stories exert on readers. The fear aroused by Poe’s story is more or less original. Reading Poe’s Gothic tale, the reader, undoubtedly, feels fear about the protagonist’s distorted psyche which the reader can not get by reading a conventional one; reading a detective tale, the reader shudders with the bloody and gloomy criminal scene at the same time as he gains great pleasure from his participation in the deduction. In a word, for a certain effect, Poe achieves some originality in his story writing; for originality, Poe aims his story at a unique effect. Secondly, Brevity contributes to Single Effect. In order to ensure “the intensity of the intended effect”, a story should have a perusal that can be com- pleted at one sitting; at the same time, “a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all[6]”. Lastly, Totality can be understood as the totality of the reader’s impression of a story. Poe repeats some words, phrases, images and settings to form a unified impression on the reader. Thus, we say, the principle of Single Effect is the most dominant in Poe’s story creation and the four principles all drive at the involvement of the reader. Poe carefully practises his reader-shoot system of principles in his story writing. He fixes psychological terror as the central effect of most his stories. Poe uses all possible means to arouse the reader’s fear.
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Allan Poe’s Practice on Single Effect in Short Stories
2. Poe’s Practice on Single Effect Poe believes, as far as the short story is concerned, the writer should aim at creating a single and total psychological effect upon the reader. Elements of a short story including the theme, plot, character, point of view and setting are always sub- ordinate to the author’s calculated construction of a single intense mood in the reader’s mind; the use of language should contribute to the building of the pre-designed effect; every possible writing technique should be used to imprint a certain impres- sion on the reader. Poe’s text is of absolute integrity, stimulating his readers’ mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties. Since the former three chapters of this thesis dis- cuss Poe’s arrangement of characters, point of view, setting and plot, this part ex- plores the favorite theme of Poe’s short stories, the musical language, and the use of correspondences in Poe’s stories. (1) Death Theme The theme is the basic idea of the story. A short story can concentrate around one specific theme or a sequence of themes related to one another. In Poe’s case, a single effect is more basic than the theme. Poe’s theme serves to arouse a certain effect in the reader’s heart. Fear is the effect most of Poe’s stories aim at. Poe creates an “undisputed domain of fear. Poe again and again tries to make us experience” a forceful terror[7]. In order to create the effect of terror, Poe often chooses death as the theme of his story. Poe mentions in “The Philosophy of Composition” that to write a great depressing work, one must use the best melancholy theme. Poe states, “Now, never losing sight of the object, supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself: ‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind is the most melancholy?’ ‘Death’ was the obvious reply”. Many Poe’s short stories have the dark theme of death. “Ligeia”, for instance, is a story about the death of the narrator’s first wife and her revival in the second wife’s corpse. Another ex- ample that Poe uses death as its terrifying theme is “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In this story, a man buried his sister alive and was killed at last by her after she gained resurrection. Moreover, “The Masque of the Red Death” is a typical example of Poe’s horror tales focused on death. The Red Death seemed omnipresent and even in the ball when people were supposed to have fun they could not escape from the presen- timent of death. Examples of Poe’s favor for death as the motif of his stories can also be found in many other short stories of his such as “Morrela”, “Berenice”, “The Tell- Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, “William Wilson”, and so on. Poe tries to expose the reader to great terror by relating different types of death: burying someone alive (i.e. “Ligeia”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”), killing someone without any reasonable motive (i.e.
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“The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”), and self-suicide (i.e. “William Wilson” about self-destruction and “The Tell-Tale Heart” about self-revelation).That Poe’s stories with the death theme successfully convey terror to readers supports his idea that death is the best topic to write about.
In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe states that an artistic piece should stimulate the reader’s “intense and pure elevation of soul.” The reader should get “pleasure” when reading a good piece of work. Some may doubt whether Poe’s story can give “pleasure” to the reader with the dark theme of death. In fact, though over- whelmed by fear when reading those stories with death theme, readers feel some secret attraction by them. This may find explanations considering Freud’s idea on death instinct which Poe’s idea shares some similarity with. According to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s later writing, one of the basic instincts to drive a per- son is the death drive. He believes that every person has an unconscious wish to die. He says, “ If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be com- pelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’ [8]”. Freud maintains that every one has the hidden desire to go back to a state of calm, or non-existence. He explains that this death wish is similar to the wish of migratory birds and fish to return to their primordial breeding grounds each year. He further theorizes that this death wish sometimes finds expres- sion in “our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in books or movies, our craving for rest and sleep”; some- times “it presents itself openly as suicide and suicidal wishes”; sometimes “we direct it out away from ourselves, in the forms of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destruc- tiveness[9]”. The death wish drives the protagonist in Poe’s story to behave as he does. Take “William Wilson” as an example. There are two characters with the same name in the story. One “Wilson” always showed antipathy for the other. This antipathy flared up into a bitter hatred so that one Wilson killed the other. In fact, these two Wilsons are one person[10]. In this sense, the person committed suicide psychologi- cally. That’s the natural result of the death wish. Another example to show Poe’s protagonist’s death wish can be found in “The Black Cat”. The narrator says, “From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my character . . . I was especially fond of animals”. After getting married, he had a cat and he took it as his “favorite pet and playmate”. But such a docile person became tempered one day and tortured the cat to death by bloody means. This is what Freud says that sometimes a person directs the death wish out in the form of cruelty. Besides, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator directed his death wish out in the form of murder and destruction. Just because his neighbour’s eye had unsettled his nerves, the narrator meticulously
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planned the murder and killed the neighbour who had never wronged him and whom he even loved. More thrilling, he asked the police to search the house thoroughly after the killing and then bade them to sit upon “the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim[11]”. At last, he could not help revealing his crime himself because he heard the beating of the victim’s heart “louder—louder—louder”. In fact, the beat of the heart was just in the narrator’s imagination and the police could not hear it at all. It was the instinct to destroy himself that caused him to convict himself. This is the feeling that “we stand upon the brink of a precipice”, knowing it will be suicide to jump off, yet we wonder “what would be our sensations during the sweep- ing precipitancy of a fall from such a height [12]”. The death instinct can explain the seemingly crazy behavours of the protagonists in Poe’s stories. It also gives expla- nations why Poe’s death motif can get readers deeply involved in. The reader expe- riences what the protagonist does when reading the story. He also has the impulse or the curiosity to experience the feeling of “jumping off a cliff”. Reading about an- other’s experience of “jumping off a cliff”, in some sense, can satisfy the reader’s own death wish. He certainly gains “pleasure” and “elevation of soul”. (2) Musicality of Language & Single Effect Poe uses some linguistic means to help create a certain atmosphere. The repeti- tion of words or phrases is one outstanding characteristic of Poe’s language which is discussed in chapter four. Here we shall look at another characteristic of Poe’s lan- guage, musicality. Poe believes in the power of music. He says, in “The Poetic Prin- ciple,” “It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the creation of supernal Beauty.” Here, “supernal Beauty” refers to “the elevation of soul,” that is, experience of pleas- ure. In his opinion, a work should stimulate the reader’s poetic sentiment and thus it can achieve the aim that the reader gains “the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense” pleasure. And using poetical language is a good strategy to produce this sentiment. One of the main characteristics of poetic language is musicality. He applies some devices to create musical language. One is the clever use of vowels and consonants. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of the best examples on this point. In the opening paragraph, Poe uses many words with long vowels and diph- thongs to shadow the reader a sense of dreariness, solitude and depression— “dur- ing”, “dull”, “dark”, “soundless”, “low”, “passing”, “alone”, “drew”, “gloom”, “mere”, “bleak”, “gray”, and so on. Words of “during”, “dull”, “dark”, and “day” in the first sentence all begin with the voiced consonant /d/, creating a sense of heavi- ness. “The moaning and grieved syllables strengthen the gloom of the House of Usher”, says Huang Huili[13]. “The Cask of Amontillado” also presents Poe’s delib- erate choice of syllables. In the first paragraph, the narrator tells about his motive to
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Creativity and Innovation Vol.3 No.1 2019 kill another man. He uses “injury”, “venture”, “insult”, “wow”, “revenge”, “threat”, “avenge”, “risk”, “punish”, “impunity”, “wrong”, “retribution”, etc. These words mostly contain short vowels and monophthong, revealing his eagerness to kill an- other man and playing up the tension. In a word, Poe makes effective use of proper vowels and consonants so that his language sounds musical. Another device Poe uses to colour his language with musicality is parallelism. “Parallelism is the repetition of syntactically similar constructions of coordinate sentences or phrases [14]”. The par- allel structures in Poe’s short stories are mainly the listing of adjectives, the listing of preposition phrases and parallel short sentences. Parallelism gives the rhythm of the language and contributes to the creation of some atmosphere. For example, “An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all; that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance” is a sentence from “The Fall of the House of Usher” with the listing of adjectives and help color the impres- sion with gloomy terror. Many similar examples can be found in other stories: “long, gorgeous, and all untradden path; the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and nat- urally-curling tresses,” “My memory flew back (oh, with what intensity of her lofty—her ethereal nature, of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, to entombed” (“Ligeia”); “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others; the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outburst of a fury” (“The Black Cat”); “there came to my ears a low, dull, pick sound” (“The Tell-Tale Heart”); “a painful, intense, and widely-extended excitement” (“The Prem- ature Burial”). Besides the listing of adjectives, the listing of preposition is com- monly seen in Poe’s stories: “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work”. (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), “I reveled in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her idolatrous love” (“Ligeia”); “there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of hor- ror, and of disgust” (“The Masque of Red Death”) Poe also applies the parallel short sentences to enrich the musicality of the language. The following sentences consist of parallel clauses: “I took from my waistcoat—pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I open the damnable atrocity” (“The Black Cat”); “Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expressions of the dead…” (“Ligeia”). All the parallelism used in Poe’s stories not only produces musical language but serves to create a certain atmosphere, so be tension, anxiety, madness or terror which all aim at the involvement of the reader. As Roger As- selineau says, “All the clever prosodic devices he (Poe) uses and sometimes invented were intended to hypnotize the reader by appealing most exclusively to his ear
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(which is the most passive of senses) and thus stir emotions and passions at a deep and almost elemental level [15]”. Because of the musical language, the reader, when reading Poe’s story, also experiences the pleasure as reading a poem. (3) Correspondences & Single Effect Poe uses any possible means to achieve a certain effect in his story. One notice- able writing technique he applies is “correspondences.” The most systemized theory on “correspondences” was from Charles Baudelaire, one of ancestors of French sym- bolism. When critics discuss about Baudelaire’s correspondences, a name, Edgar Al- lan Poe is never forgotten. Poe should owe his early reputation in France to Baude- laire who introduced Allan Poe to the European audience; Baudelaire derived some aesthetic ideas from Poe, too. In Poe’s artistic writings can some inspirations for Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences be found. The theory of correspondences is the cornerstone for Baudelaire’s aesthetic sys- tem. In his poem “Correspondences” Baudelaire expounds his theory of correspond- ences vividly, explicitly and concisely: Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes emit confused words; Man crosses it through forests of symbols That observe him with familiar glances. Like long echoes that mingle in the distance In a profound tenebrous unity, Vast as the night and vast as light, Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another. Some perfumes are as fresh as the flesh of children, Sweet as the sound of oboes, green as pastures And others corrupt, rich, and triumphant, Having the expanse of things infinite, Such as amber, musk, benzoic, and incense, That sing of the flight of spirit and the senses. In this poem, Baudelaire makes it clear that man’s senses are correspondent and that man and nature are correspondent. Poe has some similar ideas. In “The Poetic Principle,” Poe writes, “An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which he exists.” Poe believes the artistic piece should stimulate the reader’s pleasure and “manifold forms”, “sounds”, “odors”, and “sentiments” can provide this pleasure. In other words, men’s senses are correspondent to generate a certain effect, which Poe calls
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“the pleasure” or “the Poetic Sentiment”, on the audience. Poe continues, “The Po- etic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes—in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance—very especially in Music”. Here Poe fur- ther explains that all these artistic forms can be applied to help create a certain effect because men’s psychological world and the physical world are linked. Thus, we can see Poe mentions some basic ideas about correspondences in his “The Poetic Princi- ple”. Poe practises his idea of correspondences in his writings. He was well aware of the effects which colours and sounds can exert on the audience.
Given the use of colours and sounds, “The Masque of the Red Death” is one of Poe’s best stories. Poe creates a blurred dreamland atmosphere at first with the help of colours: It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven-an imperial suit… These windows (of the seven rooms) were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern ex- tremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple . . .
Poe describes eight rooms in detail. The rooms with different colours create an illusion and a sense of uncertainty in the reader’s heart. The reader feels curious about the weirdness of the rooms and is anxious to find out what happened in such strange rooms. The seventh room’s is emphasized: “The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes were scarlet-a deep blood color”. The tapestries in the room were black but the windows were scarlet. This hints darkly at strange events. The coluors of black and scarlet suggest something bad and bloody respectively. The reader’s curi- osity and imagination are easily stimulated at such impressive coloured scene. He is eager to figure out what would happen next but at the same time has a sinister fore- boding. Curiosity and dangling terror torture the reader. Then, the sounds made by “a gigantic clock of ebony” heightened the weird atmosphere and increased the un- easiness and terror in those in the masquerade. The reader becomes more disturbed and anxious as if he heard the toll of the bell. The reader joins those in the masquer- ade, experiencing what they did. “Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which
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was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical[16]”. The sounds made by the clock were so peculiarly penetrating that people in the masquerade stopped dancing and laughing whenever the clock struck the time. The reader also hears its sounds and disconcerts at them as if it is death-knell. The sounds and colors in this story brand a frightful impression on the reader. Also, they bear peculiar charm that attracts the reader to explore the story. Colors and sounds are effectively applied in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, too. At the beginning of the story, the reader is pulled into a place with “white” trunks of decayed trees, a “black” pond and “gray” sedge and walls on a “dark” day. The story is like a drawing without any light color hue until the appearance of Madeline Usher who was wearing a white robe with blood at the dark night. The blood is so harshly distinct that the reader is shocked together with Mr. Usher who buried Made- line alive. Accompanied with the hue effect is the sound effect. Every sound is clear and increases the audience’s uneasiness and fear. The reader hears the rustling of “the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the wind, swayed to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed”, “a cracking and ripping sound… amid the rattling of the windows, and the ordinary mixed noises of the still increasing storm”, and “a low and apparently distant, but harsh, most un- usual screaming sound[17]”. Colours and sounds in the story serve for the creation of terror in the reader’s heart. Many other examples of perfect use of colours and sounds can be found in Poe’s stories. Readers are overwhelmingly impressed with “the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth” of Berenice (“Berenice”), the descending pendulum whose “nether ex- tremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel” and the hisses it made “as it swung through the air” (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), the “bird-pale blue eye, with a film over it” of the old man and his heartbeat, “a low, dull, quick sound—like a sound a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), the “pan- demonium in petto” where “the fiddles shrieked—drum row-de-dowed—the trom- bones bellowed like so many brazen bulls of Phalaris” (“The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”), and the bug glittering like gold (“The Golden Bug”). In Poe’s stories, colours and sounds are deliberately chosen to work out some effect on the reader. Visioning the colour and hearing the sound as Poe deliberately plans, the reader de- velops some feeling the color and the sound are closely related to. The colors and sounds in Poe’s stories are endowed with feelings, which blurs the boundary between the physical reality and the psychological reality. This was Poe’s practice of his idea about what was developed into systemized theory of correspondences later by Bau- delaire.
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For Poe, a unified literary work is one in which every detail, with respect to both style and content, directly contributes to the creation of the total effect of the piece. Before he starts to write, the author should decide what effect his work will create and then carefully plan everything to achieve the effect. Poe’s theory is well practised in his own story writing. His stories and his theory well support each other. The reader experiences great pleasure in his participation in the story. He is usually impressed with the effect Poe aims to achieve.
Works Cited [1] Leonard Unger, ed. American Writers. Vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974), 417-18. [2] See Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition”. [3] L. Pattee, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: “Critical Assessments”. Vol. III, ed. Graham Clarke (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd. 1991), 301. [4] Ibid, 301. [5] Poe’s “Review on Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tale”. [6] Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition”. [7] Leonard Unger, ed. American Writers. Vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974), 414. [8] Sigmund Freud 1991a, 246. Emphasis in original,
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