Recovery of the Ground in Eureka, Poe's Cosmogonic Myth
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DESCENT: RECOVERY OF THE GROUND IN EUREKA, POE'S COSMOGONIC MYTH by Susan Elizabeth McCaslin B.A., University of Washington, 1969 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English @ SUSAN ELIZABETH McCASLIN, 1973 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY March 1973 ~llrights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name : Susan Elizabeth McCaslin Degree: Master of Arts Title of Thesis: Descent: Recovery of the Ground in Eureka, Poe's Cosmogonic Myth Examining Committee: Chairman: Stephen A. Black Robin Blaser Senior Supervisor / Robert H.. ~t'nham Evan Alderson Warren Tallman Associate Professor University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. Date Approved: March 19, 1973 PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis or dissertation (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of ~hesis/~issertation: Descent: Becsvcq of the Ground in Eureka, Toe's Cosmogonic Myth Author: . .. L' (signature) Susan Elizabeth McCaslin (name ) April 16, 1973 (date) ABSTRACT Poe was not "a fault of nature," "a find for French eyes," ripe but unac'countable, as through our woollyheadedness we've sought to designate him, but a genius intimately shaped by his locality and time. It is to save our faces that we've given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape. (IAG,216) The depth and seriousness of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as an American writer has been largely unappreciated up until the publication of William Carlos Williams' essay, "Edgar Allan Poe," in In the American Grain (1925), where Williams moves towards a definition of Poe's "originality" . "in its original sense of solidity which goes bac-k to the ground, a conviction that he can judge for himself." (1~~~216)Williams argues that the French were ready to receive the fruits of Poe's labours to shape a conscious methodology of poetry, while his contemporaries in America sought from the beginning to reduce the breadth and complexity of Poe' s work to "the grotesque and arabesque," and the man himself to a psychological "case." While Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941) corrected most of the fallacies centering around Poe's life, the larger problem of the work remained, In 1959, however, the appear- ance of Richard Wilbur's clear-sighted discussion of Poe's conscious use of symbol and myth in the Laurel edition of the poems, forced a reconsideration of the works in terms of a development and a wholeness of vision. I will be moving out from the work of Williams and Wilbur to argue that the poems and tales do propose a wholeness--that there is a gradual development in Poe's thought and method which finds its completion in his cosmic myth, Eureka (1848), written at the end of his life. It is in Eureka that Poe draws together the fragments of a cosmology implicit in the poems and tales. It is my purpose not only to show that Eureka is the issue of the work that precedes it, but also to demonstrate that it falls into the ancient tradition of LL--- 1- - - - . cosiri~gonicpoetry. LUU~uec;un~es buiil the culmination of Poe's work and a refusal of the generally accepted ways of viewing the world prevalent in the Nineteenth century. But before entering upon an examination of some of the early poems, tales, 2nd finally Eureka itself, I have found it necessary to turn first to some general problems in reading Poe, since much of the criticism emerges as a barrier, rather than an entrance into his work. Thus I will devote the first Section to an examination of the way in which a criticism grounded in Romantic Platonism and Eighteenth Century Neo-classical thought is simply in- adequate to deal with the experiential nature of what Pge's work proposes, I want to show how from the beginning, iii Poe's work moves out of a refusal of the imposition of static grids of meaning (including those of philosophical realism and idealism) upon experience as process. There is thus a parallel refusal of the Neo-classical sense of language itself as transparent, implicit in the works and criticism--that is, that view of language which assumes word or symbol is referential on a one to one basis to a fixed "outer" reality. By excluding the intelligence of conceptualization from his definition of poetry and turning his back on the topological sense of language, Poe moves toward an elemental (perceptually based) sense of cosmic polarity. Where Romantic and I Christian Platonism seek a transcendence of opposites (all the oppositions of a Cartesian dialectic), Poe "descends" into an experiential contrarium where opposites are no longer polar, but alive. In response to the closed systems of Neo-classicism, which tend to stress the abstract and conceptual, Poe places the weight on the particular, the perceptual, and moves towards a form which is open-- which seeks to incorporate the reader into the work through a participatory act. In the first Chapter I will also be looking at some of the psychoanalytic work on Poe. Since most of it is grounded in that same view of language and of the world which assumes a static outer reality (over which the subjective or "private" experience of the poet looms gigantically) , I will be arguing that the psychological, alone, is inadequate to deal with Poe. No where is this inadequacy of the psychoanalytic clearer than in Eureka. In Chapter I1 I want to turn to some of Poe's statements of theory in light of its ground or core in the thought of S.T. Coleridge. For it is here in Poets critical essays that one finds the intellectual development leading to Eureka that is paralleled in the more image-centered tales. I will be using primarily Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought as a means of entry into Coleridge Is sense of opposites. I want to suggest that it was through Coleridge that Poe first gained entrance to a tradition that refuses to reduce experience into hypostatic terms and thus found a ground for his own unique sense of opposites. ina ally, in Chapters 111, IV and V, I will be returning to the poems and tales in order to study Poe's enactment of the opposition of self and world as it confronts him in his own time and place. Chapter VI will be devoted to an examination of Eureka as cosmogony. Here where the poem approaches the void, it plays with meaning and the absence of meaning, the thought and the unthought--that place where image's active compliment (the "imageless" other) con•’ronts the naked self, and the poem begins to break into open-form narration. For in Eureka that which Williams perceives as Poe's v insistence on "method," his "strong impulse to begin at the beginning" (IAG,217) emerges as a redefining of the meaningfulness of language and a final attempt to "clear the ground" for direct (primary) contact with the world of his experience. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION . SOME CRITICAL PROBLEMS OF ENTRANCE . POE AND COLERIDGE: THE AFFIRMATION OF OPPOSITES . THE CIRCUMSCRIBED EDEN OF THE EARLY TALES AND POEMS . POE'S HELL AND THE DESCENT INTO THE RATIONALMIND . FINAL STEPS TO EUREKA: THE DIALOGUES . EUREKA: POE'S COSMOGONIC POEM . NOTES . SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . dok the fekhible agony which 1 have 60 LaXeLy enduked--an agony known only Xo my God and fa myaeld--seema to have paaaed my aoul thtough dike and puttidied if 6ttom aLL Xhat i6 weak Hencedottwaad 1 am aftong :--f hua fhoae who tove me hall aee--aa weLl aa Xhoae who have ao telenfleaaly endeavotted Xo huin me Poe's Letter to Mrs. Whitman November 25, 1848 viii The General Proposition is this--Because Nothing was, therefore All Things are. 1--An inspection of the universality of Gravita- tion--i .e., of the fact that each particle tends,. -not to any one common point, but to every other particle--suggests perfect totality or absolute unity, as the source of the phenomenon. 2-:~ravit~ is but the mode-in which is manifes- ted the tendency of all things to return into their original unity--is but the reaction of the first Divine Act. 3--The law regulating the return--i.e., the -law of Gravitation-is but a necessary result of the necessary and sole possible mode of equable irradiation of matter through space: this equable irradiation is necessary as a basis for the Nebular Theory of Laplace. 4--The Universe of Stars (contradistinguished from the Universe of Space) is limited. 5--Mind is cognizant of Matter only through its two properties, attraction and repulsion: there- fore Matter is only attraction and repulsion: a finally conszidated globe-OF-globes, being but one particle, would be without attraction--i. e. , gravitation: the existence of such a globe pre- supposed the expuision of the separative ether which we know to exist between the particles as at present diffused: thus the final globe would be matter without attraction and repulsion: but these -are matter: then the final globe would be matter without matter--i.e., no matter at all: it must disappear.