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Introduction Chao 1 Introduction In Poe’s best-known stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” and “Berenice,” Poe places “horrifying” verses in the center of the story-texts to make his narrator-protagonists auditors of the poet-protagonists (Ligeia and Roderick) or creates his reclusive scholar (Egaeus) who restricts himself almost exclusively to a library and to its volumes which Berenice then acts out. In “Usher” and “Ligeia” Poe creates in the poems a total psychic landscape, one whose figures literally describe an extreme state of human consciousness— that of the poet-protagonist and also, I will suggest, by extension, that of the narrator-protagonist. While Ligeia’s poem allegorically depicts a tragic play about human mortality, Roderick’s offers a fully developed version of a mind (his own) enervated by madness. Both of the poems epitomize the story, contain in microcosm the theme of the whole story, and seem to be strangely self-sufficient, in no need of expansion by reference to the story. Or we could say that the stories “enact” poems which have a “prophetic” aspect for the narrators. And in the case of “Berenice,” Egaeus represents a sort of scholar figure who is strangely immersed in his world of language. His act of reading, in the mold of the narrators in “Usher” and “Ligeia,” foreshadows his live torment which he himself will soon carry out by pulling out Berenice’s teeth. Accordingly, in these three stories, we see that the act of reading governs the narrator-protagonists’ thoughts and feelings, and in a sense becomes the essence of their mental life. More specifically, the poems/books prophesy the downfall, the death or madness of the poet-protagonist but also, arguably and again by extension, of the narrator who reads or hears them. In his “Marginalia” Poe writes: “ Who ever really saw anything but horror in the smile of the dead? We so earnestly desire to fancy it ‘sweet’— that is the source of the mistake; if, indeed, there ever was a mistake in the question” (1342). Chao 2 Citing this passage, J. Gerald Kennedy claims: “Unlike most of his contemporaries, Poe refused to soften or idealize mortality and kept its essential horror in view” (Poe, Death and the Life of Writing 17). In “Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “Berenice” (as in many Poe stories and poems) the “return” of the living dead (portrayed of course as women) radically undermine the narrator’s self-presence by presenting him with life-in-death. Thus in these stories the poems/books acquire their spectral autonomy by serving as a prologue to the narrator’s suffering, having now been inscribed in his mind as the poem or book’s “reader”; it becomes a crucial part of the story’s larger “hermeneutical nightmare” (Judith Sutherland 12-37). Like a dream or nightmare, the poem/book lurks beneath the narrator’s conscious mind and seduces him with its horrible, irrational force, ultimately that of death and madness. The key point here is then that the state of “living death”— “mediated” by the doubled protagonist, Ligeia-Rowena and Rodeick-Madeline, or Berenice— that totally unnerves the story’s narrator (and through him its reader) is in some way epitomized by the poem/book, which also horrify the narrator. For instance, the two poems in “Usher” and “Ligeia” are objects of horror for the readers but also the narrators. In reading and reciting aloud the poems that were written (in “Ligeia”— “she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself” ) or listening to poems that are being spontaneously sung as part of an impromptu performance on the guitar (in “Usher”— “The words of one of those rhapsodies I have easily remembered” ), the narrators as readers-auditors in effect repeat the poems, suggesting that they are surrendering the outside world in order to enter fully the world of the poem. Poe thus makes this whole literary act of creating or expressing, of writing/speaking/singing as well as of reading/listening, an explicit part of his tales. Both the poet-protagonists are indeed described from the outset as being highly sensitive artistes. Ligeia studies Emersonian transcendental philosophy and has very Chao 3 lofty and refined “sentiments”; Roderick is a hyper-sensitive, effeminate aesthete, clearly neurotic (and supposedly suffering from the same “nervous disorder” that afflicts his twin sister), showing a “highly distempered ideality” in his obsession with “rhymed verbal improvisations.” Even though Berenice does not represent a poet figure to compose her eerie poem, what she presents to the narrator is a philosophical thought analogous to the feelings elicited in the books which he claims to have habitually busied himself in. Therefore, in these stories, Poe heightens the narrators’ emotional involvement with the poet-protagonists by emphasizing the former’s actual experience of listening/reading. In this sense, the narrators’ act of “reading” the poems /books is similar to the readers’ act of reading the story. The constant focus on “repetition” and “remembrance” reminds us that we ourselves are (like the narrators) repeating-remembering the stories, and that the action of the tales parallels both the authorial act of “telling” them and our own act of reading them. Thus, if horror is indeed the theme of these stories as well as their “single effect”— in “The Conqueror Worm” we get the line, “And Horror the soul of the plot”— we could say that this horror is “epitomized” in the poems/books themselves, embodied or incarnated in them before “elaborated” in the lengthy narratives of the stories proper. But what is the essential horror Poe focuses here? In “Ligeia” the central meaning of “The Conqueror Worm” is philosophical: we finally all die, our bodies inevitably decay and there is no “eternal soul” dwelling in “heaven” (for even the mimed “spirits” are eaten by the Worm that suddenly crawls onstage); though humans may fight against it the “Worm” (Death) ultimately conquerors all. Yet this meaning becomes more immediate and real when Ligeia has the (male) narrator repeat the verses as he watcher her exhausting struggle against death, her desperate attempt to cling to life, on her deathbed: this actual, apparently futile life-death struggle of the “plot” enacts the main sense of the poem. Similarly, “The Haunted Chao 4 Palace” describes the horror of a disordered or diseased mind, a state of irrationality or madness, yet this poetic meaning is concretely enacted by Roderick’s own bizarre “performance” of the verse, his singing of it as (calling on the depths of his disturbed unconscious) he spontaneously composes it, and the performance is just one stage in his own progressive struggle against madness. Finally, Egaeus’s habitual meditation of his curious books (a horror controlled by and represented in Berenice) resembles the narrators in “Usher” and “Ligeia,” who becomes more afflicted with the books’ “imaginative nature”— which is nonetheless “autonomous” and “real” in suggesting Berenice’s return and his horrible, murderous deed to violate her tomb and extract the teeth. In other words, we might say that the narrators’ attention or attuement as listeners/readers to those rhapsodic verses and books brings them into a world where “reading” and “being” are one. That is, each line of them seems to have been arranged to bring them as well (and by extension we as readers of the stories) to this present moment of the poetic performance, which speaks of death and madness. And this moment is the crux, since while the poet-protagonit does die/go mad, his or her auditor-reader (the narrator) apparently does not. Or we could say that they remain suspended in this moment, this ambiguity. For the narrator’s very person is intimately linked with reading and thus, like the whole text of Poe’s tale, to a world peopled by those hypersensitive artistes who are condemened to an unending existence (fantastic, “literary” existence), to the horrors of undying death (fantastic, literary death). We could also interpret along the same lines the fact that these stories finally become an account of the narrator’s own attempt to escape from the death or madness predicted by the poem or book— though his is clearer in the case of “Usher”— since it is not really certain that the narrator-reader has fully escaped, at the end, this state of suspension, ambivalence, undecidability, in-betweenness. That is, the Chao 5 narrator-reader’s attempt to finally escape from the world of “literature,” of the story itself, must be in vain. Then we would need to situate such an interpretation in relation to that reading of “The Conqueror Worm” which takes the real horror to be not that of the “poem” itself but rather that of the “soul” embodied by the poem-as-tomb, the tomb that commemorates and indeed “contains” the soul of the soon-to-be-dead (though actually not yet finally dead, still “suspended”) person or body of Ligeia. Analogously, we can interpret “The Haunted Palace” as (here more obviously) the “tomb” of Roderick’s irrational, warped, disordered psyche. The question then is, on such a reading, how do we see the role of the poem’s listener/reader, of his own soul, in relation to this poem that embodies or entombs the soul/psyche of the doomed poet? Also obviously in “Berenice,” Egaeus’s compulsive reading habits, as the story proceeds, turns into his obsessive meditation on the physical reality around him. The philosophical thought (though were not written/composed by Berenice) is in effect incarnated in the “physicality” of Berenice, and causes a drastic inversion in the character of his commonest thought. Might not the listener/reader partakes of this same poetically entombed soul, or even absorb it, as the poet-protagonist, through a sort of (poetic) transformation? That is, might not the horror of the listener/reader in hearing/reading the poem/book be, in the poetic context of the stories, grounded in the discovery of just such a transformation? All of these three stories involve (like so many of Poe’s works) various sorts of twins or doubles, and clearly in all of them the narrator also becomes, in some sense, the poet-protagonist: this becoming-protagonist as becoming-poet is also a function of being subject to the horrifying effect of the poems/books.
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