Chao 1

Introduction

In Poe’s best-known stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “” 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 “” 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. Thus, far from disrupting

the spell cast by the poem/book, the narrator’s readerly self-awareness makes the

poetic performance indistinguishable from actual lived experience. When for instance Chao 6

the dead Ligeia appears to the narrator in his own opium trances, even though we are

left uncertain as to whether this is but the aroused narrator’s illusions or an actual

visitation by the dead women risen from the grave, it seems as if the poem’s own

voice has “hollowed out” its reader, and somehow now speaks “by itself” through him.

The poem’s real existence for him, beyond its mere haunting presence in his memory,

thus gives body to what eludes the narrator’s mind— the horror of mortality.

This study thus aims to explore Poe’s device of integrating the verses/ books into

their respective stories in terms of the narrator-protagonist and poet-protagonist

relationship (Here Ligeia and Roderick are more obvious as poets of their own to

compose the self-sufficient verses, whereas Berenice’s poeticality lies much in her

powers of mind and the fact that she actually stands for the “physicality” of what the

narrator reads). The central argument is that a kind of poetic “transformation” takes

place here, such that the narrator’s own state of mind is violently affected by the poem:

he now experiences himself as a living being consumed by death and/or madness. But

in these three stories the reader-listener also wants to “contain” the prophetic force of

the poem/book, its horrifying and potentially dead force, through a certain kind of

“resistance.” Thus I shall also be looking at the narrator’s “reading” in these stories as

a kind of “resistant reading.”

Chapter One is an analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and its embedded

text, “The Haunted Palace,” intended to demonstrate that the poem per se is not just a

compelling account of Roderick’s self-consciousness but a “life context” in which the narrator-listener is “already engaged” or already embedded. This is already clear, I

will argue, from the narrator’s desperate attempts throughout the story to prevent

Roderick’s imaginings from realizing themselves in objective reality. Near the end of

the story the narrator reads to Roderick’s another literary text, the “Mad Trist,” to calm him down, and this “reading” is echoed by actual plot-events (Madeline’s Chao 7

emergence from her tomb). But here the narrator’s reading is also a kind of repetition

of his own act of hearing (“reading”) “The Haunted Palace” poem, which only

reinforces his role as a reader/echoer of the story epitomic “poem” and thus too his desire to keep the deadly force of this poem suspended within a purely narrative (or

“readerly”) world.

In other words, I am seeing the narrator as a kind of “resistant reader” of the horrifying poem sung to him by Roderick, but here the strategy of “resistance” to a literary text involves reading/understanding it purely as “literature.” The narrator’s final “escape” from Roderick-Madeline’s collapsing house-mind I read as a portrayal of his attempt to avoid, through the force of reason, being trapped in Roderick’s reading game. That this “character” may after all be permanently suspended within the author’s “reading game,” within these “fragments of the ‘House of Usher,’” is suggested by the author’s use here at the end of quotation marks to designate “House of Usher” as the story’s title.

Chapter Two is an analysis of “Ligeia” and its embedded poem, “The Conqueror

Worm,” intended to show how, with the escalation of death images, the narrator is maddened by his failures to fully master Ligeia’s irreducible poem, so that it becomes

(once again) impossible for he himself to fully disengage himself from its contingent

“life context.” To begin with, I introduce Poe’s 1845 revision of Ligeia which clearly envisions Ligeia as a poet in her own right; Ligeia’s threatening creativity is particularly clear in her soul-stirring voice and unusual eyes. I then focus on the narrator’s dramatic response to Ligeia’s dying struggle. Here I argue that her powerful volition in the face of death does not represent a wished mastery over death; on the contrary, it points toward the fact that death cannot be conquered no matter how strong the will of the dying person: this is again the force of the poem’s sense (of the “conqueror worm”) and too, I will suggest, of Ligeia’s meaning as “poet.” By Chao 8

having the narrator (her lover) read her poem, she poetically inscribes in his

unconsciousness this inevitable victory of the worm (of death) over everything

(including soul and spirit, romance, love and poetry); his attempts through the rest of

the story to resist this meaning, to escape it, will be once again in vain; he will remain

suspended in Ligeia’s own life-in-death state, the (poetic) state of a life moving inevitably toward death even if never finally reaching it within the literary

(writerly-readerly) world of the poem itself. The worm that feeds on the narrator’s

“inherent unconsciousness,” a part of himself that he can never confront, or indeed on

his very being, is on my reading (also) the worm of “reading” itself, of burrowing down into a textual world from which finally there can be no escape. This is a world in which characters are (like vampires) constantly reborn and narrators can never

“leave” them. Here my analysis of “Ligeia” will be joined to its kindred piece

“,” both of which plot the similar scene of metamorphosis where the narrators

witness “the hideous drama of revivification”— thus, in some sense, a repetition of the

irremediable death enacted at their dying wives’ deathbed.

Chapter Three is a shortish analysis of “Berenice” and Egaeus’s obsessive

reading of some curious books, especially some Latin sentence he specifies, intended

to demonstrate how, during his process of reading, the literary meaning of the text he

reads serves to irritate the disorder of his mind, and turns unconsciously into the

physical reality around him (even if he speaks of reading itself). In the case of

“Berenice,” unlike Roderick and Ligeia (the poet-protagonists), Berenice is not

represented as a poetic figure; however, her appearance at the library whenever

Egaeus-as-reader is reading reinforces the powers of her mind and designates the fact

that she, both poetically and physically, inscribes in the narrators’ unconsciousness

this autonomous reality that emerges out of his act of reading itself. Egaeus’s violation

of the tomb and his extraction of Berenice’s teeth is thus an indication of his fear for Chao 9

the teeth’s sentient power (and of course the horrifying reality they represent). But at

the end, that Berenice comes back to life and he discovers his murderous act just

proves that he cannot “disengage” himself from their “sensitive,” “sentient” power, as much as he “detaches” the teeth from the still-living Berenice.

The narrators never can be free of the gaze of their eyes which is itself the frozen expression of life-in-death, of life’s inevitable ending-in-death, its suspension in this state; yet perhaps these eyes are also those of the reader, fixated on the never-ending text laid out before them. Hence the final line of the tale: “ Here, then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never— can I never be mistaken— these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes— of my lost love— of the lady— of the LADY LIGEIA.”

Here the reader is left to insert the (worm-like) quotation marks around the last word.