fiction files redux discussion

The Raven is my all-time favourite poem. Ever.

The best reading of it I have ever heard was on that rubbish Lou Reed album in which the actor Willem Dafoe reads as some droning music goes on in the background.

Recently, I read Peter Ackroyd's biography entitled: Poe: A Life Cut Short, simply because I realised this writer has been in my life and shaped many of my nightmares and dreams since I was a young lad.

Poe has some interesting connections to England too. His mother was English and he went to school in Stoke Newington, London for some years!

I still have my paperback copy of a collection of his short stories and prose poems...my oldest sister got it for me when I was 12 or 13...I remember it being a Christmas present.

Reading Ackroyd's biography, I soon realised - no wonder the guy drank himself into an early grave and saw erotic qualities in death and dying! Every woman he loved pretty much died slowly of TB. Maybe even he had it!

He is regarded as the father of the detective story...and there's an interesting shout for him as a science-fiction writer too...which I'd never considered before. Also, his essay Eureka is meant to be a visionary - if scientifically shoddy - piece of work.

The essay - The Philosophy of Composition - has had a profound effect on horror literature and cinema...heck, I even wrote my B.A. dissertation on it!

Anybody else an admirer/obsessive fan of Poe's work. He's like the American version of Shakespeare.

Martyn wrote: "The Raven is my all-time favourite poem. Ever.

There are some huge fans of his here on the FF Redux tour. Take a look at the thread in our short story folder on his excellent Berenice. One of my personal favorites.

Indeed. Bernice is grand!

What are you opinions of Poe? I really did mean that when I said he's the America's Shakespeare.

looks like i need to crack open The Complete Illustrated Works of Edgar Allan Poe... thanks for reminding me.

Martyn wrote: "Indeed. Bernice is grand!

What are you opinions of Poe? I really did mean that when I said he's the America's Shakespeare."

We had a lot of fun discussing the story. I think we felt more "ok" with discussing Poe than Joyce, actually. Joyce is such an undisputed master it's kind of hard not to look at it with wide eyes and not know where to begin.

I think it is the other way around, Poe is such undisputed master that we can look with wide eyes and laugh. Joyce, we are weary of our comrades telling us that he is just a snob prankster or if we are laughing we did not get the joke because in the academy nobody laughs...

Anyways, I think it is unfair with both Will and Eddie...

Jcamilo wrote: "I think it is the other way around, Poe is such undisputed master that we can look with wide eyes and laugh. Joyce, we are weary of our comrades telling us that he is just a snob prankster or if we..."

Martyn - I am sure you are aware of the Poe/Baudelaire connection, but are you aware of the role Dostoevsky played in getting Poe translated into Russian?

Poe, initially lost to his American audience, was saved from obscurity by these Europeans I think. I am going to go back into the MySpace archives and dig up a couple threads on EAP. I also know we hashed him out pretty good in the Southern Lit thread.

Cheers,
mm

I think with Poe it's more that I feel like I get him better. I don't know if it's an American thing, or because he's just more accessible.

With Joyce I always have this feeling that I'm going to say something so "wrong" about his work... probably just scars I bear from being in an online group about Joyce years and years ago, full of humorless academics.

The americans are funny, very funny about this. Their best defense against that nobel prize dude is if they say "Hah, if we could look so well to us, we would have loved Poe." My theory is that damn American Novel. They need size, space, but Poe is everything minimal.

It is not the bloody europeans only, but South Americans. Machado de Assis was a huge fan of Poe, having translated him, in fact one of the joys of portuguese translations (unlike english, we do not have a tradition in this field) is comparing The Raven of Machado with the version of Fernando Pessoa. I have no idea who first translated Poe to spain, but Horacio Quiroga, one of the early american short storytellers was very Poe like. So, he was translated by Borges and Cortazar. Who needs more ? (Besides having already guys like Baudelaire and Mallarme).
In Japan, the best short storyteller I knew Akutugawa was a Poe fan. Apparently he was a huge hit in the early XX century there and one of the main western authors they absorbed.
But the americans... I think Poe is the most influential american author of all time. Who can compare with him. Not Emerson. Certainly not Dickinson, because while she is a far superior poet, her sense of solitude is nothing compared with someone alone in a crowd. Melville and Hawthorne own too much to Poe to be appart of him. Whitman, certainly a huge name, but while Whitman deveted himself to write a new old form of poetry in name of Democracy, it was Poe who organized the aesthetics of a new genre, inside prose, which could be read by everyone, everywhere. After that who? Eliot and modernism or Faulkner? Hardly, authough Eliot is one of the few American critics who I saw giving compliments to him, but to his critical essays. Other was the british elephant Henry James who complimented Poe use of language, which was the guy who praized Flaubert.
Talking about Flaubert (his correspondence is fantastic, by the well - wonderful for Borgeians Wittengsteineans) le Mote Just is no concidence for someone who was aware of Baudelaire poetic, under Poe influence (Or twins in the world) because the search for a prose as strong as poetry is Poe aim as well. Not to mention Eureka, since Flaubert wanted a language for literature that would be precise as science. I am not so keen about Maupassant, but how can he not be a poesque.
I did not knew about Dostoievisky, altough his psychological romance could be Poesque, yet, could be Stendhal, could be Pushkin, could be the germans, but Chekhov said the Black Cat was a prime example of perfect short stories. And as different they are, one playing with the impressions of colors and other with contrast of black -white, Chekhov rules about short stories, the maximum effects, the necessary elements, etc is Poe all the way. And of course, Nabokov. I do not talk about Kafka, which paradoxes may have arrived by some special path, since Kafka was invented by dostoievisky (Joseph K. is Joseph Karamazov, the long lost grandson of Ivan, when he went to play cards in europe), but Borges is Poe. And even minor realistic genres, H.G.Wells, Doyle and Lovecraft owns something to poe and not so minor, but as much big as his moustache, Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson... But how many can be an influence to realism and symbolism for the same aspects? The guy with the Raven. Funny thing is the number (number is democratic) of different works. Each different author is a fan of different work.Oh, poor americans...
Now, Martyn, you better give us a lecture about Poe history in russia...

Shel wrote: "I think with Poe it's more that I feel like I get him better. I don't know if it's an American thing, or because he's just more accessible.

With Joyce I always have this feeling that I'm going to..."

There's been a lot of nonsense written about Joyce and his works over the years...and sometimes people believe that nonsense a lot...Joyce scholars are usually the culprits...Joyce was no snob...but Joycean scholars seem to be...which is just daft.

I feel the same way about Shakespeare, Martyn.

I mean the guy was bawdy, and funny, as hell. No one could hurl an insult like him. And people are so freakin' serious about the rhythm and cadence and blah blah blah all the time. SO boring.

Despite that long, mad ramble by Mr. Camillo - I believe he hits upon a very good note: Poe organised the aesthetics of a new genre...that is a nice way of putting it, I think.

It was an inner monologue that explains the entire world of literature for scholars. The key to my text is the number of times that the letters P,O,E are used in the text, containing the hidden message that nobody shall understand: the text is about Edgar Allan Poe. Cleaver, aint?

Jcamilo wrote: "I did not knew about Dostoievisky..."

I want to go back to the old MySpace threads and find the group discussions on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. There was some good discussion there regarding the use of the Double in the novel and Fyodor’s debt to Edgar Allan in that regard.

Meanwhile here is some background on their literary relationship.

http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/02/043....

During the early 1860s, Dostoevsky showed his interest in the esoteric by his publication of stories by Edgar Allen Poe in the journal "Vremja" (Time) and in articles about the American writer's literary style. Dostoevsky was intrigued by Poe's technique of presenting the outward possibility of an unnatural event while proceeding to relate a realistic tale. In the issue of "Vremja" that contained the stories "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Devil in the Belfry," there is an unsigned piece entitled "St. Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose."


There is also a good (longish) essay on the topic, here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi...

Jcamilo wrote: "It was an inner monologue that explains the entire world of literature for scholars. The key to my text is the number of times that the letters P,O,E are used in the text, containing the hidden mes..."

you're funny!

This from the Southern Lit Thread, FFv2
Posted: Aug 23, 2007 11:24 AM

Martstar wrote: First I'd like to second the definite Gothic distinction in southern lit and the prominence of grotesque characters and situations.

Michael wrote: I've been meaning to mention Poe.

I know he is a tough guy to categorize. And he is not known for mingling well with others. His is such a unique voice.

And his regional identity is mixed. But on the whole, I would call him a southern writer and gentleman.

I think we are going to have to resign ourselves to inviting Edgar Allen to our little party. And even if Sam Clemens is dominating the room with his stories, and Faulkner and Tennessee Williams are a little much in their cups and also talking in lyric cadences to the assembled, we should not fail to note the quiet dark haired man in the corner with the asymmetrical smile who is visiting from Baltimore by way of Richmond, and who has a certain notorious reputation for writing short stories of the bizarre and unusual variety.

mm

Jonathan Evison wrote:

. . . let us not forget poe's athletic side! . . . apparently, e.a.p. was a pole-vaulter of some local reknown . . . when i was working in hollywood in the 90s, sly stalone was pitching a poe biopic, in which-- i'm not making this up-- stalone wanted to play poe himself and "his athletic side" . . . gotta love hollyweird! . . .

. . . this stalone story inspired me in my radio days to produce a skit along similar lines . . . if you're interested in listening to it (it's a movie preview, and quite funny, if i do say so) go to:

http://www.shakennotstirred.com

. . . in the right column of titles, about halfway down, click on "mosses"-- it's supposed to say "moses, " but the webmaster wasn't a big speller . . . fantasy island is pretty funny, as well . . .

Michael wrote: As always, our humble moderator can take a reputable discussion off on a wild tangent! The Sly Stone skit had me peeing my pants buddy.

Kris wrote: "Few people know that Poe wrote a novel. I highly encourage everyone to seek out the brilliantly disturbing The Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket which is the optimistic-young-..."

hogwash! Poe himself thought it "a silly book"...so hardly his finest hour.

Martyn wrote: "Kris wrote: "Few people know that Poe wrote a novel. I highly encourage everyone to seek out the brilliantly disturbing The Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket which is the opti..."

I actually like this rambling work. There is a sense the author himself doesn't know where he is going with it, but the stow-away/buried alive parts, and the ghost ship, and the cannibalism, all add up to a series of great episodes, even if the story eventually falls off the face of the map. The litany of latitudinal markings is hypnotic...

I've said it before here: Lovecraft must have thought very highly of this work in that he tried to rewrite it as his At the Mountains of Madness. Martyn; I would DEFINITELY recommend you read this HPL novel and then reapproach Pym.

Great ending too!

"March 22d.-The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but upon touching him we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow."

But, finest hour? No. Many finer hours to be sure.
mm

Michael wrote: "Martyn wrote: "Kris wrote: "Few people know that Poe wrote a novel. I highly encourage everyone to seek out the brilliantly disturbing The Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket wh..."


I have read At The Mountains of Madness. I was looking on Google Earth at Antarctica just the other day...Lovecraft did his homework.

Well, it is not like the nature of your argument is wrong. But really, Poe was more than used to be called silly by others. He was a strong critic, and defended himself a lot of times. So, I doubt he was accepting a veredict about Gordon Pym that wasnt his real opinion.
Now, Wikipedia... Borges said several works of Poe are his greatest work. In fact, the one he most quoted was Eureka, but that depends his moody. James liked Poe, but that does not meant he considered Gordon Pym to be Poe finest work. And the same about Baudelaire. Verne and Wells, of course, Gordon Pym is their turff...
But the point is finest hour and Gordon Pym is not even close of Eureka, Poe essay about furniture or his theory of composition, or a handful of the short stories.

Jcamilo wrote: "Well, it is not like the nature of your argument is wrong. But really, Poe was more than used to be called silly by others. He was a strong critic, and defended himself a lot of times. So, I doubt ..."

Indeed.

have to give this thread a bump, as i have been on a mini poe-tour over the last week or so and -- i must say -- it is as if the scales have fallen from my eyes. i always liked the dude, found him to rise above much of the pedestrian lit 101 we are fed, but WOW. he really got me this time with the power of his effect! most notably, i have read "black cat," "amontillado," and "TT heart," and of course the common themes there took my breath away. now, we know that poe was an aesthete, abhored allegory, but christ, that unmissable idea of one's conscience "walled up" but still very much there suggests that poe's obsessions got the better of him. i ask you FF-ers: do you think poe had a guilty conscience that "guided" his work, or did the supreme aesthete simply dazzle me with a calculated effect?

Keith wrote: "... now, we know that poe was an aesthete, abhored allegory, but christ, that unmissable idea of one's conscience "walled up" but still very much there suggests that poe's obsessions got the better of him. i ask you FF-ers: do you think poe had a guilty conscience that "guided" his work, or did the supreme aesthete simply dazzle me with a calculated effect? "

hey keith! thanks for making me think about poe -- i haven't in a while, and he and i have had a long association. i'm going to go read the poetic principle again, and some of the other essays and stories, and come back to this. it's certainly an interesting question you pose though i don't know i would have characterized it as a "guilty conscience" so much as a highly insecure and resentful one. i have no doubt poe relished any story where he could demonstrate an act of getting even, of showing them.

while i want to refresh myself, and then come back to this, my gut says poe had very little control over anything in his life so even when he prescribed rules for literature, he would also flout them when it suited. i think a lot of what he wrote he thought would be marketable, but i think his talent shone through with what you term "the power of his effect", and that he could not manufacture that effect. i think he was too wasted out of his gourd, too out of control: lost, angry, and very sad about his life, about the people he could never hold onto, and i think the power of his hell came through to us in these gothic stories because on some level he understood them better. a. gordon pym is one of my least favourites -- i felt its length, and thought poe must have too, that he cranked it out. i suspect that the genre was harder for him to relate to, and that's why it didn't resonate for me as much.

p.s. martyn, thanks for starting the topic. i love poe's poetry --except for the bells, i hate the bells.

Borges already answered this question. He said Poe wrote he believed to be true, a romantic claiming a classic ideal (and said, classicists often claimed the existense of a muse, a romantic ideal)...

Anyways, Poe was a fan of Coleridge, if you get Coleridge Kublai Khan idea (suggested by a dream) and join with Poe theory, you have all you need.

oh oro. just because borges answered this question doesn't mean we can't toss it around ourselves. :P

and yeah, i was thinking about coleridge and poe yesterday too. i was all set up to think about poe because i've been trying to read the rime of the ancient mariner in italian. :)

It just means that Borges could be wrong.

Anyways, we should not give to Poe's subconcious more credit than those he gave to his characters. His stories are already gloomy and filled with teenager angst (Soon, we discover Poe was Peter Pan), we can see it on the paper. That was certainly something he had control off. Baudelaire quite understood it at first.

The "unity of effect" I think should be analysed from the perspective of form. How much the journalist Poe is resentful of his incapacity to write for long, to fill chapters after chapters? He is quite nice with Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett, but he gave some cheap shots at Longfellow. We know he was a rebel reggarding Emerson and a more positive view of philosophy. If Poe may not control something behind his works, I think it is not his dark passions (I mean, a dude who writes a handful of poems and tales about dead women would be a fool to not see that he had something about dead women in his mind), but that his aesthetic option (in the end, he didnt invented anything, he just afirmed what he saw before him) was not just for the belief that people would only read in one sit, but that was his only path and only form to have an identidy.

A funny side, I remember Cormac McCarthy gave an interview when The Road was being produced that he believed authors with huge books are not going to survive as people wanted to read quickly. He should have said, in one sit.

I find it interesting that we think we can "know" anything about Poe's personality. Personality is a construct, and we can't "know" Poe in that way any more than we can stand outside our selves and describe our selves.

All we have are his words and how they affect us. Everything else is projection, conjecture and assumption.

perhaps, as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle -- i think poe the technical master and stylist is always "there," but his obsessions are leading they way, pulling him along to those tales of vengeance and guilt. i actually have not read "pym" and, in concert with mo, i don't expect to like it much. i just don't see how his style could play in the long form.

Shel wrote: "I find it interesting that we think we can "know" anything about Poe's personality. Personality is a construct, and we can't "know" Poe in that way any more than we can stand outside our selves and..."

i'm not sure we can't "know anything" about poe's personality: being an avid fan of his, at one point i read a lot of his letters, and criticism, and i think those words in addition to his literature can give insight into one's literary motivations-- and yes, i concede that these are constructs. and yet, i think even in constructs there are clues to personality -- we may just have to agree to disagree on this, but i think that's why i respond with antipathy to some writers' voices -- who they are comes up off the page, and i don't particularly like who they are. of course, i'm assuming you're responding to my comments but i'm not sure if i'm right about that, shel -- if it was what i said, you'll note i never definitively asserted anything. i am just theorizing based on my experience of his text, essays, criticism and letters.

keith: i think you're probably right that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. if you have a chance at some point, please give "william wilson" a read, and let me know what you think of it in the context of vengeance and guilt. it's always been one of my favourites of his shorts, being obsessed with doppelgangers as i am. :)

p.s. oro, i went back to your last comment, and agree: poe could be bitchy and resentful when it came to the other writers of his day-- whether his assessment was based on artistic principle and unbiased critique, or bitterness at their success and his lack thereof, i suspect is up to our own opinions of those writers, and their works. for myself, i feel sorry for him. he was a tremendous talent but nobody really got it while he was alive (except the french)and it seems to me that he had just had trouble accepting the train of losses in his life.

i read this biography back in the day: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. If anybody has an interest, i think it's worth reading.

I think french discovery was after his death too (too be honest, The Raven was quite popular when he published it.) Surprise, surprise... Baudelaire was quite bitter and resentful with a handful of his peers too...

As a another Poe fan, I am regrettably in opposition to some of the statements, here.

Keith, if you liked those stories, I hope you can pick up the 'woman' stories/tales. I had the good fortune to read them in this order (due to the old anthology I had), "Ligeia," "Morella," and then "Berenice," or vice versa. There's a progression. The end of "Berenice" is, well, "Whoah."

Maureen, I'm afraid I'm somewhat confused. Many, if not almost all of Poe's work is highly crafted; and, the tales are crafted to a very concerted 'effect.' Instead of 'ripping off' Aristotle's poetics, and slapping his name on it, like Spencer did, Poe realized that the dramatic structure of fiction differed significantly from drama. Hence, his explanation of "effect" in his "Philosophy . . ." was/is progressive.

I disagree w/ you regarding Pym. Admittedly, this is one of literary palette. So, for my buds, "Great. Great. Great." And, he composed it as a serial. Imagine if he had a stable home at that time—what Pym would have been. And, we won't even mention the idea of the 'white as evil,' specifically, what he did with it (Ref. another post from the Old FF)--this subject as a hermeneutic easily could be the subject for a Master's thesis: Moby Dick --> Pym --> the Ancient Mariner --> Frankenstein. And, the sections of hiding, starvation, and cannibalism still stand up as incredibly vivid and arresting. Pending one's disposition—down right 'scary.'

Shel, (I'm w/ Maureen, here). Poe did, after all, leave plenty of letters, notes, journals, etc. Though, his biggest mistake, methinks, was leaving his legacy to an "enemy" (Griswald) who maligned him and his work almost as soon as he died. And hence, the stories of drunkeness, debauchery, etc., rose to a high pitch—and, they lasted. Will his "personage" (Fitzgerald's term) ever be released from the almost iconic visage of "Misunderstood Romantic?" I think/hope so.

W/ Maureen here too . . . Silverman's biography is GREAT. It is the latest and has much new information, and diligently discerned.

Indeed, the threads regarding the 'fight' for copyright (England in particular was taking and reprinting liberally) as well a drive to establish an American literary tradition with its own independent voice add to reasoning for Poe's difficulty.

"William Wilson." A great 'doppleganger' story. Or perhaps, I should use the word "tale."

Please excuse me if I defend Eddie. But, unlike Emerson or Longfellow, he had to 'scrap.' Even someone closer to him in class, Dickens, did not help him.

Yet, he established firmly American literary criticism (despite the "hachet-man" reputation), brought shape to the the unique American literary form of the short story, INVENTED the detective story, penned one of the first science fiction stories, etc. Quite a few accomplishments for an orphaned, shunned, 'unplaced,' often destitute, yet devoted man of 40 years.

And, "The Raven" still stands as a great accomplishment. Despite the academic criticism ("sing-song" poetry, the "—or" phoneme wasn't composed as he described, etc.), the poem still stands. Indeed, it seems a challenge still: write a poem with trochaic tetrameter as the unit and sustain it so that it does NOT fall into sing-song doggeral.

A much thanks (¡Muchas gracías!) for the conversation about Eddie. Despite different perspectives/opinions, I think we're all more in agreement about him.

for "I was a child and she was a child/
In this kingdom by the sea" . . .

Kudos,

See, something I do not think matters much is Poe's difficulty. They are no different from Shelleys, Elizabeth Barret, Keats, Baudelaire, Kafka, Melville (a bigger victim of american criticism, because he did wrote the great american novel after all)... While this all happens (toast) to consume Poe, he himself was unaware of this and did not wrote under his own mystic. Of course, sick, weak, dying women in his life has impact, because this is in the end the main theme of poe (which would imply that not all he fabricated about his method was a fantasy) but this is not his drama.

Anyways, a movie is coming about him with John Cusak, I hope they do not make him die saying never more.

I have the opinion Poe was the most influential author of USA, and certainly a head up as the most influential of all XIX century. He certainly had a sharp eye for many things reggarding the reading habits, sometimes his genius was bigger than his accomplishment(but I note that short stories writer often repeat themselves over and over, we see all wrong attempts but we see the bullseye too.)

A note, Longfellow was at least nice, writing a sympathetic note after Poe's death, which is much more any would do because Poe's attacks were vicious.