Edgar Allan Poe Discussed

 Crime Reads published an interview of John Tresch under How Edgar Allan Poe Reinvented American Literature – and Science Writing. Some highlights I want to save and share:

Lisa: Poe is not funny. In general, things that are creepy aren’t funny. One of the things that’s fascinating is that Poe is so serious and yet we’ve relegated him to the school room. Americans think that Poe is something you read in elementary school and you make a diorama and there’s a body in a wall and that’s it. That’s the height of American literature. We did it to Hawthorne. We did it to Washington Irving. What does that say about America as a culture, as a canon?

John: It’s not so good on its past.

Lisa: Or it reinvents itself and gets rid of the things that don’t fall into line. 

John: In Poe’s case, there’s such an effort in the 19th century to set up Boston as the intellectual center of the country. Poe is not very Boston. He’s got a lot more edge to him, a lot more irony. A sense of the cruelty of the world. And he’s working in genres that don’t get taken as seriously

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Lisa: The reason we have trouble with Poe is that he doesn’t tow a line. He has a much more open point of view than the writers of his time. He’s not especially religious. He is ill and his illness becomes part of his persona, but his illness is also part of his life. He was a chronically ill person trying to make a living in a very difficult sphere. I think literary people want him to be more literary and he just isn’t. I mean, he cares about literature, but he messes with form. Poe is too weird to shove into a category.

John: He’s always going to be the outsider.

Lisa: That is an incredibly charged thing in 1830s and 1840s America. We are basically on the cusp of civil war. And he is either a Southern gentleman in the north or a literary Yankee who goes south.

John: Exactly. And he plays both. Beyond the north-south division, which is forming at that time, all literary cultures are very regionally aware. His outsider status allows him to set the agenda for literature and decide what counts as good. Then he viciously tore down the things that he doesn’t think are good, which is why he’s dying his whole life to get his own magazine. He wants to be the owner and the editor-in-chief and call the shots. He feels this great pressure from the Rupert Murdochs of his time. 

You were saying that he’s always outside. He’s not welcomed by American letters. And I think that’s sort of true. He has his friends, he has the critics, he has his fellow writers, he’s got amazing moments—with Hawthorne, for example—where there’s a really appreciative exchange. And in New York, after the “Raven,” he’s the talk of the town. He is totally celebrated. He’s welcomed to all the salons and becomes very close friends with literary people in New York. 

It’s that success that’s perversely his undoing. It’s at the time when Virginia’s more ill [with tuberculosis] and he’s taking on more and more jobs. He starts to work for and then eventually takes over the editorial control of “The Broadway Journal.” He’s working like 18 hours a day. He’s republishing his own work, or plagiarizing his own work, and getting articles to put into “The Broadway Journal.” And he’s also drinking quite a bit.

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Lisa: There’s a way in which his trickery made people really angry, not only people in his time but the people who end up codifying what American literature is in the early 20th century. The question that’s often asked is why is Poe left out. Why did we erase the history of the American literary bestseller? Because it was mainly women’s fiction. By disregarding popular authors, it’s trying to codify itself as transcendent. There’s a real seriousness about art and Poe is actually a very serious artist for all of his trickery. What he wants more than anything is respect.

John: That’s true. I think that combination of real seriousness—like here are my principles of criticism and literary evaluation, which are connected to the seriousness of the modern scientific revolution. There are huge new discoveries being made. And he speaks that language. He speaks with that authority of scientific certainty. That’s a big part of what I wanted to show. He makes his claim to literary acuity as he speaks like a scientist. He’s definitely serious about it, but he then makes use of that seriousness in popular literature and then invents these new genres, right? Which are hard. You don’t know how to make sense of them. There’s no name for science fiction.

There’s no name for detective fiction yet. He invents new genres. It’s always about selling, about getting a readership and attracting readers who don’t appreciate the formal qualities of the work. The thing that I think drove American critics nuts about Poe was not only that he sold much more than the authors that they venerated as proper literature. But then he had this huge following among the people who were looked at as real authorities for literary taste in Europe. This is modern literature because it’s experimental, because it’s psychologically acute, because it’s not afraid of frightening subjects. It’s not afraid of the perversity of the human mind. It’s not afraid of the unconscious. It puts it all right there on the page. And in that lurid myth, in those shocking images, that’s where the field of experimentation for future literature lives. Americans took a very long time to get with that.

sch 12/6/22