Movements in the Hollow Coffin: On “The Fall of the House of Usher” (original) (raw)

Abstract

On "The Fall of the House of Usher" MARK STEVEN A n irrational belief that the dead may return to haunt the living is part of "the uncanny," a psychical phenomenon whose theory Sigmund Freud adapts (from Ernst Jentsch) to describe "the perceptible reanimation of something familiar that has been repressed." "The writer," Freud argues, brings us "in relation to spirits, demons, and ghosts" by "not letting us know whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation." 1 If psychoanalytic theory holds that literature is manifestly a haunted medium, then perhaps a productive intersection could be staged between Freud's uncanny and Jacques Derrida's "hauntology"between psychical phenomena and a critical program that "supplants its nearhomonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive." 2 The literary figure of this conjunction would best be described as "undead"-and, by reading an exemplarily haunted work of literature with these two theories in mind, I want to propose some ideas for what I am going to call "the undeath of the author." To begin with a concession: Edgar Allan Poe is done to death. While the flesh-and-blood Poe met his physical end over 160 years ago-done in by either alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, or tuberculosis-similarly myriad scholars have dissected his literary corpus with all the critical tools provided them, and by doing so they have turned out a variety of different Poes. Scott Peeples describes a handful in the preface to his indispensible Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004): "the romantic Southern outcast, the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for Freudian psychoanlysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the antiracist, and so on." 3 Achieving metaphorical quintessence, then, a profusion of that scholarship has been deeply indebted to Roland Barthes's seminal essay "Death of the Author" (1967). Within this context, the most famous work to be influenced by Barthes-Joseph Riddel's 1979 essay "The 'Crypt' of Edgar Poe"-argues that, in Poe's tales, "images of nature are already metonymic substitutions for words-or substitutions for substitutions," and that Poe's "realm of dreams" is in fact the "realm of language." 4 It is thus that Poe has

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References (29)

  1. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9.
  2. Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Camden House, 2004), ix.
  3. Peeples, Afterlife, 85. See Joseph N. Riddel, Purloined Letters: Originality and Rep- etition in American Literature, ed. Mark Bauerlein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995). For more self-consciously post-Barthes and poststructuralist criticism, see Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989);
  4. Michael J. S. Williams, A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1988);
  5. and John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980).
  6. See Jacques Rancière, "The Politics of Literature," in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 152-69.
  7. A similar argument might also be made with regard to the fiction of Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne. See, for instance, Bryan C. Short, Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992); and G. R. Thompson, The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993).
  8. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143.
  9. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 148.
  10. 9 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 146-47. For a full-blooded rendition of this type of analysis, see David Ketterer, "'Shudder': A Signature Crypt-ogram in 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" Resources for American Literary Study 25, no. 2 (1999): 192-205.
  11. See, for instance, John Carlos Rowe, "Edgar Allan Poe's Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier," in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 75-105; and Meredith L. McGill, "Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity," in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 271-304. The best and possibly the most influential study on Poe with regard to antebellum culture is Terence Whalen's Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).
  12. Thomas Jefferson, "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled," in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A, ed. Nina Baym et al., 6th ed. (London: Norton, 2003), 732.
  13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 473.
  14. Jefferson, "Declaration," 728.
  15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980-1987, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 4. For a detailed explanation of Deleuze and Guattari's complex relationship with democracy, see Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stan- ford Univ. Press, 2010).
  16. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 146. 16 "October 4, 1845," in ER, 1076.
  17. J. Gerald Kennedy, "'A Mania for Composition': Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-Building," American Literary History 17, no. 1 (2005): 6. See also David Leverenz, "Poe and Gentry Virginia," in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 210-36.
  18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 441.
  19. Edgar Allan Poe, "Nathaniel Hawthorne," in ER, 572.
  20. Peeples, Afterlife, 63. Peeples offers a broad overview of psychoanalytic readings of Poe in chap. 2, "A Dream within a Dream: Poe and Psychoanalysis," 29-62.
  21. C. Alphonso Smith, cited in Peeples, Afterlife, 19. See also Louis A. Renza, "Poe's Secret Autobiography," in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), 58-89. 22 Though the above analysis is my own, my design for Poe's "phenomenological hypotaxis" is taken from Peter Coviello, "Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery," ELH 70 (2003): 883.
  22. Coviello, "Poe in Love," 883.
  23. Jodey Castricano, Crytpomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2001), 6.
  24. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 202. 26
  25. Derrida, Specters, 8. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press), 4.2.26-27.
  26. Derrida, Specters, 8-10.
  27. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.3.19-23.
  28. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 147; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus, vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980-1987, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 1983), 9.
  29. Jefferson, "Declaration," 732; Alexis de Tocqueville, "Testimony against Slav- ery," Liberty Bell (1855); quoted in Matthew J. Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and Ame- rican Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 62. 31 The debates concerning Poe's racism receive lengthy consideration in Maurice S. Lee, "Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism," American Literature 75 (2003): 751-81. For consideration of racism in "The House of Usher," see David Leverenz, "Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poe's Sensationalism," in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 95-128.