American Literature Romanticism UHCL 2015 sample student research project

American Literature: Romanticism
research assignment
Student Research Submissions 2015
Conference Proposal, Presentation, and Commentary

Jonathon Anderson

5/10/15

Conference Proposal

The Public Poe: Wit, Satire, and Social Commentary in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe

The aim of my research and analysis of "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." and "How to Write a Blackwood Article" / "A Predicament," two relatively unknown stories by Edgar Allan Poe, is to consider the extent to which Poe's work in the genres of humor and satire might be related to his familiar, “Dark Romantic” corpus of psychological mystery and horror. There is an apparent duality to his literary output that, on one side, demonstrates a sustained interest in the prurient topics of madness, isolation, and ruin in perennial favorites like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” while on the other side, we have stories that seem to follow a completely alien trajectory into the realm of wit, satire, and social commentary. Put another way, we can articulate the opposition between sides of Poe’s creativity as the difference between the interior focus of the horror and mystery tales and the exterior, or public, focus of his humor and satire. Framing our comparison in this way opens the door to seeing Poe’s literary agenda in relation to the attitudes and ideals of the eighteenth century, particularly the idea that social interaction is a key component of the healthy intellectual life. By assessing Poe’s debt to and attitude toward the eighteenth century, it may be possible to resolve the apparent mismatch between the Poe of the macabre and the comparatively neglected Poe of wit.

Presentation Paper

The Public Poe: Wit, Satire, and Social Commentary in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe

More than perhaps any other author, Edgar Allan Poe is seen as the connoisseur of hermetic and often claustrophobic literary worlds that undermine rationality while resonating with inescapable doom. The narrative point of view in the “characteristic” Poe tale is directed inward, as with “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Ligeia,” chronicling the disintegration of the logical mind and the accompanying hostility toward social interaction of haunted individuals. In one after another of Poe’s mid-nineteenth century horror and mystery tales, there is a reinforcement of this inner connection between social interaction and mental health, as if the stories are photographic negatives of the ideals inherited from the eighteenth century: as protagonists like the narrator of “Ligeia” or Roderick Usher withdraw from public life we see them become the localized, internal sites of Gothic decay just as we see the ratiocination and conversation of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin and his associates pull the world of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” back from the brink of irrational panic. Poe, long acknowledged to be the most European of American Romantics, does not seem to shy away from admission of his intellectual roots in Enlightenment ideas even while operating at his most sensational, drawing freely on not only classical sources but on a wide range of world literary traditions and even contemporary pseudo-science to build up structure after structure of what, in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” he calls “taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition” (322).

In his deep sense of "literariness," and unlike his close contemporary Hawthorne, Poe bears more than a passing resemblance to the great luminaries of the century before him. In particular I am thinking of the practitioners of satire in the British Isles Alexander Pope and Johnathan Swift. This comparison may do violence to our image of Poe as tumultuous arch-Romantic, "a Byron unhinged in this wretched world" as Baudelaire called him, but similarities are not difficult to identify. Like Pope, Poe strived for clarity and precision in his language while making a display of his extensive learning. Also like Pope, though with more dubious success, Poe was closely involved with his literary world as both artist and critic. With Swift Poe shared a certain impatience with human vanity sometimes imperfectly rendered as misanthropy, which came through in his fiction in what John Bryant calls his "bizzarely cartoonish characters" (19). More than these stylistic quirks, though, Poe seems to approach his predecessors in his use of humor in the two dozen or more stories classified as such that he published during his lifetime.

Poe's humor, while marked by the same intelligence and learning as his much more familiar stories of horror and mystery, trades the "self"-obsessed, "self"-directed concern with madness, isolation, and ruin for the external, public focus of wit, satire, and social commentary. To be sure, the range of Poe's humor does not compare to the range of his better known mystery and horror tales. Poe's wit is essentially the eighteenth century variety, associated with "judgment, reason, and the ability to articulate commonly held truths in an original and persuasive manner" (Murfin and Ray 535). His satire tends to follow the Juvenalian precedent set by Swift and the Pope of The Dunciad, with an occasional appearance of the Horatian mode of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. His social commentary, when present, tends to deal with the foolish pretensions of people not as intelligent as himself, particularly in the literary world.

Perhaps the most characteristic example of Poe's humor as I have described it here is seen in the story "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.," which purports to be the memoir of the title character as he recounts his "important, yet feeble and tottering, first steps, by which, at length, [he] attained the high road to the pinnacle of human renown" (305). Young Thingum becomes enamored of the idea of becoming a "great man … by becoming a great poet" after hearing the editor of the publication the Gad-Fly read a poem celebrating his merchant-barber father's "Genuine Oil-of-Bob." It is not lost on the ambitious young man that the "brilliant conductor of the Gad-Fly" is "remunerated with a regal liberality" for his poetic efforts (306). Consequently, he sets to work. His initial attempts are frustrated by comparison with the editor's stanzas on the “Oil-of-Bob,” whose “splendor more dazzle[s] than enlighten[s] [him]." Poe’s Juvenalian impulse begins to awaken as a crestfallen Thingum hits on the idea of plagiarizing “several antique and altogether unknown or forgotten volumes” recovered from “the rubbish of an old book-stall, in a very remote corner of the town” (307). From these little-known and obscure books, Thingum extracts the following:

From one of these, which purported to be a translation of one Dante’s “Inferno,” I copied with remarkable neatness a long passage about a man named Ugolino, who had a parcel of brats. From another, which contained a good many old plays by some person whose name I forget, I extracted […] a great number of lines about “angels” and “ministers saying grace,” and “goblins damned,” and more besides of that sort. From a third, which was the composition of some blind man or other, either a Greek or a Choctaw – I cannot be at the pains of remembering every trifle exactly, - I took about fifty verses beginning with “Achilles’ wrath,” and “grease,” and something else. From a fourth, which I recollect was also the work of a blind man, I selected a page or two all about “hail” and “holy light”; and, although a blind man has no business to write about light, still the verses were sufficiently good in their way. (307)

The joke in this of course, beyond the bumbling ignorance and shallow dishonesty of the poet, is that his thefts of Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, and Milton are summarily rejected by the editors of “the four principal magazines” as “twaddle … entirely devoid of imagination”, “disgusting and unmeaning rant … trash of trash”, “ineffable nonsense [and] drivel”, and “incoherent and ungrammatical bombast” (308–09). Poe’s “ability to articulate commonly held truths in an original and persuasive manner” is here put in service of the bitter observation common among unrequited artists that the authority figures in one’s field have lowered their standard of taste to the lowest common denominator, saying “Even ‘such and such commonly revered classic artist’ couldn’t be successful now.”

Clearly Poe intends for us to despise Thingum Bob and his unthinking submission to popular taste, formulating Thingum’s conclusion from his “experiment with the old books” like this: “if I could not write better than Mr. Dante, and the two blind men, and the rest of the old set, it would, at least, be a difficult matter to write worse” (309). Thingum accordingly composes the (to the reader) laughably bad couplet, “To pen an Ode upon the ‘Oil-of-Bob’ / Is all sorts of a job.”, and is catapulted to fame for his “eloquence and art” (310, 315). And once the press at large takes up the praise of Thingum’s “Oil-of-Bob,” lifting him up into the “rich … galaxy of genius” peopled by Mlle. Cribalittle, Slyass, Mrs. Fibalittle, Mumblethumb, Mrs. Squibalittle, and … Fatquack,” we see that the entire industry is worthy of our contempt and scorn. This is Poe at his most scathingly humorous, with wit and satire operating at full tilt to destroy his enemies.

However, even if we, with Bryant, “stop short of envisioning a kinder, gentler Poe,” we would be foolish to see in him an author who, in Baudelaire’s words once again, “imperturbably affirmed the wickedness of man” (52, Baudelaire 95). For the antidote to the savage satire of Thingum Bob, we have only to look at Poe’s other satire of bad writers and unscrupulous editors, the pair of stories titled “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament.”

Immediately we can see that our protagonist Suky Snobbs, who writes under the name “Signora Psyche Zenobia,” is a far more endearing narrator than Thingum, even if they are cut from the same cloth. Whereas Thingum Bob, Esq., is an almost completely humorless and pompous dullard, the Signora Psyche Zenobia is fun:

I presume everybody has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek, and means "the soul" (that's me, I'm all soul) and sometimes "a butterfly," which latter meaning undoubtedly alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas. (320)

This opening of the first paragraph shows more mental energy than Thingum seems to summon in the entirety of his "Memoranda to Serve for the Literary History of America." (Remember, Thingum couldn't even be bothered to recall whether the book that started with "Achilles' wrath" was by a Greek or a Choctaw author.) From Zenobia's amusing assumption that the preexisting Greek meaning of her pen name somehow refers to her new favorite dress, she proceeds to comment on, and plan revenge against, her apparent nemesis Tabitha Turnip before returning circularly to her initial assertion of identity:

Where was I? Ah! I have been assured that Snobbs is a mere corruption of Zenobia, and that Zenobia was a queen – (So am I. Dr. Moneypenny always calls me the Queen of Hearts) – and that Zenobia, as well as Psyche, is good Greek, and that my father was “a Greek,” and that consequently I have a right to our patronymic, which is Zenobia, and not by any means Snobbs. Nobody but Tabitha Turnip calls me Suky Snobbs. I am the Signora Psyche Zenobia.

As with the first paragraph of "Thingum Bob," Poe compresses a fair amount of characterization into the initial half page of text. Comparing the two, what becomes evident is that Thingum, with his references to Shakespeare, posterity, greatness, the "duty" to "leave behind him … such landmarks as may guide others to be great," and the "pinnacle of human renown," is preposterously condescending in a way that never really occurs to the Signora Psyche Zenobia (305). Though she, too, feels the justice of her own renown as "corresponding secretary to the 'Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Association, To, Civilize, Humanity," or P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A. T. C. H., her aspirations are more practical and localized, "endeavor[ing] to introduce a better style of thinking and writing" into the literary society of which she is a member (321). In other words, the Signora Psyche Zenobia is not a high level threat to the artist the way Thingum Bob, Esq. is, and Poe is actually somewhat "kinder" and "gentler" in his ensuing satire.

Beyond Zenobia's frivolous vanity, Poe suggests the milder Horatian mode of satire in "How to Write a Blackwood Article" with his secondary characters, Dr. Moneypenny and Mr. Blackwood. Although Dr. Moneypenny never appears directly in the story, his presence looms large behind Zenobia’s narrative voice as a sort of Dr. Johnson, dispensing witticisms to our bluestockings that pass without comprehension from at least Zenobia if not the rest of the women. Some of his humorous observations include the name of Zenobia’s society, the P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A.T. C. H., which “he chose because it sounded big like an empty rum-puncheon,” his wry comment on the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (S. D. U. K.) “that S stands for stale, and that D. U. K. spells duck, … and that S. D. U. K. stands for Stale Duck, and not for Lord Brougham’s society,” his idea that the ladies’ “initials give [their] true character,” and his suggestion that, referring to metaphysics and spirituality, “which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as cant,” she spell “cant” with a capital K. All of Moneypenny’s attempts at humor baffle the Signora Psyche Zenobia, who shares with us that “Dr. Moneypenny is such a queer man that [she] is never sure when he is telling the truth.”

This same earnest intellectual simplicity, incapable of nuance, mediates her meeting with Mr. Blackwood, who seems ready to freely disclose his advice. This meeting gives Poe a chance to employ his wit to articulate the absurdities of the contemporary literature he encountered as critic, even (possibly) taking the opportunity to poke a little fun at his own story, “The Premature Burial,” here called “The Dead Alive,” which Blackwood describes as “full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin.” (322) The editor, after recommending a few fresh life-threatening “misadventures” like overdosing on pills, getting “knocked in the head, or run over by an omnibus, or bitten by a mad dog, or drowned in a gutter” to provide “the details necessary in composing what may be denominated a genuine Blackwood article of the sensation stamp,” goes on to give an account of the different narrative styles (323).

In the process, Poe doles out what seems to be a ready fund of one-liners. About the “tone elevated,” which “[s]ome of our best novelists patronize,” Blackwood remarks, “The words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning” and “This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think.” Concerning the “tone transcendental,” for which “[a] little reading of the Dial will carry you a great way,” “Hint everything – assert nothing.” Poe seems to find the style of the Transcendentalists particularly silly, with Blackwood’s final advice on that front being “You may hint at buck-wheat cake, or you may go so far as to insinuate oat-meal porridge, but if bread and butter be your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say ‘bread and butter’!”

As for the story Zenobia writes using Blackwood’s advice, “A Predicament,” it is, in Ecaterina Hantiu’s words, “a perfect piece of nonsense” as her very limited and very concrete understanding of Blackwood’s narrative techniques results in the “destruction of logical thinking” (30 – 31). The Signora Psyche Zenobia writes:

What a host of gloomy recollections will ever and anon be awakened in the mind of genius and imaginative contemplation, especially of a genius doomed to the everlasting, and eternal, and continual, and, as one might say, the – continued – yes, the continued and continuous, bitter, harassing, disturbing, and , if I may be allowed the expression, the very disturbing influence of the serene, and god-like, and heavenly, and exalting, and elevated, and purifying effect of what may be rightly termed the most enviable, the most truly enviable – nay! the most benignly beautiful, the most deliciously ethereal, and, as it were, the most pretty (if I may use so bold an expression) thing (pardon me, gentle reader!) in the world – but I am always led away by my feelings. In such a mind, I repeat, what a host of recollections are stirred up by a trifle! The dogs danced! I – I could not! They frisked – I wept. They capered – I sobbed aloud. Touching circumstances! which cannot fail to bring to the recollection of the classical reader that exquisite passage in relation to the fitness of things, which is to be found in the commencement of the third volume of that admirable and venerable Chinese novel the Jo-Go-Slow. (328)

Zenobia makes good on her intention to employ Blackwood’s “tone heterogeneous,” combining “in equal proportions” his “tones” curt, elevated, and transcendental with the first of his “piquant expressions” to give the impression of erudition. In the process, however, she woefully botches the reference to “The venerable Chinese novel Ju-Kiao-Li,” as she does with every single literary allusion provided to her – a French phrase, a Spanish stanza from Cervantes, an Italian line from Ariosto, a German couplet from Schiller, a smattering of Latin phrases, and, finally, a few lines in Greek from Demosthenes. And though her attempts at “get[ting] … into such a scrape as no one ever got into before” arrive before long at the grotesque, Poe manages to keep the narrative rooted in humor through Zenobia’s stubborn inability to move beyond the literal and her ever-ready sense of personal injustice.

All this is to say that Poe was, perhaps surprisingly, more than capable of the sorts of humor and satire we associate with the great wits of the eighteenth century and almost never associate with the American Romantics. He provides evidence of his familiarity with Alexander Pope’s work in particular through references to his poetry at various points in his Marginalia, expanding a line or a heroic couplet into his own singular musings.

This leaves us in a tough spot. Somehow we have to resolve two seemingly incompatible Poes. On the one hand, we have the familiar master of the individual’s melancholy and the macabre. On the other hand, we have this bright, if sometimes searing, practitioner of wit and satire shining a light on the world around him. The key to making sense of the strange case of Poe may actually lie in understanding his ties to the attitudes and ideals of the eighteenth century, because, whereas the horror and mystery tales reinforce the value of conversation and social interaction to healthy intellectual life through negative example, Poe's humor problematizes these ideals, cataloguing their possible failures when implemented by people who fall short of either the intellectual excellence of the eighteenth century or the moral transcendence of the nineteenth.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. “New Notes on Edgar Poe.” The Unknown Poe. ed. Raymond Foye. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1980. 93 – 107. Print.

Bryant, John. “Poe’s Ape of UnReason: Humor, Ritual, and Culture.” Nineteenth – Century Literature 51.1 (1996): 16 – 52. Print.

Hantiu, Ecaterina. “Humor and Satire in Edgar Allan Poe’s Absurd Stories.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 11.2 (2010): 28 – 35. Print.

Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2009. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Print.

Commentary

I’m surprised by the direction this project took. I started off with the intention of showing Poe as a sort of precursor to the literary gamesmanship of Postmodern authors like Borges, Nabokov, Martin Amis, or Mark Danielewski. Looking back over the research proposal from my midterm, however, I certainly seem to have had at least an inkling of Poe’s debt to the “Golden Age of Satire / Wit.” It was one of those things where, as Poe says in his Marginalia, “the mere act of inditing, tends, in a great degree, to the logicalization of thought. Whenever … I am dissatisfied with a conception of the brain, I resort forthwith to the pen, for the purpose of obtaining … the necessary form, consequence, and precision.” It’s not anything new, but it always catches me by surprise when I’m working to articulate a point and end up somewhere different than I intended. In light of what I seem to see above as close parallels between Poe and Swift in “Thingum Bob,” and between Poe and Pope in “Blackwood,” I think a closer comparison could yield some interesting results. In concert with this, a reading of Poe’s complete Marginalia would be helpful.

In the bigger picture, I found the fact disappointing that so little critical work has been done on Poe’s humor, satire, and hoaxes. I’ll admit that they require a different set of expectations as a reader, and maybe that is what has hampered them from greater circulation. Then again, maybe my whole point of view is askew since I took Dr. Day’s Restoration and Eighteenth Century British Literature course this semester as well. Fourteen or fifteen weeks of Enlightenment wit and satire may have given me an approach to Poe’s satire that gives it more than its due, but it seems to me that the bigger problem with him in general is that he’s something of an aberration among the American Romantics. At times he seems to value style over substance, indulging the voice of a character to the exclusion of engaging action and giving rise to claims that his characters lacked moral content. I also agree with Baudelaire that Poe is deeply skeptical of the ideas of equality and to a certain extent even American individuality, which, in a roundabout way, ended up being my main way to resolve the incompatibility between the sides of his creative personality. Through a social lens, the horror stories show the perils of individualism and isolation, the mystery stories show the saving grace of community, and the satires show the possible hang-ups of community.

There seems to be almost an alternative lineage running parallel to, and intersecting at odd angles with, the mainstream American Romantic movement that retains the essentially detached, witty, and amiable relationship to the world that we see in the eighteenth century and again with the American Realists at the end of the nineteenth century. This lineage seems to run through Irving, to Poe, and on to Twain. I’m only working on a hunch, but I’d be very curious to see how Poe as humorist pans out and connects to either Irving or Twain in the twenty five or so stories he published in the genre. While I’m at it, there are a few tales from Hawthorne that eschew our customarily dour image of him, if memory serves me correctly.

In my preparation for the essay on Romantic poetry, I came across the introduction W. H. Auden wrote for the Penguin Portable Romantic Poets that articulates a couple ideas I’ve been circling around in this commentary. Writing of Emerson and Thoreau, Auden says, “Their work has both the virtues and the vices of the isolated and the protestant: on the one hand it is always genuine and original, it is never superficial; on the other it is a little too cranky, too earnest, too scornful of elegance.” Auden seems to have hit the nail on the head with our general concept of American Romanticism: this statement could be applied, with qualification, to Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe in his melancholy mood, as well as Emerson and Thoreau.