The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe Page 2

  But it was not science he abhorred so much as the triumph of mechanical reason, confirmed by technical progress. In ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ Monos denounces ‘the harsh mathematical reason of the schools’,17 sweeping aside the ‘rectangular obscenities’ with which technology has littered our globe. Poe used speculative theory from the start to frustrate technological methods and aims. Each ‘advance in practical science’ meant ‘a retro-gradation in the true utility’. Industrialization led only to regimentation; regimentation to that ultimate disease of the ‘poetic intellect’, the expropriation of the imagination. A pure mathematics – blending calculation with the ideal – of the circle, the sphere,18 the oval, of the curving arabesques that spiral through dreams and the screwed form of a helix (as on a watch-spring or electromagnetic coil of wire), controlled his visionary quests.

  One critical fight he was intent on waging :19

  The mistake… of the old dogma, that the calculating faculties are at war with the ideal; while, in fact, it may be demonstrated that the two divisions of mental power are never to be found in perfection apart. The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always preeminently mathematical; and the converse.

  His fascination with lunar investigation, sound and colour, the cosmology of Newton, von Humboldt, and Laplace, was a cult of homage to pure science. ‘Poe was opening up a way,’ wrote Paul Valéry, ‘teaching a very strict and deeply alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism became one…’ 20 The beauty of number was that point, that configuration, where mathematics and mysticism met.

  Something of this ambivalence, ever since, has haunted science fiction. Itself an offshoot of gothicism, the new genre was to evoke a horror both of the future and of the science which could bring that future about. By identifying with the collapse of technology, it was already critically undermining that technology. Yet its only appeal was to science. It had nowhere to turn but to science for its salvation. The fiction, then, was that somehow science must learn to control its own disastrous career. Poe too – quite self-consciously, of course – was working in this gothic vein. Within his husk of mathematics, as often as not, lurks an old-fashioned kernel of magic. In a sense, he recreated all the traditional feats of magic in pseudo-scientific terms (of galvanism and mesmerism). Alchemy became the synthetic manufacture of ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’; resurrection of the dead, the time travel of ‘Some Words with a Mummy’; demonic possession, the hypnotic or ‘magnetic relation’ of ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’; apocalyptic vision, the cataclysmic fire of ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.’ Just as the pseudo-scholarship (in antiquarian statutes and genealogies) of Scott, or gothic elaboration of Hawthorne, was part of an attempt to make the imaginative spell more potent, more binding, so Poe’s detailed and mathematical science intensifies his imaginative fusion with the occult.

  There is far more of literary burlesque, of outright parody, in all this than Sam Moskowitz, for example, or H. Bruce Franklin,21 appeared to realize. Yet clues abound. Those zany, zestful surfaces are all deceitful. The reckless playfulness invades even the august vision of Eureka. For his science ultimately is admitted to be a kind of hoax; his fiction openly and ironically conceived as a lie. Like Lucian, in his True History, he might have declared : 22

  The motive and purpose of my journey lay in my intellectual restlessness and passion for adventure, and in my wish to find out what the end of the ocean was, and who the people were that lived on the other side.

  But what he contrived was the inversion of romantic fiction from the antiquarian hoax (of a Chatterton or Macpherson) into a futuristic hoax. It proved a brilliant reversal of time-scale, made possible by the wide-spread willingness of an ever-proliferating, journal-reading, stock investing, news addicted, male and female public to be duped.

  ‘His purpose in the hoaxes,’ Constance Rourke astutely remarked, ‘was to make his readers absurd, to reduce them to an involuntary imbecility. His objective was triumph…’ 23 Or in Poe’s own caustic words :24

  Twenty years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic; now the case is exactly conversed.

  ‘Hans Pfaall’ stands in a direct line of descent from the pseudo-scientific ‘Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus’ : the literary hoax from the start was bound up with literary burlesque. Compared to Queen Anne’s England, however, Jacksonian America presented even more fertile ground: 25

  As the tall tale came into its great prime in the early ’30s a sudden contagion was created. A series of newspaper hoaxes sprang into life in the East. The scale was western, the tone that of calm, scientific exposition of wonders such as often belonged to western comic legend.

  Americans ‘who like so much to be fooled’, Baudelaire commented in a note to ‘Hans Pfaall’ 26 adding that fooling people was Poe’s main ‘dada’, or hobbyhorse. The American hoax, or tall story, was indeed a kind of pioneer dada – a violent, endlessly protracted game with the absurd. What Poe, the Southerner, initiated, Mark Twain (the very name is a hoax) from the South-West was lovingly to perfect, and William Faulkner with reckless rhetoric to explore for a twentieth-century topology of the South.

  But by detaching himself from the prosaic present, in imaginatively identifying with the future, Poe himself was duped. Compiling, extrapolating, closely paraphrasing, he seems to have deceived himself at last into claiming his very plagiarisms as his own.27 Spell-bound, he became his own victim. There are moments – at the climax of ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, or Eureka – when the hoax is no longer openly and ironically confessed as a ‘lie’, but celebrated as the ‘truth’ of the imagination, whose natural home is located on remote geographic horizons or pursued into the distant future. There, with intuition as guide, Truth and Beauty – science and art – will fuse in a single poetic vision. Why not fiction as a kind of science, when science itself was proving to be a kind of fiction?28

  A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth.29

  The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.30

  All art constantly aspired towards the condition of science : all science constantly aspired towards the vision of art. The spell of science fiction for Poe derived as much from his long-drawn-out romance with science as from his scientific concept of romance.

  He offered Eureka to his readers as 31

  this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone: – let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.

  It was to be his last stab at piercing the ‘Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical’ cloud of unknowing – ‘the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt’.32 In an intuitive, that is to say apocalyptic vision he proposed ‘to show… the plainly inevitable annihilation of at least the material Universe’.33 What was it but a maelström of energy, speeding away and returning, round and round, in an eternal vortex, whose ‘First Cause’ was the will, ‘the Volition of God’? Such is the ‘plot of God’ – an endless drama of expansion and contraction, of dissipation (or irradiation) and collapse (or reconstruction), of exhalation and inhalation. In the beginning was the word, the breath, the inspiration of God. Such was to be this astronomical book of Revelation:34

  Then, indeed, amid unfathomable abysses, will be glaring unimaginable suns… The inevitable catastrophe is at hand.

  The bravado of thought, the hyperbole, the sheer effrontery is breathtaking :35

  … a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.

  Poe is both the Euclidean theologian and methodological Wittgenstein of this universe, declari
ng ‘the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity to be an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing’.36 For the ultimate basis of the vision rests on the imaginative primacy of the artist. If God is a poet, then only a poet can play God and reveal God. Dupin, with a hunch, could investigate the criminal mind (to reconstruct his action); but Poe intuitively enters the mind of God (to reconstruct the mystery of divine creation). He is both the creator and the solver of conundra.37 He is both the detached observer (scientist, explorer, detective) and imaginative artist; both master and mystagogue. What is a hoax at one end can turn to a poetic vision at the other. What is mystery can as easily turn to mystification; science fiction, to use his own word, become the science of ‘Mystification’.38

  It is the poetical essence of the Universe – of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms : – thus Poetry and Truth are one.39

  J. B. S. Haldane once pointed out that the human organism is exactly intermediate in size between the electron and the spiral nebula, the smallest and largest existing objects. This, he suggested, gave man a privileged position in the world of nature.40 But to what varying effect! For Poe, what he learnt as an amateur scientist and astronomer led incontrovertibly to what he had always known (intuitively) as an artist. Just as what Teilhard de Chardin, a century later, learnt as geologist and palaeontologist seemed to lead incontrovertibly to what he had always known (intuitively) as a Christian.41 Melville, in the face of science, imaginatively retreated into myth. Poe encountered science as the precise mathematical equation between Truth and Beauty; ‘that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. He aspired to be nothing less than an American Keats with the mind of Newton, or rather a sublimer Newton with the soul of Keats.

  All his imaginary trips – by ship, balloon, laudanum, hypnosis – were aimed at setting the soul free from the demands of the body and so from the restraints of normal perception; simultaneously releasing the mind from its own tomb, the prison of its endlessly inturned and ramifying nervous complexes (where Madeleine Usher or Fortunato were buried). For, above all, they express ‘the thirst to know which is forever unquenchable’42 – reaching out for knowledge, beyond waking, in sleep; beyond sleep, in death; beyond death, pushed to further and further extremes of consciousness on voyages as dreams, or dreams as voyages (‘Out of Space – out of Time’), to a confrontation with the abyss, the whirlpool, the void which is eternity. There are voices of those who have plunged into the ultimate abyss, but survived (like the Norse fisherman); voices that seem to rebound from the fatal impact (like that of Arthur Gordon Pym); voices that hover suspended at the point of transition (like M. Valdemar); voices retrieved from beyond the point of no return (via bottles or Moon-men); voices that continue the quest on the far side of the grave in angelic dialogues among the stars.

  Baudelaire, long ago, had mourned Poe’s ‘eccentric and meteoric literary destiny’.43 Mallarmé enshrined that image in a passionate tribute, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe, recited at the unveiling over Poe’s grave in 1875 of a block of basalt. Walt Whitman attended the ceremony in Baltimore but declined to speak.44 Tennyson and Swinburne sent letters from England. But Mallarmé alone transfigured that tomb:

  Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur

  Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne

  Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.45

  That meteorite, plunged down from some cosmic disaster, still survives. Far off it seems to loom – as dim, eternal witness of this interloper among ‘the tribe of Stars’, apocalyptic prophet and pioneer victim of science fiction.

  A Note on the Text

  POE published and republished his stories in a wide assortment of newspapers, books, magazines. Again and again they appeared in Richmond or Baltimore, Philadelphia or New York. Editorial salaries apart, they were his sole source of income. Naturally he squeezed them for all they were worth. Each new appearance, however, offered a new chance for revision; and he tinkered compulsively. So that even their final form – in the edition of 1845 or the Broadway Journal, for example – was often belaboured with further scribbled marginalia, emending the text. It is essential, therefore, to determine not only the first printing of each story, but also the last printing supervised by him.

  What provoked him, above all, was the professional slackness of his provincial editors and hack printers. For Edgar Allan Poe meant to rise above all such hacks. Self-consciously he was a dandy – the first American literary dandy – and demanded perfection. But again and again as he launched his work, it returned to him flawed by his own hurried lapses or butchered by others’ carelessness. The Broadway Journal, at least, was under his own eagle eye and printed under his own direction.

  This edition does not aim at collating these many textual variations and corrections. The only such collation, to date, is in the ‘Virginia’ edition, edited by James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902). Bibliographical notes at the rear merely list the first publication, all reprints during Poe’s lifetime, and the occasional autograph manuscripts available.

  From which the following have been selected as standard texts :

  MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE: Broadway Journal vol. 2 (11 October 1845), pp. 203–6

  THE UNPARALLELED ADVENTURE OF ONE HANS PFAALL : Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) vol. 2, with revisions, mainly of the final ‘Note’, first incorporated by Rufus Griswold (1849–56)

  THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION: Tales of Edgar A. Poe (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845) – twelve stories selected by Evert A. Duyckinck

  A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM: Tales (1845), incorporating Poe’s manuscript corrections

  THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA: Tales (1845)

  A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS: Broadway Journal (29 November 1845)

  THE BALLOON-HOAX : New York Sun (13 April 1844)

  MESMERIC REVELATION: Tales (1845)

  THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE : Broadway Journal (25 October 1845), with revisions of the scientific data and expansion of the notes, first incorporated by Rufus Griswold

  SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY : Broadway Journal (1 November 1845)

  THE POWER OF WORDS: Broadway Journal (25 October 1845)

  THE SYSTEM OF DR TARR AND PROF. FETHER: Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1845)

  THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR : Broadway Journal (20 December 1845), incorporating Poe’s MS. notes from his own copy

  EUREKA : George P. Putnam (New York, 1848), with emendations incorporated from a copy of the first edition: ‘They are in Poe’s handwriting, in the faint tracing of a pencil, and are the changes the poet had in mind to make in a second edition.’ (James A. Harrison, Works vol. 16, pp. 319–36)

  MELLONTA TAUTA: Godey’s Lady’s Book (February 1849)

  VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY: The Flag of Our Union (14 April 1849)

  The texts themselves have been left unaltered. Bar the odd hyphen, nothing is deleted; nothing added except superior numerals to mark a reference in the commentary. All footnotes to the texts or insertions in square brackets signed ‘Ed.’ are authentically Poe’s, denoting the ‘Editor’ as ‘Edgar’.

  Bibliography

  SPECIALIZED work, devoted to individual pieces, is attached to their individual commentaries at the rear. More general work is still rare. The initial research into Poe’s use of contemporary science in his fiction was consolidated in three (unpublished) doctoral theses:

  CARROLL D. LAVERTY, Science and Pseudo-Science in the Writings of Poe (Duke University, 1951)

  JOHN F. LIGON, On Desperate Seas: A Study of Poe’s Imaginary Journeys (University of Washington, 1961)

  ELVA BAER KREMENLIEV, The Literary Uses of Astronomy in the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (University of California, Los Angeles, 1963)

  The debate on Poe’s status as the pioneer of science fiction has been conducted,
among others, by:

  HUBERT MATTHEY, Essai sur le merveilleux dans la littérature française depuis 1800 (Paris : Payot, 1915)

  LÉON LEMMONIER, ‘Edgar Poe et le roman scientifique française’, La Grande Revue vol. 83 (1930), pp. 214–23

  H. P. LOVECRAFT, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: B. Abramson, 1945; Dover Books, 1973)

  J. O. BAILEY, Pilgrims through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (New York: Argus Books, 1947)

  PETER PENZOLDT, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: P. Nevill, 1952; New York : Humanities Press, 1965)

  CLARKE OLNEY, ‘Edgar Allan Poe: Science Fiction Pioneer’, Georgia Review vol. 12 (1958), pp. 416–21

  SAM MOSKOWITZ, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963)

  H. BRUCE FRANKLIN, ‘Edgar Allan Poe and Science Fiction’, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)

  BRIAN W. ALDISS, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; New York: Doubleday, 1973)

  Baudelaire translated all pieces in this collection, with the exception of ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’, ‘Mellonta Tauta’ and ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’. Details of the first publication in France is given under each separate head.

  MS. Found in a Bottle

  Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre

  N’a plus rien à dissimuler.

  QUINAULT – Atys1

  OF my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. – Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions2 has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age – I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.