POE AND SYMBOLISM: "MS IN A
BOTTLE" AND "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER"
Source: Symbolism and American Literature. Charles Feidelson, Jr.
In his chapter on "Four American Symbolists" (35-43), Feidelson has
been discussing Melville and Moby Dick when he turns to Poe.
The diabolism of Moby-Dick is more an effect than a cause of
Melville's method. Pursuing the symbolic voyage to the utmost, but realizing at the
same time its ineffectuality, Ahab is ruined, and Melville discovers that he is
potentially an Ahab, the devil's partisan, the nihilist. Poe begins where Ahab
leaves off. 
His primary
aim is the destruction of reason, and he takes pleasure in the very horror of the
task. The gentleman who comes riding up to the house of Usher is the personification
of rational convention. Like all Poe's narrators, even the most unbalanced, he would
like to cling to logic and the common-sense material world. But he has set out on a
journey which is designed to break up all his established categories; reason is
deliberately put through the mill and emerges in fragments. The story concerns not
only the fall of Usher's house--itself a symbol of the end of rational order--but also the
shock to the narrator's assumptions, the dissolution of his house. The writer of
"MS. Found in a Bottle" is a similar type. His "habits of rigid
thought," "deficiency of imagination," and "strong relish for physical
philosophy" lay him open to extraordinary agitation as he voyages into a region of
eccentric thought and anomalous things. Moreover, despite his intense rationalism,
the abnormal appeals to something within him. At the beginning of the story he is
estranged from country and family, and he goes voyaging out of "a kind of nervous
restlessness." The secret aim of his journey, hidden from his own conscious
thought, is the creation of a new world by the destruction of the old. Meditating
his fate, he unconsciously daubs "the word DISCOVERY" upon a sail that lies on
the deck. But this Emersonian motive takes on an exaggerated air because of the
tension within him. Irrationality is the main characteristic of his discoveries:
A feeling, for
which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul--a sensation which will admit of no
analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear
futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter
consideration is an evil. I shall never--I know that I shall never--be satisfied
with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these
conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly
novel. A new sense--a new entity is added to my soul.
The new sense of the narrator is
cultivated by the immeasurably ancient, swollen ship, hovering, like the house of Usher,
on the verge of annihilation; by the incomprehensible mariners, whose eyes have "an
eager and uneasy meaning"; and by the chaotic sea, stretching away to ramparts of ice
that look like "the walls of the universe." The horror that his old sense
feels at impending extinction is balanced by "a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries
of these awful regions." He comes to see that the horror and the extinction are
the necessary means to a new vision: "It is evident that we are hurrying onward
to some exciting knowledge--some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is
destruction." the ship whirls round a gigantic amphitheater of whiteness and
plunges into the vortex. The narrator makes his "Discovery" through a
discipline of horror, finds a new reality though the violation of the old, and attains
"exciting knowledge" through the loss of his own identity.
POE'S CONFLICT: RATIONALISM AND HOSTILITY TO REASON
Just as the reason of Poe's
narrator is conquered not only by the situation in which he is caught but also by
something within him, Poe himself was divided between extreme rationalism and extreme
hostility to reason. Together with the stories that destroy the rational mind and
world, he produced the tales of ratiocination. The advocate of
"indefiniteness" as a poetic principle was also the author of "The Philosophy of Composition," in which the
poetic process is treated as a mathematical problem. Poe's extreme degradation of
reason resulted from the presence of both factors inside him. He was not, like
Emerson and Whitman, primarily in conflict with a rationalistic society; he was at war
with himself. In addition, his ability to take a purely objective view gave a new
twist to their theory of poetry. While he held with them that poetry is
"indirect" and "suggestive," he considered the poet a craftsman,
deliberately constructing the vehicle of irrationality. Again, the result was
extremism.
For the rest, Poe's conception of literature
was basically similar to theirs and had a similar origin. The ambiguity of Poe's
metaphysics, which constitute a kind of materialistic idealism, exactly corresponds to the
paradox of "process." The psychophysical world projected by the
transcendentalists might be called an idealistic materialism. But, instead of
attempting to describe the unity of thought and things from the side of
"spirit," Poe carries out the same unification in terms of matter, infinitely
rarified "until we arrive at a matter unparticled-without
particles--indivisible--one." His purpose is not reduction of one term
to the other but reconciliation: "The matter of which I speak is, in all
respects, the very 'mind' or 'spirit' of the schools . . . and is, moreover, the 'matter'
of these schools at the same time."
Creative Motion/Reality/and God
Whether phrased in idealistic or materialistic language, the paradox is
the consequence of a new category, creative motion. Poe continues: "The
unparticled matter, in motion, is thought . . . . This thought creates. All created
things are but the thoughts of God." As applied to poetry, creative motion
becomes "the phycial power of words." The thought and the thing are
spoken into birth in the course of that incessant modification of form which is
reality. Although Poe's God is still the unmoved mover, everything else is
translated into continuous activity.
These ideas, which Poe sets forth only in
a half-poetic style, lie behind the ambiguity of his formal literary theory. His
well-known literary doctrines hover between materialism and idealism, which cut across his
odd mixture of psychological and philosophical principles. According to his psychological
doctrine, beauty is "not a quality . . . but an effect," a state of mind
produced by a certain collocation of words. According to the philosophical doctrine, a
poem is the reflection of "supernal" Beauty, "of which through the
poem . . . we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses." Both views were
disastrous in practice: the theory of effect led to crude effects; the theory of supernal
beauty led to the romantic claptrap which was Poe’s stock in trade. But the two
doctrines met in a conception which was potentially a good deal more profitable. The
reflection of supernal beauty is attained "by multiform combinations among the things
and thoughts of Time"; these combinations, in various mediums, create the
psychological beauty of "effect." In both cases the key to poetry is the
meaningful medium, which is at once a material and a spiritual reality. In both cases
poems are made by novel structures of the medium, "modifications of old forms—or
in other words . . . creation of new." It is this conception of a
distinctively aesthetic method and content that makes Poe so hostile to the poetizing of
science and ethics. He wants a free hand with his "multiform combinations,"
unhampered by determinate rational form. Like the French Symbolists who admired him, Poe
takes music as the prototype of all art, because here, in the medium that is least
distinguishable from its subjective or objective reference, he finds the perfect
antithesis to the language and methods of reason. His emphasis on the sound of words to
the detriment of their meaning is a relatively superficial point. He aims at a much more
sweeping musicality: the treatment of meaningful words as though they were the autonomous
notes of a musical construct, capable of being combned without regard to rational
denotation. And as he persists in his elaboration of the pure poem ("this poem per
se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for
the poem’s sake"), his mood becomes not merely indifferent to reason but
actively anti-rational. In order to live in the reality of creative motion, the old static
reality must be destroyed; the new forms can arise only through a drastic modification of
the old.
The advocate of new form is Mallarme’s Poe, born to invent: "Donner
un sens plus pur au mots de la tribu." Although "indefiniteness" could
mean the power to transcend the finite words of the mob, it actually produced sloppy
poems. He succeeds better in his stories, which do not carry out, but portray, his
aspirations. Most of the tales play upon the wonders that lie beyond the confines of
reason and upon the concurrent horror of the aberration necessary to attain them. This is
Baudelaire’s Poe, "l’ecrivain des nerfs." The
narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" grants that he is "very, very dreadfully
nervous" but insists that his disease has "sharpened . . . not dulled" his
senses. This story, like many others, is a variation on the theme of
"perverseness," which Poe defines as "a perpetual inclination, in the teeth
of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it
to be such." The center of interest in these stories is not simply the emotion of
horror but the irrational state of mind, terrified at itself, yet oddly prolific. In a
sense, the unnatural violation of law is a natural capacity. Perverseness, though abnormal
from the standpoint of reason, is "an innate and primitive principle of human
action."The
narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" grants that he is "very, very dreadfully
nervous" but insists that his disease has "sharpened . . . not dulled" his
senses. This story, like many others, is a variation on the theme of
"perverseness," which Poe defines as "a perpetual inclination, in the teeth
of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it
to be such." The center of interest in these stories is not simply the emotion of
horror but the irrational state of mind, terrified at itself, yet oddly prolific. In a
sense, the unnatural violation of law is a natural capacity. Perverseness, though abnormal
from the standpoint of reason, is "an innate and primitive principle of human
action."
USHER
The most general treatment of this theme is "The Fall of the House of
Usher," the subject of which is aesthetic sensibility. Poe strikes a balance between
the wonder and the horror of the images that assail the narrator 
and preoccupy Roderick. The
first glimpse of the mansion "unnerves" the visitor in a manner wholly beyond
analysis; try as he may to explain his melancholy as the result of "very simple
natural objects" in peculiar combination, he cannot make out the formula. At the same
time, his gloom has nothing in common with the romantic love of ruin: "no goading of
the imagination could torture [it] into aught of the sublime." As he proceeds into
the house, his unnerved sensibility becomes increasingly aware of novel possibilities.
"I . . . wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were
stirring up."
Throughout the story the narrator, like the house, is
"falling"; he exists in a kind of suspended motion between the perception of
"simple natural objects" and the neurotic perception of an aberrant world. The
house itself is described as utterly decayed in every stone, yet possessed of a
"specious totality." It exists on the verge of complete disintegration and
transformation, standing on the brink of the dark lake where the narrator sees its
"remodelled and inverted" image. The zigzag fissure that is "barely
perceptible" in its front points downward into the tarn. The house is poised between
objective reality and a symbolic status that can be attained only by its immersion in the
reflecting water and simultaneous dissolution. THIS IS LIKE
HAWTHORNE. Usher’s belief in the "sentience" of the house is another
way of stating the same idea. For generations this psycho-physical quality has been
growing, occasioned not only by the structure of the building ("the method of
collocation" of the stones) but also by "its reduplication in the still waters
of the tarn." The mansion and the lake together create a distinctive world, whose
evidence, verified by the narrator, is "the gradual yet certain condesation of an
atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls." Usher and his family have
long inhabited this world, which exerts a "silent, yet importunate and terrible
influence" upon them. Their "peculiar sensibility of temperament" is
inseparable from their peculiar environment, just as the name "House of Usher"
includes "both the family and the family mansion." But they are victims of their
environment only in the sense that they have made their own milieu. The strange atmosphere
is the kind of reality created by their strange habits of thought—the product, as its
psychophysical quality testifies, of a fusion between the mirror of their minds and the
material world. The "host of unnatural sensations" that afflicts Roderick and
all his clan in synonymous with the decay of their mansion. The imminent disintegration of
the house is Roderick’s own moment of transition between the vestiges of reason and
the "exciting knowledge whose attainment is destruction."
His terror is the measure of his adherence to the old reality; his art is the
reward of the new. For behind the whole story is the conception of an antirational art. He
produces music of "singular perversion," abstract paintings of an indescribable
eccentricity, and poems that are "wild fantasias." He is the artistic mind in
extremis but profiting by its own extremity. Although the specimen verses that Poe
offers are unfortunate, the allusions to unorthodox music and to "pure
abstractions" in painting make his point well enough. Usher’s art is the last
stage of the quest for novelty which begins when all art is conceived in the image of
music. Antirational in genesis, it is doubly antirational in form and terrifying in its
escape from the canons of reason: "The paintings over which his elaborate fancy
brooded . . . grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more
thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why."
The denouement comes in "a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night . . .
wildly singular in its terror and its beauty." The shifting winds, the careering
clouds, and the "unnatural light" appeal to Roderick Usher; his disorder is one
with the external chaos, which announces the final disintegration that has been impending
throughout the story. The movement of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is like
that of "The City in the Sea," from expectation to fulfilment; and in both cases
it is Death that is pending and realized. Death broods over the luxuriant art of the city,
and death is implicit in the crumbling house and deranged mind of the Ushers. Poe
associates death, the opposite of life, with the inverted world, the opposite of reason.
In "The Masque of the Red Death" the bizarre taste of the duke is the
counterpart of the pestilence which his walls cannot shut out; the "spectral
image" of death takes over the masquerade. In "The Assignation" the hero,
who is dedicated to artistic incongruity, dies in order to achieve the last full measure
of eccentricity: "Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing in fire, and
the delirium of this scene is fashioning me for the wilder visions of that land of real
dreams whither I am now rapidly departing." In "The Colloquy of Monos and
Una" the process of dying is a revelation: "The senses were unusually active,
although eccentrically so—assuming often each other’s functions at random. The
taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and
intense."
Yet if death, like mental derangement, creates
through disorganization, it is also the loss of personal identity. Just as Usher simultaneously exploits and loathes his disease, he
longs for death and fears it—longs for the state of "real dream" to which
he tends and fears the annihilation which that entails. This is the meaning of the
relationship between Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline, between whom "sympathies
of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed." They are hardly
distinguishable, except that Madeline is less substantial, and they come to stand for two
aspects of the same individual. Although Roderick laments her seeming death, he puts her
living in the tomb and cannot bring himself to rescue her; she, who when living seemed
almost dead, struggles to return to life. The issue here is what Poe learnedly refers to
in "Morella" as "principium individuationis—the notion of that
identity which at death is or is not lost forever." And the issue is decided
by the loss of identity, since Roderick is unable to desire that she live, and her will is
unable to survive. The two collapse together; derangement is completed by dissolution.
With them their world collapses into eternal flux—amid "a long tumultuous
shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters." The lake which formerly
presented the "remodelled and inverted" image of the mansion now actually closes
over "the fragments" of the house of Usher.
At a time when English literature was living on the capital of romanticism and
increasingly given over to unambiguous narrative and orthodox meditation, American
literature had turned toward a new set of problems, growing out of a new awareness of
symbolic method. In the central work of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Poe, symbolism
is at once technique and theme. It is a governing principle: not a stylistic device, but a
point of view; not a casual subject, but a pervasive presence in the intellectual
landscape.
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POE'S RECURRENT THEMES AND MOTIFS
BULLETIN
BOARD
POE'S COSMOLOGY
"THE
TELL-TALE HEART": THE STORY