/lit/ - Literature

>>23113919
You don't explain how they fall flat. What specifically do you think he's lacking? All those synopses you gave sound potentially compelling, yet you seem to think their weakness is self-evident.

What he's aiming at in these short stories is an intense, fascinated, compulsive focus on a single image or vignette. It's the throb of the heart under the floorboards, the man seeing the last brick seal him into his tomb, the aristocrat awaking from his trance to find his sister's bloody teeth in his hand.

He strips away the subtleties of character and plot in order to set up his black, bare, showman's stage, with a pale corpse in a varnished box. You might think that that aesthetic is dry and oversimplified, but it's because of - not despite - that compression, that obsessive intensification and distillation, that people like Poe.

There's none of Hawthorne's moral allegories or fireside quaintness framing the scene. There's none of the normal narrative development of the nineteenth-century tale, because while those tales concern the complexities of the social world - complexities you can chart and navigate and unravel into a plot - Poe is concerned with obsessive psychological states that are detached from any world and any thing except their object of fixation.

The criminal in a Dickens story is a figure either of moral approbation or of tragic pity. He has a social meaning, and you respond to the story as you would respond to an anecdote told you by a friend. The criminal in a Poe story is beyond social reference points: he is simply a breathless voice of manic compulsion that carries you along in its hell-bound momentum.

If emotions respond to people and events, the states Poe explores respond to singular dream images - the oblong box, the hooded Inquisitor, the unknown man in the crowd. When you wake from a dream, haunted by some face, some gloomy building you walked through, some domestic object turned strangely ominous, I'd wager you wouldn't call that dream simple. In fact it's so dense with enigmatic significance that you wouldn't be able to begin to unravel it, because the significance seems bound up with that haunting image itself, not the development of episodes around it.

While the nineteenth-century realists were still spinning anecdotes as if everyone knew what the human mind was, Poe was distilling the irrational dream-energy that would later be fuel for modernism. That's why the surrealists liked him, that's why Baudelaire admired him, that's why he broke new ground for fiction. Anyway, that's my angle on him.