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Edgar Allan Poe's (Meta) Physics A Pre-History of The Post-Human
Edgar Allan Poe's (Meta) Physics A Pre-History of The Post-Human
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the force. No less than the entirety of peoples physical and spiritual lives, their strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, fates and character traits, were dependent upon the particular amount and polarity of Od force around and within their
bodies. Even consciousness itself, because it was theorized to be
predicated upon electrical activity in the nervous system, was
found to result from the Od forces action upon the self.
Far from a cultural aberration, Mayos study was in fact
representative of a significant current of nineteenth-century
thought. Mayo was writing in the context of numerous theories
premised upon the existence of an omnipresent force or principle, including philosophical systems (panpsychism, Naturphilosophie, transcendentalism), speculative sciences (electrophysiology, Humboldtian cosmology), and cultural practices that
conflated the two (mesmerism, spiritualism). He was committed, like many of his peers, to uncovering a rational, unified, and
material model of the physical and metaphysical universeas
well as the place of the newly conceived human within it.2
Of course, this idea that the whole of existencewhether natural, spiritual, or humanis reducible to a single, apprehensible law has a long history in Western thought apart from
orthodox Christian theology, ranging from the Newtonian celestial mechanism of the Enlightenment to the animism and
atomism of pre-Socratic Greece; though the particular beliefs
and emphases of these systems vary dramatically, all hold that
Man, even if granted ontological priority, is inexorably subject
to the same powers and laws that superintend the rest of the universe. What the nineteenth century adds to this narrative is, on
the one hand, a Romantic discourse of the Individuals essential
continuity with the natural world (and thus with the Spirit behind it), and, on the other hand, an increasingly professionalized scientific method enlisted to analyze such claims. Conceivably contradictory (and often actually so), these two positions
2 I cannot here adequately address the considerable critical work done on the development and reification of a natural-historical notion of the human over the course
of the mid eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, but see especially Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2004) for an argument that the development of the nineteenth-century human sciences hardened the reification of an ontologically distinct (and superior) human.
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sality of the Od meant that persons and things were interconnected to such an extent that the force of things could either
upset or restore the Od balance of persons, with baleful or
beneficial results, respectively.
For Mayo, then, mesmerisms revelation of the continuity
between ostensibly differentiated persons and their environments was not merely incidental; it was the practices condition
of possibility. The disintegration of the boundaries dividing self
and other, synecdochic for the general convergence of self and
world, was requisite for mesmerisms dramatic exhibitions of
control over individual bodies. In this light, in mesmerisms and
the Od forces transfer of authority over the human from the
traditional Christian God to a universal physical law, humanity
was no longer a creation apart, an isolated point of significance
defined in relief against an essentially detached world; instead,
the species was integrated within a unified, physical cosmos.
And yet this integration did not result, for Mayo, in either the
species disappearance or its irrelevance.6 Rather, conceding
that the Ods operations were largely opaque and uncontrolled
at present, Mayo had every confidence that humanity might one
day manipulate its energies for the improvement of the race. Indeed, Mayo intimated that mesmeric healings might be the
first, tentative step toward a future utopia in which a harnessed
Od force would be consciously directed toward the full realization of humanitys now dormant potentialities.
Like Mayo, Edgar Allan Poe actively studied mesmerism
in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to writing three explicitly mesmeric tales, Poe reviewed and published the work of
other writers on the subject, was acquainted with some of the
mesmerist luminaries of his day, and maintained a correspondence with various experts in the field.7 And, like Mayo, Poe regarded mesmerism as a particularly vivid instantiation of a more
6 Mayo thus duplicates the paradoxical logic of taxonomic natural histories since
Linnaeus: assuming humanitys fundamental commonality with the rest of nature, on
the one hand, while still reserving a sense of the significance of human difference, on
the other. See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996).
7 For summaries of Poes relation to mesmerism, see Sidney E. Lind, Poe and Mesmerism, PMLA, 62 (1947), 1,07794; Doris V. Falk, Poe and the Power of Animal
Magnetism, PMLA, 84 (1969), 536 46; Adam Frank, Valdemars Tongue, Poes
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fundamental process wherein persons are subjected to the control of material universal forces. Unlike Mayo, however, Poe radically deviated from the utopian, utilitarian, or benign notions
of mesmerism at play in most contemporary discourses on the
topic, picturing instead the unsettling implications for human
ontology consequent upon the idea that persons are less sovereign entities than manipulatable effects of external powers.8
Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did,
that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it
for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being
by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and
the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power. For Poe,
then, mesmerism reveals the selfs identityits putative independence and integrityto be disturbingly fragile, if not altogether illusory.
In thus suggesting that contact with things profounder
than selves is necessarily disintegrative of the individual subject,
Telegraphy, ELH, 72 (2005), 635 62; and Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric
Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,
2006). For broader accounts of mesmerism in America, see Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound:
Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978); John J.
Kucich, Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2004); Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama
Press, 1998); Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997). For a useful collection
of Poes positive statements about mesmerism, see Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 18091849 (Boston: G. K. Hall
and Co., 1987), pp. 523, 619.
8 Poe consistently rejects his ages belief in the ultimate perfectibility of society
(Fuller, Mesmerism, p. 21), deriding many of the movements associated with mesmeric
principles, including such causes as temperance, womens rights, abolitionism, communitarianism, phrenology, . . . as well as dietary, dress, marriage, and medical reform
(Carroll, Spiritualism, p. 4). Writing to James Russell Lowell on 2 July 1844, Poe succinctly notes: I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will
have no appreciable effect upon humanity (The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John
Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. [New York: Gordian Press, 1966], I, 256).
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Poe touches upon a paradox at the heart of many nineteenthcentury metaphysical discourses: namely, the idea that cosmic
forces undermine any meaningful sense of the discreteness or
individuality of selves but, simultaneously, are also available for
various practices of the self around which the individual subject
can cohere (relevant here would be mesmerism or Madame
Blavatskys later theosophy, but also, perhaps less obviously,
Ralph Waldo Emersons Nature [1836] or Walt Whitmans Leaves
of Grass [1855]). Poes rejection of this logic is significant because of both its timing and its broader implications, intervening as it does early in the development of a larger, quintessentially American formulation: the self-affirming dialectic
between an emergent humanist Individualism (and its concomitant notion of the autonomous, sovereign individual) and
those supra-personal forces (whether political, economic, or
religious) understood to be simultaneously greater than individuals and yet also primary sources of individual identity. Earlycentury discourses of citizenship in American democracy (such
as those by Alexis de Tocqueville), mid-century social and religious utopianisms, or late-century articulations of individuals in
industrial capitalism (such as Andrew Carnegies) may be the
most familiar examples, but the underlying logic was ubiquitous.9 Poefamously anti-democratic, anti-nationalistic, anticapitalisticmakes clear, however, that you cannot have it both
ways, cannot transcend the self for the sake of the self, cannot
unify the social, much less the universal, without eliminating
(the individuality of ) individuals.10
In Poes universe, then, a cosmic force exists, but not in the
service of human interests. Nonidealistic, asocial, and nonhuman, this universal principle relegates humankind to, at best, an
ephemeral existence: contingent, never assured, constantly en-
9 For the oft-noted convergence of theories of liberal democracy and market capitalism in the formation of a distinctively American form of individualism, see Steven
Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); and Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, et al. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986).
10 For the best articulation of Poes antagonism toward myths of national or economic
progress, see J. Gerald Kennedy, A Mania for Composition: Poes Annus Mirabilis and
the Violence of Nation-building, American Literary History, 17 (2005), 135.
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In Mesmeric Revelation (1844), for instance, Poe presents through the visions of a dying mesmerized patient (Mr.
Vankirk) a picture of the universe in which all phenomena, both
physical and spiritual, consist of a common material substrate,
an ultimate, or unparticled matter, [that] not only permeates
all things but impels all thingsand thus is all things within itself. 12 Subsequently revealed to be, as in Spinozas philosophy,
a manifestation of spirit or God, this invisible unarticulated
matter is, Vankirk insists, still as fully matter as before (Mesmeric Revelation, p. 1,034), the physical medium through
which all constituents of the interconnected universe manifest
the universal impulse.13 Contra the affirmations of life and self
evident in contemporary mesmeric theory, however, Vankirk
claims that apprehension of this universal influence is achievable only in a mesmeric trance or death, because these states
allow for the supercession of our individual, rudimental bodies (Mesmeric Revelation, p. 1,038). In other words, the selfs
death (or its mesmeric equivalent) is the necessary cost of transitioning from a body capable of capturing only a small, contingent spectrum of the totality of being to a state of absolute
harmony and identification with the universe: in the ultimate,
unorganized life [i.e., death], the external world reaches the
whole body. . . . in unison with it . . . the whole body vibrates
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). For a riposte to the paradoxical will-to-will
of much writing on the post-human, see Daniel T. OHara, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2, 30, no. 3
(2003), 10722. More locally, I am resisting the affirmative account of post-human
mimesis in Poe offered by James Berkley in Post-Human Mimesis and the Debunked
Machine: Reading Environmental Appropriation in Poes Maelzels Chess-Player and
The Man That Was Used Up, Comparative Literature Studies, 41 (2004), 356 76. Poe,
I argue, does not imagine the loss of the human into its environment only to reconstitute an improved subjectivity available to the individual self.
12 Edgar Allan Poe, Mesmeric Revelation, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
Thomas Mabbott, et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,
1969 78), III, 1,033; further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
13 For a brilliant argument that Poe deflates spirituality by materializing it, see Joan
Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poes Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
Yet where Dayan posits that Poes insistence on physicality constitutes a rejection of all
spiritual unity and meaning, I would argue that it instead subverts the periods religious
orthodoxies only in order to embrace a material cosmic process that is itself infused
with the meaningfulness (though not the salvific potential) normally reserved for the
spiritual.
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(pp. 1,03738); or, as Vankirk states earlier, when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, and
I perceive external things directly, without organs (p. 1,037;
emphasis added).14 As out-of-body, self-abeyant events, both
mesmerism and death offer literally direct experiences of
uni[ty] with the cosmos. Vankirk, however, just before he dies,
makes clear that the difference between normal, rudimental
senses and the sensations of the ultimate life is one of degree
rather than kind; both states bodily register the universes vibrations, even if it is only in the state of ultimate life that one
recognizes what the sensations portend: the conjunction of sensor and sensed in the unity of the unparticled matter. Whether
one is alive or dead, awake or entranced, sensations mark the
immediacy of congress and the reciprocity of identity between
sensible universe and sensing subject by blurring the line that
separates the two; sensations, that is, mark the bodys destabilizing encounter with its uncannily identical beyond.15 Mesmeric
Revelation underscores this point by making subject and object
indistinguishable in the same moment that self and not-self are
collapsed into a common unity, in the same space where external things [are perceived] directly.
Like Poes mesmeric tales, Eureka combines empiricist inquiry and transcendent insight, offering a material physics of
the spiritual relation between self and universe by showing
the constitutive imbrication of the two, the interdependencecum-convergence of subject and object.16 In short, Eureka is
14 Although the implications of the parallel are beyond the scope of this essay, there
is an uncanny resemblance between Vankirks vision of the ultimate life and Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattaris description of the body without organs.
15 For a different account of the significance of sensations in Poes work, see David
Leverenz, Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poes Sensationalism, in
A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2001), pp. 95127.
16 Eurekas mixture of scientific factuality and spiritual inspiration is made explicit in
the balance between the preface (What I here propound is true:therefore it cannot
die) and the dedication (to those who feel rather than to those who thinkto the
dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities) (Edgar Allan Poe,
preface to Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry
and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984],
p. 1,259; further references are to this edition and appear in the text). Despite the poetic form, Poe never suggests that the science of Eureka is inaccurate. Many critics of the
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ads of individual Intelligences become blended . . . into One. . . .
individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness . . . Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel
himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch
when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the
meantime bear in mind that all is LifeLifeLife within Life
the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine. (Eureka, pp. 1,358 59)
As Eurekas conclusion, this passage encapsulates the essays dominant themes: that the coherent identities of individual things (especially Man) ultimately will be lost in the final
reconstitution of God; that this is a transitional process whose
effects can be felt in the present; that we are not the only things
to feel it. Together, these ideas capture the exceeding strangeness of Eurekas universe. On the one hand, it makes us continuous with the godhead; but, on the other hand, it does so
only by reducing us to a mortal knowledge of our common
thingness. In revealing that inanimate and animate things
alike are all of a shared, divine substance, Eureka necessarily
eliminates our ontological distinction and, consequently, our
existence. In opposition, therefore, to the this-worldly optimism and anthropocentricism of its contemporaries, Eureka
echoes Vankirk in making our deaththe death of the individual, the death of the humana precondition of full transcendence. Poe notes: in order to comprehend what [God] is,
we should have to be God ourselves (Eureka, p. 1,276)and,
for Poe, we can only become God when we are no more;
something survives our fatal convergence into One, but it is
not us. In Poes universe, identity can only be born in the moment that difference is buried, when gravity yields the grave.19
19 See Irwin, American Hieroglyphics; Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: FirstPerson Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe,
Hawthorne, and Melville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989); and Evan Carton, The
Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985). These critics all have discussed how Eureka makes death a precondition for knowledge, but they do so in order then to offer either deconstructionist or psychoanalytic arguments that diverge from the point that
I believe Poe is making here about the material basis of such absolute identification.
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bodies: shadows take flesh; phantoms become palpable realities; incorporeal thoughts assume less and less indefinite
shapes. Yet these now-tangible places and things do the same
work as Eurekas whispered memories: they speak to us with low
voices about our future, they precipitate an encounter with that
which is beyond us. As localized instantiations of the fatal effect of other bodies on our own, the myriad forms in Poes tales
thus concretize and particularize the general cosmological narrative outlined in Eureka: individual entities subjected to the
influence of their larger environments, until a final collapse cancels their differentiation. Therefore, though written at the end
of Poes life, well after his most prolific period of producing
short fiction, Eureka can be read as retroactively theorizing in
broad philosophical strokes the consistent (meta)physical laws
embodied in much of his earlier writings.20 From cats to comets
to teeth, normally innocuous things, now synecdochically invested with cosmic import, bring selves into submission to the
world, thus producing a state wherein the subject is itself reduced to a thing.
Martin Heideggers analysis in Being and Time (1953) of
the relation between Dasein and objects can help to clarify the
significance of what Poe is doing in these instances. Exploring
the paradox that everyday things (such as hammers or clocks)
are normally invisible as discrete items because of the familiarity and banality of their use by Dasein (things never show
themselves initially by themselves), Heidegger argues that such
things become conspicuous only when they resist the normative associations attached to them or when, more directly, they
defy being used.21 Whether it is because they are damaged, misplaced, or merely in the way, things demand confrontation
only when they are obstinately unhandy, when their handiness or purposiveness for Dasein is interrupted (Being and
20
For prior, differently valenced readings of Eurekas relation to the tales, see Dayan,
Fables of Mind; Carton, Rhetoric of American Romance; and Louis A. Renza, Edgar Allan Poe,
Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.
Press, 2002).
21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1996), pp. 64, 68.
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22 The reductive conflation of the terms humanity and/or self with Dasein is not
strictly fair to Heideggers usage. Insofar as Heidegger does present Dasein as the particular kind of being exclusive to humankind, however, this approximation will serve
for the purposes of illustration required here.
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Thus, rather than asserting their presence only when unhandy (for Heidegger being unusable merely reinscribes the
fact that things exist for persons), Poes things attain prominence by forcefully propelling themselves from the indiscernability of the material background to the hypervisibility of
peoples lives, before dragging them back to the abyss of indistinction (Being and Time, p. 69). Such dramatic interventions
force people to recognize that things are objectively present
(p. 69), actively disabling their mastery of and being in the
world. Where Heidegger wants to eschew theoretically considering things independently of their utility or handiness to Dasein as material for living (Being and Time, pp. 68, 64), Poe
wants to demystify the illusions of independence and anthropocentrism by revealing there to be only one material of life,
one in which humanity and individual selves are lost in, or
folded into, their others.23 Indeed, it is the moment of this entropic relapse into the common indistinction of thingness (for
both objects and subjects) that makes individual forms
perceptible at allthus Vankirk is most aware of his body when
he senses it being absorbed into the universe. And Poe advances
this fusion-via-annihilation as the standard of subject-object relations in the world. Individual, discrete things stand-in for, are
the visible reminders/remainders of, materiality as such, the
common denominator that reveals a mutual origin and foretells
a shared, future collapse with the perceiving subject. Like the
more transparent universal processes of Eureka or the mesmeric
tales, the things of Poes other writings, protean embodiments of
cosmic forces, attack the integrity of characters coherent, autonomous identities, rending them apart (rendering them a
part) and revealing them to be of the same constitution as, subject to the same forces as, continuous with rather than discrete
from, unified Being. Such things, in other words, do violence to
us. Put another way, Poes tales ask: what happens when Hei-
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24 For Heideggers exposition of how hammers further the being of Dasein, see Being and Time, pp. 64 65.
25 Brown argues that we can only begin to confront the thingness of objects when
they stop working for us . . . when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The
story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to
the human subject (Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry, 28 [2001], 4). Although Brown does not here explicitly reference Heidegger, he does acknowledge the
relation in other writings.
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Consider, for instance, Ligeia (1838). Given its epigraphwhich reads in part, God is but a great will pervading
all things. . . . Man doth not yield himself to . . . death . . . save
only through the weakness of his feeble will 26and given the
standard interpretation of the story as emblematic of an indomitable will enabling even the survival of death, it may seem
counterintuitive to include the tale in a discussion on the death
of individuals.27 The difficulty is only superficial, however. The
tales epigraph, for instance, anticipates almost verbatim Eurekas pantheistic assertion of God pervading all things, including the will of Man. And, as we have seen, such a universal interconnection works to cancel the survival of individual selves.
Indeed, from the tales first page, the narrators existence as an
independent entity is endangered, as Ligeia is characterized as
enthralling and pass[ing] . . . into [the narrators] spirit
(Ligeia, pp. 310, 314); the narrator even admits, I was
sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself . . .
to her guidance (p. 316). Reproducing the structure of the
mesmeric sance, the narrator literally loses himself in Ligeias
eyes, his I into her eye.28
In order to see how this represents a loss of selves rather
than their consummation, we can follow the narrators example
and pause for a moment on (or within) Ligeias eyes. To him
they resemble the twin stars of Leda and almost recall to
memory something long forgotten (Ligeia, p. 313). But he is
not able, in the end, to remember what this something is,
leading him to repeatedly ask what was it? regarding that
which lay far within the pupils of [his] beloved (pp. 314, 313).
26 Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia, in Collected Works, II, 310; further references are to this
edition and appear in the text.
27 See, for instance, Arthur Hobson Quinns classic Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941), pp. 269 70; and J. Gerald Kennedy,
Poe, Ligeia, and the Problem of Dying Women, in New Essays on Poes Major Tales, ed.
Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 11329.
28 Harold Bloom reads Poes work in general, and Ligeia in particular, as being
centered on psychological absorption and pathological fantasies of incorporation
(see Bloom, introduction to The Tales of Poe, ed. Bloom [New York: Chelsea House,
1987], p. 8). I concur with Blooms attention to absorption but define it in material
rather than psychological terms.
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trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarna pestilent and
mystic vapor (pp. 399 400).
Even more unnerving, the houses atmosphere quickly
becomes the narrators own: with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervade[s] the narrators
spirit, resulting in an utter depression of soul analogous to
the bitter lapse into every-day life of waking from an opium
dream (House of Usher, p. 397). This disruption of the narrators putatively autonomous self through a confrontation with
an object of every-day life exhibits the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed [him] (p. 399). The narrator, in other
words, is not detached from the scene he surveys. Indeed, the
fact that the peculiar affect of the scene becomes the narrators own, affecting him even physically, forces him to admit that
there are combinations of . . . natural objects which have the
power of thus affecting us (p. 398). Though analysis of this
power lies . . . beyond our depth (p. 398), the fact that the narrator can feel a power in his surroundings at all suggests that
the two are interrelated to an extent that complicates their differentiation. That affects or atmospheres might actually reside
in things and then possess persons, rather than the other way
around, is a disconcerting propositionbut it is that one the
tale embodies.
All of this could still be discounted as the narrators imaginative projections were it not for what follows. Literalizing the
indistinguishability of building and inhabitants inherent to the
equivocal appellation of the House of Usher, the story displays the effects of the mutual influence of structure and lineage over the long lapse of centuries, a reciprocal imbrication made all the more incestuous because the very ancient
family tree never put forth . . . any enduring branch that lived
beyond the mansions walls (House of Usher, pp. 398 99).
Suffering equally from lines that are absences (the branchless
family tree; the fissure reaching from the top of the houses
roof to its foundation), the house and its eponymous owners
are connected by a common rupture that foreshadows their
collapse into one another. And Roderick Usher, last of the family line, knows it or rather, he senses it. Indeed, Rodericks
self-avowed defining characteristic, and why he calls the narra-
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sufferance . . . obtained over his spiritan effect which the
physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into
which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon
the morale of his existence. (House of Usher, p. 403)
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human subject but only its edifying transformation into something more, Poes nonproductive and unyielding vision of the
post-human insists on the overcoming of the subject by the object that it uncannily resembles, the loss of the putative individuals life to the world such that the I, too, becomes a thing; the
post-human for Poe, in other words, is Gothic rather than
utopic, something to be lived, if at all, by corpses rather than immortal persons. Thus, although he participates in his cultures
particular cosmontological imaginary, Poe represents an inassimilable negativity within that cultures twinned developmental
histories of the Human and the Individual, histories whose postmortems, despite the post-human, have yet to be written.38
Johns Hopkins University
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe; Eureka; Ligeia; The Fall of the House
of Usher; mesmerism