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Beyond Orientalism: Edgar Allan Poe

and the Middle East
Karen Grumberg

Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation

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 Introduction:
Beyond Orientalism—
Edgar Allan Poe and the Middle East
KAREN GRUMBERG

E
dgar Allan Poe’s writing travels well. Through Charles Baudelaire’s
French translations, Poe’s works enthralled Parisian readers and pro-
ceeded to make their way across Europe and beyond.1 Poe’s transfor-
mation into “world author” was taking place at almost the same time as his
establishment as a US author. Evocative analyses of Poe’s translation into Ice-
landic, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and many more languages complement the
exposés of his influence on authors around the globe. Poe has been translated
and retranslated, read and reread, adapted and imitated, offering a particu-
larly rich illustration of the transnational and translinguistic circulation that
David Damrosch emphasizes in his characterization of world literature.2 The
scholarly interest in Poe as a participant in a global literary network is readily
evident in the proliferation of recent studies such as Poe Abroad, “Cosmopol-
itan Poe,” Poe’s Pervasive Influence, Translated Poe, and “Poe and his Global
Advocates.”3 While scholars have long been concerned with Poe’s influence
on specific authors and literary traditions—for example, on French literature
via Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, or Paul Valéry; on Argentine literature via
Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, or Julio Cortázar; or on Japanese litera-
ture via Edogawa Rampo or Ryūnosuke Akutagawa—the studies cited above
indicate a shift in approach, reframing individual cases collectively as the basis
of Poe’s status as a world author. There is by now no doubt of Poe’s foresight
when he expressed in a letter to John Allan on December 22, 1828: “the world
shall be my theatre” (Letters, 1:17). The global stagings of Poe’s works tell
their own distinctive stories, which, taken together, link Poe to the discourse
on world literature.
Another body of scholarship that considers Poe’s interaction with the
wider world focuses on his Orientalism. Poe’s representation of themes and
aesthetics associated with Central Asia and the Middle East has been read

Vol. 53 (2020): 3–9 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press and Washington State University

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alongside those of his contemporaries in the United States and Europe.4 Like
them, Poe drew from widespread stereotypes, not to engage meaningfully with
the region as a home to people with distinctive, complex cultures, but rather
to infuse his poetry and prose with an exotic, mysterious atmosphere. Decades
before Edward Said published his seminal study on the subject, critics had
already commented on the Orientalism of Poe’s works (with some earlier crit-
ics betraying their own Orientalizing tendencies). There is no question that
Poe’s perception of “the East” furnished a treasure trove of objects and behav-
iors that would help stylize stories like “Ligeia” and poems like “Al Aaraaf.”
The question of Poe’s Orientalism continues to provoke compelling avenues of
inquiry and analysis that occasionally produce incompatible interpretations.
Schueller, for instance, reads Poe’s works, and specifically “Ligeia,” as offering
“a parodied Orientalist discourse [that] intersects with discourses on South-
ern nationalism and sexuality.”5 This reading of Poe’s Orientalism as a polit-
ically strategic appropriation and revision contrasts with others that consider
it political only by virtue of the disengagement from the real it seems to afford
Poe. For example, Gruesser’s reading of “Ligeia” critiques what it sees as Poe’s
unproblematized use of Orientalist tropes by applying Said’s core ideas to the
story: “‘Ligeia,’ like Orientalism, portrays the intellectual, if not the political,
dangers of allowing a paper construct to take the place of that which actually
exists.”6 In the critical imagination, Poe’s employment of Orientalist tropes has
been interpreted both in keeping with conventional Western Orientalism and
as its subtle subversion.
Poe’s Orientalist representation of the Middle East, while significant,
speaks to a single facet of his works’ engagement with the region. What of
the region’s engagement with Poe? How did (and how do) readers, authors,
and other producers and consumers of culture in the Middle East understand
his poems and stories? What are the challenges and rewards of bringing Poe’s
works into contact with new linguistic spheres and diverse cultural contexts?
How might such interactions affect our reading of Poe? These questions under-
pin this special feature on “Poe and the Middle East.” The Middle East region
encompasses areas that are geographically, historically, culturally, and linguis-
tically bound, but, at the same time, these commonalities accommodate dis-
tinctive narratives and collective experiences. In bringing together these five
articles to consider the question of “Poe and the Middle East,” we want to
demonstrate the value—to world literature and to comparative literature—of
considering authors and their works on both global and regional scales. The
Middle East offers a particularly urgent case for comparison: its contempo-
rary political volatility has given rise to a separatism that belies centuries of
distinctive but overlapping, mutually informing cultures. The rich variety of

4 POE STUDIES
 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Middle Eastern dialogues with Poe showcases concerns specific to particular

Middle Eastern cultures, languages, and nations while also suggesting that,
broadly speaking, the cultural traditions of the Middle East read Poe on their
own terms, warranting investigation beyond the heretofore dominant analyses
of influence, translation, and adaptation.
The primary goal of this special feature is to provide a sense of the
remarkable diversity that characterizes the reciprocal encounter between Poe’s
works and the Middle East, broadly conceived. As such, these articles not only
complement but also complicate the questions posed by many of the important
studies that have considered the intersection of Poe and the Middle East region
primarily through the lens of Orientalism. The multifarious web of relations
between Poe’s texts and the cultures of the Middle East invites us to move
beyond Orientalism or risk falling prey to the same homogenizing tendencies
that characterize it. In this spirit, the pieces collected in this special feature
seek to recalibrate our understanding of the dynamics between Poe and the
Middle East. Building on the critical corpus that has established Poe’s Orien-
talism as relevant to his writing, these essays offer new insights both on his
Orientalist proclivities and on the ongoing dialogue particular Middle Eastern
cultural traditions have with Poe and his legacy. Taking us beyond the ques-
tions of translation and literary influence that have animated most discussions
of global Poe, these articles outline diverse modes of contact and appropria-
tion. Together, they illuminate unexplored corners of Middle Eastern cultures
and, at the same time, enhance our understanding of Poe and the remarkable
elasticity of his poetics.
In the first article, “How to Make the East Interesting: Poe and the Holy-
Land Vogue,” Milette Shamir adds a new dimension to the critical conver-
sation on Poe’s Orientalism, differentiating between Poe’s tendencies toward
Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said, on the one hand, and Poe’s employ-
ment of “the overlapping but distinct discourse of biblical orientalism,” on
the other. This biblical orientalism, she explains, “regards the east not as the
fanciful realm of the Turk, Arab, or Persian Other but as the place of origin for
the Protestant self, not as the land of Arabian Nights but as the birthplace of
the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels” (11). As such, Shamir reads bibli-
cal orientalism as the ground for Poe’s participation in the “Holy-Land vogue.”
Though Poe is not as closely identified with this trend as other nineteenth-
century US authors, Shamir posits that he made substantive contributions to
its discourse through his use of biblical materials. In Poe’s case, she argues,
this appropriation was a key technique for the creation of readerly interest:
Poe was “an active agent, even something of a front-runner, in the widespread
project of repackaging old biblical materials into modern textual styles for

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mass consumption,” piquing readers’ interest in texts about the Holy Land and
ensuring the ongoing circulation of these writings (11–12). Besides reflecting
Poe’s fascination with new techniques for generating interest, his Holy-Land
texts—printed by both religious and secular presses—also point to the fallacy
of rigid lines of separation between such categories in the nineteenth century.
Readers of Poe’s Holy-Land works, suggests Shamir, were not primarily drawn
to those texts by spiritual yearning nor by an Orientalist desire for Eastern
mystique, but by excitement. For Poe, making the East interesting is more
than a literary technique—it is a mode of strategic marketing, circulation, and
dissemination.
While Shamir investigates what Poe’s work says about the East, the next
article, by Jeffrey Einboden, considers what Poe’s work disallows the East from
saying. In “‘As Moslemin their Shrouds at Mecca’: The Arabic Repressions and
Resurrections of Poe’s Corpus,” Einboden argues that Poe’s Orientalism, readily
evident in various material signifiers embellishing Poe’s characters and settings,
exists also beneath these surfaces, in linguistic form. The Arabic language itself,
Einboden suggests, is at the center of Poe’s revisions and adaptations of Mid-
dle Eastern textual precedents. Like a character whose fate lies in the hands of
the author, so too is Arabic subject to live burial, uncanny appearances, and
reanimation. Rather than read Arabic merely as a victim in Poe’s stories, how-
ever, Einboden points to the agency of Arabic in the face of Poe’s repressions
and revivals. Its persistent presence, he claims, signals an active intervention
“both below and beyond [Poe’s] English canon” (30), in spite of the English
texts’ manipulations, misrepresentations, and repressions. Both body and text,
the Arabic that haunts Poe’s works, having undergone excisions and distor-
tions, emerges as a metatext with its own story to tell. It is a story with two
sides: though primarily concerned with the English texts’ revision of Arabic
antecedents, Einboden also considers how several Arabic translations of Poe
negotiate the matter of Poe’s Arabic. These translations might be expected to
play a restorative or corrective role, yet Einboden shows, surprisingly, that the
precision they offer may well mislead readers in its own way.
The three subsequent articles are situated squarely within the Middle
East region itself. My own piece, “‘Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to
dream before’: Poe, Degeneration, and Revolution in the Hebrew Imagination,”
examines articles published in Hebrew periodicals on the right and left of the
political spectrum from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Outlining the
engagement with Poe in the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Yishuv,
and later in Israel, I consider how Hebrew readers who identified with incom-
patible visions of Zionism appropriated Poe’s writing and his perceived persona
to antithetical ends. To those on the left, his preoccupation with decadence

6 POE STUDIES
 I N T R O D U C T I O N

and decay signified a seductive threat to the healthy corporeality associated

with Labor Zionism and its revolutionary spirit, an exemplar of the “degener-
ation” that Max Nordau had identified as the source of social putrefaction in
nineteenth-century Europe. To those on the right, the same aesthetic was evi-
dence of Poe’s innovation and creative courage, identified with the revolution-
ary inclinations of the United States of America and its culture. At the center
of my investigation is Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the passionate ideologue of Revisionist
Zionism, an ardent admirer of Poe, and the first Hebrew translator of “The
Raven.” Jabotinsky’s “Ha-orev” is considered to this day not only the definitive
Hebrew rendering of Poe’s poem but also a milestone in Hebrew translation his-
tory writ large. Though Jabotinsky’s association with Poe through his famous
translations positioned Poe, in many Hebrew readers’ minds, on the political
right, Jabotinsky himself, as I argue, understood Poe with far more nuance and
complexity than allowable within the binary of right and left. This resistance to
facile categorization may help explain the ongoing Hebrew negotiations with
Poe’s works.
In her contribution, “The Haunting Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe in Otto-
man-Turkish Literature,” Hande Tekdemir proceeds from an understanding
that Ottoman/Turkish writers of the nineteenth century, unlike their contem-
poraries in other parts of the world, apparently were not influenced by Poe.
She argues, though, that despite the dearth of explicit and overt manifesta-
tions of influence, Turkish literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries is haunted by the legacy of Poe. Seeking to expose this “indirect
impact” on Ottoman literature, Tekdemir considers instances of Poe’s shadowy
presence behind the immediate inspiration for certain trends in Ottoman lit-
erature. French translations of Poe, for example, assumed the quality of origi-
nal French literature, a primary source of inspiration for Turkish authors and
poets. Similarly, she posits, the popularity of pseudotranslations and adapta-
tions of detective fiction can be traced to Poe’s pioneering contributions to the
genre. Poe’s present-absence in Turkish literary culture emerges most forcefully
in Tekdemir’s close readings of the works of two nineteenth-century writers
with decadent inclinations. These authors, as she shows, borrow not only from
Poe’s aesthetic and thematic repertoire but also from his critical sensibilities.
The robust textual and contextual evidence she provides notwithstanding, Tek-
demir stops short of asserting Poe as the indisputable inspiration for these
authors’ works, resisting the impulse to bring Poe’s shadowy figure into sharper
focus. It is precisely in this unresolved state, she suggests, that Poe’s presence
ought to be understood in relation to Ottoman-Turkish literature. By contrast,
late-twentieth-century Turkish authors’ unambiguous embrace of Poe speaks
to broader transformations in Turkish literary culture.

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The final article in this feature takes us away from the realm of texts
and onto the silver screen. In “The Disappearing Body: Poe and the Logics of
Iranian Horror Films,” Laura Fish considers the Iranian cinematic adaptation
of specific aesthetic strategies associated with Poe—namely, the representation
of deeply unsettling ambiguity experienced by female characters undergoing
extreme psychological turmoil. The focus of her investigation is the Iranian
Armenian filmmaker Samuel Khachikian, known for having introduced the
crime thriller to Iranian cinema. Reconceptualizing Khachikian’s thrillers as
horror films, Fish brings them into conversation with Poe’s stories to highlight
shared techniques and motifs in the production of horror. She calls on Sigmund
Freud and Julia Kristeva to help theorize “the viewing of the corpse . . . as a
form of abjection through which the female character dissolves into madness,”
ultimately prohibiting any real resolution and sustaining a sense of perpetual
disquiet in Poe’s stories and Khachikian’s films (89). While unresolved endings
are typical of Poe’s stories and integral to his creation of horror, Khachikian’s
particular industrial and commercial contexts did not allow filmmakers the
luxury of irresolution and ambiguity. The restoration of order at the end of
his films, accordingly, seems “to undercut the uncanny imaginings his films
provoke” (89). As Fish argues, however, his experiments with horror resonate
nonetheless by fixating on the same porous border between life and death that
preoccupied Poe. Her comparative reading takes her finally to more recent Ira-
nian cinema; produced in the diaspora, these newer films are unconstrained by
the demands for narrative closure that muffled the echoes of Poe in Khachiki-
an’s films. Fish posits that the same unstable border between life and death that
unsettled Poe’s readers undergirds Khachikian’s films’ production of horror and
agitates his viewers.
These five articles do not purport to provide a comprehensive picture
of the Middle East’s engagement with Poe, nor even to suggest the possibility
of such an endeavor. To the contrary: what is most compelling about these
contributions, taken as a whole, is how strikingly different they are in their
methods, approaches, and arguments. The value of collections that hinge on
a common concern, such as translation, is undeniable. There is something to
be said, however, for allowing specialists in various Middle Eastern cultural
traditions to approach the question of Poe in the Middle East on their own
terms. The result, as this special feature demonstrates, is a diverse array of
studies that reflects the multifarious, multilinguistic, heterogeneous nature of
the Middle East region as a whole, as well as of its various parts. Some of these
articles chart varied attempts to represent aspects of different Middle Eastern
experiences, histories, and subjectivities; others point to Middle Eastern tropes
as tools for the exposure and concealment of characteristics of the Anglophone

8 POE STUDIES
 I N T R O D U C T I O N

American self. In all of them, the dynamic between Poe and the Middle East—
whatever its trajectory—is ultimately reciprocal and fluid, taking us beyond
the univocality and stasis of Orientalism. Even as Poe used the Middle East to
accomplish certain goals in the context of his nineteenth-century reality in the
United States, cultural producers in the Middle East have used Poe to address
the fissures and contradictions within their own collectives. These articles,
taken together, offer a taste of these complex negotiations.
University of Texas at Austin

Notes
1
Addressing Paul Valéry’s observation that Baudelaire’s introduction of Poe into
European literature was critical to Poe’s legacy, Lois Davis Vines argues that it was not
only Europe but the world at large that benefitted from Baudelaire’s translations and
essays. The essays collected in her volume focus on Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
See Vines, Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press,
1999), 1.
2
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
2003).
3
Vines, Poe Abroad; Emron Esplin, “Cosmopolitan Poe: An Introduction,” Com-
paratist 35 (2011): 198–210; Barbara Cantalupo, ed., Poe’s Pervasive Influence (Beth-
lehem: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2012); Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds.,
Translated Poe (Bethlehem: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2014); and Emron Esplin, “Poe and his
Global Advocates,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. J. Gerald Kennedy
and Scott Peeples (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019), 597–617.
4
See, for example: John Carlos Rowe, “Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, 87–103; Malini Johar Schueller, “Harems, Ori-
entalist Subversions, and the Crisis of Nationalism: The Case of Edgar Allan Poe and
‘Ligeia,’” Criticism 37, no. 4 (1995): 601–23; John C. Gruesser, “‘Ligeia’ and Oriental-
ism,” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 2 (1989): 145–49; Jacob Rama Berman, American
Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary (New York: New York Univ.
Press, 2012); and Berman, “The Near East,” in Edgar Allan Poe in Context, ed. Kevin J.
Hayes (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 53–62.
5
Schueller, “Harems,” 605.
6
Gruesser, “‘Ligeia’ and Orientalism,” 149.

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