Abstract
A persistent subject-matter of Poe’s, from Usher, through tales such as Ligeia and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, to his cosmic prose-poem, Eureka, is the borderline between life and death, the moment when matter becomes “unparticled.” Poe’s imagination is fundamentally conditioned by Ancient Greek atomic theory as it comes down through Lucretius. Using this theory, Poe provides the most extensive body of work of minds in extremis in the nineteenth century, often literally so. This essay will focus on how atomic theory is refashioned by Poe into a unique contribution to the literature of terror.
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Notes
- 1.
For a succinct history of philosophical materialism prior to Poe, see Wolfe. Wolfe summarises the main currents of eighteenth-century materialism as follows: “it was a thoroughgoing naturalism, seeking to inscribe our knowledge of the mind (or soul), self, morals and beyond into a sphere compatible with experimental evidence; it was a particularly embodied set of theories, relying on (and conversely, nourishing) biomedical debates; yet it was also, frequently, more speculative than not, extending a kind of Lucretian ‘science-fiction’ approach to the understanding of Nature…” (93). A “kind of Lucretian ‘science-fiction’” is a perfect description of Poe’s approach to materialism, especially his cosmological prose-poem Eureka.
- 2.
For the wider context of materialism in the Gothic, see Botting.
- 3.
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is the title of Poe’s 1840 collection of stories. He seems to be reworking Radcliffe’s influential division between terror and horror from her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), where tales that largely feature mental terror are “arabesque,” while those focussing on physical horror are “grotesque.” Poe’s tales are, in fact, almost always a mixture of both modes.
- 4.
“A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things,” William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” (ll. 102-104); “The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 272).
- 5.
As Charles Wolfe points out, philosophically speaking, materialism is an extremely slippery concept. Its meanings are clearer when used pejoratively by anti-materialists (91). Materialism itself runs into the inescapable dualism of language, where binary thinking is required to explain singularity, defeating the attempt in the process. Poe obviously does not solve this conundrum; it is, rather, his field of exploration. What can be said, though, is that Poe is a materialist in the pejorative sense in which the term was frequently used by materialism’s enemies; that is to say, Poe was critical of conventional spirit/body dualism. In this respect he is closer to someone like Joseph Priestley, who was militantly against spirit/body dualism while also being a firm believer in some kind of supernatural “unparticled matter.”
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Miles, R. (2022). Poe In Extremis. In: Cogan, L., O'Connell, M. (eds) Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13363-3_7
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